6. Xander #2
Me: Penny’s car is at Reece’s. Need somebody to get it. Cat has a spare key. Don’t ask questions.
Iz: On it. Is she safe?
Me: She’s with me.
Iz: Bringing Kaid. We’ll handle the car.
I pocket the phone. Start the engine. Pull out of Reece’s driveway. And the fight starts before we’ve reached the end of the street.
“What the fuck are you doing, Xander?”
Penny is awake now. The cold air from the vents and the adrenaline of being dragged out of a house are cutting through the chemical fog, and what’s emerging is not grateful. It’s furious.
“Taking you home.”
“I didn’t ask you to come get me. I didn’t ask for your help. I didn’t ask for any of this!”
“Your mother called me, Penny. Alice called me crying because her daughter turned her phone off and disappeared. She was terrified. Your father is at home calling lawyers. They’re out of their minds.”
That lands. I see it—the flinch, the guilt, the particular pain of a girl who loves her parents and is destroying them and can’t stop.
“That’s not—I told her I’d be home later—”
“You told her you weren’t coming home! That’s what she heard! A mother whose daughter was kidnapped three months ago hears ‘I’m not coming home’ and she doesn’t hear ‘I need space.’ She hears ‘something has happened to my child again.’”
Penny’s face crumples. She turns to the window. I can see her reflection in the glass—the tears tracking down her cheeks, the jaw set against the crying, the stubbornness of a girl who will not let me see her break even though I’ve already seen it a hundred times.
“Don’t act like you care about my parents, Xander.
Don’t pretend this is about them. This is about you.
This is about your need to control everything—where I go, who I’m with, what I put in my body.
You don’t get to do that. You don’t get to fuck me in a closet and throw money at me and call me ‘slumming it’ and then show up at Reece’s house like my knight in shining armor. ”
“Reece was touching you.”
“So?”
“So?” I slam my hand on the steering wheel.
“His hand was inside your shirt, Penny! You were so high you couldn’t even feel it!
Do you understand what he was doing? Do you understand what comes next?
He’s grooming you! The same way he groomed Daisy—the touches, the pills, the ‘you came to me, I didn’t come to you.
’ That’s his playbook! And you’re running straight into it! ”
“At least Reece gives me what I need without making me feel like shit about it!”
The sentence detonates in the car like a grenade. The silence after it is absolute—just the engine and the heater and the windshield wipers moving because it’s started to sleet and Massachusetts in January doesn’t care about your emotional crisis.
“What you need.” My voice has gone cold. The Lucian voice. I hear it and I hate it and I can’t stop it. “You need a drug dealer’s hands on your body. That’s what you need.”
“You don’t get to judge me.” She turns from the window.
Faces me. Her eyes are red and wet and blazing.
“You’re doing the same thing I am. You’re snorting the same pills.
You’re paying Reece with your body too—you just use fists instead of—” She stops.
The sentence lands somewhere too close to the thing she didn’t do, the thing Reece was building toward, and the proximity makes her voice crack.
“We’re the same, Xander. We’re the exact same kind of broken and you can’t handle it because looking at me is like looking in a mirror. ”
She’s right. She’s right and it’s the worst thing anyone has ever said to me because it’s true.
Looking at Penny—high, wrecked, in the passenger seat of my car with Reece’s fingerprints still on her collarbone—is exactly like looking in a mirror.
Two addicts. Same dealer. Same debt. Same damage.
The only difference is the method of payment, and neither of ours is clean.
I drive. The streets of Edgewood blur past—stone walls, iron gates, the houses of families who have no idea what’s happening in the cars passing their driveways.
I turn onto our street. The MacHale house appears—warm stone, copper gutters, porch light on even though it’s mid-afternoon because Alice always leaves it on. Always.
Gideon and Alice are in the window. I can see them—Alice’s hand on the glass, Gideon’s arm around her. Waiting. The silhouette of parents who have been standing at that window since their daughter said “I’m not coming home” and who haven’t moved since.
I pull into the driveway. Put the car in park. Don’t look at her. Penny turns to me. Her hand reaches across the center console—tentative, shaking, the fingers that were in my hair in a closet and on my chest on a bathroom floor. She reaches for my hand. I pull away.
“Xander. Please.”
“No.” I stare through the windshield. At the porch light.
At the parents in the window. At the house that was more of a home to me than the one I was born in.
“Whatever we had is over, Penny. The friendship. All of it. You made your choice when you drove to Reece’s instead of home. He’s all yours now.”
The cruelty of the sentence is precise. Surgical.
Aimed at the exact place where it will do the most damage—because if she hates me, she’ll stay away, and if she stays away, Reece loses his leverage over me, and if Reece loses his leverage, maybe—maybe—I can find a way out of the cage he built for both of us.
The logic is insane. I know the logic is insane. But sanity left this car somewhere around the second traffic light and what’s driving now is pure, desperate self-destruction disguised as strategy.
Penny looks at me. The tears have stopped. What’s left is something beyond tears—a stillness that is not peace but the absence of fight. The quiet of a girl who has been punched so many times—not physically, but in every other way—that she’s stopped flinching.
“It’s always been you, Xander.”
Five words. Said without anger. Without performance. Just truth—flat, heavy, laid on the seat between us like a body.
She opens the door. Gets out. Closes it—not slams, closes, which is worse because slamming is anger and closing is resignation.
She walks to the front door. Alice opens it before she reaches the steps and pulls her inside and the door closes and the porch light stays on and I am alone in the driveway of the house that raised me sitting in a car that smells like Reece’s cigarettes and Penny’s tears.
I put the car in reverse. Pull out.
The friendship bracelet on my wrist catches on the gear shift. I look down at it. Teal and yellow. Eleven years.
It’s always been you, Xander. I know, Penny. I know. That’s the whole fucking problem.
I don’t go inside right away.
I sit in the driveway of the Anderson estate and stare at the glass-and-stone monument to my father’s ego and try to stop the images from cycling. But the carousel is spinning and I can’t find the button.
Reece’s fingers on her collarbone. The undone buttons.
The way she leaned into the couch without registering what was happening because the pills had taken her to the place where touch is just sensation.
Her face when I pulled her away—not grateful.
Confused. Like being removed from danger and being removed from comfort were the same thing.
The car fight. Her face in the window. The tears she tried to hide in the glass. “We’re the exact same kind of broken and you can’t handle it because looking at me is like looking in a mirror.”
It’s always been you, Xander.
My hand finds the friendship bracelet. Runs along the faded threads.
The bracelet is the only thing from my childhood that Lucian couldn’t take—not because he didn’t try, but because I learned to hide it.
Under long sleeves. Under the tape when I fought.
Under everything. The bracelet stayed because I needed proof that somewhere in my history, someone chose me voluntarily, without obligation, without transaction.
A seven-year-old girl with teal dye in her hair tied a string on my wrist and said “forever” and I’ve been holding onto that word ever since because it’s the only promise anyone has ever kept.
My door opens. I flinch.
Valentina. Of course. Materializing in doorways is her superpower—silent, smiling, the particular skill of a girl who has been trained to appear when damage is most effective.
She tosses her phone onto my lap. “Might wanna check on your girl. Didn’t know you were into sharing.”
She leans against the car door, arms crossed, watching me the way a cat watches a mouse—not because she’s hungry. Because the suffering is entertaining.
I look at the screen. GlossX.
Penny. At Reece’s. The photos are from today—someone at the gathering was documenting.
Penny on the couch with her head thrown back, laughing at something Reece said, his arm around her.
Penny and Daisy, foreheads touching, giggling.
Penny standing on a chair with a drink raised, eyes half-closed, the chemical ease painted across her face.
And then the one that breaks me.
Penny on Reece’s lap. His hands on her waist. His mouth against her neck.
Her eyes closed, her lips parted, the particular surrender of a girl who is not choosing this but is not refusing it because the pills have taken the choosing part of her brain offline and what’s left is just a body responding to stimulus without the filter of consent.
A video. Penny on the table. Dancing. Laughing. Someone hands her a beer and she funnels it and the crowd cheers and she throws her head back and shouts, her voice tinny through the phone speaker:
“Fuck you, X!”
My vision goes red. Then white. Then nothing.
I throw the phone. Not at Valentina—past her, through the open car door, against the stone wall of the garage. It shatters. Pieces of glass and circuitry scattering across the heated driveway like shrapnel.