Chapter 2

By seventeen I had gotten very good at repairing any cracks in my facade.

Mike was the boy everyone wanted. Girls liked that he was steady, that he actually listened when they talked. I watched it happen from the sidelines of every party, every hallway, and got so practiced at hiding what it did to me that I stopped noticing I was hiding anything at all. It wasn't a decision I remember making. It was more like a muscle that got stronger every time I used it, until using it stopped feeling like effort at all.

There was a girl named Priya in his junior year. Smart, funny, kind to me even though I never gave her a reason to be.

"She asked if I wanted to get food this weekend," Mike told me one night, grinning at his own homework.

"Cool," I said, and felt something cold slide into place behind my ribs.

I found out from a mutual friend that Priya had talked to some guy from the swim team for maybe ten minutes at a party, about a chemistry assignment. That was the whole story, the kind of conversation that happens a hundred times a week at parties without meaning anything. But to me, it was an opportunity.

"Hey," I said to Mike a few days later. "I probably shouldn't say anything, but somebody told me Priya was all over some guy at that party last weekend. I didn't want you finding out some other way."

"All over him how?"

"I wasn't there. I'm just telling you what I heard."

"Are you sure?"

"I mean, I wasn't there," I said again.

He didn't call her back or text her. Two weeks later she stopped trying. Mike, heartbroken, came and sat with me on the porch steps that night, the way he always did, without fail, whenever something in his life had gone wrong.

"I don't know what happened," he said, staring at his hands. "I thought she actually liked me."

"You'll find someone better," I told him, and meant it in the worst possible way.

I did it three more times before university.

A girl named Farrah, who cried in the school parking lot and I had to walk past pretending not to see. A girl whose name I still won't say out loud, because what I did to her took most of a semester to live down with her own friends. Each time I told myself it would be the last one, that I'd let the next girl through, and each time some cold, familiar certainty overrode the promise before it had a chance to matter. I got faster at it each time, more efficient, and each time I felt good and satisfied.

There was a girl named Renee, senior year, who Mike actually brought home for dinner, which none of the others had gotten far enough to do. She was sharp, funny, unimpressed by our house in a way I respected more than I wanted to.

"So you're the famous Luke," she said, shaking my hand across the table. "Mike talks about you like you hung the moon."

"He exaggerates," I said, smiling, already deciding, before she'd even sat down properly, how long she'd last.

"I don't think he does," she said, and turned back to Mike with a look that made something twist hard in my chest.

Later, clearing plates in the kitchen, she found me alone for a minute. "You're quiet," she said. "Mike said you're usually the loud one."

"I'm just tired," I said. "Long week."

"He really cares, you know," she said, drying a dish, not looking at me. "It's kind of intense, honestly. The way he talks about you. I've never seen a guy that devoted to a sibling."

"We're close," I said.

"Clearly," she said, and there was something in the way she said it, not suspicious exactly, just observant, that told me she'd seen more in one dinner than most people managed in a year.

She came back a few more times that month. Mike liked having her around, which meant I had to like it too, at least on the surface, long enough to figure out how to end it without ending it obviously. I picked an old boyfriend she'd mentioned once, in passing, at that first dinner, a name Mike hadn't even registered, and built a whole story out of it over three weeks, a slow drip of concerned comments to a mutual friend who I knew would carry them straight back to him.

"Did you know Renee's still talking to her ex?" I asked Mike eventually, careful, like it cost me something to say. "Sam mentioned it. Said they've been texting a lot."

"She never mentioned an ex," Mike said, frowning.

"Maybe it's nothing," I said. "I just don't want you to get hurt."

He asked her about it that weekend. She denied it furiously, told him someone was clearly lying to him, and he believed her right up until I produced one more detail, a location, nothing that actually existed outside my own head, and something in him finally cracked. She lasted six weeks total, a story about her and that old boyfriend, one I'd built almost entirely from nothing, ending it for good. I never felt bad about that one, honestly I didn't feel bad for anyone.

I told myself it was because none of them deserved him. I never let myself finish the sentence that followed that thought, the one that started with because I do.

Looking back, I think what disturbs me most isn't any single thing I did in those years. It's how easy all of it was, how little resistance the world put up when a seventeen-year-old boy decided, quietly and completely, that no one else was allowed to have what he wanted.

Nobody stopped me. Nobody even noticed enough to try. University would hand me four more years to get even better at it, and I had no intention of wasting a single one of them.