12. Chapter Twelve
Penelope
I haven’t replied to Percy, but I don’t think twice about it throughout the weekend. I don’t think about it while I do Pilates, while I fold my laundry, or while Ivory is telling me about how wild Saturday night got at Hawthorne.
I take my sketchbook to the table and lay a sheet of trace over the corner-lot plan, and I get to work, because there’s Whitmore work waiting for Monday, real work, the kind they don’t hand interns. I’m six months in, and they’ve finally stopped giving me door swings. It feels like a win.
At two, my phone buzzes on the far end of the table.
I’m halfway through transferring a line, and I don’t look up. My laptop’s paired with my phone, so the message appears in the corner of the screen while I’m working, and my eyes flick to it out of curiosity.
Percy: Strawberries are $4.86. Thought you should know.
I grab my phone and look at the text for a long moment. I have no idea what it means. I don’t know why he’s mentioning strawberries, or why the boy who never texts first would text me on a Sunday afternoon, after I left him unanswered, about fruit.
Me: Are they organic?
Percy: I don’t know.
I put the phone face down and go back to my drawing. I work well for the rest of the afternoon, and every so often, I find myself listening for a sound the phone doesn’t make. It doesn’t buzz again. That’s fine. I get a great deal of work done.
On Tuesday, it’s ten-thirty at night. I’m in bed texting Taylor about the thing Oliver said at the office — I’ve typed it twice and deleted it twice, and I’m on the third attempt, which is not the version I mean — when his name comes up on the screen.
Percy: Are you up?
I pull my bottom lip in and hold it. He doesn’t do this. He doesn’t send are you up. He doesn’t send anything, in the ordinary sense.
Me: Yes.
The three dots appear. They disappear. They appear again. Something in my chest tightens, and I’m typing fast when they disappear again.
Me: Is everything okay?
Percy: Yeah.
Percy: I don’t sleep.
I read it twice.
Me: What do you mean you don’t sleep?
He takes a full minute. I watch the screen the whole time.
Percy: I haven’t slept much since I got here.
Me: To Camden?
Percy: Yeah.
We are halfway through the school year. That’s five months of a boy lying awake in the dark, and I sit with my back against the headboard, holding my phone in both hands.
Me: That’s a long time.
Me: So what do you do all night?
Percy: Read.
I sit up straighter. He reads. That boy — that enormous, silent boy with hands the size of dinner plates and blonde hair falling in his eyes, who says maybe four words if you’re lucky — sits up in a dark house reading books.
I try to picture it, and I can’t. What would I do if I couldn’t sleep? I type back to him.
Me: I would draw.
Percy: I know.
I set the phone on my chest and stare at nothing for a second, and something in me goes warm and strange. He knows. I smile.
Me: Do you want to FaceTime?
He doesn’t text back.
He calls.
It rings in my hand, and I nearly drop it. My heart sinks into my stomach. I look at myself in the camera, push my hair back off my face, and answer.
“Hey,” I answer quietly, because of the hour.
“Hi.” The room behind him is dark. He lifts the book so I can see it — a paperback, worn at the corner, and I can’t read the cover in that light.
I grin and lift my sketchbook to the camera.
Then I get my phone stand off the nightstand and prop him against the lamp.
I turn the volume down, lean back against my headboard, and go back to my drawing.
And we don’t say anything. Ten minutes go by.
Then twenty. There’s the small sound of a page turning, and my pencil on the paper.
I have never in my life understood how anyone stands to talk on the phone, and here I am with a boy propped against my lamp who isn’t talking either, and it isn’t awkward, it’s the least awkward thing in my week.
At some point, I glance over, and he’s reading. Really reading, brow down, entirely inside it. I pick the phone up and bring it close.
“Hey?” I whisper.
He looks up and lifts his phone.
“It’s almost eleven.”
He doesn’t answer, but something crosses his face that says he knows exactly what I’m saying.
“Maybe,” I say slowly, “we could do this in person sometime.”
Nothing. Just those eyes that say more than words could.
I narrow mine. “You’re sure you’re not tired?”
He shakes his head.
“What helps?”
He shakes his head again. “Nothing.”
I look at him for a while. The dark room, the book, the quiet expression he always holds. “Are you afraid to fall asleep?”
He shakes his head. He looks away when he does it.
“Do you want to stay on FaceTime?” I ask. “You can watch me sleep. Maybe it’ll inspire you.”
The side of his mouth lifts. It’s barely anything.
“I’m kidding.”
He looks down at his book.
I say, “I heard Hawthorne threw a crazy party this weekend.”
He holds up two fingers.
“Two?”
He nods.
I laugh. “I’m now convinced you don’t talk because you’re secretly exhausted.”
He shrugs, and I smile. He almost does something with his face that in another person would be a smile.
“Seriously. Why are you so quiet?”
He thinks about it long enough that I know I’m getting a real answer.
“There’s not much to say.”
I huff a small laugh. That was not a real answer at all. “So your brain’s blank.”
He grins — actually grins, quick, gone — and everything about it tells me it’s the exact opposite. That his head is a loud room, he’s never once let anybody in.
“Okay.” I stack my sketchbook and my laptop onto the nightstand. “I’m going to sleep.”
He’s still there on the screen.
“Text me,” I tell him.
He nods. I end the call.
The phone buzzes in my hand before I’ve set it down.
Percy: I’m texting you.
I laugh into my empty room.
Percy: Thanks for the company.
Percy: Good night, Penelope.
Me: Try to get some sleep.
He doesn’t text back that night. Or the next. Or the next.
And now that I know, I can’t unknow it. Every night that week, I turn off my lamp and lie in the dark and think about a boy three miles from here who is not asleep.
I wonder what he’s reading, and whether the house is cold, and whether anyone in his life has ever asked him a single one of these questions. I wonder if he’s alright.
On Friday, I turn in my part of the Ashfield project.
I’ve been at it for two weeks. Nine days of it in the studio until midnight, then here at my table until two, and the drawings that came out the other end are the best work I’ve ever done.
I know they are. I don’t need anyone to tell me.
Somewhere around the sixth day, I found the ground floor’s real problem — the entry was fighting the corner instead of using it —, and I moved it, which nobody asked me to do, which was not in the redlines, and the whole building finally worked.
Oliver takes the set from me and lays it flat on the long table by the windows.
Then he reads it. He puts both hands on the table and reads it the way an architect reads drawings, sheet by sheet, and the office noise goes on somewhere far away.
I stand there with my hands at my sides and my heart doing something undignified.
“You moved the entry.”
“Yes.”
“To the chamfer.” He follows it with one finger. “So the corner does the work instead of the fa?ade. And you gained—” he stops, counts something, “—you gained the whole east bay for retail because you didn’t have to hold that lobby.”
“Yes.”
He straightens up and looks at me. “That’s it. That’s the one that gets built.”
I can’t get a word out. Nobody has ever been right about my work out loud, in a room, to my face.
Adler says good and moves on. My mother says lovely, darling.
This man just read nine days of my thinking off a sheet of paper and named the exact decision I made and told me why it works, and for one full breath, my guard is not up, and I feel the enormous warmth of being acknowledged.
The one that comes when somebody sees the actual work, and it is the best professional moment of my life.
Then he says, “Which is why I want you on Chicago.”
The room comes back.
“It’s a two-year build. Ground-up. You’d start as a junior after graduation, but I want your hands on it from now — summers, breaks.
Nobody your age gets a two-year project.
” He’s smiling, and he means every word, and he’s giving me something extraordinary.
“It’ll be finished the spring you graduate. ”
Two years. The spring I graduate. Everything from this moment until the day I walk across a stage, already drawn, in a city I never chose, on a set of sheets a man handed me because he read my work and liked what he saw.
“This is what I meant,” he says. “At dinner. A career and a life.”
And there it is. Word for word, the first night, the mousse I didn’t order.
“Thank you,” I say. “That’s — thank you.”
He nods like a man who has done a kind thing, and he has, but the warmth in my chest is replaced with coldness. It’s so cold that I shiver.
At the plotter, Lyla doesn’t say anything at all.
She hasn’t said anything about the Whitmore men being nice again.
She just stands next to me while the drum turns, and after a while, she puts a hand on my arm, briefly, and takes it back, and asks whether I’m doing anything this weekend.
The silence is so much worse than the sentence.
In the parking garage, I get in my car and sit for a second.
I should be euphoric. I have been waiting for this moment since I was sixteen years old — the moment somebody would look at my drawings and know.
It happened forty minutes ago. It happened exactly as I imagined it, and it was better than I imagined it, because he was right. But I will never know if I earned it.
My mother sent my portfolio before I agreed to anything. There was never an interview, really. There was a dinner. I don’t know where the arrangement ends, and I begin.
I start the car.