“He’s adorable,” Margot whispers to Cricket in the large auditorium. They are required to be there, an elective both of them are taking on American literature, one of those survey classes with a famously easy professor. If they went to the reading, he would eliminate one paper.
“Who?” Cricket whispers back.
“The poet boy, look at him.”
“I think you’re losing it.”
“He’s adorable,” Margot says. “The accent. Those eyes. And the words. Listen to the words.”
“You’re really losing it,” Cricket says.
Outside, the spring night is warm and the sun has set over the low hills, but traces of it, long, slender ribbons of purple and red, are visible above the trees. They wait for him. Students stream out of the theater and walk past the two of them, and when the building is almost empty, there is Henry by himself, walking out and staring around as if it is odd to be outside.
Margot stands back while Cricket approaches him. She witnesses their conversation, sees Henry look up in her direction, and she tries to read his expression. Is it fear? Shyness? Is it a lack of interest?
A moment later, he makes the short walk with Cricket over to where she stands.
“Hi,” Margot says.
“Hello,” he says, and it is almost as if he cannot look at her, his dark eyes glancing at her face before moving away. Margot finds it rather endearing.
“I loved your reading,” she says, and it’s true, she did; it moved her, his words, and it is because she had never heard anyone be so honest about anything before. She had never heard a man talk about women that way. She had never heard a man confess to a profound love and, at the same time, deep embarrassment in the presence of his own mother. It seems to Margot that, when reading, Henry was all exposed heart, and listening through the veil of his thick accent and the rise and tumble of his incantatory language, she felt like he was speaking directly to her.
“Thank you,” Henry says. Then, “I was nervous.”
“It didn’t show.”
“No? I was shitting bricks. Excuse me, I didn’t mean to say that.”
“It’s okay,” she says, laughing.
Margot knows by looking at him that she will have to lead. It is not something that she is used to, and if someone had asked her before this evening if the idea even interested her, she would have said no. But Henry’s words suggest fragility, and she thinks maybe this extends to who he is, but she can also sense his strength, hidden somewhere like a secret, and this is the part she wants to know.
“Walk with me,” she says.
And like that, Cricket just recedes into the distance with a thin wave, and the two of them take off across campus. Henry is taller up close than he looked onstage, and as they walk, first across the quad and then through a break in the old red-stone buildings and toward the lake, the only logical outcome when she thinks about it, she senses that he is happy to be moving, that it is relaxing him.
They come up a final rise and in front of them is the main street that runs along campus and beyond that is the broad expanse of lake, a mile across here, inky black in the exhausted light and stretching out of view on either side, a giant finger cut into the earth. All along here, benches have been placed to capture the view of the open water, and on this warm night many of them are taken by couples, so without talking about it they move along them until they find one that is open.
“Should we sit?” Margot says.
“Sure,” says Henry.
On the bench they can sit side by side and look out and not have to look directly at each other, though Margot looks at him more than he looks at her, and she knows this is his shyness and she does not mind. When she does look at Henry, it is his long lashes she notices and the way his mouth purses when she asks him a question and then how, a moment later, it relaxes. They talk about the reading. Henry tells her how he fell in love with poetry. “I want to be a poet,” he says.
“You are a poet,” she says.
“Not yet.” He laughs. “Not the kind of poet I want to be.”
And this, Margot decides, more than his handsome earnestness, his long lashes and his warm, dark eyes, is what draws her to him. It is the first time she has met a boy here who knows with great certainty what he wants to do with his life, and the thing he wants to do is not working for his dad’s firm, or just figuring it out in New York, or even, like Danny, knowing that for the rest of his life the choice to work or not work will always be an option. It is not something Margot has ever really considered before, but it is his raw ambition that draws her in, the impracticality of it all, this idea that he wants to do great things with words, that he wants to chase some kind of ancient fame, perhaps even become one of the people they read about in books. It is something she wishes sometimes that she had, instead of always making light of her love of painting if anyone asks, as if it could only possibly be a hobby and not something ever carefully considered.
And sitting on that bench, looking out at the lake, she knows that tonight she will kiss him and that soon she will sleep with him and she also knows, more broadly, that if she doesn’t want to fall in love with him, she needs to decide that now.
Margot turns toward Henry and she doesn’t say anything. He is aware of her staring at him, and in a moment he turns toward her. Her face is upturned and a few people walk by in front of them, shadows in the night, and Henry quickly glances toward them and then back to her, and when he does, he leans forward and brings his lips to hers and then they are into it.