3. Penelope #2
“That’s not how this works. That’s not how we work. I am your best friend, Penelope MacHale, and your shit is my shit. Always.”
I want to tell her. The words are right there—in my throat, behind my teeth, pressing against the wall of performance I’ve built.
I want to say: I’m using. Percocet. From Reece.
Every day. I can’t stop. The pills are the only thing that makes the noise quiet and without them I can feel everything and feeling everything is worse than feeling nothing.
I don’t say it. I smile. I deflect. I do what Penny does. “I promise I’ll try harder with the therapy thing. Now tell me about this Ashes of the Kings show before I combust.”
Cat holds my gaze for three more seconds. Measuring. Deciding whether to push or let it go. She lets it go. But I can see the decision being filed—stored in the place Cat keeps the things she’s going to come back to when the time is right.
She grabs her phone. “Okay. So. Floor seats. VIP. Backstage passes because I know a guy who knows the lighting tech.”
“You know a guy who knows the lighting tech?”
“Kaiden knows a guy. Same thing. The point is: we’re meeting the band, Penny. THE BAND.”
I scream. She screams. We jump on the bed like we’re twelve and for thirty seconds the world is just music and my best friend and the promise of a night where the only noise is the noise I chose.
The door opens. Saoirse, in the hallway, drying her hands on a dish towel. She doesn’t look surprised to find two teenage girls jumping on her son’s bed. She looks amused.
“Dinner’s ready, girls. Callum made the curry and Thomas contributed the bread, which means the bread is store-bought and the curry is actually good.”
Cat laughs. “We’ll be right down.”
Saoirse’s eyes find mine. Linger. The look of a mother who sees things—who has spent her career working with women in crisis and can identify the tells of a girl in trouble from across a room.
She smiles—warm, gentle, the smile of a woman who is deciding not to push yet but wants me to know the door is open.
“Penny, sweetheart. You know you’re always welcome here. Anytime. For anything.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Monaghan.”
“Saoirse.”
“Saoirse.”
She nods. Disappears down the hallway. Cat bumps my shoulder.
“She likes you.”
“She’s worried about me.”
“Same thing, in this house.”
We head downstairs. The kitchen is warm and loud and full of the chaos that happens when the Monaghan household gathers—Callum at the stove, Thomas at the island with a beer, Saoirse setting plates, and from the pool house the distant bass of whatever game the boys are playing, Danny’s laugh cutting through the walls.
I sit. Eat. Perform normal. The curry is good. The bread is store-bought. Thomas asks me about school and I deflect with humor. Callum asks about my parents and I say they’re great. Saoirse watches me eat and I can feel her counting my bites the way a nurse counts vitals.
After dinner, Cat and I head back upstairs. She calls Kaiden—because she has to, because they are physically incapable of going four hours without hearing each other’s voices, and it would be annoying if it weren’t so obviously, achingly real.
I stand in the bathroom. Door closed. Her voice muffled through the wood—laughing, low, the register she uses only for him.
I reach into my bag. Pull out the zippered pouch.
One pill. I crush it on the counter with the back of my phone case.
Line it up. Lean down. The burn. The drip.
The sweet chemical loosening that I have come to associate with safety the way other people associate it with a hug or a locked door or the voice of someone who loves them.
I clean the counter. Check for residue. Put my ear to the door—Cat’s still on the phone, murmuring something to Kaiden that I can’t hear and don’t need to.
I stumble out. Fall onto the bed. The guilt arrives on schedule—the shame of snorting pills in your best friend’s bathroom while she’s in the next room trusting you to be okay. The shame is familiar now. Comfortable, almost. Another sensation the pills will erase if I give them twenty minutes.
Cat comes back in. Sees me on the bed. Crawls in beside me. “You okay?”
“Just tired. Long week.”
She doesn’t believe me. I can feel her not believing me in the quality of the silence that follows—the silence of a girl who is choosing not to push but is not choosing not to notice. She pulls the blanket over us. Turns the light off.
“Penny.”
“Yeah.”
“Whatever it is you’re not telling me—I’m not going anywhere. When you’re ready.”
The tears come in the dark. Silent. She can’t see them. But she can feel them—she reaches over and takes my hand and holds it, and we fall asleep like that, fingers linked, the way old friends used to when they were little and the world was something you could hide from under a blanket.
Except we’re not little anymore. And the things we’re hiding from don’t stay outside the blanket.
Monday. Hell’s front door.
I’m standing at my locker, trying to summon the energy to give a shit about calculus, when a body leans against the locker next to mine. Close. Casual. The proximity of a boy who has decided he’s charming and is about to prove himself wrong.
Kole Hobbs.
He’s tall—not Xander tall, but tall enough to look down at me with the practiced angle of a guy who thinks height is a personality trait. His blazer is open. His tie is loose. He smells like Polo cologne and ambition.
“Sup, Pretty Penny.”
“Hey, Kole.”
He reaches out and tugs one of my teal streaks. Playful. Possessive. The gesture of a boy who thinks touching a girl’s hair without permission is flirting rather than trespassing.
“Love these. New?”
“They’re four months old.”
“Well, they look fresh.” He grins. Slides closer.
His elbow on the locker beside my head, his body angling to create a pocket of space that boxes me in without technically blocking me.
The geometry of a boy who has studied how to corner a girl while maintaining plausible deniability.
“So what are you doing later? I was thinking we could grab a coffee. Or dinner. Or both. I know this place in Newburyport—waterfront, great food, candles on the tables. Very… us.”
“There is no ‘us,’ Kole.”
“Not yet.” He winks. His hand drops from the locker to my arm—fingers trailing down from my elbow to my wrist, light, testing. “Come on, Penny. One dinner. I’ll even let you pick the music in the car. I know that’s, like, a whole thing for you.”
The fact that he knows music is a thing for me means he’s been paying attention, which is either flattering or stalking depending on the context. In Kole’s case, it’s a little of both.
“I appreciate the offer, but—”
“Just coffee, then. Thirty minutes. I’ll buy.
I’ll even pretend to know who the band on your jacket is.
” He taps the Ashes of the Kings patch on my blazer—where I’ve sewn it to the inside, visible only when the blazer is open, the smallest act of uniform rebellion I’m allowed. His finger lingers. “Is that a yes?”
“It’s a maybe.”
“I’ll take a maybe.” He pushes off the locker with a grin that’s too wide and too confident and steps back just as a hand closes around my arm.
Xander.
He pulls me away from Kole, not asking permission and does not care about the optics. Kole’s grin drops. He takes a smart step back, because whatever else Kole Hobbs is, he’s not stupid enough to challenge Xander Anderson in a hallway.
X pulls me around the corner. Into an empty classroom. The door shuts behind us. “You will not hang out with Kole Hobbs.”
“Excuse me?”
“He only wants one thing, Penny, and he’s not even subtle about it.”
“Oh, just like you?” The words come out sharp. Aimed. Finding their target. “At least Kole asked me to dinner first. You didn’t even ask my name before you shoved your hand down my pants.”
He flinches. Microscopic. Behind his eyes, where nobody else would see it. But I see it because I’ve been reading Xander Anderson’s face since before I could read words.
“This isn’t about me.”
“It’s always about you! Everything is always about you and your pain and your bullshit and the rest of us are just collateral damage. We’re done, X. This conversation, this friendship, whatever the fuck this is—we’re done.”
I try to walk past him. He grabs my arm. Again. Always grabbing, always pulling, the physical vocabulary of a boy who doesn’t know how to use words so he uses his body instead.
“Penny, stop. Can we just—can we talk? Please?”
The “please” nearly undoes me. Xander Anderson does not say please. The word sounds foreign in his mouth—soft, unfamiliar, like a language he used to speak and forgot.
“No. There’s nothing to talk about. You said what you needed to say at the pool house.”
“I’m sorry, okay?” His voice cracks. The mask slipping. “If I had known you were—”
“Knew I was a virgin?” I spin on him. Get in his space.
My face inches from his. “Would you have really stopped, Xander? Would you have pulled back and looked at me and asked if I was okay? Or would you have done exactly what you did—turn me around so you didn’t have to see my face and take what you wanted? ”
His jaw tightens. His eyes are dark and wet and something underneath them is breaking in real time. But I can’t stop. The hurt is a machine and it’s running.
“This conversation is over.”
I push past him. This time he doesn’t grab my arm.
He steps in front of me. Blocks the door.
His body between me and the exit, and now we’re close—too close.
I can smell him—soap and sweat and that scent underneath that is just Xander, the smell that has been imprinted on my nervous system since childhood and makes my body do things my mind did not approve.
His hands find my hips. Rough. Firm. The grip from the closet. The grip that says “you’re mine” in a language my body speaks fluently even as my brain is screaming at me to step away.