24. Xander
Aweek off.
Seven days of sleeping on couches and in Penny’s bed and eating food Alice left on the counter because nobody had the energy to sit at a table.
Seven days of therapy sessions that felt like surgery without anesthesia—Darla and Gina and the group and the private sessions, each one peeling back another layer of something that hurts to look at.
Seven days of Danny’s name in the group chat going unanswered, the blue bubbles from the rest of us piling up against his silence like waves against a wall that isn’t giving.
Now we’re standing in the Edgewood Prep parking lot, and I can see the fear on Penny’s face.
Not the old fear—not the craving fear or the Reece fear.
The “everybody knows” fear. The fear of a girl who has been in the news and on GlossX and in police reports and is now walking back into a building full of people who have been consuming her tragedy like content for a week.
I take her hand. “It’s okay, baby. I got you.”
She squeezes. Hard. The grip of a girl who is holding on because letting go means standing on her own and standing on her own is still something she’s learning to trust.
We walk in. Through the entrance. Past the stares—and there are stares, the particular hush that falls over a hallway when the people at the center of the school’s biggest story walk through it.
But the stares are different from before.
Not the GlossX stares—not mocking, not cruel.
These are the stares of people who watched two of their classmates get kidnapped and one of them almost die and are now looking at them the way you look at someone who survived something you can’t imagine.
I don’t know if that’s better or worse.
Kaiden and Cat meet us at Penny’s locker.
Cat looks… thinner. Her eyes are shadowed.
The eyeliner is sharp as ever but underneath it the girl is tired in a way that liner can’t fix.
She’s been carrying Daisy’s death—not the guilt of causing it, but the guilt of surviving the room where it started.
The guilt of being the girl who threw the chunk of concrete.
The guilt of being alive when someone else isn’t, even when the someone else was holding a gun.
Kaiden has his arm around her. Tighter than usual.
The grip of a boy who watched his girlfriend get taken in a van and has not fully recovered from the twelve hours between the taking and the finding.
He’s not sleeping—I can see it in his face.
The dark circles. The jaw permanently set.
The leader holding the group together while his own foundation is cracking.
Ryan and Iz wander over. The formation—the Elite Five minus one. The gap where Danny should be standing is a wound that nobody acknowledges out loud but everybody orbits around, the way you walk around a hole in the floor: carefully, aware of the edges.
Penny looks around. Frowns. “Where’s Danny?”
Ryan sighs. “He’s not ready. Cliff called—Danny hasn’t left his room in three days. Won’t eat. Won’t talk. Kaid tried. Iz tried. I tried.”
Kaiden’s jaw tightens. “He punched Cat.” Flat. The sentence delivered like a verdict. “When she went to see him, to try to talk, he hit her in the face. Cliff had to pull them apart.”
Cat shifts. Pulls her sleeve down over her wrist where I can see the edge of a bruise. “He’s dealing with a lot, Kaid. His sister died. He’s not thinking—”
“He hit you, Catherine.” Kaiden’s voice is ice. The Monaghan ice—the one that Cat’s ice princess was modeled after, the original version, cold enough to freeze a room. “There is no amount of grief that makes that acceptable.”
Iz: “He needs time. And therapy. And space.”
Ryan: “He’s my best friend and I agree with Kaid. He took it too far. But I’m not giving up on him. None of us should.”
The bell rings. We stand in the hallway—the six of us, the gap, the weight of a group that used to be unbreakable and is now held together with tape and promises and the stubborn refusal to let one person’s pain dismantle what took twelve years to build.
Penny squeezes my hand. “We’ll figure it out. We always do.”
We always do. The sentence of a girl who has survived too much to believe in fairy tales but still believes in us. And maybe that’s the only belief that matters.
The morning is a blur of classes I can’t focus on and hallways I navigate on autopilot.
The craving is low today—a hum, not a scream.
Darla’s meds are helping. The anxiety sits in my chest like a stone instead of a boulder, and the difference between those two weights is the difference between functioning and drowning.
But I’m not okay. Nobody who was in that warehouse is okay.
The images cycle: Reece’s face in the cage.
The pepper spray. Daisy’s gun against Penny’s skull.
Danny screaming. The blood on the concrete.
I see them in the quiet moments—between classes, during lunch, in the spaces between one thought and the next.
Darla calls these intrusive images. Gina calls them flashbacks.
I call them the rent I pay for surviving.
I eat lunch with Penny. In the library. Quiet.
She’s not eating enough—I can see it in her face, the sharpness of her cheekbones, the way her uniform hangs looser than it did a month ago.
The craving suppresses appetite. The trauma suppresses appetite.
The medication suppresses appetite. She’s fighting a three-front war against eating and the food on her tray is a casualty.
“Eat, babe.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I know. Eat anyway.”
She takes a bite. Chews without tasting. The compliance of a girl who is doing it because the boy she loves asked and not because her body wants it. I’ll take it. One bite at a time. The same way sobriety works—one hour at a time, one day at a time, one bite of a sandwich you don’t want at a time.
Ryan finds us in the library during free period.
He sits across from us with his phone face-down on the table—the gesture of a boy who has something to discuss and doesn’t want the distraction.
“Ally is scared. The feds arrested Lucian and his network, but the man she’s promised to—he’s connected to different people. The arrest didn’t touch him.”
“What do you need from us?”
“A plan. Before graduation. She needs to disappear—her and Tobias. Somewhere the man can’t reach. I’ve been looking into programs, safe houses. But I need help. I can’t do this alone.”
“You’re not alone, Ry. The dads are already in it. Arthur knows. We add this to the agenda.”
Ryan nods. The relief is visible—the shoulders dropping half an inch, the jaw loosening. The boy who has been carrying Ally’s survival on his own back hearing that the back has backup.
The final bell rings. I meet Penny at her car. She’s leaning against it, headphones in, eyes closed. Turnover. The album she plays when she needs gentle. I watch her for a moment before she senses me and opens her eyes.
“How are you really?” I ask. Not the hallway version. The real version.
She pulls one earbud out. Considers the question. “I didn’t want to use today. That’s the first day I can say that. Every other day since the warehouse, the craving has been there by morning. Today it waited until fourth period.”
“That’s progress.”
“Is it? Or is it just a longer fuse on the same bomb?”
“It’s progress, Penny. Darla would tell you the same thing. The fuse getting longer IS the work working.”
She looks at me. Studies my face the way she’s studied it since we were kids—reading the weather behind my eyes, checking for storms.
“How are YOU really?”
I lean against the car beside her. Shoulder to shoulder.
“I saw Reece’s face on the back of my eyelids during second period.
I heard Daisy’s gun click during lunch. I thought about my mom’s closet three times.
And I didn’t call Darla because I wanted to see if I could get through a school day without the lifeline. ”
“Did you?”
“Barely. But barely counts.”
She takes my hand. The bracelet threads pressing between our palms. “Barely counts.”
We pull into the driveway. Gideon is in the garage—not working on the studio this time. Standing. Waiting. The posture of a man who has news and has been physically unable to sit down since he received it.
Penny gets out. Hugs him. “Head inside, sweetheart. Your mom needs help with dinner.”
She goes. He turns to me. His face is doing something I’ve rarely seen: uncontrolled emotion. Gideon MacHale, the crisis communicator, the man who manages his feelings like he manages other people’s narratives—is beaming. And his eyes are wet.
“Marco called.”
My heart rate spikes. “And?”
“The gym wants to sponsor you. Amateur circuit. Regional fights. A contract to be part of their team.”
The sentence enters my body and detonates in a different way than sentences usually detonate—not destruction. Construction. The feeling of a foundation being poured. A future taking shape.
Gideon grabs me. Hugs me. The Gideon hug—full, hard, the compression of a man who has built a gym in his basement and driven a boy to training at five a.m. and watched that boy crawl out of a cage and a jail cell and a treehouse and is now watching him receive the first reward that wasn’t paid for in blood.
“I’m so damn proud of you, kid.” Into my shoulder. His voice thick. “We’ll tell the ladies at dinner.”
We head inside, the best news of my life sitting on my heart.
Dinner. The MacHale table. The four of us.
The routine of a family—passing dishes, pouring water, the choreography that has become normal enough that it doesn’t feel like performance anymore.
It feels like home. Not the Anderson house kind of home—the real kind.
The kind where nobody flinches when a fork drops and nobody monitors their volume and the silence between conversations is warm instead of loaded.
Gideon takes Alice’s hand. “Xander and I have some news.”