7. Penelope #3
The car arrives. I get in. Go home.
The house is empty.
My parents are at work. My dad’s car is gone from the garage.
My mom’s studio light is off. The house that was full of truth and tears last night is now full of silence, and silence is the craving’s favorite environment.
Silence is where the whisper becomes a voice becomes a scream becomes the only sound in the universe.
I go to the back door. A small bag is tucked under the mat. Reece is efficient—I’ll give him that. The bag is folded tight. Inside: white pills. New ones. Smaller than the Percocet. Stronger, he said.
I hold the bag in my fist. Feel the weight of it. The weight of a choice that isn’t really a choice anymore because my body made the choice months ago and my mind is just the passenger now, along for the ride, watching from behind the glass as the car drives itself off the cliff.
I walk through the kitchen. Through the back door.
Across the yard. The snow is thick—three inches, maybe four.
It fills my school shoes immediately. My socks are soaked within seconds.
My bare legs above the knee socks go numb.
I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except the treehouse and the pills and the particular promise of silence that waits at the intersection of both.
The tree line. Our property backs up to three acres of woods—old growth, the trees thick enough to block the wind, the snow thinner under the canopy.
I walk the path I’ve walked a thousand times—the path Xander and I wore into the ground over years of childhood, our feet making a trail that grass never grew back over.
The treehouse sits fifteen feet up in the old oak.
The one my dad built when we were nine—or rather, the one dad started building before Xander took over because Xander, even at nine, was better with tools than most adults, and my dad was smart enough to hand the boy a hammer and let him build something permanent in a life where nothing else was.
I climb the ladder. The rungs are slippery with ice. My hands are numb. My fingers barely close around the wood. But I climb because this is the last place I need to be and the body knows the route even when the mind has checked out.
The door pushes open with my shoulder. Inside the treehouse unchanged. A time capsule of two kids who don’t exist anymore.
The drawings are still on the walls—crayon, marker, the artwork of children who hadn’t yet learned that the world would require them to be something other than themselves.
I drew flowers. Xander drew houses—always houses, never the Anderson house, always the kind with a garden and a porch light and the particular warmth he associated with the MacHale kitchen.
Our names in wobbly letters on the ceiling beam: PENNY + XANDER, BEST FRIENDS FOREVER, with a drawing of two stick figures holding hands.
The blanket. Our blanket—the one we dragged up here when we were ten, a quilt Adeena made before she got too sick to sew, the patches faded and the batting coming through at the corners.
I grab it. Wrap it around myself. The cold has seeped through everything—my blazer, my shirt, my bones.
But the blanket smells like old wood and childhood and the faintest trace of Adeena’s lavender hand cream, and the smell is so specifically “before” that it makes my eyes sting.
I sit on the floor. Pull the pills from my pocket. Lay them out in front of me. Six pills. Small. White. Unremarkable.
My phone buzzes. GlossX notification. I open it because I can’t stop myself, because self-destruction is a loop and the loop includes looking at the thing that’s destroying you.
The photos are everywhere. Kole’s post from the party. The Reece photos from yesterday. New comments—hundreds now. A meme someone made: my face photoshopped onto a pill bottle with the caption PRETTY PENNY’S DRUG OF CHOICE: ATTENTION.
I scroll. The comments blur:
She’s done. Her whole reputation is trashed. Who would even date her now? Xander doesn’t want her. Nobody wants her. Penny is disgusting. Heard she’s selling herself for drugs. Slut. Junkie. Pathetic.
I lock the phone. Set it face-down on the floor. The pills sit in front of me. Six white circles on the dark wood.
I’m not strong enough.
The thought arrives without argument. Without the usual counter-voice that says “yes you are, keep going, you can do this.” The counter-voice is gone. It left somewhere between Joey’s hand on my arm and Valentina’s smile and Xander’s back as he walked away.
I have never been strong enough. That’s the truth I’ve been hiding behind the smile and the humor and the music and the pills.
Other people are strong. Cat is strong. Cat survived Garrett, survived the basement, survived the bleach burns and the broken ribs and the cold floor.
Cat walked into therapy and did the work and let Kaiden in and rebuilt herself brick by brick. Cat is strong.
I am not Cat.
I have had the cushiest life of anyone I know.
Two parents who love me. A house with a heated driveway.
A car I bought with money I earned doing something I love.
Concert tickets and backstage passes and a bluetooth speaker with stickers on it and a best friend who would die for me.
I have had everything—everything—and I am still here on the floor of a treehouse with six pills and a blanket that smells like a dead woman’s hand cream.
What is wrong with me? Why can’t I handle what other people handle? Why does the world hurt me more than it hurts everyone else? Or does it hurt everyone else the same amount and they’re just better at carrying it?
Xander carried me. That’s the thing nobody understands.
For thirteen years, Xander Anderson stood between me and every sharp edge the world aimed at me.
He beat Garrett unconscious at thirteen.
He ran to me during the kidnapping. He held me on bathroom floors and in treehouse blankets and on the swings with the pink backpack.
He was the wall between me and everything that could hurt me.
And now the wall is gone. Not broken—removed. Deliberately. By the person who built it.
He walked away. In the hallway, with everyone watching, he turned his back and walked away and left me standing there with nothing between me and the wolves.
That’s the thing I can’t survive. Not the pills or the photos or Reece’s hands or the basement.
The thing I can’t survive is Xander Anderson choosing to leave.
I pick up a pill. Roll it between my fingers. Feel the chalky smoothness against my skin.
I want it to stop. All of it. The craving. The nightmares. The carousel of men’s hands on my skin. The pictures. The whispers. The particular exhaustion of performing okay while everything inside me is rotting.
Mom said it took her four tries. But Mom was strong. Mom had Dad. Mom had something to come back to. I have nothing to come back to.
The lie is so convincing it doesn’t even register as a lie.
It registers as fact. The particular fact of a girl who has been loved relentlessly by everyone around her and has become so numb that she can no longer feel it.
The pills took the pain. But they took the love too.
And what’s left is a girl on a treehouse floor who can’t feel either one and doesn’t see the point of a life lived in the space between.
I crush the first pill. Line it on the floor. Lean down. Inhale. The burn. The drip. The familiar softening.
Not enough.
The second pill. Crush. Line. Inhale.
The softening becomes a loosening. My muscles unclench. The cold retreats. The treehouse gets warmer—or my body stops registering temperature, which is the same thing when you’re this far gone.
Not enough.
If I take enough, the noise stops permanently. No more carousel. No more basement. No more closet. No more Xander’s back walking away in a hallway. No more of any of it.
The third pill. This one I don’t bother to crush. I place it on my tongue. Swallow it dry. It scrapes down my throat like a promise.
The fourth. Same.
The treehouse tilts. The drawings on the walls—the flowers, the houses, our names on the ceiling beam—start to swim.
The edges of my vision go soft. The blanket is warm but my hands are cold and the cold is moving inward, toward my center, and somewhere in the functioning part of my brain a voice is saying “that’s too many, that was too many, you took too many” but the voice is so far away, like someone shouting from the bottom of a well, and I’m already at the top and moving toward the sky.
My heartbeat changes. I feel it—the acceleration, the flutter of a muscle being asked to do more than it was designed to do. My ears ring. A high, thin sound, like a note held too long on a violin string that’s about to snap.
I lie back on the blanket. Adeena’s blanket. The patches warm against my back. The ceiling above me—the beam with our names, the stick figures holding hands. PENNY + XANDER. BEST FRIENDS FOREVER.
Forever is a long time. Exactly.
My body starts to shiver. Not from cold—from chemistry.
The pills are doing something they haven’t done before.
My skin is clammy. My palms are wet. There’s a pressure in my chest—not pain, pressure.
Like a hand pressing down on my sternum from the inside.
My breathing changes—shallow, fast, then slow, then irregular, the particular arrhythmia of a respiratory system being overwritten by an opioid that was dosed for effect and has achieved overdose.
I watch it happen from above.
Not metaphorically. The dissociation is total—I am above my body, looking down at a girl in a school uniform on a treehouse floor wrapped in a dead woman’s quilt with white powder residue on her upper lip and her phone face-down beside her and her friendship bracelet visible on her wrist. The teal and yellow threads. Eleven years.
From up here she looks small. Smaller than she looked in the hallway or on the bathroom floor or in Xander’s car. She looks like what she is: a girl who ran out of reasons to stay and couldn’t find a single hand reaching for her in the dark.
That’s not true. There were hands. So many hands.
Cat’s hand on the bathroom floor. Mom’s hands braiding her hair.
Dad’s arms around her. Iz’s hand steadying her shoulder.
Saoirse’s hand offering a plate. Even Xander’s hands—bloody, shredded, pulling her close on a bathroom floor, catching her tears on his thumb.
There were hands everywhere. She just couldn’t feel them through the numbness.
The girl on the floor stops shaking. The breathing goes shallow. The ringing in her ears changes pitch—higher, thinner, a sound approaching frequency rather than music.
There is a light. Not dramatic. Not cinematic. Just a brightening at the edges of the dark—a softening of the boundary between here and not-here. The light doesn’t beckon. It just… is. Patient. Waiting. Not in a hurry.
The girl’s hand reaches toward it. The friendship bracelet slides down her wrist. Teal and yellow against pale skin.
The ocean is stronger than anything. The sun never gives up.
The light gets brighter.And then—
Darkness.