7. Penelope #2
“I want to stop,” I say. Into my dad’s shirt.
Muffled. The sentence that has been trapped behind my teeth for months.
“I want to stop, Mom. I’m so tired. I’m tired of lying and hiding and pretending.
I’m tired of men touching me like I’m public property.
I’m tired of the nightmares. I’m tired of the basement playing on loop in my head.
I’m tired of Xander looking at me like I’m nothing after he was everything.
And I’m tired of being the girl everybody worries about instead of the girl everybody laughs with. ”
My mom is crying harder now. My dad is crying—Gideon MacHale is crying, and the tears on my head from above are his, and the arms around me are shaking, and in this moment, in this bedroom, with the porch light on outside the window, three people who love each other are finally standing in the same pain instead of on opposite sides of it.
“We’re going to get through this,” my dad says.
His voice thick but steady. The steadiness of a man who has decided that this is a crisis he can manage and is already building the infrastructure.
“Darla. Therapy. An outpatient program if you need it. Whatever it takes, Penny. We are not going to lose you.”
“What if I can’t do it?”
“Then we try again,” my mom says. “It took me four tries. If it takes you forty, we’ll be here for every single one.”
I close my eyes. Let them hold me. The craving is still there—humming under my skin, whispering in the dark spaces between my bones. It’s not gone. It won’t be gone for a long time, maybe ever. But for the first time since October, the craving is not the loudest thing in the room.
My parents are louder.
My parents, who have loved me through every lie and every pill and every midnight phone call and every photo that shattered their image of their daughter—my parents are louder than the craving. And maybe that’s enough. Not forever. But for tonight.
They stay until I fall asleep. I feel them get up—carefully, the way parents move around sleeping children, the choreography of love in the dark. The door closes softly. The hall light goes off. The house settles.
For the first time in months, I fall asleep without a pill. The withdrawal hums. The nightmares wait. But I survive the night.
Maybe Mom was right. Maybe it takes four tries. Maybe this is try number one.
Try number one lasts fourteen hours.
I wake up shaking. Drenched in sweat. The sheets tangled around my legs like restraints.
The withdrawal is no longer humming—it’s screaming.
Full-body. Every nerve ending firing distress signals.
My jaw is clenched so hard my molars ache.
My hands are claws. There’s a cramp in my abdomen that makes me curl into the fetal position and whimper into my pillow.
I get up. Shower. The hot water helps—barely, temporarily, the way holding your hand over a candle helps you forget about the bonfire.
I get dressed. Uniform. Plaid skirt, white button-up, tie, blazer with the crest. Black knee socks.
Black shoes. Concealer under my eyes. No eyeliner—my hands are shaking too badly.
I pull my hair into a bun because I don’t have the energy to style it and the teal streaks are fading to something that looks more like a mistake than a choice.
The girl in the mirror looks like a draft of a person. An outline someone started drawing and abandoned.
My dad drives me to school. He squeezes my hand before I get out. “Call me if you need anything. Anything, Penny. I mean it.”
“I will.”
I won’t. But I say it because saying it makes him feel like he’s done something, and right now I need him to feel like he’s done something so he’ll let me close the car door.
The hallway is a gauntlet.
I feel them before I see them—the stares. The weight of a hundred sets of eyes aimed at a single target. Kids who were my classmates yesterday and are my audience today, watching me walk from the entrance to my locker like I’m a nature documentary and they’re waiting to see if the gazelle survives.
Whispers. Not even trying to be quiet about it. The particular cruelty of teenagers who have been given a target and are exercising the only power they have:
Did you see the pictures? The ones from Reece’s?
She was on his lap. Like, on his lap. And the fight photos—Kole’s face was destroyed.
She was just lying there while he— I heard she’s sleeping with half the school for pills.
I heard she fucked Xander in a closet at an underground fight. Pretty Penny isn’t so pretty anymore.
I keep my head down. Walk. Put one Converse in front of the other. The music in my headphones—my shield, my armor, the one thing that has always worked—can’t compete with the noise today. I’m playing Deftones at maximum volume and I can still hear them through the bass.
My phone buzzes.
Reece: Miss you already, little mama. Got something new for you. Stronger. You’re gonna love it.
I stare at the text. My thumb hovers over the reply. The craving lunges—a dog on a chain, straining toward the hand that feeds it.
I lock the screen. Don’t reply. My hands are shaking harder. I make it to my locker. Open it. Grab my books. Try to breathe.
A hand grabs my arm. Pulls me sideways.
Joey Marchetti. Junior. Lacrosse team. The kind of boy who peaks at seventeen and spends the rest of his life chasing the feeling. He’s grinning—wide, predatory, the grin of a boy who has heard a rumor and decided it’s an invitation.
“Yo, Pretty Penny.” He leans in. Close. His cologne is aggressive. “Heard you’re down to party for a little white pill. That true? Because I can hook you up. All you gotta do is—”
“Get the fuck off me.” I rip my arm free. “That’s not true. None of it is true.”
“Not what Reece says.” He pulls his phone out.
Swipes. Shoves the screen in my face. “Look. New photos from yesterday. You and Reece looking real cozy. You and Daisy getting friendly. And this one—” He grins wider.
“That’s you topless in the background while Reece is rolling a blunt. Didn’t know you had it in you, Penny.”
I smash the phone out of his hand. It clatters to the floor. Joey laughs and picks it up and walks away, and his laughter is the soundtrack as I turn the corner and nearly collide with Kole.
Kole Hobbs. His face is still bruised—the black eye from Xander’s fists fading from purple to yellow-green. He doesn’t speak. Just stops. Looks at me. Smiles. The slimy smile of a boy who has photos of you on his phone and knows exactly what that leverage is worth.
“Nice pictures, Penny.” He winks. “The ones of us together got a lot of likes. We should do it again sometime. When you’re… available.”
I walk past him. Don’t respond. Can’t respond.
My throat is closed. My vision is narrowing.
The hallway is shrinking around me like a tunnel and every face in it is aiming something at me—a phone, a comment, a look—and I need to find someone, anyone, who is not looking at me like I’m a car accident.
I look for Cat. Not at her locker. Not in the hall. I look for Iz. His locker is empty. No sign. Danny. Ryan. Nobody. The Elite Five and Cat are nowhere in this building and I am alone in a hallway full of people who have seen me at my worst and are enjoying the view.
My phone buzzes again.
Reece: Saw you at school. Looking rough, little mama. I can fix that. You know where to find me.
And then I see Xander.
He’s at the end of the hallway. Leaning against the wall by the science wing.
Arms crossed. Face bruised—the black eye from the fight with Lucian, the swelling from my punch days ago.
He’s watching me. Not watching the way Iz watches—with warmth, with concern, with the attention of someone who wants to help.
Watching the way a person watches a building burn.
From a distance. With the deliberate removal of someone who has decided that proximity will only feed the fire.
Our eyes meet. Across fifty feet of hallway. Across the whispers and the phones and the wreckage of everything we used to be.
I take a step toward him. My mouth opens—to say what? I don’t know. Help. Please. Xander. Something.
“Xander… please.”
He looks at me. Through me. The mask is on—locked, sealed, the Lucian face.
And underneath it, if I squint, if I use every ounce of the eighteen years I’ve spent reading this boy’s expressions, I can see the thing he’s hiding: agony.
He wants to come to me. Every muscle in his body is fighting the distance.
But the distance is the only thing he knows how to give me that he believes won’t hurt me, and so he gives it.
Even though it’s the thing that’s hurting me most.
He shoves off the wall. Turns. Walks away.
And behind me, a voice: “Aww. Your boyfriend doesn’t want you anymore?”
Valentina. Leaning against the opposite wall. Phone in hand. The smile that’s all teeth. “Can’t say I blame him. Who wants damaged goods?”
The sentence lands in the place where the last thread was holding.
The thread snaps.
I walk. Not to class. Not to the bathroom. Not to a teacher or a counselor or any of the adults whose job it is to protect the students in this building. I walk to the exit. Through the doors. Across the parking lot. Into my car that my dad drove me in, which means I don’t have my car, which means—
I walk. Through the parking lot. Out the gate.
Down the street. The cold hits me immediately—January in Massachusetts, no coat over the blazer, the plaid skirt and knee socks doing nothing against the wind that cuts through the quad and follows me onto the sidewalk.
I don’t care. The cold is better than the hallway.
The cold is honest. The cold doesn’t whisper.
I call a car. Stand on the corner. Wait. Shivering. My phone buzzes.
Reece: Last chance, mama. New product. Free sample. You know you want it.
Me: Drop it at my house. Back door. Thirty minutes.