32. Chapter Thirty-Two
Penelope
Ivory has both hands around my ankle, and she’s pulling. “Up. Up. It’s nine, you goblin, we have appointments.”
I groan.
“Pedicures at noon, and I want breakfast. Get up.”
I’ve got my face in the pillow, so I mutter into it, “I’m working today.” That’s code for I’m finally drawing again, and she knows it.
“You’ve drawn every night this week like a woman possessed. Let’s get our toes done, so I can tell you everything about Drew.”
I lift my head to see if she’s serious.
She flashes me a smile. “It’s better than it ever has been.”
I let my head fall on the pillow, but I don’t take my eyes off her. “Is he your boyfriend now?”
She shakes me. “No. Get up, so I can tell you everything.”
I’ve been staying up way too late, so my body groans as I sit up. “Okay,” I huff, rubbing my eyes. “Fine, but first, you’re going to do Pilates with me and drink lemon water.”
She rolls her eyes. “Are you trying to kill me?”
I look her dead in the eye. “Thirty minutes. With me. On the mat. Then I’ll get my toes done and listen to whatever garbage Drew Faulkner is feeding you.”
She scoffs in disbelief. “Rude. I hate every single thing about you.” She rolls off my legs. “Fine. Thirty. But if you make me do the leg circles, I’m moving out.”
I reach over to the nightstand for my phone while she’s stomping off, and there’s a text under Ivory’s from last night.
Percy: That’s good.
I look at it and smile into the pillow.
He answered. That’s the thing about Percy — you don’t get a paragraph, you don’t get a follow-up question, you get that’s good at one in the morning and that’s him.
Two words from Percy is a warm hand on your back from anyone else.
I’ve spent a year and a half learning to read the size of his small things, and this one’s good. I put the phone down still smiling.
“Thirty minutes,” Ivory yells from the other room, “And I’m timing it. If you add one second –– I swear, Penelope! I will start calling you Nelly.”
I chuckle, looking at Percy’s text one more time before I fly out of bed and throw on my activewear.
Ninety seconds into the first hold, her arms are shaking, and she’s narrating her own death.
“I am hungover. You’re the worst person to live with. This is — how is this — my whole body is failing—”
“Breathe out on the effort.”
“I can’t breathe. I’m dying.” She collapses flat on the mat. “Why do you do this to yourself? You’re twenty. Save this for when your joints hate you.”
I hold the plank as she lies next to me in a heap and complains. I ignore her and think about all the work I have to do for the internship.
The nail place is warm and smells like acetone and lavender, and Ivory’s got her feet in the water beside me, scrolling, both of us picked our colors and now we’re just waiting.
“So Drew’s got a game tonight,” she says, not looking up. “Seven o’clock. We should go.” She wiggles her toes. “The whole crew’s going out after. Theo, all of them.”
“Mm.”
“Speaking of.” She sets the phone in her lap. “Drew keeps saying Theo’s still into you. Like it’s his personal mission now. He brings it up constantly. It’s honestly embarrassing for both of them.”
I keep my eyes on the water. “There’s nothing there.”
“That’s what I said. I told him you’d have to be brain-dead to go back to Theo Marsh, no offense to the month you spent —”
“None taken.”
“— but Drew’s got it in his head that he’s, like, a matchmaker now.” She rolls her eyes. “He’s back with me for the plot, apparently. His word.”
“That’s romantic.”
“Isn’t it.” She grins, and then it goes softer. “It’s not serious, me and Drew. I know what it is. I’m probably leaving anyway.”
I turn in the chair. “Leaving.”
“Yeah. Study abroad next fall.” Her whole face lights up. “I finally sent everything in. I applied to three — Paris, London, and Rome — and now I just wait and see who takes me first. Whichever one comes through, I go.”
“All three?”
“You’re supposed to apply to a few. It’s competitive.
” She’s scrolling through something, showing me a photo of a courtyard, a school building, I can’t tell.
“Paris is the dream. But London, the studio’s supposed to be incredible, and Rome — Penelope, it’s Rome.
I’d learn to draw a building on a two-thousand-year-old street.
I don’t care which one. I just want the email. ”
“When do you hear back?”
“Spring. It’s forever away.” She sighs. “But it’s real now because the applications are in, and now it’s out of my hands.” She grabs my wrist. “I’m going to Europe for a whole semester. Say you’re happy for me.”
I chuckle. “I am happy for you.” And I am — and then it lands that next fall her side of the apartment is going to be empty for a whole semester, and I hadn’t thought about that until right now.
“You’re going to have to find a subletter,” she says. “Or you get the place to yourself for a semester, which, honestly, is living the dream.” She goes back to her phone, then stops. “Wait. That’s what I keep meaning to ask you.”
“What?”
“Is there someone?”
I look at her.
“You’ve been —” she waves a hand, searching, “— different. You’re up at all hours, you’re glowing, you’re drawing again, you keep having these nights you don’t really account for.
I’m not interrogating you.” She holds her hands up.
“I just know what you look like when nothing’s going on, and this isn’t that. ”
For one second, I actually consider telling her. But it isn’t only my secret. There’s a whiteboard in a house on Hawthorne Street, and a boy who cares an awful lot about the guys he lives with, and it isn’t mine to tell.
“I switched firms, remember,” I say. “That’s what’s different.”
She studies me for a second. Then, because she’s Ivory, because she’s already halfway to Paris in her head, she lets it go. “Okay. Keep your secrets.” She points at me. “But whoever he is, he’s got you drawing again, so I like him already.”
I don’t correct her. Something in me eases at how easy she made that — at not having to lie, just having to say nothing.
“Come to the game,” she says. “Please. I just applied to move to three different countries, you have to celebrate me.”
“I’ll think about it.”
Gianna and Mara texted me all afternoon about going to the hockey game, and then Ivory asked again the second we got home, so it was three against one, and I lost. That’s how I end up here — walking into the rink at quarter to seven, following Ivory through a set of doors into a cold that I wasn’t expecting, because I didn’t know an arena would be cold, which in hindsight makes sense, there’s ice in it.
It’s bigger than I thought but smaller than a football stadium.
The seats go up steep on all sides, most of them are full.
There’s a smell — cold and rubber and popcorn and something underneath it, sweat maybe, old and worked into the building.
The ice is very white and bright under the lights.
Everything around it is dim, so the rink looks like the only real thing in the room.
Music’s playing loud between whistles. People are yelling.
I’ve genuinely never been to a hockey game or set foot in a place like this.
“Penelope!” Gianna’s behind one of the benches, and she’s waving both arms over her head like I might miss the only person standing up in a section. “Penelope! Ivory!”
We climb down the steps toward her. She’s saved a whole row — a jersey draped over the seats to hold them, her brother’s number on the back — and she yanks it off the moment she sees us coming.
“Okay, good, you made it, sit, sit.” She’s already talking a mile a minute. “These are the best seats, right behind the bench, close enough to hear them yell at each other. Penelope, you sit here, in the middle, so you’re between me and Mara and you can’t escape.”
“Was I going to escape?”
“First-timers always want to escape by the second period. It’s the cold. You get used to it.” She hands me half a pretzel I didn’t ask for. “Eat. It’s tradition.”
I sit between them and take the pretzel.
The seats really are close — a low wall and a pane of glass are the only things between us and the ice, close enough that I can see the players’ faces when they skate past. Down below us, the benches are filling, guys in full gear leaning over the boards, spitting, talking, a coach with a clipboard pacing behind them.
“When does it start?” I ask.
“Any second. Watch the tunnel.” Gianna points. “There. That’s my brother. He’s going to pretend he doesn’t see me.” She cups her hands. “Reeve!” Benson Reeve stands near the tunnel and does not look up. “See? He saw me.”
“He didn’t look at you,” Mara laughs.
The lights do something, and the music gets louder.
Both teams come pouring out onto the ice in a loop, fast, and the whole building stands up, so I stand up too.
Gianna’s screaming. Mara’s screaming. I clap because everyone’s clapping.
Then there’s a whistle, and the two teams line up in the middle, and a referee drops the puck, and it starts.
I don’t really know what I’m looking at.
I’ve never cared about sports. Not once in my life have I sat down and watched a game on purpose.
So I sit there and watch. The guys skate faster than I expected, and they stop easily.
The puck’s impossible to follow until suddenly it’s the only thing in the room.
Gianna is a different creature. She knows everything. Elbows on her knees, forward in her seat, calling things before they happen — watch, watch, he’s gonna dump it in — and half the time she’s right, and every time she’s right, she grabs my arm.
“Did you see that? Mara, did you see that pass—”
“I saw it!”
“That was filthy! That was a filthy pass—”
“It was pretty good.”
“Pretty good.” Gianna is baffled. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that to me.”
Mara’s not a hockey person, I don’t think, but Gianna’s the kind of loud that’s contagious, and within ten minutes, Mara’s yelling at the referee about a call she can’t possibly understand.
Gianna’s egging her on, and the two of them are feeding off each other so hard I mostly just watch them instead of the ice.
Ivory, a few seats down, is quiet. Which I notice, because Ivory is never quiet.
At a party, she’d be the loudest one in the room.
But here, sober, in a cold rink with two girls she doesn’t know that well, she just watches, phone in her lap, and not finding much else to do with herself.
It’s strange, seeing her with the volume off.
The game moves back and forth for a while, and I’m just starting to follow it — starting to see where the puck’s going to go before it goes — when something happens fast down in the corner closest to us.
A guy in white carries it up the boards, and a guy in our colors comes across and ends him, shoulder into chest. The white jersey goes down hard, the glass bangs a foot from my face, and the whole section is on its feet before I’ve understood what just happened.
“Ohhh—” Gianna’s up, both arms in the air. “That’s Golding! That’s Blue! Get up, Penelope—”
The guy who threw the hit skates off like nothing happened, calm, blank-faced, and I recognize him — the quiet one from the house, the one Gianna said looks like an asshole. He just turned a person off with his shoulder and felt nothing about it.
“Clean,” Mara declares.
“So clean,” Gianna agrees.
I’m still watching the guy on the ice get up slowly when Ivory leans forward down the row.
“There’s Theo.” She points unnecessarily because she’s been tracking him the whole time. “Number seventeen. Right side.”
Gianna and Mara both turn and look at me. At the same time.
“What,” I say.
“You know Theo?”
Ivory laughs. “Oh, she knows him alright.”
Gianna’s laughing now, and Mara’s laughing.
I roll my eyes and let them have it, because it’s easier than the truth, and the truth is I couldn’t pick Theo Marsh out of that ice if Ivory hadn’t pointed him out, and the only number I’ve been watching all night is a boy on the end of the bench who isn’t even in the game.
“Where’s Lucy?” I ask, in a gap.
“She doesn’t come to these things,” Gianna answers.
“That’s because you don’t let her,” Mara says.
“It’s for the best.”
I don’t know what she means, but I don’t press.
I look back at the bench without meaning to. Percy’s at the end of it, big even sitting down, his mask up on the top of his head, his eyes on the ice.
During the break, Ivory leans down the row toward Gianna and Mara.
“What are you two doing after this? Come to Drew’s thing, it’ll be fun.”
“Hell yeah,” Mara says.
“I’m always down,” says Gianna.
When the second period starts, Ivory loosens up a little, sitting between Mara and me, waving at Drew on the bench. I keep my eyes forward. And then there’s a body hitting the boards across the rink.
Theo’s out there on the right, fast and sharp and cocky with it, exactly like he is off the ice. The puck flies across to him, and he snaps it straight into the net.
And in the same second, down on the bench, Percy looks up.
His eyes come up off the ice and into the stands, and they find me.
I smile. For him, only him, across the whole loud barn.
And he looks away, back to the ice, fast, like he never looked up at all.
I sit there with the smile still on my face and nowhere to put it.
I don’t look at him for the rest of the game.
Eventually, they lose by one. I don’t fully understand the game, but Gianna is rushing to leave before everyone else does.
“Is it a Hawthorne party?” I ask as we walk out. Ivory has her arms hooked through mine.
Gianna scoffs so hard she nearly chokes. “My brother won’t allow me to go to a Hawthorne House party. Is that where you invited us to?”
Ivory shakes her head.
Mara interjects, “We’re warming him up to the idea.”
“It’s a long game. Maybe by next year he’ll crack, and I’ll finally be able to go to one.” She loops her other arm through my free one, so I’m pinned between the three of them, moving toward the doors.
“It’s at some frat, Drew’s friend’s place. The same one as last night,” Ivory says. “You’re all still coming, right?”
“Obviously,” Gianna says.
Ivory looks at me.
“I’m coming,” I say.