By now the silence between him and Papa in the truck cab had reached an excruciating pitch. Even worse now that Henry couldn’t quite reassemble his mother’s features according to the foggy schematics of who she’d actually been. The bulk of what he knew about his parents’ lives pre-him came from that one afternoon. Mom’s own past was a mystery, one Papa seemed to believe could only be preserved in the vault of his memory, as if exposure to daylight might send it fleeing, gone for good, like a caged rabbit released and skittering madly into the woods.

Henry cracked the window open, hoping the draft might sweep out some of Papa’s palpable disappointment. Maybe the chug of air could clear Henry’s mental canvas for Mom’s face, but no. Instead, the wind started sculpting another’s likeness into the guilty putty of his thoughts.

The mousy girl with the shadow teeth. Repeated contact with stomach acid had stripped the enamel from the back side of her teeth, leaving each one pronounced, almost fang-like. Her grin, which she covered with a fist whenever it escaped, reminded Henry of a wolf, carnivorous and cunning. Over the last two weeks, he’d never worked up the nerve to tell her how much he liked it. Then again, when could he have? On the long list of no-no’s plastered on every corner and pillar of the youth inpatient wing, whispering was forbidden. So was touch, a rule enforced at the beginning of every group session with a mandatory elbow flap, ensuring everyone’s personal bubble was safe from rupture. The cruelest rule prohibited patients from exchanging contact information, so they wouldn’t get in touch and relapse together on the outside.

Bulimia, she’d explained, was about control. This had made immediate sense to him. There was something very deliberate and precise about her, from the arc of her left eyebrow to the way she spoke. That cool prairie drawl. The illness had ground every angle and bend of her to suggest, at least to him, a blade. Even her name, Michelle, reminded him of machete. Such a primitive, efficient technology. Its sole function to hack, which the thought of her did to him. It hacked at him, hurt him, but in a new way. A way that he welcomed and already missed.

Three days ago in the art room, Henry told her it was physically impossible to fold a sheet of paper more than eight times.

“Bullshit,” she said.