13. Penelope #3
Everything in me stutters. Then he pulls me in, my head tucked against his chest, his arms wrapping around me fully.
“You’re okay,” he murmurs into my hair. “She’s not worth it.”
I grip his shirt, still buzzing. “I almost hit her.”
“You absolutely would have,” he says. “And it would’ve been iconic.”
A breath of a laugh escapes me. He hums softly, chin resting against the top of my head.
“Think about the program,” he adds, gentler now. “Think about healing. We’re not derailing that for her.”
My fingers tighten in his shirt.
“But God, Penny—” he continues, quieter, a smile in his voice, “the look on her face when you said ‘footnote’? I’m going to replay that for weeks.”
Cat, from twenty feet away where Kaiden has finally set her down: “Did Penny just threaten to fight Valentina?”
Kaiden, still grinning: “She did.”
Cat: “I’m so proud I could cry.”
Kaiden: “You are crying.”
Cat: “Shut up.”
The laughter breaks the tension. Cat walks over. Puts her hands on my shoulders. Looks at me with the particular seriousness of a girl who has survived her own impossible love story and has zero tolerance for anyone else’s bullshit.
“Penny. I love you. And I love Iz. And somewhere in the dumpster fire of my feelings, I even understand Xander.” She pauses.
“But maybe—and I say this as your best friend who is running out of arms to hold—maybe you all need to stop playing games and actually talk to each other. In a room. With words. Like adults. Because this triangle is going to destroy everyone in it.”
She’s right. She’s always right. But talking means admitting that I want Xander’s hands on me even when his words destroy me. That Iz’s kindness heals me even though my body doesn’t ignite for him the same way. That I’m standing in a storm I helped create and don’t know which direction is shelter.
Last period approach. Iz and I walking—his arm around me, mine around his waist. His hand on my hip. Lower than usual. His thumb tracing circles through my blazer. The particular escalation of a boy whose feelings are real and whose restraint is thinning.
Xander steps into our path. Arms crossed. The grin gone. Something more complicated—not anger. Pain.
“Don’t play this game, Iz.”
Iz doesn’t break stride. “What game? The one where I treat her with respect? The one where I ask before I touch? Because from where I’m standing, X, you’re the one running a playbook. Alcoves and secret fingers one minute, Bella on your arm the next. You want to talk about games?”
“Stay out of what you don’t understand.”
“I understand perfectly. You want her in the dark but not in the light. You’ll touch her behind trophy cases but you won’t hold her hand in a hallway. That’s not love, X. That’s—”
“ENOUGH.”
My voice. Not Xander’s. Not Iz’s. Mine. Louder than I intended. Sharp enough to stop both of them mid-sentence. They turn to me—both of them—with the expression of boys who forgot the girl they’re arguing about is standing right here.
“I am so tired,” I say, my voice shaking but steady, “of men talking about me like I’m a prize in a game I didn’t agree to play. I am standing right here. I have a mouth. I have opinions. I am not a body to be discussed or fought over or passed between you like a goddamn joint at a party.”
Xander opens his mouth. I put my hand up.
“No. You don’t get to speak. You had your chance to speak in that alcove, and you used it to tell me who I belong to while your fingers were inside me. That’s not a conversation, Xander. That’s a claim. And I am done being claimed in closets and alcoves and bedrooms after midnight.”
I step closer to him. My voice drops. Not soft—precise. Aimed.
“If you can’t choose me in the light—in a hallway, in front of everyone, without hiding behind trophy cases or closed doors—then you don’t get me at all.
Not in the dark. Not anywhere. I am not your dirty secret.
I am not the girl you touch when nobody’s watching and ignore when they are.
I am Penelope MacHale and I deserve to be chosen out loud. ”
His face. The words landing. Each one finding bone. “Penny—”
“You had your chance to speak. You used it.”
I turn. Walk away. My chin up. My back straight. The posture of a girl who has drawn a line and is not looking back.
Iz catches up. His hand finds my waist—not my hand, my waist. His palm flat against my hip bone, pulling me into his side. The escalation of a boy who just watched a girl choose herself over the boy they both love, and found it the most attractive thing he’s ever witnessed.
His mouth finds my ear. “That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
His hand slides lower. Resting on the curve where my hip meets my thigh. Possessive but asking—the Iz version of possessive, which always comes with a question mark instead of a period.
My body—my traitor body, my body that craves touch the way it used to crave pills—leans into it.
Into him. Into the warmth and the want and the particular comfort of being desired by someone who is standing in the light doing it.
Not hiding. Not running. Just here. With his hand on my hip and his mouth near my ear and his want visible to anyone who looks.
“Feisty girls are absolutely my thing,” he murmurs. “I am in so much trouble.”
“You’re literally in love with Bella.”
He winces. “Gotta bring it there every time, huh?”
“Every time. Because I love you and you deserve someone who calls you on your shit.”
He grins. Pulls me tighter. “Alright, babe. Let’s get to class.”
Four-thirty. Darla’s office.
The room surprises me. Not the folding chairs and stale coffee of every recovery group in every movie I’ve ever seen.
It’s open, bright—floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall, plants on the sills, warm lighting, the design of a woman who understands that healing doesn’t happen under fluorescents.
The chairs are in a circle—real chairs, upholstered, the kind you can sink into.
A whiteboard with colored markers. A coffee station with actual mugs.
Eight of us. All high school—Darla’s program is exclusively for students under eighteen.
No college kids, no adults. Just teenagers in various stages of breaking and rebuilding, sitting in a circle with the particular self-consciousness of people who know they’re supposed to talk about their feelings and would rather do literally anything else.
I scan the circle. Maddie—sophomore, swim team, quiet.
The girl I’ve seen in the hallways but never spoken to, the invisibility of a girl who has been using in plain sight.
Two boys I don’t know—sitting together, nervous, clearly friends from another school.
A girl in an oversized hoodie who hasn’t made eye contact with anyone.
A junior I recognize from AP History. And a boy in the corner with his hood up and his arms crossed, radiating the “I don’t want to be here” energy that is apparently universal among teenage boys in recovery.
And Xander. Directly across the circle. Because of course.
We fought today. Screamed at each other in a hallway. I told him he doesn’t get me in the dark anymore. And now we’re sitting in a circle twelve feet apart about to discuss our feelings with a licensed professional while the taste of his fingers is still a sense memory my mouth keeps replaying.
The whiplash is making me seasick.
Darla stands in the center. Not behind a desk—in the circle. Equal. The positioning of a leader who refuses to be above.
“Welcome. For the new faces—I’m Darla. This is Level One.
This room is safe. What’s said here stays here.
I will enforce that with my career, my reputation, and my lawyer.
” She pauses. Her eyes find mine. Then Xander’s.
The particular look of a woman who has known us both since we were in diapers—backyard barbecues, holiday parties, the New Year’s Eve gatherings at the Monaghan house where Darla brought the pie and Arthur brought the wine and Iz ran around with the rest of us while the adults pretended they couldn’t hear the noise from the Anderson house next door.
She knows us. Not as patients—as children she watched grow up.
The woman who bandaged Iz’s knee when he fell off the monkey bars.
Who brought casseroles to the MacHale house after the kidnapping.
Who sat with Alice when I was in the hospital.
Darla Walsh isn’t just our doctor. She’s family.
And that makes this both easier and harder.
She introduces the therapist—Gina. Kind eyes, sharp mind. The combination of a woman who has sat in enough pain to recognize it instantly.
Gina: “I’m going to ask you to talk about the thing underneath the drug. Not the substance—the wound it was covering. If we don’t name the wound, we can’t treat it.”
My phone vibrates.
Xander: I can’t stop thinking about how you tasted today.
My blood goes hot. Not arousal—fury. We fought. I told him he doesn’t get me in the dark. I drew the line. And he’s texting me during a recovery session about tasting me.
I type under my folder:
Me: Are you fucking serious right now? We’re in a RECOVERY SESSION.
Xander: I know where we are. I’m still thinking about you.
Me: We literally screamed at each other three hours ago. I told you I’m done being your secret. And your response is to text me about sex during therapy?
Xander: It wasn’t sex. It was me showing you something.
Me: You showed me that you can make me come in a hallway. Congratulations. Now show me you can treat me like a person in public. That’s the part you keep failing.
I lock the phone. Shove it in my bag. Look up. Darla’s eyebrow is raised. The look of a woman who sees phones in therapy the way a hawk sees field mice.
Gina is asking people to share. Maddie goes—pills from her mom’s cabinet, the pipeline from anxiety treatment to addiction.
The two boys share—opioids, sports injuries, the prescription-to-street escalation Darla’s program was built to interrupt.
The girl in the hoodie talks about alcohol and a home that smells like vodka.
Then Gina points to Xander. He stands. Not because anyone said stand—because Xander Anderson does not deliver important things sitting down.
“I lost my best friend because of my addiction.”
The room goes still.
“Ten minutes apart in the maternity ward. Every birthday. Every holiday. Their family took me in when my own didn’t want me. And I repaid that by becoming the worst version of myself.”
He’s not performing. I can tell—eighteen years of reading this boy’s face, and this is truth.
“I pushed them away. I said things I can’t unsay. I chose drugs over the one person who made the noise quiet. And when they needed me most—when they were drowning—I turned my back.”
His voice cracks.
“The thing that scares me most isn’t that I lost them.
It’s that I might have taught them they’re not worth staying for.
That my leaving confirmed every bad thing they already believed about themselves.
And if that’s true—if I gave them a reason to reach for the pills—then I’m not just an addict. I’m a weapon.”
I stand up. The chair scrapes. Everyone looks.
I walk out. Through the door. Into the hallway. The tears falling before I hit the corridor—not because he hurt me, but because he said the thing I needed to hear: that he knows. He knows his leaving landed on me. He knows the weight of it nearly killed me.
Darla follows. Her hand on my arm. Gentle. “Penny. Breathe.”
“He was talking about me.”
“I know, sweetheart. I’ve known you both since you were in strollers at your mothers Fourth of July parties.
” She hands me water. “I’ve watched you two circle each other your whole lives.
The bracelets. The treehouse. The way you’d hold hands on the playground and your mothers would look at each other and smile.
I know what you are to each other. That’s why you’re both in my program. ”
“What he said about being a weapon—about teaching me I’m not worth staying for.
” I wipe my face. “That’s exactly what happened, Darla.
When he walked away in the hallway that day—the day of the treehouse—it confirmed every voice that said I’m not enough.
And I reached for the pills because the pills don’t walk away. ”
Darla nods. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to work on. Not the drugs. The belief underneath them. The belief that you’re not worth staying for. That belief is a lie, Penny. And lies lose their power when you say them out loud in a room full of people who know they’re lies.”
She squeezes my arm. “Ready to go back?”
“Yeah.”
We walk in. I sit. Xander’s eyes find mine. Concerned. Searching. The boy underneath. He mouths: “Are you okay?”
I look at him. At the boy who broke me and found me and is sitting in a recovery circle talking about me like I’m the most important thing he’s ever lost.
I nod. Take a breath.
I want to heal. That’s the only thing I know for certain in a life full of contradictions and whiplash and boys whose hands I can’t stop leaning into. I want to heal. Not for Xander. Not for Iz. Not for my parents or Cat or Darla or anyone else who is waiting for Penny MacHale to get better.
For me. The girl under the pills and the performance and the bracelet. The girl who needs to learn that she’s worth staying for—not because someone else says so, but because she decides it herself.
So I sit in this circle. And I breathe. And I let the work begin.