5. Penelope
The water starts hot.
I stand under it and let it hit my skull and run down my body and pool around my feet, pink-tinged from the blood on my hands where I gripped Xander’s shirt too hard and the scabs from last week cracked open.
Danny’s guest bathroom is nicer than most people’s master baths—marble tile, rain showerhead, the luxury of a family that spends money the way other families spend time.
None of it registers. I could be standing under a garden hose.
I could be standing in the rain. The location is irrelevant because the location is always the same: inside my own head, which is the one place I cannot leave.
The water turns warm. Then lukewarm. Then cold. I don’t move.
The images cycle. They always cycle. A carousel of the worst moments, spinning on a loop I cannot stop:
The basement. Zip ties. The needle. Cat’s screams through the wall. Jon’s face—the mask he wore at school dissolving into the thing underneath. Alastair in the doorway, adjusting his cufflinks, watching his son work on Cat the way a director watches a rehearsal.
Garrett. Thirteen. The lacrosse field. His hand on my arm. The weight of him. The smell—cologne and sweat and something darker, the scent of a man who has done this before and will do it again. Then Xander. The lacrosse stick. The sound it made against Garrett’s skull. The blood on Xander’s shoes.
The closet. Xander’s hands turning me to the wall. The sound of my own breathing. The pain. The pleasure that lived inside the pain and made me feel broken for feeling it. The Plan B money in the car. The silence.
Reece’s hand on my hip. His lips on my cheek.
The pill passing between our palms like a secret handshake.
The transaction of it—his product for my compliance, my body for his currency, the economy of a girl who is paying for silence with pills and paying for pills with pieces of herself she can’t afford to lose.
Kole. His phone above me. The flash off. His mouth on my neck while I lay there unable to move, unable to speak, unable to do anything except exist as an object in someone else’s photograph.
And underneath all of it—underneath the basement and the closet and the pills and the photos—the thing I am most tired of:
Men touching me without asking.
Garrett didn’t ask. Jon didn’t ask. Alastair didn’t ask.
Xander didn’t ask. Reece doesn’t ask. Kole didn’t ask.
Every significant male interaction I’ve had in the last five years has involved a hand on my body that I didn’t invite, and I am so fucking tired of being touched by people who think my skin is public property.
I slide down the shower wall. Sit on the marble floor.
The cold water hits my scalp and runs down my face and I let it because the cold is the only thing that feels clean.
My hands are shaking. My body is shaking.
The withdrawal is starting—the low hum of wrongness building to a whine, my muscles aching, my jaw tight, the cellular desperation of a body that has learned to depend on chemicals and is being denied them.
I cry.
Not the performance kind. Not the pretty kind.
The ugly, animal kind—the sounds that come from the place below the ribs where grief and shame live stacked on top of each other like geological layers.
The sobbing shakes my whole body. It echoes off the marble.
It fills the bathroom with a noise I didn’t know I could make—guttural, broken, the keening of a girl who has been holding it together with tape and pills and performance and has finally, finally, run out of all three.
Through the wall, I can hear voices. The boys.
Muffled. Xander’s voice—low, serious. Kaiden’s voice—measured, controlled.
I can’t hear the words but I know they’re talking about me because they’re always talking about me, about what to do with Penny, about how to fix Penny, about the problem of a girl who is spiraling and won’t grab the rope they keep throwing.
I don’t want to be a problem. I don’t want to be a project.
I want to be a person. I want to be the person I was before the basement and the closet and the pills.
I want to sit in the treehouse with my bluetooth speaker and play songs for a boy who carries bugs outside instead of stepping on them and make friendship bracelets with dumb color choices and believe that the right song at the right volume can fix anything.
I want to go back. I can’t go back.
The water goes ice cold. I turn it off. Sit in the silence. The marble floor pressing cold into my thighs through the soaked uniform skirt I forgot to take off.
A knock on the door. Soft. Not demanding.
“Penny?” Cat. “I brought you clothes. Can I come in?”
I try to say “yes” but what comes out is a sound that isn’t a word. Cat takes it as permission.
She opens the door. Takes in the scene—me on the shower floor, fully clothed, soaked, shivering, mascara tracking black rivers down my face, my hands raw and bloody against the marble.
She doesn’t gasp. Doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t rush to me with the performative urgency of someone who wants to be seen helping.
She just sets the bag of clothes on the counter, grabs a towel from the rack, and sits down on the bathroom floor beside me.
Not touching. Not talking. Just sitting. In my mess. In the cold water pooling around us. In the silence of a girl who has been exactly where I am and knows that the first thing a drowning person needs is not a lecture—it’s a body nearby, breathing, proving that survival is possible.
We sit like that for a long time.
Then she reaches over and turns the towel around my shoulders. Gently. The way you’d wrap a child. “Talk to me, Penny.”
It comes out in pieces. Not in order. Not in complete sentences. In fragments—the way a demolished building looks before they clear the rubble, all the pieces there but nothing in the right place anymore.
“I’m so tired, Cat.”
“I know.”
“No. You don’t. You don’t know because I haven’t told you because I’ve been so busy pretending I’m fine that I forgot what not-pretending feels like.
” The words start slow and then they come faster, picking up speed like a car on a hill with no brakes.
“I’m tired of men touching me. That’s what it is.
That’s the thing I can’t say out loud because saying it means admitting that it keeps happening and that means something is wrong with me that attracts it. ”
“There is nothing wrong with you—”
“Garrett touched me when I was thirteen and Xander had to beat him unconscious to make it stop. Jon and his father drugged me and beat me in a basement. Kole put his hands on me while I was unconscious and took pictures. Reece touches me every time he gives me a pill—his hand on my hip, his lips on my cheek, his fingers in my hair like I’m a toy he’s petting.
And Xander—” My voice breaks. Shatters. Reforms. “Xander turned me against a wall and fucked me without asking and then gave me money for Plan B and called me ‘slumming it’ in a hallway. And the worst part—the worst part, Cat—is that I liked what he did in that closet and I hate myself for liking it and I can’t stop thinking about it and I don’t know if that makes me broken or just… just as fucked up as he is.”
Cat is quiet. Her hand finds mine on the wet floor. Holds it.
“And the pills.” Softer now. The exhaustion taking over, the adrenaline spent.
“The pills are the only thing that makes all of it stop. Every man’s hands, every flashback, every nightmare, every memory of the basement.
The pills make the world go quiet and I need quiet, Cat.
I need it like I need oxygen. And I know—I know it’s killing me.
I know Reece is using me. I know I’m an addict.
I can see it from the outside like I’m watching a movie of someone else’s life and I’m screaming at the screen to stop and she can’t hear me because she’s me and I can’t hear myself anymore. ”
The tears come again. But different this time. Emptying tears. The kind that feel like bleeding out—painful, messy, but somehow necessary. Like the poison is leaving.
Cat pulls me into her. My head against her chest. Her arms around my back.
She’s crying too—I can feel it in the shake of her breathing, in the wetness falling into my hair.
She holds me the way Saoirse holds people—full body, no gaps, the kind of hug that says “I am not letting go until you believe you’re worth holding. ”
“Listen to me.” Her voice is thick with tears but steady underneath.
The Cat voice. The one forged in basements and hospital rooms and therapy sessions.
“Nothing that happened to you is your fault. Not Garrett. Not the basement. Not the closet. Not Kole. And the pills—the pills are not a moral failure, Penny. They’re a symptom.
You’re in pain and you found the one thing that made the pain stop and your brain latched onto it because that’s what brains do.
That doesn’t make you weak. It makes you human. ”
“I can’t stop, Cat. I’ve tried. I’ve told myself I’d stop a hundred times and I always go back. The craving is… it’s not even in my head anymore. It’s in my body. My hands shake. My teeth hurt. I can feel it in my bones.”
“Then we get you real help. Not the therapist you went to three times and ghosted. Real help. Darla. She’s gotten me through shit that should have destroyed me, Penny. She can help with the addiction and the trauma and the part of your brain that tells you you deserve this.”
“What if it doesn’t work?”
“Then we try again. And again. And again. Until it works or until I physically run out of energy, which won’t happen because I am Catherine O’Farrell and I don’t quit. Not on the people I love. Not ever.”
She takes my face in her hands. Looks at me. Green eyes, sharp even through the tears, the eyeliner smudged but still somehow lethal.