8. Xander #2
I climb. My hands on the frozen rungs. My heart beating in a place I didn’t know hearts could beat—my throat, my ears, my fingertips.
I try the door. It won’t open. Something is blocking it from inside—her body, maybe, or the weight of whatever she dragged across the floor.
“Penny!” I bang on the wood. “Penny, open the door!”
Nothing. No sound. No movement. The silence that has weight—the same silence from the Anderson house, from the closet, from the nine hours before I pushed open a door and found my mother’s feet.
No. No, no, no.
I slam my shoulder into the door. Once. Twice. The wood gives. Something scrapes across the floor. I push through.
Penny.
On the floor. On Adeena’s quilt. Her eyes rolled back.
Her skin white—not pale, white. The blue-white of a person whose circulation is failing.
Her lips are parted. Her breathing is—I press my ear to her chest. It’s there.
Faint. Irregular. The rhythm of a heart that is being asked to work through a chemical assault and is losing the argument.
Pills scattered across the floor. A small plastic baggie—Reece’s baggies, I know them, I’ve held a hundred of them, the particular fold and seal that is Reece Hall’s signature. The white powder residue on the wood planks. On her upper lip.
“PENNY!” I grab her face. Her cheeks are ice. “Wake up! Wake the fuck up, Penny. Open your eyes. OPEN YOUR EYES.”
Nothing. Her body is limp. A doll. A girl-shaped absence.
I scramble to the door. Lean out. Gideon is at the edge of the tree line—he followed me, of course he followed me, he is a father and fathers follow.
“CALL 911! SHE’S UNCONSCIOUS! SHE TOOK PILLS—SHE’S NOT brEATHING RIGHT! CALL THEM NOW!”
Gideon’s phone is out before I finish the sentence. I hear him—the controlled voice of a man in crisis mode, the public relations specialist delivering the most important briefing of his life: address, treehouse, female, eighteen, suspected opioid overdose, hurry, hurry, please hurry.
I go back to Penny. Pull her into my lap. Her head against my chest. Her body cold against mine. I rub her arms, her hands, trying to push warmth into skin that doesn’t want it.
“Stay with me, Penny. Stay with me. You don’t get to leave. Do you hear me? You don’t get to fucking leave. Not here. Not in our treehouse. Not on this blanket. You don’t get to die in the place where we were happy.”
My voice is breaking. Not cracking—breaking.
The structural failure of a boy who has been holding everything—the closet, the cage, the pills, the cruelty, his mother’s feet—with a wall built from anger, and the wall is gone.
Penny took it. Penny on this floor with pills in her blood and her eyes rolled back took the last brick and the wall is rubble and underneath it is just a boy.
Just an eighteen-year-old boy holding his best friend and begging her to breathe.
“Please, Penny. Please. I’m sorry. I’m so fucking sorry.
For the closet and the money and the pool house and this morning—God, this morning, I walked away from you in that hallway and you said ‘please’ and I walked away.
I walked away because I thought distance would keep you safe and it didn’t, it did the opposite, it did the fucking opposite and now you’re—”
I can’t finish. The words dissolve into sounds that aren’t words. The noise of a person who is grieving something that hasn’t happened yet and might still happen and the not-knowing is the worst part.
Sirens. Distant. Getting closer. The most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
EMTs in the yard. Gideon directing them toward the trees. Alice behind them—she must have come outside, must have heard me screaming. She’s running through the snow in slippers, her face a mask of terror that will haunt me for the rest of my life.
The paramedics climb. They have to get her down the ladder—a backboard, straps, the efficient choreography of people who save lives for a living. They take her from my arms and the absence of her weight is the emptiest thing I’ve ever felt.
I climb down. Stand in the snow. Watch them work.
Alice collapses against Gideon. He catches her. Holds her. His face above hers is the face of a man watching his world end in slow motion.
They load Penny into the ambulance. Alice climbs in beside her—won’t be separated, won’t let go of her daughter’s hand, the ferocity of a mother that no EMT is brave enough to challenge.
The ambulance pulls away. Lights on. Sirens screaming. Gideon and I stand in the driveway. The silence after sirens is the loudest silence there is.
“My car,” I say. “I’ll drive.”
He nods. Gets in. We pull out. Follow the ambulance’s route toward Edgewood General.
The car is quiet. Not Lucian-quiet. Gideon-quiet.
The quiet of a man who is holding himself together with the particular discipline of someone who has to be the strong one because his wife is in the ambulance and his daughter is on the stretcher and the only other person available is an eighteen-year-old boy who is covered in his daughter’s tears.
“Those pills,” Gideon says. Not looking at me. Looking at the road. “Those were the same ones from the dealer. Reece.”
“Yeah.”
“He gave them to her knowing she’d—”
“He gave them to her because he doesn’t care if she lives or dies, G. She’s a revenue stream. That’s all any of us are to him.”
Gideon’s hands tighten on his knees. “Us?”
The word hangs. I let it. “We’ll talk at the hospital. All of it. I promise.”
He nods. The quiet returns. But it’s different now—not empty. Full. Full of the things that are about to be said and the life that is about to change and the particular weight of two men who love the same girl driving through the dark toward the place where they’ll find out if she survived.
I pick up my phone. Call Kaiden. He answers on the first ring.
“Kaid.” My voice is wrecked. Unrecognizable. “Penny overdosed. She’s in the ambulance. I need—” The sentence breaks. I try again. “I need you. I need Cat. I need everybody. Please. I can’t—I can’t do this alone.”
The silence on the other end is Kaiden processing. One second. Two. Then: “We’re coming. All of us. Right now. Which hospital?”
“Edgewood General.”
“Fifteen minutes. We’ll be there.”
He hangs up. I drive. Gideon stares out the window. Somewhere ahead of us, an ambulance carries a girl who is fighting for her life, and behind us, four cars are pulling out of four driveways because a boy who spent months pushing everyone away just admitted he can’t do this alone.
The waiting room at Edgewood General is too bright and too cold and smells like antiseptic and bad coffee and the particular despair of families waiting for news they’re not ready to hear.
They arrive in waves. Kaiden and Cat first—Cat’s face white, her hand in Kaiden’s, the ice princess gone and what’s left is just a girl who is terrified of losing her best friend.
She sits down next to me without a word and takes my hand and holds it, and the fact that Cat O’Farrell is choosing to hold the hand of the boy who hurt Penny the most tells me something about forgiveness that I’m not ready to understand.
Iz next. With Darla—his mother, the doctor, already in professional mode. She checks in with the nurses. Gets information. Comes back with updates: they’re working on her, the Narcan was administered in the ambulance, she’s responding but not conscious.
Danny and Ryan together. Danny’s face is a storm. He doesn’t sit. He paces—three steps one way, three steps back. Ryan beside him like a shadow, the particular proximity of a boy who knows his best friend is about to detonate and is staying close to absorb the blast.
Thomas arrives. Still in his reading glasses. He sits beside Gideon and puts his hand on his shoulder and doesn’t say a word because Thomas O’Farrell communicates love through presence, not language.
Callum and Saoirse. Callum with his lawyer face—already thinking about next steps, about Reece, about the legal architecture of what comes after tonight. Saoirse goes directly to Alice, who has come out from the treatment area for a moment. The two mothers hold each other and cry.
Arthur Walsh arrives last. Still in the suit from the police station. He walked me out of a jail cell four hours ago and now he’s standing in a hospital waiting room because the same boy he bailed out is connected to the girl on the other side of those doors.
We fill the waiting room. Four families. Five boys. The people who have been holding each other up since childhood, gathered in a hospital because one of their own is fighting for her life and the boy who should have protected her is the one who drove her to this.
Alice comes to me. Sits in the chair beside mine. Takes my hands.
“Xander.” Her voice is raw but steady. The steadiness that comes after the worst has happened and the adrenaline has been replaced by the grim determination to understand.
“I need you to tell me everything. Not some of it. Not the version that protects people. Everything. Starting from whenever this started.”
Gideon is across from me. Thomas beside him. Callum standing. Saoirse with her arm around Cat. Kaiden’s hand on my shoulder. The boys arranged in a semicircle that is not interrogation but invitation—the geometry of people who love you asking you to trust them with the truth.
I look at my hands. At Alice’s hands around mine. At the pale band on my wrist where the friendship bracelet used to live.
And I tell them. Everything.
I start at thirteen. Garrett Pennington.
The lacrosse field. What he tried to do to Penny.
What I did to stop him. The blood on my shoes.
The thing that broke between us—not the friendship but the way we could look at each other, the particular damage of two kids who shared a trauma and couldn’t talk about it because the trauma wore both their faces.