“Are you sure? It was like you were . . . gone. I mean, I don’t have much experience with this, but I don’t think that’s normal.”

“I’m sick,” I blurted out, a sudden lie I could not control. I needed time to think, to understand myself and my body, run back through our mothers’ warnings, our past conversations. I had finally caught up to you. I had all the missing pieces, and still, I could not quite see what it meant.

His expression shifted.

“How so?”

“My body is—weird. It’s not normal. That’s why I . . . disappeared for a bit.” He kept trying to look into my eyes. I twisted away from him.

“Does it affect your health?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should we go to a doctor?”

I had to place a hand on his knee to stop him from rising. “I don’t think a doctor could help me.”

“Why not?”

“It’s something that runs in my family.”

“Let me help you.” His earnestness would one day save me, but that day it wrenched.

“My mother wouldn’t want me to tell you.”

“Why is that?”

“Family secret.”

He frowned.

“Would I get to know if we married?”

“We aren’t marrying.” I nearly laughed. It was too much, all at once. This riddle of Reforging, finally an answer within reach, something to do with pleasure instead of pain. I mourned that we hadn’t been able to puzzle it out together. We had spent our last year feuding. To know that you were experiencing something like this with your boy, that this, of all things, was what we had fought over. “We’re—we’re only enjoying each other.”

He leaned back, his eyes wide. My words had hurt him, I realized, the first time they had done so, even as I had continually brushed him off for weeks.

“But I—” he began. Then he shook his head and packed up his books, stuffed them into his bag.

“Wait.” Something had gone wrong, something I had not intended. The pleasure I was chasing, those moments of happiness, was leaving.

“I need to focus on studying,” he mumbled. “I’ve wasted too much time.”

He stood. I was in his way, between him and the door. I continued to sit, looking up at him, at a complete loss for words.

“You’re not coming back?” I asked weakly.

“I’m going to America. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

I moved aside. He left the pencil company, the door clicking closed behind him. I wished he had slammed it. It might have woken me from whatever stupor I was in right then. I had been relying on him to help me.