Chapter 31
After neither Pilates nor my hot shower does enough to quell last night’s unease, I do something I haven’t done since I lived with my mom and Nora—I tidy for company.
Every surface has been spritzed with cleaning solution and wiped with a rag.
Hound’s dark hair has been vacuumed up and Penny’s oil paint stains covered strategically with rugs and pillows.
Penny’s and my collection of front-door shoes have been sorted into their respective closets—black loafers, heeled boots, and patent leather Mary Janes in mine; straw sandals, vintage ballet flats, and white Keds in hers.
I’m doing dishes that were already clean when the knock sounds at the door and Hound howls so hard he nearly hurts himself.
Sophia’s weekend style isn’t too different from her school attire.
Loose wide-leg jeans, a curve-hugging tank, one too many necklaces.
Elliot’s unsurprisingly in gym clothes that still smell like the morning’s sweat and body spray.
Peter’s the only one who looks like he put effort into his outfit for our first off-campus hang: Instead of his usual Henley, he’s gone for a suede jacket and a white button-down, which makes him look a bit like a professor himself.
“Wait, it’s so cute,” Sophia tells me, taking in the hanging plants Penny keeps alive, her easel, and the little paper lanterns we’ve hung off the fire escape. She kneels to the floor and gives Hound the nuzzles he craves, and I can see hearts form in his eyes.
“He’s never going to leave you alone now,” I tell her.
“That’s all I could have hoped for,” she says into the top of his head.
“Does he bite?” Peter asks, wary. And that’s fair. Hound looks like he could tear your leg off. He probably could, but he won’t, and that’s what matters.
“Not unless you neglect to give him pets.”
Peter doesn’t laugh until I give him a pointed look, and then a relieved chuckle escapes him. “Good one.”
“These are cool,” Elliot says, pointing at the moody photographs that line the living room wall.
“Thanks.” I debate saying I found them at a thrift shop but decide I don’t care. That maybe I’m done caring. I actually don’t think my new friends have any intention of judging me. “I took them, actually.”
“I didn’t know you did photography,” Peter says. “Are you taking a class at Harker on it?”
I keep forgetting Harker teaches regular classes and electives. I can’t imagine cutting out early from Monster Identification to make it to Intro to Pottery on time.
“It’s just something I do for fun.”
“You should do it for money,” Sophia says, squinting at a photo I took of a little girl on an STC swing set. “This one makes me want to cry.”
When the front door swings open again, four sets of hunter eyes snap to it like hawks spotting prey.
“Oh!” Penny nearly drops the overstuffed paper bags she’s holding in her arms. “Hi! Viv, I didn’t know you had”—she takes in Sophia, Peter, and Elliot—“people over.”
Shit, shit, shit—“Sorry, these are just…my friends.”
Penny is too kind to raise a brow, but I can see the confusion in her eyes. I don’t have other friends.
“From work,” I add as Hound trots over to Penny excitedly. “New friends from work. Guys, this is my roommate, Penny.”
I give all three of them my best don’t say anything weird eyes.
“The famous Penelope Pine!” Sophia says with her pure-charisma smile.
Penny squeezes the paper bags closer to her like safety blankets. “Hi.”
Sweet Pen. I hope Sophia’s attempts at friendship don’t scare her. “I thought you were at Claude’s,” I say.
With that, Penny’s face falls. In fact, her eyes go a little glossy as she sniffs. “I upset him, I think. He told me we needed space.”
I am going to have this art-dealing fuck drawn and quartered. Especially now that there’s a chance a deviant was in our apartment. I want Penny here as little as possible.
“Yikes,” Sophia says.
“He wanted me to come to Paris with him this week for work, which was really generous and all…” She drops the bags on the counter and begins to take out her Babylon Bazaar haul.
Fresh marigolds in plastic, two bumpy-skinned gourds, some carrots, and a head of berry-red radicchio.
“But it’s the Harvest Festival at the school where I teach.
The kids look forward to it all year. I told him I couldn’t miss it. ”
“Sounds fair to me,” Peter says with a comforting nod. “He didn’t understand?”
Penny turns on the faucet to wash the produce. “He just wants me to prioritize our relationship. I know he’s more hurt than angry.”
Sophia shakes her head. “What are you, Mother Teresa?”
Penny blanches. “No, I—”
“Sounds like he wants you to prioritize his penis,” Elliot says like it’s helpful.
I wince. “Elliot and Peter are also part-time relationship therapists, apparently.”
Penny dries her hands. “What do you guys do at the Windsor?”
Well. Now we’re fucked. Sophia shoots me a look of concern and I blurt, “They’re interns. Unpaid interns.”
“Why do we have to be unpaid?” Elliot mopes, falling back into the couch.
“It’s a cruel world,” I say, but my eyes tell him, Shut up.
“Don’t get your sweaty clothes all over Viv and Penny’s couch,” Sophia scolds.
“Fine.” He shrugs before pulling his shirt off, displaying a flawlessly chiseled eight-pack.
“Oh my god,” Penny breathes before spinning around to shove the vegetables—and her head—into the fridge.
“Elliot,” Peter says under his breath. “You’ve scandalized Viv’s roommate.”
“Wait,” Soph says, looking at her phone. “Stay like that for one sec.” She rounds the kitchen counter and takes a picture of Elliot’s torso as he’s sprawled across my couch. “Now you can put your shirt back on.”
Elliot shakes his head as he yanks his shirt overhead. “Is this what being a sex slave feels like?”
“I think you need to be having sex to be someone’s sex slave,” I say.
“What’s the picture for?” Penny asks quietly, eyes intent on her flowers and their vase.
Sophia makes a disgruntled noise, bypassing the stool next to me to climb onto the countertop and pull her legs up under her. “This guy I used to sleep with won’t leave me alone.”
“Vintage car guy?” I ask.
“No, this other guy.” Sophia shows Penny and me her phone, where we see a depressing string of unanswered messages. The last one reads I can’t stop thinking about you.
“He seems nice,” Penny says, and the twisted thing is I know she means it.
I shake my head. “Oh, Pen.”
Sophia replies to Sam’s last message with the faceless photo of Elliot’s abs. From this angle it looks like they’ve just wrapped up some decent a.m. couch sex. “There,” she tells us. “That should do it.”
Elliot laughs from across the room, but it’s Peter’s expression I’m hung up on. He looks like he’s just realized the puppy he was hoping to adopt is rabid. I’d give him a pat on the shoulder if it wouldn’t embarrass him. Better he learns now that Sophia is no man’s peace—certainly not his.
“Should we head out?” Elliot says. “I want to get there before all the gladiator costumes are gone.”
“You’re a gladiator every year,” Sophia says. “How about something with a shirt? I’m sick of you drinking your weight in alcohol to stay warm.”
“That’s the best part of the costume!”
“We’ll be back in a bit,” I tell Penny. “Then movie night?”
Penny nods, smoothing down her blond ponytail. “Sure. Have fun.”
“Or you could come?” Sophia says, throwing on her coat. “We’re going to get Halloween costumes.”
My body goes rigid at the thought. This morning has been like a tightrope walk. A successful one so far, sure, but I have little desire to see the rope extended through the afternoon.
Penny mulls the offer over. “I wouldn’t want to impose…”
“Stop it. You’re coming. It’ll help you get your mind off of Klaus.”
“Claude,” Penny corrects morosely.
“See, I’d already forgotten.”
“Do you mind?” Penny asks me. “I know you guys are having a work hangout.”
I couldn’t deny Penny if she asked me to drink bleach. “Of course not. Don’t be silly.”
Sophia loops an arm through Penny’s and drags her out the front door.
“Classic work hangout to get Halloween costumes,” Elliot says behind me with a laugh.
“Didn’t you know?” Peter says quietly as I lock up. “That’s a fake unpaid intern’s favorite activity.”
“I’m going to fake fire both of you.”
A short walk through leaf-strewn Babylon later, we arrive at the costume store before the afternoon rush. Halloween is next weekend, so we’re lucky the place hasn’t been completely picked over.
Elliot drags Sophia off to find his gladiator costume, and Peter asks one of the store associates to point him in the direction of the superhero section.
Penny sticks by my side as we wander the aisles, “Monster Mash” playing from the loudspeakers.
She’s quiet, her hands grazing plastic bags of costumes but her eyes never sticking on anything too long.
“I’m sorry about Claude,” I tell her.
“It’s okay.”
“He just wishes he could take you everywhere. I don’t blame him.” It physically pains me to have Claude’s back, but I think it’s probably what Penny wants to hear.
“Sure,” she says.
“In fact…” I remind myself this lie is for her safety. “There have been some break-ins on our street this week. I’m going to keep staying at Fiona’s since the exhibit is so soon…Will you stay with him? Once you make up? Just until the guy is caught?”
“Oh,” she says, frowning. “Okay. Sure.”
I stop in the middle of the sexy Disney aisle. “Penny. Is something else wrong?”
Her eyes shift from my face, down the aisle, and up to the ceiling.
“Penny,” I warn. The girl is not one for conflict. “Tell me what’s up.”
Her voice is quiet as she says, “Why didn’t you want your new friends to meet me?”
And I thought supporting Claude hurt. Upsetting Penny is as bad as it gets. It’s like stepping on your dog’s tail and knowing they don’t understand what you’re saying when you apologize. “I didn’t— I wasn’t trying to keep anyone from you. I just didn’t know if you’d like them is all.”
“Who have I ever not liked?”
Penny is everything I’m not—happy, warm, friendly, good.
We always say she’s the sun and I’m the moon.
In reality, I feel more like the pitch-black sky, but in Penny’s eyes I’m the other side of her coin, and I’m not going to argue with an honor like that.
And she makes a good point. In classic sunny fashion, Penny’s never met someone she didn’t wish well.
It’s as impressive an ability as my hyperagility.
No, more impressive. Definitely more impressive.
“They’re just different. They’re”—violent deviant-killing machines—“interns.”
Penny can’t quite make sense of what I’ve said, but I can tell she’s trying. She’s too pure for this bullshit. “Well, I’m not judging anyone for where they’re at in their careers. Certainly not as an elementary school art teacher.”
“I should have known. Thanks for being…so open-minded.”
Penny nods, satisfied. “I really like them. Sophia’s great.”
We round a corner and find Sophia coming out of a dressing room in a Medusa costume that leaves virtually nothing to the imagination. “Yeah.” I laugh. “She’s full of surprises.”
Peter’s messing with an animatronic skeleton. When he sees her, he turns as red as a thermometer in July.
“Can you zip this up for me?” she asks him.
His throat bobs as he tries to rasp out an answer, swiping his floppy brown hair from his face. The man is making an impressive effort to keep his eyes off anything remotely inappropriate.
“For sure,” he croaks, eyes on the ceiling as if asking for mercy.
The song shifts to something with chains clanging and cauldrons bubbling. Elliot comes out of his changing room, as shirtless as expected, and I have to admit he looks good. Those abs are as flawless as they were on my couch, and his wavy hair frames a face perfect for beach volleyball.
He shakes his head at Sophia. “Soph, you look like a prostitute.”
“Thank you!” She studies her stomach and thighs in the mirror as Peter watches on from behind her.
“Do you like this one?” Penny asks me, holding up a vampire costume. “Or this one?” In the other hand she’s got a paisley hippie dress.
“That one,” the four of us say in unison.
She nods to herself as if the vampire was a stupid idea anyway.
If Penny is the sun and I’m the moon, Sophia is all the stars in the sky, Elliot is a mellow haze of clouds, and Peter is the astronomer on the ground taking it all in.
Set against the scent of fog machines and the sound of “I Put a Spell on You,” I decide to reevaluate all my preconceived notions about keeping some kind of emotional distance from my new friends and keeping those new friends away from Penny.
I want to store this moment in a frame like a beloved grainy photo.
The kind you look back on and think Things were easier back then.
The five of us together is kind of wonderful.
“What are you gonna get, Viv?” Penny asks. “Catwoman again? Or I liked your Black Swan one last year.”
“Why are you allergic to color?” Sophia asks. Her boobs are staring at me in what is essentially just a snakeskin bikini.
“I can’t hear you in that thing.”
“What about this?” Elliot says, offering me a sleek witchy ensemble. “Feels you-ish.”
“How about that devil costume?” Soph says, gesturing to a slinky red minidress hanging seductively off a mannequin.
Open back, paired with sheer red thigh-high tights and red patent heels.
And little horns, of course. I wander over to it and run the silk between my fingers.
It’s so vibrant. So unafraid of standing out—of looking wrong or evil or impulsive.
It’s so red.
“It’s perfect.”