Chapter 14 Catherine #2
Bathroom. Makeup bag—concealer, mascara, the eyeliner I can do in thirty seconds.
My toothbrush. Phone charger from the nightstand.
All of it crammed in with the mechanical efficiency of a person who has packed a bag in a crisis before.
The last time was the night of the fire, when my mother shoved a go-bag at me and told me to run. The muscle memory is the same.
My parents are in the hallway outside my room. Still fighting. My mother’s voice has gone shrill—the pitch it reaches when she’s losing the argument and knows it. My father is doing the low, controlled thing that means he’s on the edge of something he can’t take back.
“You cannot keep making decisions about her life based on what the Penningtons—”
“This has nothing to do with the Penningtons!”
“Then why does their name keep coming out of your mouth every time we talk about our daughter?”
I pull on my Vans—the beat-up black ones, socks on, my feet still cold from the walk home.
I’m still in Kaiden’s grey sweats and his lacrosse sweatshirt, MONAGHAN across my back, and I don’t change because changing would mean staying in this room for another thirty seconds and I cannot be in this house for another thirty seconds.
I sling the backpack over my shoulder. Open my door. My parents are standing in the hallway facing each other, mid-sentence, and they both turn to me at the same time.
“Catherine, we’re not finished—” my mother starts.
“I am.”
I walk between them. Down the stairs. Grab my keys from the hook by the front door even though I don’t have a car because habit is stronger than logic. Open the door.
My father is at the top of the stairs. “Catherine. Please. Don’t leave like this.”
I look up at him. At the man who carried me out of a burning house.
Who sat beside my hospital bed for three weeks.
Who has spent two years trying to build a wall between me and the worst thing that ever happened to me, and who is now watching that wall crumble because the daughter he saved is walking out the door in a boy’s sweatshirt with bandaged wrists and a backpack full of makeup.
“I’ll be at the lacrosse game,” I say. “Penny’s driving me. I’ll text you when it’s over.”
I close the door behind me. Walk down the path. Through the gate. Penny’s car is idling in the driveway because Penny is early for everything, and today that saves me. I get in. Close the door. Stare straight ahead.
“Drive,” I say. “Please drive.”
Penny looks at my face. At Kaiden’s sweatshirt. At my bare ankles above the Vans. Doesn’t ask. Puts the car in gear and pulls out.
She doesn’t ask where to go. Just drives toward the school—toward the lacrosse game—but takes the long route.
The scenic one. The one that winds through the back roads of Edgewood where the trees are thick and the houses are far apart and there’s nowhere to be except the inside of a car with a girl who is falling apart.
“Talk to me,” she says eventually. Not pushing. Offering.
So I do. I tell her everything. Not the sanitized version. Not the performance. Everything.
Jack. Starting from the beginning—the book club, the grooming, the first time he touched me, the years of abuse, the blackmail, the photographs. The night I found him with the other girl. The confession to my parents. The fire. The gun. The three shots. The beam that fell and pinned me. The scars.
Penny drives. Her hands tighten on the wheel as I talk, her knuckles going white in stages, but she doesn’t interrupt. Doesn’t gasp or cry or say “Oh my God.” Just listens the way a person listens when they understand that the telling is more important than the hearing.
Then the cutting. When it started. Why. The mechanics of it—the pressure, the release, the chemical relief that’s not a choice but a compulsion. The program they sent me to. The year of isolation. The way it felt more like punishment than treatment.
Then Kaiden. The library. The throat. The garden. The photo. How the boy who bullied her best friend turned out to be the person who held her while she broke and kissed every scar on her body and begged her to stop hurting herself.
“Last night I climbed his trellis bleeding from both wrists,” I say.
“He carried me to the shower and cleaned me up and sat on his balcony and smoked a joint with me and told me about being kidnapped by the Penningtons when he was twelve. And then we fell asleep holding each other. That’s what happened. That’s who he is.”
Penny is quiet for a long time. We’re almost at the school. She pulls into the lot but doesn’t park near the field. She parks in the far corner, under the trees, where nobody walks. Kills the engine.
“Cat.” Her voice is thick. She’s been holding it together while I talked, and now that I’ve stopped, the holding is cracking. “I don’t—I don’t know what to say. I’ve never—nobody’s ever told me something like that before.”
“You don’t have to say anything. You just have to know. Because you’re my best friend, and I’m tired of the people closest to me not knowing the truth.”
She reaches across the console and takes my hand. Holds it. Squeezes hard enough that I feel her pulse against mine.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she says. “You hear me? I’m not going anywhere.”
I nod. Can’t speak. The ice princess is offline and what’s left is just a girl in a car holding her best friend’s hand in a parking lot.
After a while, Penny sniffs. Wipes her eyes. Squares her shoulders. Looks at me with the particular expression of a girl who has just processed a lifetime of trauma in twenty minutes and is now going to do the most Penny thing possible: pivot to something manageable.
“Okay,” she says. “One question.”
“Shoot.”
“Since apparently both sets of parents and the Monaghan security cameras are now invested in your sex life—” She pauses for effect. “Are you being safe?”
I stare at her. She stares at me. Her face is perfectly serious for exactly two seconds before it cracks into a grin.
“Callum Monaghan asked Kaiden if he was being ‘responsible’ at the breakfast table this morning,” I say. “While I was sitting right there. Eating pancakes.”
Penny shrieks. Actually shrieks—a sound so loud it fogs the windshield. “He did NOT.”
“He did. With the newspaper still in his hand.”
“I’m dead. I’m actually dead. That man is a politician and he asked his son about condoms at the breakfast table.”
“To be fair, I have an IUD. So technically—”
“STOP. I need details. Scale of one to ten. How is the sex.”
I look out the window. At the lacrosse field in the distance. At the stands starting to fill.
“Eleven,” I say.
Penny grabs my arm. “Catherine O’Farrell. You nasty little—”
“He’s…” I search for the word. “It’s not like anything I imagined. It’s not gentle. It’s not careful. He’s rough and possessive and says things that should scare me but don’t. And afterward he’s…soft. Like a different person. Like the boy underneath all the armor.”
Penny is looking at me with an expression I haven’t seen from her before—not the teasing, not the jokes. Something serious and tender underneath.
“You deserve that,” she says. Quiet. “After everything. You deserve someone who makes you feel like an eleven.”
I almost cry. Almost. The ice princess catches it at the last second and seals the breach, but Penny sees the near-miss and her hand squeezes mine one more time.
After the talking. After the crying and the laughing and the eleven-out-of-ten and Penny shrieking about Callum Monaghan’s breakfast-table interrogation. After the silence that follows the silence—the good kind, the kind two people share when they’ve said everything and nothing is left unsaid.
I pull my backpack from the floorboard. “I need to change. I can’t walk into that game in sweats.”
Penny adjusts her rearview mirror so it faces the ceiling. “Change away. I’ll stand guard.”
“We’re in a parking lot.”
“A far corner parking lot. With tinted windows. And anyone who walks by can deal with the free show. Go.”
I strip Kaiden’s sweats off and pull on my black jeans in the passenger seat, which requires a degree of contortion that would impress a yoga instructor.
The fitted black top goes on next—a long-sleeved shirt that covers the bandages without looking like it’s covering anything.
Then Kaiden’s sweatshirt back over it, because I’m wearing his name today and every person in those stands is going to know it.
Penny hands me her visor mirror. I do my face in four minutes—concealer under my eyes to erase the evidence of the morning, mascara, a sharp wing of eyeliner that takes exactly three strokes because I’ve been doing this since I was fourteen and my hands are steady even when the rest of me isn’t.
I look in the mirror. The girl looking back is composed.
Put together. The black jeans. The eyeliner.
The grey sweatshirt with the forest green and gold crest and MONAGHAN across the back.
The ice princess, reassembled from the wreckage of a kitchen fight, constructed in the passenger seat of a Honda Civic in a school parking lot.
Nobody will know. That’s the trick I’ve been perfecting since I was twelve. Nobody ever knows.
“Ready?” Penny asks.
I pull the hood down. Smooth my hair. Check the bandages under my sleeves.
“Ready.”
She drives us to the main lot. We get out. I pull the hood up—MONAGHAN catching the grey October light—and walk toward the lacrosse field with my best friend beside me and the sound of my parents fighting still ringing in my ears and my face looking like none of it ever happened.
The day is cold and everything at home is falling apart. But right now, in this sweatshirt, with this girl, walking toward a field where a boy who knows every scar on my body is about to play the game of his season—Right now, I’m okay.
For right now, okay is enough.