2. Xander #4
“Are you fucking serious?” His voice is shaking.
Iz’s voice does not shake. “She was a virgin? Did you even ask, X? Did you ask her anything? In a goddamn closet?” He’s pacing.
Hands in his hair. The emotional intelligence that makes him the anchor of our group is turned against me now, fully weaponized.
“I don’t even know who the fuck you are anymore.
I need to leave this room before I fucking kill you. ”
He storms out. The door slams. Danny stands. Looks at me. Doesn’t say a word. Just shakes his head—slow, deliberate, silence from the quietest person in the group using that silence as a weapon—and walks out.
Ryan stands. “You fucked up, X. And you fucked up Penny. And I’m telling you right now—if you don’t fix this, you’re going to lose every single person in that hallway. Including me.”
He walks out leaving just Kaiden and me. The pool house. The silence.
He leans on the bar. Arms crossed. Watching me with the expression of a boy who has spent six years standing beside me through everything and is, for the first time, wondering if he should stop.
“What happened to you, man?”
I stand. Pace. My hands are shaking. The words are clawing at the inside of my chest, trying to get out, and I’ve been holding them in for so long that the pressure is physical.
“You want to know what happened? You really want to fucking know?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“Did your mom kill herself, Kaiden?” The words explode.
Not measured. Not calculated. Raw. “Did you come home from school and push open a closet door and find your mother hanging from the rod with the rope still swinging? Did you see the blood on her wrists where she cut herself first, before the rope, because she wanted to make sure? Did your father call the coroner instead of the hospital because he said ‘there’s no point, she’s already gone’—didn’t even touch her, Kaid, didn’t even try to cut her down, just stood there and watched me scream? ”
Kaiden’s face changes. The frustration dissolves. What replaces it is horror. The kind that lives in the eyes of a person who is hearing the full truth for the first time and realizing how much worse it is than the version they’d imagined.
“And before that—before the closet—he beat me my entire life, Kaiden. My entire life. Since I was old enough to walk. Told me I was a burden. Told me I looked too much like her. Kept me out of school for weeks and told the office we were traveling. Locked me in my room without food. Hit me with whatever was closest—belt, hand, bottle, didn’t matter.
And then she died and he had a new wife in the house before the funeral flowers were dead.
And now I walk past my mother’s reading room and Valentina is in it, sleeping in the space where my mother used to sit, and every trace of Adeena Anderson has been erased like she never fucking existed. ”
I’m crying. I realize this without deciding to do it. The tears are just there—hot, falling, the first I’ve allowed since the night I found her. They track through the dried blood on my jaw and drip onto the collar of my school shirt.
“So yeah, Kaid. I’m fucked up. I’m so fucked up that I took Penny’s virginity in a closet and didn’t even know.
I’m so fucked up that I post pictures of the only girl I’ve ever loved to humiliate her into hating me because hating me is safer than being near me.
I’m so fucked up that the only time I feel alive is when someone is punching me in the face.
Get fucked, Kaiden. You had two loving parents.
You had a house that felt like a home. You have no idea what it’s like to grow up in mine. ”
Kaiden is quiet for a long time. Then he walks across the room. Sits on the couch beside me. Puts his hand on the back of my neck—firm, heavy, the grip of a boy who has been my brother for six years and is choosing to stay.
“You’re right. I don’t know the entire extent. But I’m here. And I’m not leaving. So whatever you need—wherever you need to go from here—you’re not going alone.”
I put my face in my hands. The tears keep coming. Kaiden’s hand stays on my neck.
After a while: “Go fix it, X. Go fix it with Penny.”
I lift my head. “She’s gone. They’re already gone.”
“Then go tomorrow. But fix it. Because what you said to her tonight—that wasn’t you. That was your father. And you are not him.”
The sentence lands in the center of my chest and stays there, pulsing.
You are not him. I want to believe that, but I’m not sure I can.
I walk home. Kaiden offers to drive. I say no. I need the cold. I need the dark. I need the solitude of a Massachusetts night in January, the kind where the air hurts your lungs and the snow crunches under your shoes and the houses you pass are all lit from within by families you don’t belong to.
The walk takes thirty minutes. Past the stone walls and iron gates of Edgewood.
Past the MacHale house—porch light on, Alice always leaves the porch light on, the warm golden glow of a home that works the way homes are supposed to work.
Past the Monaghan estate—dark now, the family asleep, the kitchen where Callum threw my father against a wall cleaned and quiet.
Past the Walsh house, the Harrington house, the Rorke house.
Past all the homes that took me in at various points of my childhood when my own home wasn’t safe, which was most of the time.
I stop. I’m not at my house. I’m at the cemetery.
My feet brought me here without consulting my brain, the way they do sometimes—muscle memory of a route I’ve walked so many times that the body navigates on autopilot while the mind is somewhere else. Somewhere with a rope and a closet and bare feet and silence.
The cemetery is quiet. January-quiet. The snow on the headstones glows blue-white under the moon. I walk between the rows—past names I don’t know, past dates that mean nothing, past the carved angels and crucifixes of Edgewood’s dead—until I find hersADEENA MARIE ANDERSON: Beloved Mother
The headstone is simple. Lucian chose it.
He chose the cheapest option in the catalog because spending money on a dead wife’s grave is not, in Lucian Anderson’s accounting, a worthwhile investment.
No flowers. No mementos. No indication that the woman buried here was someone who used to paint watercolors of the garden she planted and sing off-key to the radio and leave lights on in the hallway because she knew her son was afraid of the dark.
I stand over the grave. The snow soaking through my uniform shoes. The cold seeping through my blazer. The moon turning everything silver.
“You know what I did tonight, Mom?” My voice sounds wrong in the cemetery silence.
Too loud. Too alive. “I told Penny’s secrets to a room full of people.
I called her a whore. I said being inside her wasn’t worth it.
I looked at the girl who’s been my best friend since we were born and I used every tool Dad gave me to make her feel like nothing. ”
The headstone doesn’t answer. Headstones never do. That’s the cruelty of them—they’re the shape of a person without any of the person inside.
“And I found out she was a virgin, Mom. She was a fucking virgin and I didn’t know. I didn’t know because I didn’t ask. Because I’m so deep in my own shit that I couldn’t see hers. Sound familiar?”
The anger rises. Not at Penny. Not at the boys. At the stone. At the name carved in it. At the woman who lies beneath it.
“You left me with him.” The words come through clenched teeth.
“You knew what he was. You knew what he did to me. You lived in that house and you watched it happen and the best solution you could come up with was a rope in a closet? That was your answer? Leave me alone with the man who beat us both and just—check out?”
I’m kneeling now. When did I kneel? The snow is soaking through my uniform pants.
My hands are on the headstone, palms flat against the cold granite, and the tears are coming again—not the gentle kind from the pool house.
The violent kind. The kind that tear through your chest like they’re escaping.
“You tried to kill me too! On the bridge! You drugged me and held me and cut your wrists and tried to slit my throat! I was a kid, Mom! I was a little kid and you were supposed to protect me and instead you tried to take me with you because dying with me was easier than fighting for me!”
My fist hits the headstone. The skin splits. Blood on granite. I hit it again. Again.
“Fuck you.” Through the sobs. Through the blood. Through the January cold that has turned my tears to ice on my cheeks. “Fuck you for leaving me. Fuck you for the closet. Fuck you for making me the kind of person who hurts Penny because you taught me that love and pain are the same thing.”
I press my forehead against the stone. The cold seeps into my skull. “You should have killed me the first time.”
The cemetery absorbs the words. The snow falls. The moon doesn’t care.
I stay there for a long time. Long enough that the cold stops hurting and starts feeling like nothing at all, which is the most dangerous stage of cold—the stage where your body stops fighting it and starts accepting it.
Eventually, I stand. Wipe the blood on my pants, turn around, and walk home.
The Anderson estate. Glass and stone and sharp angles. Every light off except the kitchen. Lucian’s territory.
I open the front door. The marble foyer echoes under my shoes—wet from the snow, leaving tracks on the imported Italian tile that Veronica will have the housekeeper clean in the morning without comment. I try to make it to the stairs.
“Where have you been.”
Lucian. Kitchen doorway. Scotch in his hand. The silhouette of a man who has been waiting for a fight and is delighted that one has arrived.
Behind him—Veronica, at the kitchen island, wineglass in hand, watching with the detached interest of a woman who married money and considers domestic violence a spectator sport.
And Valentina, on the stool beside her mother, phone out, recording.
She’s always recording. The girl documents everything—leverage, she’d call it.
Insurance. The behavioral DNA of a girl raised to collect ammunition.
“Nowhere.”
“You’re bleeding. You’re in your school uniform at midnight. And you smell like a goddamn sewer.” He takes a sip of scotch. Savors it. “What am I supposed to tell the neighbors when my son comes home looking like a degenerate?”
“Tell them whatever you want. You’re good at making shit up.”
The sip stops. The glass lowers. His eyes—my eyes, the same blue, the same shape, the genetic legacy I cannot escape—go flat.
“You’re embarrassing this family, Xander.”
“What family.” I look past him. At Veronica, who hasn’t been part of this family for more than three months. At Valentina, who is filming this with a smile. “This isn’t a family, Lucian. It’s a business arrangement with a wife upgrade and a bonus daughter who spends her time stalking my friends.”
Valentina lowers her phone. “Excuse me?”
“You heard me.”
Lucian steps forward. The glass sets down on the counter with the precise click of a man who is freeing up his hands. I know this choreography. I’ve known it since I was old enough to walk. The setting of the glass. The squaring of the shoulders. The particular stillness before the storm.
His hand catches my arm. The grip. The grip I’ve felt a thousand times—tight, deliberate, the pressure that says “I own you” without words. I look at his hand. Then at his face.
“You are a disappointment, Xander. You have always been a disappointment. Your mother knew it. That’s why she did what she did—she couldn’t stand the sight of the failure she produced.”
The words land exactly where he wants them to land—in the center of the wound that hasn’t closed. Veronica watches from the island, unmoved, wineglass at her lips. Valentina has the phone up again, recording, and the faint glow of the screen illuminates her smile.
“Why don’t you do the world a favor, Xander.” Lucian reaches into his pocket. Pulls out a fold of bills. Drops them on the marble floor at my feet. “Use that. Buy whatever it is you’re putting up your nose. And do us all a favor and don’t wake up this time.”
Veronica’s hand goes to her mouth—not horror, performance. The gasp of a woman who is watching and judging and filing this for future use. Valentina doesn’t react at all. She just films.
I look at the money on the floor. At my father. At the house that used to have my mother’s watercolors on the walls and now has nothing. At the woman sitting where my mother used to sit and the girl sleeping in the room where my mother used to read.
“You first.”
I step over the money. Walk past him. Up the stairs. Into my room. Lock the door.
The room. My room that isn’t my room anymore. The quilt—gone. The watercolor—gone. The lavender hand cream—gone. Everything that was Adeena erased. Replaced with furniture I didn’t choose and sheets I didn’t buy and the blankness of a space that has been stripped of its history.
I sit on the bed. Reach into my backpack. Pull out the bag.
The pills are white. Small. Unremarkable. They don’t look like the thing that’s killing me—they look like aspirin, like vitamins, like something a doctor would hand you in a paper cup with a reassuring smile.
I crush three on the desk. Line them up with the edge of my student ID. Roll a bill tight. Lean down.
The burn. The drip. The slow, chemical erasure of everything—the pool house, the words, Penny’s face, the cemetery, my father’s voice, the money on the marble floor, the girl recording my destruction for content.
The world goes soft. The closet dims. My mother’s feet dissolve. The friendship bracelet on my wrist becomes just threads—no weight, no meaning, just faded color and fraying cotton against my pulse.
I lie back. Close my eyes.
I was a fucking virgin, Xander.
The sentence follows me into the dark. Penny’s voice. Steady. Unbreaking. The voice of a girl who told me the hardest truth of her life while I sat on a couch and smirked at her.
You took that from me.
The pills can’t erase it. Nothing can erase it.
She gave me the truth and I’m going to carry it in my body forever—alongside the closet and the rope and the bare feet—because some things you do can’t be taken back, and some things that are taken can’t be returned, and the boy who tied a friendship bracelet on a girl’s wrist at seven and said “forever” didn’t know that forever would look like this.
The pills pull me under. The last thing I feel is the bracelet against my wrist. Teal and yellow. Faded. Eleven years. The last thing I hear is her name in my own mouth, whispered into a dark room in a house that doesn’t belong to me anymore.
Penny.
Then nothing.