CHARACTER
Dryby Jarrod Shusterman and Neal Shusterman

Henry

Henry

Quick Facts

Who He Is

Bold, slippery, and always selling, Henry Groyne treats the Tap-Out like a start-up accelerator. He crafts a polished persona—letterman jacket, good hair, smooth pitch—to pass as a high school “insider” with access to water. That persona masks an eighth grader with a gift for spin and a moral compass calibrated toward personal profit. As a foil to the group’s more communal instincts, Henry embodies the colder edge of Human Nature and Morality: he reduces human need to leverage and turns catastrophe into a marketplace.

His preppy surface is itself a strategy. Jacqui’s jab—“an infomercial with good hair”—captures how his image functions as camouflage. Even when he’s disarmed or exposed, Henry doesn’t change tactics; he simply pivots the narrative. For him, identity is a pitch deck, and survival is synonymous with brand management.

Personality & Traits

Henry believes every exchange should be exploited, not endured. He reframes danger as “opportunity,” feelings as “leverage,” and people as “assets.” That worldview makes him useful in negotiations—and lethal to trust.

  • Opportunistic capitalist: Treats the crisis like a market. He trades his mother’s pyramid-scheme ÁguaViva for “appreciating assets,” seeing scarcity as a way to build wealth (Chapter 21).
  • Manipulative and deceptive: Lies about his name, age, and, most crucially, the contents of his promised “box of water,” using charm and feigned empathy to embed himself with the group (Chapters 18, 21).
  • Intellectually arrogant: Quotes self-help and business slogans as ethical cover, casting himself as a mini-Machiavelli whose smarts entitle him to lead (multiple chapters).
  • Self-preserving: When cornered, the salesman vanishes and the survivor remains. He trades the group’s truck keys for a single drink, revealing loyalty as a talking point, not a principle (Chapter 43).
  • Superficial charisma: Wins over Alyssa and Garrett early by mirroring their concerns and flattering their strengths, converting their trust into his leverage (Chapters 21–23).

Character Journey

Henry starts as a frictionless operator selling competence: the rich-kid fixer who can get a truck, broker a deal, and “optimize” survival. At the evac center, he brokers the group’s release by promising water that doesn’t exist—an apparent rescue built on vapor (Chapter 21). The illusion collapses at the empty bug-out; once his leverage disappears, so does his allegiance. Cornered by scarcity, he liquidates the group’s only real asset—the truck—for a mouthful of water (Chapter 43). The final twist is pure Henry: in the aftermath, he rebrands himself on the news as a selfless teen hero (Chapter 56). He learns nothing moral; he learns audience. His arc isn’t redemption but upscaling—from small-time grifts to public mythmaking.

Key Relationships

  • Alyssa Morrow: Henry targets Alyssa first, sensing her need for stability and leadership in chaos. By sounding reasonable and accommodating, he briefly outshines Kelton—until his betrayal detonates any possible connection and clarifies Alyssa’s instinct for real, not performative, courage.
  • Garrett Morrow: Henry plays the “cool older brother,” praising Garrett’s ideas to secure a loyal ally and a steady flow of intel. When the scam surfaces, Garrett’s disillusionment is sharper than the others’—he realizes he was recruited as an “asset,” not respected as a person.
  • Kelton McCracken: Henry pegs Kelton as a volatile rival and works to undermine him, using Garrett’s insights to poison Kelton’s standing with Alyssa. Their antagonism turns physical twice, and both times Kelton punctures Henry’s aura of control, exposing the pose beneath the polish.
  • Jacqui Costa: Jacqui clocks Henry from minute one. She mocks him, refuses his pitches, and challenges every grab at authority. Their dynamic—her blunt realism versus his performative competence—keeps the group from surrendering to his narrative.

Defining Moments

Henry’s story is a sequence of pitches—each more desperate, each more revealing. When leverage runs out, he sells what isn’t his, and when consequences loom, he changes the story.

  • The Confrontation in Dove Canyon (Chapter 18): He tries to dominate with a toy gun and a prep-school swagger. Kelton disarms him and dislocates his shoulder, exploding the illusion that Henry’s confidence equals control—his first real market correction.
  • The Lie (Chapter 21): He negotiates his way into the group with a promised box of ÁguaViva that’s only brochures. The deceit shows how he converts the group’s hope into his bargaining chip, turning trust into currency.
  • The Betrayal (Chapter 43): After the empty bug-out reveals his bluff, he steals the truck keys and trades them to dangerous men for a single drink. The moment strips his philosophy to its core: survival as self-investment, even at others’ expense.
  • The Reinvention (Chapter 56): He reappears on TV as “Henry Groyne,” a lauded teen savior. This final rebrand proves his true superpower—narrative control—aligning him with the darkest edge of Survival and Desperation.

Essential Quotes

“Rich is an adjective, wealth is a verb.” (Chapter 18)
Henry turns finance-speak into a moral alibi. By redefining “wealth” as continuous action, he justifies exploitation as industriousness—a sleight of hand that makes predation sound like productivity.

“I’ll tell you what. I appreciate the passion that you have for your friends’ and family’s well-being, and can see why you might feel entitled to that truck. So I’m prepared to give it to you. But only under one condition. You take me with you.” (Chapter 21)
This is Henry at his most persuasive: mirroring Alyssa’s values, soothing, then attaching a condition. He frames the ask as generosity, wrapping self-interest in the language of empathy.

“I never said there was water in that box. You just assumed.” (Chapter 34)
A masterclass in blame-shifting. Henry reframes his lie as a listening error, weaponizing ambiguity and proving that for him, truth is whatever he didn’t explicitly deny.

“In this life, you see what must be accomplished, weigh your options, and then embrace the opportunity.” (Chapter 56)
On television, he distills his ethos into a credo—cool, strategic, and amoral. It’s the final pivot from schemer to symbol, showing how easily public desperation can be molded by a confident narrative.