Chapter 7 #2
This car is the one thing I built myself.
Imported from Japan. Right-hand drive. I tore it apart in this garage and put it back together over six months—new turbo, intercooler, lowered suspension.
Everyone assumes I paid someone. I didn’t.
The garage is the one place where I make things instead of breaking them.
I wash my hands in the utility sink. Dry them. Head inside.
My father is at the kitchen island. His face tells me he already knows.
“Sit down, Kaiden.”
I sit. He doesn’t speak for a while. Just looks at me with an expression I’ve seen him use in campaign meetings when someone’s made a decision he can’t undo—calculating, controlled, but underneath it, furious.
“Pennington’s father called. His son’s at the emergency room getting his nose reset. They’re talking police. Lawyers. Press.”
“Okay.”
“Okay?” His voice goes sharp. “Kaiden, we are eight months from an election. Every headline, every scandal, every goddamn misstep becomes ammunition. I have spent two decades building a political career, and you just handed the Penningtons a gift-wrapped grenade.”
I say nothing. He’s not wrong.
“What were you thinking?”
“He hit Cat.”
My father stops. The politician in him pauses, and I watch the shift—the campaign manager in his head going quiet as the father takes over.
“What do you mean, he hit her?”
“Slapped her across the face in the dining hall. Whole school saw it. Then he cornered her in the hallway, shoved her into lockers, got in Penny MacHale’s face. Slashed all four of Cat’s tires in the parking lot.”
He sits down. Rubs his hand across his jaw. The anger doesn’t leave his face, but it rearranges—less aimed at me, more diffused, pointed at the situation.
“Christ.”
“So he can call the cops. He can call his lawyers. I’ll take whatever comes.”
“That’s not how this works, Kaiden. You can’t just punch your way through every problem and hope the consequences sort themselves out. You’re not twelve anymore.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?” He looks at me. Hard. “Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like a boy who can’t control his temper and is going to cost his family everything because he wanted to play hero for a girl.”
That one stings. It’s supposed to.
“I’m not playing hero,” I say. “I just wasn’t going to let it slide.”
He’s quiet for a long time. Then he sighs—deep, the kind of sigh that carries twenty years of managing situations exactly like this one.
“Do you have proof? Of what he did to her?”
“Half the school recorded the dining hall. And I pulled the security tapes of him attacking both girls and slashing the tires.”
He looks at me. Something flickers—not pride exactly. Recognition. Like he’s seeing a version of himself he remembers and isn’t sure how to feel about.
“You pulled security tapes.”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“Does it matter?”
He almost smiles. Kills it. “Send them to me. I’ll deal with the Penningtons. If they push this, we bury them in their own son’s evidence.” He stands. “But Kaiden—this is the last time you handle something with your fists and expect me to clean it up. We clear?”
“Yeah, Dad. We’re clear.”
He walks toward his office. Stops in the doorway. Doesn’t turn around.
“For what it’s worth—I understand why you did it. That doesn’t mean I approve.”
He disappears down the hall. I sit at the counter and eat a cookie and stare at nothing and think about the video—Cat’s face after the slap. How still she went. How practiced that stillness looked.
The doorbell rings at seven-thirty.
My father and I both stand—expecting cops, or Pennington’s lawyer, or both. I get to the door first and open it.
Cat is standing on the step.
She’s been crying. I can tell because her eyes are red and her mascara has tracked and she’s gripping her own elbows so hard her knuckles are white. She looks like she’s holding herself together manually—like if she lets go of her arms, the rest of her will come apart.
I don’t know what to do with this. I have no protocol for a crying girl on my doorstep. My usual tools are aggression and charm and neither one applies here, and I’m standing in my own doorway like an idiot with my mouth slightly open.
“I’m sorry to just show up,” she says. Her voice is controlled but the edges are frayed. “My front door was open when I got home. Wide open. My parents aren’t back yet and I didn’t—I didn’t know where else to go.”
My mother appears behind me. One look at Cat and she’s in motion.
“Get her inside. Now.” She reaches past me and takes Cat’s hand. “Did you call the police, sweetheart?”
“Not yet. I came here first.”
She came here. Not the police. Not a neighbor. Here. I don’t know what to do with that information either.
My mother pulls her through the door. I step aside to make room and my hand brushes Cat’s arm as she passes. She flinches. Hard. The kind of flinch that comes from somewhere deep—muscle memory, not choice.
I look down. Her sleeve has ridden up. Purple bruises in the shape of fingers wrap around her upper arm. Jon’s handprint, stamped into her skin like a brand.
Below the bruises—the scars. Thin. Parallel. Deliberate. I saw them at the launch. Now they’re right there, under the hallway light, undeniable.
Cat follows my eyes. Sees what I see. Yanks her sleeve down so fast she nearly rips the seam.
I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say that wouldn’t make it worse. So I close the door behind her and shove my hands in my pockets and let my mother do what she’s good at—make people feel safe.
“Come on, honey,” Mom says, steering Cat toward the kitchen. “Tea first. Then we’ll call your parents and sort the rest.”
They disappear into the kitchen. I stand in the hallway. My father stands beside me. Neither of us speaks.
“This is serious,” he says finally.
“I know.”
“Her door was forced open?”
“That’s what she said.”
He processes this. I can see him running it—Pennington’s escalation pattern, the legal implications, the security concerns.
But underneath the calculation, something else.
He glances toward the kitchen where Cat is sitting at the island and my mother is filling the kettle, and his expression shifts into something I rarely see from him. Concern that isn’t political.
“I’ll call the police,” he says. “And her parents. Go check on her.”
He heads for his office. I stand in the hallway a moment longer, listening to my mother’s voice in the kitchen—soft, steady, the voice she used with me when I was small and the world was too big and too loud.
I walk to the kitchen doorway and lean against the frame.
Cat is sitting at the island with a mug between her hands, not drinking it, just holding it for the warmth. My mother is pulling flour and sugar out of the pantry because that’s what she does when the world falls apart—she bakes. It’s her version of my garage. Hands busy. Mind quiet.
Cat laughs at something Mom says. A small laugh, surprised, like it escaped without permission.
Her sleeves are pushed up because the kitchen is warm and she’s cracking eggs into a bowl, and the scars on her wrists are visible under the pendant light, and my mother sees them and says absolutely nothing. Just hands her another egg.
I watch from the doorway and I feel—
I don’t know what I feel. It doesn’t have a name. It’s not the usual shit—not the possessiveness, not the wanting, not the competitive pull. It’s something quieter. Something that aches low in my chest and makes me want to stand very still and not ruin this moment with my big stupid mouth.
She looks up and sees me. Her hands still. Flour on her cheek. Eyes wide, cautious. Not afraid. Just…waiting. Trying to figure out which version of me is standing in this doorway.
I grab a cookie off the cooling rack. “Scoot over. If you’re going to take my valedictorian spot, the least you can do is teach me something useful.”
She stares at me. I stare back. My mother busies herself at the oven and pretends not to be watching us. Cat moves over. I step beside her. Our arms almost touch. She smells like my mother’s kitchen—butter and vanilla and something underneath that’s just her, warm and complicated.
She shows me how to cream butter and sugar. I’m bad at it. She corrects my grip on the spatula without looking at me, and her fingers brush mine, and neither of us reacts, which feels like the biggest thing that’s happened all day.
My father’s voice drifts from the hall as he talks to the police on the phone. My mother hums. The oven ticks.
Cat cracks an egg one-handed—clean, perfect—and I think: she grew up in a garage. She listens to screamo. She’s applying to MIT for nuclear engineering. She has scars on her wrists and bruises on her arms and a laugh that sounds like it surprises her every time it happens.
I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t have a plan for this. I’m good at plans—at strategy, at manipulation, at the long game. But standing in a warm kitchen next to a girl who makes me feel like the floor is tilting—that’s not in my playbook.
My dad appears in the doorway behind us. He watches for a second. Then catches my eye.
He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t need to. The look says: “This is what I was talking about. This is the door. Stop being an asshole long enough to walk through it.”
I turn back to the bowl. Cat is measuring vanilla extract with the precision of someone building a bomb.
“You’re very serious about cookies,” I say.
“I’m serious about everything.”
“Yeah. I’m figuring that out.”
She glances at me. Holds it for a second longer than necessary. Then goes back to the vanilla.
I don’t know what this is. I don’t know where it goes.
I know that three hours ago I had my hand around this girl’s throat in a library and she moaned and I wanted to take her apart.
I know that right now she’s teaching me how to fold chocolate chips into batter and I want to stay in this kitchen forever.
Both things are true. I don’t know how to hold both of them at once. But I’m standing here. And she’s letting me. For now, that’s enough.