Chapter 3 #3
Penelope just smiles, looking from her to me, and that is the thing that breaks us.
The smile. The serene, almost holy smile of a woman who has not been broken by any of the ordinary forces of this world.
I look at Mila. Mila looks at me. The three of us go off into one of those laughing fits where the laughing keeps starting itself again, and just when we think we’ve calmed down, one of us makes a small noise, and the other two are off again, gasping, clutching our stomachs, faces hot.
I roll onto my back and stare up at the ceiling.
I feel — God, of all things — happy.
I’m lying down on the floor of my own living room, my body wrecked, my head still pulsing softly with last night’s mistakes, and I am the happiest I have been in years.
Eventually, we migrate to the kitchen on noodle legs.
Penelope pulls a glass container out of the fridge, and inside is a kaleidoscope of pre-cut fruit. Strawberries. Pineapple. Cubes of mango that look like little jewels. Blueberries. She slides it onto the counter and tells us to help ourselves.
I cannot remember the last time I ate fruit.
I’ve lived on protein bars and gas station coffee and whatever Chase brought home from the deli on the corner near his parents’ house for so long that the first cube of mango is almost an out-of-body experience. It tastes like candy. It tastes like sunshine. I make a small, embarrassing noise.
“Oh my God.”
“Right?” Penelope says, pleased.
“This is so good. Thank you. I’m — I haven’t — thank you.”
Mila picks at the fruit politely, less converted than I am, but she thanks Penelope with a smile.
I pull out the eggs. This I can do. Cooking is the way I tell people I love them.
My mother cooked for me, and then I learned to cook for myself, and somewhere along the way, it became the thing I offer instead of saying I’m glad you’re here.
I want to feed these girls. I want to feed them every morning if they’ll let me.
“How do you want your eggs?” I ask.
We all agree on over easy.
Mila is on toast duty. Penelope is whisking something the color of saffron in a small bowl — olive oil, lemon, garlic, a pinch of something red and warm — and the kitchen fills with the smell of butter melting in the pan and bread browning and the kind of music Penelope has cued up softly from the TV in the next room.
“This is your first weekend here, isn’t it, Melly?” Mila asks suddenly.
I look up. The egg I’m cracking goes a little crooked. “Yes, it is.”
“That’s crazy.”
I grin. “I know.”
“A week ago, you were suffering at your old place.”
I laugh. Now that I’m out of there, it’ll just be a funny story to tell.
Penelope’s face lights up as she stirs her drizzle. “A lot can change in a week,” she says.
I crack the second egg. I tuck the shell back into the carton, neatly, beside the first one. There is something almost grounding about the ritual of it.
“I just — now that I’m settled in,” I say, “I need to focus on midterms. Like, I really need to focus. I’ve been so distracted with the move and everything that I haven’t opened a textbook in a week.”
“Same,” Penelope says. She closes the fruit container. She slides it back into the fridge. “I have a big midterm coming up, too.”
I crack the third egg. I drop the cover on the pan. The edges of the whites are starting to lace and crisp in the butter.
“We should study together,” I say. The idea comes out of me before I’ve fully thought it through, but as soon as it’s out, it feels right.
“Honestly, it would help me so much. I get on the phone with Chase, and I get nothing done. He’ll call, and three hours will be gone, and I’ll have read maybe half a page. ” I roll my eyes at myself.
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Penelope says, pulling out her phone. “Let me ask the girls who else needs accountability.”
“Group chat,” Mila chimes in, with the bright enthusiasm of a girl who lives for group chats. “Group chat, group chat, group chat.”
“Good idea.” Penelope leans against the counter, her thumbs flying. “Mila, what’s your number?”
I smile across the kitchen at Mila as she calls out her digits. Mila waggles her eyebrows at me and starts dancing very gently in place to the music drifting in from the living room, mouthing the lyrics.
Mila says, “We should turn the music up.”
“On it,” Penelope says, without looking up.
The volume rises by a notch. The kitchen fills.
When the eggs are done, I turn around to plate them and find that Penelope has already laid out three plates with toast on each one — a slice of perfectly browned sourdough, edges crisp, middle still soft.
I slide an egg onto each piece. The yolks tremble.
Penelope drizzles her saffron-colored oil over the top of hers and slides the bowl across the counter to me with a small smile.
“Try it. I promise.”
I drizzle it, then add salt and pepper. I take a bite.
“Oh,” I say, with my mouth still full.
“Right?” Penelope says again, pleased. “The store didn’t have ripe avocados. Otherwise, this would be a perfect ten.”
“This is a perfect ten to me,” I say honestly, and she laughs.
Mila is already halfway through hers. She nods so vigorously that a crumb falls into her lap.
I look around at the three of us — at the bright kitchen, at the music, at my best friend with toast crumbs on her thigh and my new roommate with her glass of lemon water and her pretty smile, at the soft hum of belonging in the air — and I think, this is what I came here for.
This.
Not the degree. Not the career. Not the city. Not Blue Golding. This.
“I don’t think,” I say slowly, “I’ve ever worked out first thing in the morning before.”
“That’s because you lived with Chase for so long,” Mila says without looking up.
I pause with my coffee halfway to my mouth.
“Oh,” Penelope says, glancing between us, careful. “You used to live with him?”
I nod and look at the counter. It sounds a lot like a serious relationship when you’re living together. “Yeah.”
“At his parents’ house,” Mila adds, because Mila does not have a filter.
I shoot her a look. Seriously?
“Camden was always the goal,” I say to Penelope, like I’m reading a prepared statement. “He knew that. So it wasn’t, you know — it wasn’t a surprise when I left.”
“That’s awesome, though,” Penelope says. “You saved so much money by going to community college first. I don’t even want to look at my loans.”
I take a bite of the toast. I let the saltiness and the lemon, and the warm, runny yolk do the work of pulling me back into the room.
“I don’t like to look at mine either,” I admit.
“What a scam, right?” Mila says, with feeling. “I heard a young billionaire girl say once that college is great for networking and making friends. And honestly? I can’t disagree. Look at us.” She gestures around the kitchen with her toast. “Look at us. This. This is what I’m paying for.”
I laugh.
Penelope laughs too. “Thank God you didn’t find another place. Honestly, I was panicking when Lucy didn’t jump on it. I called you the second she said no.”
“Who,” Mila says, very seriously, “would say no to this place? I would kill to live here. I would literally commit a crime.”
“The dorms are fun, though,” I say. “You’re meeting so many people there.”
“That is true.”
Penelope picks up her phone again. “Alright. The group chat is live. When should I tell them our first study session is?”
“This afternoon?” I offer.
Penelope nods, thumbs flying over her screen, and Mila goes quiet. Her eyes have gone soft and distant, fixed on some point on my face she isn’t really looking at, because she’s somewhere else entirely. She’s deep in thought about something.
I take another bite of my toast. The yolk has soaked into the bread on one side, and the sauce Penelope made has done some sort of holy alchemy together. I close my eyes for a second to enjoy it because it is, genuinely, the best thing I have eaten.
“Melly, this is the dream. This is so good,” Mila says, no longer zoning out on my face.
But it takes me a moment to realize she’s not talking about the food.
She’s talking about me living here. “You need to —” She stops mid-sentence, like a door slamming shut.
Her water glass is halfway to her lips. She freezes with the rim of it pressed against her bottom lip, and her eyes flick, just once, in Penelope’s direction.
I swallow my bite. “Need to what?”
“Nothing,” she says, too fast, and takes a sip of water as though the sip itself will erase the sentence she started.
But I know her.
“Say it,” I tell her.
She glances at Penelope again. She is shriveling like a flower in the cold. And the careful way she’s trying to keep her mouth shut tells me more about what she’s about to say than the words ever will.
“I shouldn’t,” she says, trying to brush it off.
“Mila.”
“Melly, I —”
I blink. “Mila, it’s fine. Just say it.”
Her eyes stay fixed on mine. “Okay,” she says. “Fine, I just — I just think you need to break up with Chase already.”
The room pauses. My heart sinks into my stomach. Why is she bringing it up right now? Penelope looks up from her phone. Mila and I have been doing this ever since I transferred. She’s upset that I haven’t done it yet, but I just can’t seem to do it.
Penelope reads the tension between us and places her phone down. “Do you want to be with him?”
I’m so thrown off by the question that I double-take. And then I stare at the counter because I don’t, but I do, and I don’t know how to explain that. I feel my cheeks go hot, and I cannot, for the life of me, make my mouth work.
Penelope and Mila exchange a look. It’s so small. It’s just a flick of Penelope’s eyes to Mila and a tiny, sad press of Mila’s lips back, and the shame is already up my throat before either of them has spoken a word.
Penelope says softly, “If you take too long to answer, it implies that you don’t want to be with him.”
I look at Mila. She knows. She already knows. We’ve had a hundred conversations over the past two years. It’s so dumb to know almost right away that someone isn’t for you and stay with them anyway.