17. Penny
I’ve been avoiding Xander Anderson for four days.
Four days of roundabout routes to class—adding five minutes to every commute to bypass the corridors where his locker is.
Four days of eating lunch alone in the library because the cafeteria is an open floor plan and open floor plans mean sightlines and sightlines mean his eyes finding mine across a room full of people who are watching us not look at each other.
Four days of timing my morning bathroom runs to miss his, of closing my bedroom door before he emerges from the guest room, of sitting at dinner and responding in monosyllables while my parents exchange the look of two people who are watching their daughter and their honorary son orbit the same house without ever colliding.
It’s exhausting. The avoidance takes more energy than the confrontation ever did.
But confrontation with Xander leads to closets and beds and his hands on my throat and the particular chemical reaction that my body produces when his body is near, and I am in recovery.
I am in recovery and Xander Anderson is a substance I am trying to quit.
He is my trigger. The thought arrived during Gina’s trigger exercise and I couldn’t write it down because writing it down would mean admitting that the boy I love is the thing that makes me want to use.
Group session. Darla’s office. The circle. The familiar faces. Marcus with his coffee. Maddie picking her sleeve. X across from me—the standard arrangement, the seating chart the universe maintains for maximum emotional disruption.
Darla stands. “Check-ins. Xander, you first.”
He stands and something is different.
His face. His eyes. The quality of a person who has been carrying something heavy and has set it down.
Not all of it—not even most of it. But enough that the posture has changed.
The shoulders are lower. The jaw is looser.
He looks… lighter. Like someone opened a window in a room that’s been sealed shut.
“I’m doing better.” Not performing. Not the Xander bravado.
Just… true. “I had a conversation with someone I trust—someone who’s become like a father to me.
And he helped me see some things I couldn’t see on my own.
About who I’ve been. About who I want to become.
About the difference between protecting people and controlling them. ”
He pauses. Looks at the floor. Then up.
“A few nights ago, I almost called my dealer. I was in the backyard of the house I’m staying in, and I had his name on my screen, and my thumb was right there.
But I called Darla instead. And I texted my boys—my brothers—and I told them I was struggling.
I asked for help.” His voice catches on the word “help.” The difficulty of that word in Xander Anderson’s mouth.
“Asking for help is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
Harder than any fight. But I did it. And they showed up. And I didn’t use.”
The room claps. Darla is beaming. Gina nods with the particular satisfaction of a therapist watching the work work.
Darla turns to me. “Penny? Your turn.”
I stand. Smooth my skirt. Put on the face. “I’m doing good. Recovery is going well. I’m on the right path.”
The words are hollow. I can hear the hollowness. The room can hear it. The particular sound of a person reciting a script instead of speaking from the chest.
Across the circle, Xander laughs. Not cruel—frustrated. The laugh of a person who knows what bullshit sounds like because he’s been producing it for months and can identify the brand.
“Something funny?”
“Yeah, actually. That boldface lie you just told to a room full of people who are here because they stopped lying to themselves.”
Darla steps forward. “Xander—”
But he’s not done. Not mean—direct. The directness of a boy who has decided that honesty is the only currency he’s willing to trade in and is not going to watch someone he loves counterfeit it.
“Tell them about the other night, Penny. Tell them about the cravings. About the pacing. About almost calling Reece at two a.m. Tell them how close you were. Because I was there. I saw it. And pretending it didn’t happen isn’t recovery—it’s performance.”
The room is silent. Every eye on me. The exposure of being called out in a circle of addicts who know exactly what performance looks like because they’ve all done it.
I bolt. Chair scraping. Door slamming. The hallway—empty, fluorescent, the particular corridor of Darla’s building where the tiles are scuffed and the light is too bright and I am going to kill Xander Anderson.
Footsteps behind me. His footsteps. I spin.
“DON’T FOLLOW ME!” My voice echoes off the hallway walls.
Raw. Furious. The volume of a girl who has just been stripped naked in front of a room full of strangers by the one person who knows exactly where her seams are.
“You had NO RIGHT to do that! No right to call me out in front of those people! You don’t get to stand up there and perform your fucking recovery and then turn around and use my pain as your evidence that you’re growing!
That’s MY pain, Xander! Mine! And you dragged it into the middle of a circle like show-and-tell! ”
He stops. Five feet away. Doesn’t advance. The stillness of a boy who has been screamed at by Lucian his entire life and knows that the worst thing you can do to a person who is erupting is stand too close to the blast.
“You want honesty? HERE’S HONESTY.” I shove his chest. Hard.
He steps back. Absorbs it. “I am not okay! I have never been okay! I have been performing ‘okay’ since the day they pulled me out of that basement and everyone applauded like surviving was the finish line when surviving was just the starting gun for the marathon of shit that came after!”
Darla arrives. Quiet. She doesn’t touch me. Doesn’t grab. Just positions herself between me and Xander—not blocking, mediating. The particular placement of a woman who has spent her career standing between people in crisis and the people who trigger them.
“Penny.” Darla’s voice. Low. Warm. The anchor. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“I don’t need you to be right here! I need everybody to stop LOOKING AT ME like I’m a project! Like I’m the broken girl who needs fixing! I’m not a fucking fixer-upper, Darla!”
My back hits the wall. I slide down. Knees up. The defensive posture. The position I always end up in—on a floor, against a wall, small.
Darla kneels. Not in my space—near my space. The particular distance of a woman who knows that a girl in crisis needs proximity without pressure.
“I’m scared, Darla.” The anger draining.
What’s underneath is worse. The voice of a girl who has been using fury as a lid on a pot that is boiling over.
“I’m so scared. All the time. Every single day I wake up scared.
Scared of the cravings. Scared of the memories.
Scared that I’m going to end up on that treehouse floor again and this time nobody will find me in time. ”
“Tell me.” Darla’s hands on my knees. Steady. “Tell me what you’re carrying. Right here. This hallway. It doesn’t have to be organized. It doesn’t have to make sense. Just let it out, baby.”
And the pot boils over.
It comes in fragments. Not sentences—pieces. Shrapnel. The language of a person whose pain has been compressed for so long that when it finally releases, it doesn’t come out in paragraphs. It comes out in shards.
“Garrett. Thirteen. The lacrosse field. His weight on top of me. The cologne. I can still smell it. I can still—and Xander with the stick and the blood on his shoes and I couldn’t move, Darla.
I was frozen. My body just—it stopped. And after that, after Xander saved me, he looked at me different.
Like I was broken. Like touching me would remind him—”
Breath. Gasping.
“And concerts. My safe place. Music was my—it was the only thing that was mine. And then hands. In the crowd. Fingers grabbing. Squeezing. Some guy’s hand up my skirt at an Ashes of the Kings show and I couldn’t even scream because the music was too loud and nobody could hear—and another one, at a festival, his mouth on my neck from behind and I didn’t even see his face.
I never saw his face. How do you report a man whose face you never—”
More breath. Rougher.
“Jon. The basement. The zip ties. The needle. Alastair standing in the doorway like he was watching a fucking play. Cat screaming through the wall and I could hear her but I couldn’t help her.
I was right THERE. On the other side of a wall.
And Jon made me—he put his—” Her voice fractures.
Rebuilds. “I brush my teeth four times a day and I can still taste him. I scrub my skin until it bleeds and I can still feel the needle and the drugs they pumped into me and my own body turning against me because the chemicals made everything soft and wrong and I couldn’t fight—”
Xander is behind Darla. Kneeling now. His face is wet. Not the controlled crying of a boy maintaining composure—the silent, streaming tears of a person hearing something that is destroying him in real time.
“Reece. The touching. The buttons he undid one at a time like he was unwrapping something. Daisy on the couch watching. Daisy who was supposed to be my—she was Danny’s sister, she was supposed to be safe, and she just sat there while he—and the pills.
The pills that he gave me that were supposed to make it quiet and instead they made me his.
Made my body his property. Made the transaction—his product for my compliance, his hands for my silence—”
I’m rocking now. Back and forth. The childhood gesture.
The self-soothing of a body that has run out of adult mechanisms and is reverting to the first coping strategy it learned: movement.
Repetition. The metronome of a person trying to regulate a nervous system that has been deregulated for months.