“Seriously?” Daphne Elizabeth laughed. “You can’t just force yourself to stop having feelings for someone.”

“Au contraire,” Jaya put in. “I agree with Grey.” She tossed him a brilliant smile, which he decidedly did not return. To Daphne Elizabeth, Jaya continued. “The heart must be ruled by the head. It makes for more successful unions and outcomes.” This was why she’d taken her parents’ hints about Kiran Hegde, naturally.

Grey turned those bright blue, stormy eyes on her, appraising. Jaya found herself noticing the slight shadow of stubble on his square jaw. “Right. It’s not easy. But yes. It is a matter of willpower.”

Daphne Elizabeth shook her head. “The heart doesn’t work like that,” she countered. “It’s no one’s servant. And sometimes… sometimes the person you love, as bad an idea as he might be, is the only one in the world who really, truly sees you.”

“Sometimes the heart doesn’t have the luxury of doing whatever it wants,” Grey said, almost angrily. Jaya wondered what that was about. “Sometimes there are outside mandates on what the heart can or cannot do.”

Much as she despised Grey Emerson and all he stood for, Jaya understood that. She had known from when she was very young that there were acceptable suitors and unacceptable ones. Kiran fell into the former category, and Grey, for instance, fell into the latter.

Daphne Elizabeth sighed loudly and stuffed her mouth with a waffle. Once she was done chewing, she said, “Fine. Let’s just agree to disagree, then.”

Grey blinked and his shoulders relaxed. “Right,” he said. “Let’s.”

Leo, Rahul, and Daphne Elizabeth spent the rest of breakfast talking about which teachers Jaya would love and which ones she should watch out for. Grey just sat quietly and drank his coffee. Jaya found herself laughing along to his friends’ jokes and asking questions, warming to them. She realized with a prickle of guilt that at the end of all this, when they realized what she’d done to Grey, they’d probably hate her forever. But there was no way to avoid that.

Just as Rahul finished telling them about a numerical scale he’d devised over the summer to measure the likelihood of any teacher revoking privileges (St. Rosetta’s didn’t do detention, which was much too plebeian; rather, the teachers simply revoked off-campus and on-campus privileges), a woman in a gray chignon appeared at the head of the dining hall and rang a small, insistent silver bell.

“Time for class,” Daphne Elizabeth said, sighing. “I have English… with Alaric and Caterina. I’ll get to see them sitting together and writhing all over each other the rest of the semester. Yay, me.”

“I’m sorry,” Jaya said, infusing as much warmth into the sentence as she could. “Will I see you back here for lunch?”