45. Chapter Forty-Five
Penelope
Ivory’s been gone for three weeks, and her room’s still empty at the end of the hall. The bed stripped, a few hangers she didn’t want left in the closet.
She texts constantly. London’s five hours ahead, so the photos come in while I’m still asleep and I wake up to them — the Bartlett’s studios, an old courtyard, Ivory holding a coffee in front of a building she’s going to spend a semester learning to draw, glowing, alive, exactly where she wanted to be.
Ivory: You have to come visit! It’s insane here.
Ivory: How are you?
Penelope: I’m good. Miss you.
I let the phone drop on the nightstand. Whenever it buzzes, I have some stupid hope that it’s him.
The truth is I haven’t stopped crying since I left Hawthorne. It comes when I least expect it, and it comes often, and I can’t control it. My whole life has been about control, and I can’t do the one thing I’ve always been able to do. It just arrives, and I let it, because there’s no stopping it.
I wipe my face and go back to the elevation. My hand shakes and the line comes out wrong and I do it again until I get it right.
There’s a voice in me, an old one, one my mother put there and Percy just proved right, that says the reason is simple: I wasn’t worth the risk.
I wasn’t good enough for him. Ivory told me once, years ago, that I keep everyone at a distance because I’m scared of exactly this, and I let one person all the way in, and this is what was waiting.
The tears don’t stop coming.
I should sublet Ivory’s room. The ad’s been half-written for three weeks.
I sit with it open some nights, and I don’t post it, and I know exactly why.
Because an empty apartment means no roommate.
No witness. No one to hide from. If Percy ever texted me, ever showed up at my door again, there’d be nothing to sneak around anymore — it could just be us, in the open, in my own place.
So I keep the room empty. I keep it empty for a boy who isn’t coming, and I know how that sounds, but I do it anyway.
Senior year starts and I carry the heaviest load of my life through it like a sleepwalker.
Senior Project Studio, Advanced Materials, the thesis prep — this is the year everything I fought for pays out, the year I’ve been building toward since I blew up Chicago and my mother’s plans for a storefront over a hardware store.
I do the work, and it’s fine. The thing that used to light me up — a problem worth solving, a section that finally resolves — comes and goes and leaves me flat.
I sit in studio at a desk I love and feel nothing.
The firm’s the same. I go in, I do the sheets, Renata grunts her approval, and I drive home thinking about quitting for the first time — not because the work got worse, but because I can’t feel it anymore.
It’s still mine. I fought my mother for it, and I won, and it’s still the life I chose.
I’m just too far under this month to reach it.
I get the girls back, and it’s the cruelest joke of the whole thing.
Gianna texts, and I say yes now, every time, because there’s no reason to say no anymore — no secret to protect, no boy to sneak to, nothing left to hide. So I’m in the group again, at the girls’ nights I bailed on all last year, folded back into the exact friendships I threw away to keep him.
I got them back by losing him.
When I sit in Gianna’s living room, I hate that I’m listening extra carefully when she’s talking about the team and how the season is starting next month. She never once mentions Percy, but I sit there straining for a scrap of him, desperately.
Mara starts coming over to my apartment, and she’s the thing that keeps me alive for weeks.
She’s louder than Ivory ever was, which I didn’t think was possible. She lets herself in now. She’ll do a workout with me and not complain unless she’s hungover, in which case she gives me never-ending compliments about my strength, my style, and my personality.
One night she shows up with takeout from two places because she couldn’t decide, and we eat on the floor with a bad horror movie on, and she’s telling me a story about a guy from her lab who tried to explain her own research back to her, doing all the voices, and I laugh, the first time since August, and it startles me.
It actually stops me for a second. Mara sees it.
“I knew you had a sense of humor,” she says, handing me a spring roll, and keeps going with the story.
I don’t explain that I’m not always this closed off. I don’t think it would make a difference. She hangs out with me either way.
“Gianna and Lucy are going through a fallout,” she says. “I won’t get into details, but Lucy might need somewhere to live.”
“Oh,” I say, understanding. “I have an open room.”
“I wish I could take it,” she says, but it’s too expensive. “It might be too much for Lucy too, but I don’t know, maybe you can talk to her.”
I nod, feeling my heart squeeze. “Yeah.”
I turn back to the food, unable to swallow the fact that Percy is never going to reach out to me.
I take Lucy to lunch in the last week of September and ask her to move in.
It’s a real ask, and Lucy considers it, but I can tell before she answers that it’s not going to happen.
She’s quiet the way I’m quiet, so it takes the whole lunch to get it out of her — that she’s been tutoring Benson Reeve, that it turned into something neither of them planned, and that Gianna found out and didn’t take it well.
She’s not looking for a new apartment. She’s looking for a way back to her best friend.
I’m ashamed of the relief that floods me when I understand she won’t be moving in.
Hope is a scary thing, I realize.
I leave the lunch with Lucy because Gianna texted her to come home, and I know she won’t be moving in with me. That’s a done deal. Everything is going to be okay with the girls.
By the end of September, I’m cracking. Not just a slip in character, I mean the whole thing is crumbling into a million pieces.
Mara is my favorite person because the girl knows how to have a good time.
We’ve been trying our best to stay out of the drama with Gianna and Lucy, and I think it’s finally dying down.
I’m out with the girls — me, Gianna, Mara, and a few other girls that I just met.
Everything is going fine. We’re having a good time, and then somebody at the table says something about the Hawthorne House, some party, some plan, and hearing it –– four drinks in –– makes my hands start to shake.
I have to go stand in the hallway by the bathrooms because I can’t stand to hear them talk about how hot the hockey players are.
I’ve never been boy crazy, nor have I ever been crazy over one boy.
It’s all new emotions that I have no idea how to sit with.
I look at his name in my phone. I haven’t deleted it. I’ve thought about deleting it a thousand times and I haven’t. Maybe I should reach out to him. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve reached out to him.
I open our text messages. Our last messages are from August when he was at work, and I was waiting for him at Hawthorne. I stare at his messages for a moment, and then I can’t take it anymore. My heart pounds as I start to type a message to him.
Me: My apartment is empty.
I look at it. It makes no sense, but I send it anyway.
And then I stand in the loud hallway, feeling lightheaded as I stare at my screen, waiting for him to reply.
The ache and the awful relief hits me at the same time — because I did it. After a whole month of holding my own hand behind my back, I finally messaged him first. Now it’s out there, and there’s no taking it back.