5. Penelope #2
“You are my best friend. You are the first person who looked at me in this school and saw a person instead of a threat. You walked into Edgewood Prep with your teal streaks and your combat boots and your band patches and you sat down next to me and said ‘I’m Penny, call me anything else and I’ll assume you’re talking about a dead grandmother. ’ Do you remember that?”
A wet, broken laugh escapes me. “Yeah. I remember.”
“That girl is still in there. Under all of this. Under the pills and the boys and the bullshit. And I’m going to sit right here until she comes back.”
I lean into her. Let myself be held. Let the crying finish itself—the waves getting smaller, the breathing getting steadier, the particular aftermath of a person who has purged something toxic and is lying in the emptiness that’s left.
Cat hands me the bag of clothes she brought. Sweats. An oversized hoodie that smells like Kaiden’s cologne because everything Cat owns smells like Kaiden’s cologne. Socks. Clean underwear.
“Change. Then we’re eating whatever Danny’s kitchen has and you’re sleeping. Real sleep. No pills.”
“Cat—”
“No pills. Tonight, you feel everything and you survive it and in the morning you’ll know you can survive it without them. One night. That’s all I’m asking.”
I nod. Not because I believe her. Because I’m too tired to argue.
I change. She braids my hair—one long braid down my back, the way her mother used to do before the divorce, the way Saoirse does for Cat now. The intimacy of it—someone else’s hands in my hair, gentle, caring, the opposite of every other hand that’s been on me in months—makes my eyes sting again.
We walk downstairs. The boys are in the kitchen—Xander at the counter, Kaiden by the stove, Danny pulling plates from the cabinet, Ryan on his phone, Iz already plating something that smells like eggs and toast. Five boys who have been sitting in this kitchen waiting for a girl to come out of a bathroom, and not one of them pretends it was anything other than what it was.
Xander’s eyes find mine. Hold. The expression on his face is the one from this morning—soft, open, the version of him I recognize from childhood. The version that said “easy, baby” and put water in my hands and caught my tears on his thumb.
I look away. I can’t afford to look at that version of him right now. Looking at that version makes me want to crawl into his arms and forgive everything, and I’m not ready to forgive. I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready.
Iz puts a plate in front of me. Scrambled eggs, toast, a glass of water. His hand brushes my shoulder as he sits down beside me—light, brief, the touch of a person who has learned that asking before touching is not a weakness but a language.
“Eat,” he says softly. “Small bites.”
I eat. Small bites. The food tastes like nothing but I eat it because Cat is watching and Iz is watching and the alternative to eating is another fight I don’t have the energy for.
Nobody talks about last night. Nobody talks about Kole or Reece or the closet or the pills.
They talk about nothing—about a game Ryan is playing, about Danny’s mom’s Fashion Week schedule, about the weather.
They build a wall of normalcy around me like a shelter, and I sit inside it and eat eggs and breathe.
One night without pills. One night. I can do one night.
Cat drives me home. I sleep in her and Kaiden’s bed at the Monaghan house, Cat on one side, the door locked, no pills. The withdrawal hums under my skin all night—a low, mean frequency that makes sleep a negotiation instead of a surrender. I doze. Wake. Doze. Wake.
At three a.m., Cat’s hand finds mine in the dark.
“Still here,” she whispers.
“Still here,” I whisper back.
I survive the night. In the morning, the hum is louder, but I’m still alive, and Cat was right—knowing I can survive it without them is the smallest, most fragile thing, a seed so tiny you could lose it between your fingers. But it’s there.
Monday morning. I almost make it to first period.
I’m at my locker, headphones in, a Turnover album providing the soundtrack for my attempted return to normalcy, when Cat appears at my side with her phone out and her face gray.
“Penny. Don’t freak out.”
Those three words have never in the history of human communication preceded something that didn’t warrant freaking out.
She turns the phone toward me. GlossX. The school’s social autopsy app.
Kole’s post. His face is the first thing I see—bruised, swollen, the visible aftermath of Xander’s fists.
One eye nearly shut. Split lip. He’s angled the selfie to make the damage look maximum, captioned with: “Attacked at a party for hanging out with a girl who was INTO IT. Edgewood’s golden boy showing his true colors. ”
Then the photos of me.
Me on the bed. My blazer off. My dress pushed up to my waist. My eyes half-closed—not seductive, sedated.
The particular slack-jawed vulnerability of a girl who is chemically unable to protect herself.
Kole’s face in the frame of one—his mouth on my neck, his hand on my thigh, grinning at the camera like it’s a trophy shot.
The comments are already in triple digits.
Laughing emojis. Fire emojis. The word “slut” in various creative spellings.
Someone tagged me. Someone tagged Xander.
Someone tagged the school’s anonymous gossip account, which has already reposted with the caption: “PRETTY PENNY ISN’T SO PRETTY WHEN SHE’S PASSED OUT. ”
The hallway tilts. My vision narrows to a pinpoint.
The music in my headphones—Turnover, gentle, the kind of music that usually holds me together—becomes noise.
Just noise. Noise I can’t process because my brain has switched to the emergency setting where everything goes white and the body makes decisions the mind hasn’t authorized.
I run. Not to the exit. To the bathroom.
The nearest bathroom. My Converse squeaking on the marble as I barrel through the door and into the first stall and drop to my knees in front of the toilet and throw up everything Cat made me eat this morning.
The eggs. The toast. The water. The seed of hope she planted last night that said maybe you can survive without the pills.
Gone. All of it. In the toilet at Edgewood Prep while my phone buzzes in my pocket with notifications I will never read.
The stall door opens. I didn’t lock it. I forgot to lock it. Xander.
He’s on his knees beside me in an instant.
No hesitation. No questions. His hands in my hair, gathering it back from my face, holding it while my body convulses.
His other hand on my back, flat, steady—pressure from a person who is trying to hold you together from the outside because they can’t reach what’s breaking on the inside.
“Penny.” His voice is the morning voice. The “easy, baby” voice. Soft. Low. The register he reserves for me when the mask is down and the real boy is showing. “You’re okay. I’m here. Breathe.”
Another wave of nausea. I lean over the bowl and heave and nothing comes up because there’s nothing left. Just bile. Just the acid burn of a body purging itself of everything—food, pride, the last shreds of the performance that has been keeping me vertical since October.
He rubs circles on my back. Small. Slow. The way he used to when we were kids and I’d get carsick on long drives and he’d sit next to me in the back seat and draw patterns on my spine until the nausea passed.
“Oh god, Xander. What have I done?”
“You didn’t do anything.” Firm. Not negotiable. “That motherfucker took pictures of you while you were drugged and unconscious. That’s on him. Not on you. Never on you.”
“The whole school has seen them. Everyone has—”
“And every single person who shared them will answer for it. I promise you, Penny. They will pay.”
I lean back. Against him. My body finding the position it’s memorized—head on his chest, cheek against the cotton of his shirt, his heartbeat under my ear.
He wraps his arms around me. Holds me on the bathroom floor while I shake and cry and the tiles press cold against my legs through Cat’s borrowed skirt.
“Please don’t leave me, X.” The words come from the place beneath the performance—the real place, the Penny-and-Xander place, the one that exists underneath all the damage. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep pretending. I’m so tired.”
“I’m here, baby.” His mouth against my hair. His thumb rubbing my lower back. “Take some deep breaths. Slow. That’s it. Good girl. Just breathe.”
I breathe. He holds. The bathroom is cold and the fluorescents are humming and somewhere outside this stall the school is consuming my humiliation like content, but in here it’s just us—two broken kids on a floor, holding each other, the friendship bracelets on our wrists pressing together between our bodies.
My phone buzzes. Again. Again. Again. I pull it from my pocket with a shaking hand.
Twelve missed calls. Mom. Dad. Mom. Mom. Dad. Mom.
“Shit.”
Xander looks at the screen. Sighs. “You need to call them back.”
I dial with trembling fingers. My mom picks up on the first ring.
“Penelope Carra MacHale. Where. Are. You.”
“I’m at school, Mom. I—”
“We’ve been trying to reach you for an hour. Your father and I have seen the photos. The school called us. The guidance counselor called us. A reporter called us, Penny—a reporter! What in God’s name is happening?”
“Mom, please—”
“You are coming home. Right now. This conversation is done.”
She hangs up. I stare at the phone. Then at Xander.
“I can’t face them alone.” My voice is so small it doesn’t sound like mine.
“My dad has never—he’s never been angry at me like this.
And my mom—she was crying, X. She was crying.
They’ve been so careful with me since the kidnapping, giving me space, being patient, and now this is going to—they’re going to look at me like—”
I can’t finish. The sentence dissolves into crying.
“Will you come with me? Please?”