Chapter 2

I remember the day I met him. I was the new rich girl at a public school in Queens, a place my father sent me to "toughen me up" after my mother's death and my first depressive episode. I arrived each day in a black car, a silent ghost in designer clothes, completely alone.

Ethan Lester was the king of his own small world. He was the charismatic bad boy who ran a hustle out of his locker, selling snacks and running errands for kids who had more money than sense. He was trying to support his ailing grandfather.

I was lonely. He needed money. It started simply.

"How much for a can of Coke?" I asked him one day, my voice barely a whisper.

His friends snickered. He just looked at me, his eyes sharp and assessing.

"For you? Five bucks."

I handed him a crisp twenty-dollar bill.

"Keep the change."

I became his best customer, the "patron saint" of his little crew. I'd pay him a hundred dollars to walk me to the subway, fifty for a slice of cheap pizza. It was a transaction. I was buying his time, his attention, a brief escape from my gilded cage.

I didn't expect him to see past the money.

But he did. He started to see the girl underneath the expensive clothes. The girl who never smiled, who always looked lost.

One afternoon, he found me crying behind the bleachers. He didn't say anything. He just sat down and handed me a warm churro. He waited until I was finished crying.

"You're not just a walking wallet, you know," he said softly.

That was the day I started to fall for him. Our relationship was a secret, a collision of two worlds. To be with him, I started shedding my own. I traded my designer dresses for ripped jeans, Michelin-star dinners for greasy pizza on a stoop, silent mansions for noisy arcades filled with the sound of his laughter.

The first major crack appeared when I tried to bring his world into mine. For his birthday, I bought him an expensive leather jacket, something I knew he wanted but could never afford.

He unwrapped it, his face hardening.

"I can't take this, Jocelyn."

"Why not? It's a gift."

"It's a handout," he snapped, his pride wounded. "It just reminds me that you're you, and I'm me."

The real breaking point came at my friend Molly's "Sweet 16" in the Hamptons. I begged him to come. He stood in the corner of the lavish ballroom, looking utterly out of place in his borrowed suit. My friends, with their casual, cruel condescension, circled him like sharks.

"So, you're the charity case Jocelyn picked up in Queens?" one of them slurred.

I saw the humiliation burn in his eyes. That night, he understood the chasm between us wasn't just about money. It was about a world he could never belong to, a world that would always see him as less. That insecurity became a poison that seeped into everything.