Page 39

We’re a block from Corvin when I take my phone out. My thumb automatically opens FindMy. His dot is at Corvin. Then, while I’m looking at it, it isn’t. It slides a few pixels toward the front of the building. Toward the street.

We turn the corner.

There’s a car at the curb in front of Corvin. Not his car. I know his car. Everybody in this building knows his car. This one is long, black, and polished so clean the streetlights slide down the sides of it, with tinted windows in the back. A man in a dark wool coat is standing beside the rear door with his hands folded in front of him, perfectly still, the way people stand when they’re paid to wait.

The front door of Corvin opens, and Rafe comes out.

I stop walking. Kylie’s arm jerks against mine.

He’s in a suit.

I’ve seen Rafferty Waleska in a lot of things. A hockey jersey with his name across the shoulders. A hoodie with the hood up on the library steps at seven-fifty in the morning. A gray shirt in a stairwell, soft and expensive. Sweats and a scowl and a protein shake. I’ve never seen him in this.

It’s navy, dark and perfect, cut so close to him it can only have been made for him and nobody else. A white shirt. A dark tie. A long charcoal overcoat over all of it, open at the front. His hair’s been combed back, actually combed, which I didn’t know it could do. He looks older. He looks like a picture on the wall of a building I’d never be allowed into. He looks like somebody from another planet who’s been sent to stand in front of our dorm.

The man in the wool coat opens the rear door.

“What the fuck,” Paige says, gawking.

Kenzie starts laughing. Not mean. Just helpless, the way you giggle when you see a handsome boy. “Where is he going?”

“I knew he was rich,” Kylie says slowly, staring, “but I didn’t know he had a fucking butler.”

I hear myself say it before I can stop it. “You guys have no idea.”

It goes quiet.

All three of them turn and look at me. It’s the first thing I’ve ever said about him. The first real thing, out loud, on purpose, to anyone at this school. In ten weeks, I’ve said no and not at all and I have no idea who he is. And now I’ve said this, and I can feel it hanging in the cold air in front of my face where I can’t take it back.

“How rich?” Kylie asks quietly.

I watch him on the steps. The driver waiting. The door open.

“Rich enough,” I say, “that nobody in his family uses the word.”

And then he sees us.

He’s halfway down the steps when his head turns. He sees Paige first, and Kenzie, and Kylie with her arm through mine. And then he sees me, and his face goes hard. His jaw locks. And his eyes, even from here, even in the half dark, are so furious that Kenzie actually takes a half step behind Paige.

“Jesus,” Paige mutters. “What did we do?”

“He hates us,” Kenzie whispers.

Kylie doesn’t say anything. She’s looking at me.

And I’m looking at him. Because I know his faces, and this isn’t the face from the lounge, or the stairwell, or the kitchen. It isn’t the almost-brown that comes before the worst things. His eyes are green. That bright, restless green from the stairwell, the one that couldn’t stay still. Except now it isn’t moving at all. It’s fixed on me like he’s been caught at something.

And I see straight through them like I always do.

The suit is too perfect. Somebody chose it, and it wasn’t him. His shoulders are pulled back and held there. There’s no hockey bag. There’s no bag at all. His hands are empty at his sides, like there’s nothing he’s allowed to bring. And the driver didn’t ask him anything. The driver didn’t say hello, or ask if he was ready, or reach for a bag. He just opened the door and waited, the way you’d wait for something you’ve been told to pick up.

He isn’t angry at us.

He’s angry that we’re seeing this.

He doesn’t look like someone going somewhere. He looks like someone being taken.

It lasts maybe three seconds. Then he looks away from me, sharp. He goes down the rest of the steps and bends and folds himself into the back of the car without a word to anyone. The driver shuts the door behind him with one gloved hand.