1. Penelope
New England weather is a personal attack.
I’m not being dramatic. I am actively being assaulted by the wind.
It’s January in Massachusetts and I’m walking across the Edgewood Prep quad in the school-issued peacoat that looks great in the brochure and does absolutely nothing against an actual New England winter.
Underneath: the uniform. Plaid skirt, white button-up, tie, blazer with the crest, black knee socks that stop being warm approximately four inches above where they end.
I got dressed this morning the way I’ve been getting dressed every morning since October—fast, without thinking, going through the motions so I don’t have to stand in front of the mirror long enough for my reflection to ask questions I can’t answer.
The campus is the kind of beautiful that belongs on a brochure.
Gothic stone buildings with ivy crawling up the facades, arched windows, iron gates, a bell tower that chimes on the hour like we’re attending school inside a cathedral.
Everything about Edgewood Prep screams old money and older standards and the kind of institutional prestige that comes from two hundred years of producing senators, CEOs, and the occasional white-collar criminal.
The kind of school where the parking lot has more luxury cars than a dealership and nobody blinks.
Winter break is over. Kids are flowing through the front entrance in waves—designer coats, new iPhones, tanned skin from Christmas in Aspen or the Bahamas or wherever their trust funds took them.
They’re all buzzing about what they got, where they went, who they hooked up with at what New Year’s Eve party.
The energy is electric. Everybody is so fucking happy.
I am not fucking happy.
I plaster on the smile. The Penny smile.
The one I’ve been perfecting since childhood—big, bright, the kind of smile that makes people laugh and stops them from looking too closely.
I wave to a girl from my lit class. Give a thumbs-up to one of the lacrosse guys who shouts my name across the quad.
Perform the choreography of a person who is fine, absolutely fine, could not be more fine if she tried.
I am so far from fine that fine is a foreign country and my passport is expired.
What nobody sees—what nobody is supposed to see—is the way my hands haven’t stopped shaking since six a.m. Or the fact that I skipped breakfast because my stomach is a knot of nausea and anxiety and the particular chemical emptiness that means I’m overdue.
Or the way my eyes keep scanning the hallway, not for friends, but for exits.
Bathrooms. Empty classrooms. Anywhere I can be alone for ninety seconds, which is all it takes.
Ninety seconds. Crush. Line. Inhale. And the world gets soft again.
I haven’t had a pill since last night. Twelve hours ago.
Twelve hours is an eternity when your body has learned to run on Percocet the way other people’s bodies run on oxygen.
The withdrawal isn’t dramatic yet—not the shaking, puking, crawling-on-the-floor kind.
It’s subtler. A low-grade hum of wrongness that lives under my skin, like every nerve ending is tuned half a step sharp.
My muscles ache. My jaw is tight. There’s a headache building behind my left eye that pulses with my heartbeat.
And underneath all of it, the craving—not loud, not screaming, just persistent.
A whisper that never stops. A frequency only I can hear.
Just one. Just to take the edge off. Just to get through the morning. You can stop after that. You always stop after that. But I never stop after that.
The hallway smells like floor polish and wet wool and the blend of expensive perfume that happens when two hundred rich girls occupy the same building. I weave through the crowd to my locker, spin the combination, and open it.
Inside: textbooks I haven’t opened in weeks. A photo of Cat and me at an Ashes of the Kings concert, both of us screaming, my teal streaks flying. A magnetic mirror I avoid. And tucked behind my calculus book, the small zippered bag that nobody knows about.
I reach for it. My fingers find the zipper. I start to pull—
The locker next to mine slams. I flinch so hard I bang my elbow on the metal shelf. A kid I barely know gives me a weird look as he grabs his books and walks away.
Get it together, Penelope.
I zip the bag closed without opening it. Not here. Not in the hallway with a hundred people walking past. I’ll wait. I can wait. I’ve waited twelve hours; I can wait another forty minutes until first period break.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. I pull it out.
Cat: Where are you??? I’m by the fountain. Get your ass here.
Me: Coming. Calm your tits.
Cat: My tits are very calm. YOUR tits need coffee. I have coffee. Move.
I close my locker. Adjust the smile. Head toward the fountain at the center of the main hall, where Cat is leaning against the stone basin with two iced coffees despite the fact that it is literally freezing outside, because Cat O’Farrell drinks iced coffee in a blizzard and dares the weather to say something about it.
She looks good. That’s the first thing I notice, and I hate that it makes me feel something complicated.
Cat looks good the way Cat always looks good—same uniform as the rest of us, but on her it’s different.
The plaid skirt hemmed exactly to regulation, the white button-up tucked in but with the top button undone, the tie loosened just enough to say “I’m complying but I’m not happy about it.
” Blazer sleeves pushed to her elbows. Black knee socks.
Black shoes. Dark hair. Sharp eyeliner—the lethal wing that does the work her clothes can’t, the armor she paints on every morning with the precision of a girl going to war.
The Celtic knot necklace that Kaiden gave her glinting at her throat, the only piece of jewelry that breaks the uniform code, and not a single teacher has ever said a word about it.
She looks like a girl who has come through something terrible and emerged harder and sharper and more herself than she was before.
She looks like a girl who is healing. And I look like a girl who is pretending to heal. There’s a difference, and Cat is the only person smart enough to see it.
“Penny!” She shoves the coffee into my hand. “You look like you slept in a dumpster.”
“Thank you. That’s exactly the vibe I was going for. Dumpster chic. Very on-trend.”
“Seriously. Did you sleep?”
“Define sleep.”
“The thing where you close your eyes and your brain shuts off for eight hours.”
“Then no. My brain doesn’t have a shut-off function. It’s a design flaw.”
Cat studies me. She does this—the look. The assessment of a girl who has been through her own darkness and can smell it on other people the way a dog smells fear.
Her eyes track my face: the circles under my eyes that concealer can’t fully hide, the way I’m gripping the coffee cup too tight, the slight tremble in my fingers that I’m disguising as cold.
She doesn’t push. Not yet. Cat’s been strategic about pushing since the kidnapping—she knows what it’s like to have people pry when you’re not ready, and she’s determined not to do that to me.
But I can see her filing the information.
Cataloguing it. Adding it to the growing list of things she’s noticed about me since October that don’t add up.
“Where’s Kaid?” I ask. Deflection. My greatest talent.
“Doctor’s appointment. Physical therapy for the shoulder.”
I gasp dramatically. “And you let him go alone? Without supervision? He could be flirting with nurses right now.”
“He could be flirting with the nurses and he’d still come home to me, so.”
“Disgustingly confident. I respect it.”
She laughs. I laugh. For three seconds, we sound like normal girls having a normal conversation at a normal school, and I hold onto those three seconds like a life raft because the alternative is drowning and I’ve been drowning since October and nobody knows because I’m really, really good at treading water.
We head into first period. The classroom is filling up—kids dropping bags on desks, pulling out laptops, the low hum of post-break gossip. Cat takes her seat by the window. I take mine next to her.
Xander is the last one through the door.
He doesn’t look at me. He hasn’t looked at me—really looked at me—since the night in the closet.
Since he dropped me off and handed me cash and told me to buy Plan B like I was a transaction he was closing out.
Since he ghosted my calls, my texts, the four voicemails I left in the first week before pride kicked in and I stopped trying.
He walks in like a storm system—dark energy, lowered head, the physicality of a boy who takes up space without trying and intimidates without intending.
Or maybe he intends. I can’t tell anymore.
The Xander I grew up with and the Xander who exists now are two different people wearing the same face, and I don’t know which one is real and which one is the mask.
He sits directly behind me. The proximity is a weapon.
I can feel him—his presence, his heat, the frequency he broadcasts that my body has been tuned to since birth.
The hairs on my arms rise. My heartbeat shifts.
Every cell in my body rotates toward him like a plant toward light, and I hate it.
I hate that my body still responds to a person who treated me like nothing.
I hate that I still want his hands on me after what happened in that closet.
I hate that I replay it—in the shower, in my bed, in the dark behind my eyelids—and the thing I feel isn’t anger. It’s hunger.
Something is wrong with me.
Kole Hobbs slides into the seat next to mine. He’s grinning—the grin of a boy who thinks he’s charming and has never been told otherwise because money buys patience.
“Yo, what up, Pretty Penny?”