22. Chapter Twenty-Two
Penelope
I wake up at ten-forty.
Not ten-forty like a slow Sunday. Ten-forty with the light already gone flat and high in the room, three alarms slept clean through, my mouth dry, the whole morning simply missing — my workout, my lemon water, the good gray hour at the table I no longer sit down at.
Gone. I lie there for a second, not knowing what day it is, and then I do know, and I’m up too fast, and the room tilts.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes and tell myself it’s the party, the drinks, the late night, and I get up, annoyed at myself.
I grab my phone off the nightstand to see how bad it is.
Mara (9:14): Good morning to my new best friend
Mara (9:15): Coffee. The place on the 8th. I already told Sofia you’re coming, so you have to now.
Mara (10:32): Penelope. Do not tell me that you’re still sleeping. This is unacceptable
Mara (10:35): Okay, you need your beauty sleep. But we’re hanging out this afternoon. I’m not asking.
I’m typing back before I’ve fully sat up.
Me: This afternoon, yes.
I hit send, and I’m about to put the phone down.
And there, under Mara, is him.
Percy (2:47 a.m.): The light thing. Clerestory.
I stop. I sit on the edge of my bed in yesterday’s makeup crusting on my eyelashes, and I look at it.
He texted first. He was the one person in my life who wanted nothing from me, and now something in my stomach has gone wrong, because he reached, and he never reaches, and I don’t know what changed.
And it wasn’t a hey. It wasn’t you back or how was Lisbon.
He sent me the one word that’s only ours, from a freezing hallway, on a game day.
I start to type. I get as far as I and delete it. Yeah, delete it. Are you okay — no. Everything I put down is a door that either swings open or slams, and I can’t do either at ten-forty in yesterday’s makeup.
Mara: Two hours. Brunch.
I rush to the bathroom, putting my phone on my bed. I’ll answer him later. When I’ve had proper sleep, when I can form a thought.
Mara is exactly what I need, and she has no idea she’s my savior.
She’s at the coffee place on 8th with two drinks already ordered and a whole story going before I’ve sat down — something about her cousin, something about a boy from high school, her hands moving, and she makes me forget about everything I have going on.
We hang out for three hours. We go to a vintage place.
She makes me try on a coat that’s terrible, and I make her buy a scarf that’s perfect for her skin tone.
She laughs the way Taylor used to laugh, from the belly, without checking whether it’s appropriate, and something in me loosens.
I like her. I like her a great deal, and it’s easy, and I have not had easy in a long time.
I don’t check my phone. Not once. It stays in the bottom of my bag all afternoon, and the not-checking takes a small, constant effort.
Mara has no idea. She’s telling me she was born in Wisconsin and lived in California until she was five, and her hands are going, and I let her carry me through the whole afternoon.
Theo texts at four.
Theo: You around this week?
I answer it at a red light on the walk back, one-handed, without breaking my conversation with Mara.
Me: Maybe Thursday.
Theo: Cool.
“You have to come to Gianna’s thing Saturday,” Mara says. “It’s like a girls night or something. She’ll love it if you came.”
“I’ll try.”
“You’ll come,” she deadpans, giving me eyes. “She’s going to have the best stories because she has been at the hockey house all week driving her brother insane, so she needs girl time that isn’t full of enormous men who leave their gear everywhere. Her words.”
The hockey house.
I hold very still on the sidewalk, and I smile. “Yeah, it sounds fun.”
“It will be,” she says back. “I’m so happy I met you last night.”
“Me too.” I smile.
We hug and then part ways.
The text from Percy is still haunting me when I go to bed, and it’s still there in the morning, and I can’t stop thinking about it, but I don’t text him back.
On Monday, I start at a new firm. It’s three floors up over a hardware store on Sedgwick, and the first thing I notice, coming out of the stairwell, is that nobody looks up.
At Whitmore, everyone would have looked up.
Whitmore was a converted warehouse with the brick sandblasted back to raw and the ductwork left bare on purpose, scale models under glass by the windows, a whole wall of material samples arranged like art — a room built to be walked into and admired, and everyone in it half performing for whoever might walk in.
This is not that. This is eight desks, a plotter, and a coffee machine.
The carpet’s industrial and worn pale in a track between the door and the printer.
There are drawings pinned up everywhere, real ones, marked to death in red, and none of them are framed.
Somebody’s got a dead plant. It smells like toner, old coffee, and trace paper.
It is, without question, the least impressed-with-itself room I have ever stood in.
I sent them my portfolio myself before the end of last year.
No one’s hand on it but mine. My mother doesn’t know this firm exists.
Nobody arranged a dinner. I got the email over summer, and I haven’t told a single person how much that plain little acceptance meant, because there is no one I could say it to who wouldn’t make it into something.
I’m here because I earned it.
“You must be Penelope.” A woman in her fifties, reading glasses pushed up into gray hair, a mug in one hand, walks over. “I’m Renata. You’ll mostly be with me. Sit there.”
She points at a desk with a dual monitor older than the ones I used in studio and walks off before I’ve said anything.
That’s the whole welcome. There’s no tour.
There’s no we’re so glad to have you, no lunch, no story about how she started exactly where I’m sitting.
She comes back with a stack of red-lined sheets and drops them beside the keyboard and starts talking — the file structure, their layer conventions, the way this office marks a revision, which is different from how Whitmore did it and different again from how studio taught it.
She talks fast and flat and does not once check whether I’m charmed.
She is entirely uninterested in me as anything but a set of hands that will either work or won’t.
And I could weep with the relief of it. Because Oliver was charming.
Oliver remembered the trace paper I liked and put it on my desk.
Oliver knew it was Studio II and knew it was Adler and gave me the best pencil I’ve ever owned.
Every single kind thing he ever did turned out to be a hook with a line running back to him.
The most frightening thing about that place was that everything nice meant something.
Here nothing is nice, and Renata would not remember my coffee order if I worked here for the whole year, and that is the cleanest air I have breathed since I was fifteen.
“This is the Halvorsen block,” she says, dropping into the chair beside me and pulling the sheets over. “Mixed-use, four over two, going up on Larchmont. These are the CDs. You’re going to help me get them clean.”
She walks me through it once. The plan, the core, the way the units stack, where the structural grid fights the parking below, and who won that fight. I keep up, absorbing a system the way I absorb everything, fast, cleanly, and without needing it said twice.
She hands me the ground floor and a list of markups and leaves me to it.
Renata glances at what I’ve done, hums, moves one dimension I’d placed a hair off, and doesn’t correct anything else.
And an hour later, working the second-floor plan, I find a door that swings into the path of another door, a small thing, the kind of thing that survives three sets of eyes because everyone’s looking at the big moves.
I fix it, and I say it once, quietly, when she passes. “The unit doors on two were fighting. I moved the closet swing.”
She looks. “Good,” she says, and keeps walking.
That’s it. That’s what I came here for. Be good. Be treated as good. Nobody gets sentimental about a pencil.
There was a thing that used to happen when I drew.
The room would fall away — the noise, the light, the hour — and I’d surface at some point startled, with three pages filled I didn’t remember filling and a crick in my neck and no idea it had gotten to be five o’clock.
It happened in studio. It happened at my own table before the summer.
It is the only reliable joy I have ever had, the one thing in my life that asked nothing and gave everything back, and it is the whole reason I did any of this — the applications, the fight, the thing with my mother.
But I’ve lost it. I do the work well. The lines are clean, the markups are right, and Renata moves exactly one dimension all afternoon.
But it’s dead in my hands. I watch the clock.
I have never once in my life watched the clock while I was drawing, and today I know that it’s 2:40 and then that it’s 3:15 and then that it’s 4:00, because the hours are not disappearing the way they’re supposed to, they’re just passing, one after another, while I do good work and feel no relief at all.
Something is wrong. I tell myself it’s the first day, that first days are always strange, that I’m running on no sleep, a hangover, and a summer that took more out of me than I’ve admitted.
The same things I told myself about the pencils I couldn’t pick up all last week.
It’s the adjustment. It’s the tiredness. It’s temporary.
I finish the ground floor. I square my markups. At five, Renata says, “Same time tomorrow.”
I go down the worn stairs and out past the hardware store into the evening.
I got the life. I chose it, I earned it, I’m good at it, and I walked out of it at five o’clock feeling emptier than I ever have before.