30. Chapter Thirty
Penelope
I get home from Hawthorne a little after eleven, and I shower off the whole impossible day. If someone told me yesterday that I’d be trapped at the Hawthorne House all day, I would not believe them.
Percy is…
I sit on the edge of my bed with wet hair and try to finish the thought and can’t. I’ve known Percy for a year and a half, and I still don’t have a word for what he is.
I make something to eat, and then I sit down at my drafting table.
My hand finds the 2B pencil in the cup, the one I’ve picked up and put back every morning for months, and this time it doesn’t go back.
I pull a clean sheet of trace toward me, and I put a line down, and then another, and then suddenly, I’m drawing again.
My hand moves and doesn’t stop. The room I’ve had in my head for weeks — the low house, the courtyard, the run of high windows on the north wall throwing that flat even light — comes down out of my head and onto the paper.
And the flow doesn’t stop. I’m drawing things I didn’t imagine yet.
When I look up, it’s past midnight. My neck aches, and there are six sheets fanned across the table in front of me. I sit back and look at what I made.
It’s the best thing I’ve drawn in a year.
And I’m a little afraid of it, sitting there in the lamplight — not of the work, of the feeling, because I’d forgotten this feeling, the full-to-the-walls hum of having made something, and you can’t be afraid of losing something until you have it again.
I have it again. I sit with it until almost one, and I don’t want to sleep, because the wanting-to-work is back, and I’ve missed it.
Studio is on Tuesday, and I’m sharper than I’ve been all term.
It’s junior-level now, so we have real projects — we’re each doing an adaptive reuse, an old building given a second life, and mine is a mill on the river, brick, good bones, the kind of thing I could get lost in.
In crit, I see the move before Adler says it.
His light comes from the wrong side, and he’s fighting the existing structure instead of using it.
I mention it politely, and Adler looks at me a beat longer than usual and says, “Yes. That,” and moves on.
This is my third year in this program. This is the first crit in months where I’ve been all the way in the room.
And I know it’s because of what happened on Sunday.
Everything that wasn’t flowing is now pouring out of me.
It doesn’t feel like work anymore. It feels like joy, and I’ve missed it so much.
Renata drops a set of revised sheets on my desk without a hello.
I get into the Halvorsen block, and this time the hours don’t crawl, they fly.
I catch a stair that doesn’t meet code on the second level, fix it, and flag it.
She looks at my markup and says good and keeps walking.
I sit over the drawings in the office with the worn carpet and sip a black coffee.
And it finally hits me that I was right to leave Whitmore.
I couldn’t feel that at the time. I did it on faith and a hockey boy’s no is no and my own stubbornness.
And then I sat in this office, watching a clock, feeling hollow, wondering if I’d blown up my whole life for a room with a dead plant in it.
And now I’m alive in it. The chosen thing is finally giving me something back, because I’m finally here to receive it.
Renata will never once ask about my weekend.
It’s the cleanest air I breathe all day.
Thursday is Gianna’s planned girls’ night, and it’s loud before I’m through the door.
“Penelope! Okay, good, sit, Mara’s doing my eyeliner and she’s shaking, look at her hand—”
“Stop exaggerating,” Mara snarks, not looking up. “I just had an energy drink.”
“You’re going to blind me.”
Lucy’s on the floor with the takeout menus, quiet, reading options out loud, and we can’t agree, so we order from two places, which Gianna declares the only correct way to live.
There’s a playlist Gianna keeps hijacking.
Love Island is on the TV with the sound off.
Mara does my eyeliner too, unasked, one hand on my jaw to hold me still, and gets it perfect.
I feel comfortable here. I keep noticing that I’m not on high alert or tracking anyone. I sit on a floor with three women and eat too much and laugh, and it feels so good to belong to this.
“Oh—” Gianna, mouth full, phone up. “Ivory’s back with Drew, did you know? She just posted them.”
“She’s my roommate. She came home glowing and furious about him at the same time, which is their whole relationship.”
Mara says with her mouth full, “Do they break up a lot?”
“I don’t even think they’re together.” I steal one of Lucy’s spring rolls.
“Well, Drew’s got the whole crew coming to his thing next weekend, apparently.” Gianna’s already scrolling to something else. “Half the hockey guys, Theo, all of them, it’s going to be a whole thing.”
“Mm,” I say.
Theo’s name goes past me and lands nowhere. It’s strange, actually — a month ago it was a lever I pulled when I needed to feel nothing, and now it’s just a name at a party I might not even go to, because I know exactly what I want now, and it isn’t Theo Marsh.
Mara’s saying something about the party. I let it move on. I don’t think about it again.
I get home from Gianna’s a little before midnight, ears still ringing from the noise of it, my face done up in Mara’s eyeliner, and my apartment is quiet. Ivory must be out again.
I sit down at the table. The mill’s been waiting for me all day.
I’ve been thinking about it in the back of my head through crit and through Renata’s markups, the riverside of it, the problem of the loading dock that wants to be a door.
I pull the sheets toward me, and I’m gone again, the way I’ve been gone all week, my hand ahead of my head.
It’s the best feeling I know. And he’s in it.
That’s the thing I keep not saying, even to myself, even here where no one will know.
Every line I’ve put down this week has come easier since Sunday.
When it’s past midnight again, my tea’s gone cold, and there are three new sheets on the pile. The first thing I want — before I’ve even stretched my neck — is to tell him, so I pull out my phone and tap on his name.
Me: I’m drawing again.
I set the phone where I can see it and go back to the mill.
It doesn’t light up. I don’t notice. I’ve got a river and a hundred-year-old wall and a run of windows to solve, and he’s got early ice.
I’m so full that I work until almost two and never once look at the dark screen on the corner of the table.