36. Chapter Thirty-Six
Penelope
I wake up alone, lying in my own bed at nine in the morning after four hours of not-quite-sleep.
I feel flayed. Every nerve I own is sitting on the outside of me, and the apartment is too bright and too quiet.
I lie there and take the measure of what I did last night, which is everything.
I reached first. I drove to a house I’m forbidden from and I said I like you out loud to a boy in the dark, I told him about my mother, about the drawings, about the parts of me I’ve never admitted to anyone, and then I drove home at two in the morning with none of it closed, because he didn’t cross the inch, and I didn’t either.
I don’t regret it. I meant every word. The problem is the exposure with nothing to show for it. I have spent my whole life making sure no one ever sees me at the depth I let him see me at last night, and now it’s done, he has all of it. And I have no idea what he’s going to do with it.
Under everything, from the second I open my eyes, if I’m honest, I’m just waiting. Waiting to find out whether I skinned myself alive for a boy who’s about to disappear behind his wall.
I get up. I make tea. I don’t look at my phone, because I don’t want to know.
I sit down at the table with my tea, and I put my hand over a blank paper but nothing comes.
This time, it’s not like summer. I’m not hollow or dead-handed.
This is the opposite. There’s too much, and it’s too close to the surface, and when I finally do put the pencil down, it isn’t a building.
It’s a room. Dark, small, a bed, the desk to left, the dresser to the right, and the closed bedroom door.
The bedroom I was in eight hours ago comes alive in my drawing without my deciding, and I stop when I realize what it is.
I’ve never drawn a room somebody was in.
All those houses, all those years, and not one person in any of them.
Percy’s back is taking up most of the page, but I drew it like a fish-eyed view of the room.
I look at it for a while. I learned things about him that terrify and anger me at the same time.
All of these emotions frighten me. I close the sketchbook and move on with my day.
My mom calls at eleven.
“I’m doing the Christmas menu,” she says, no hello. “Are you still being difficult about the twenty-third, or can I tell Linda you’ll be here for the Hendersons?”
Last night I told Percy that I’m not going home for Christmas, but I hadn’t told my mom that yet. I’m sitting on the bed with the package she just sent to me. It’s a beautiful coat that I put on and haven’t taken off since.
“I’m not coming home for Christmas, Mom.”
“Don’t be dramatic. Of course you’re coming home.”
“I’m not.”
“Penelope.” She uses her concerned voice.
It’s the worst one. “I know this year has been — you’ve been making some choices I don’t understand, and I’ve tried to be patient.
But Christmas is Christmas. Your father hasn’t seen you since August. He asks about you constantly, he just doesn’t say it, you know how he is. ”
“I’ll call Dad.”
“You’ll call him.” A small laugh. “You’ll call your father instead of coming home for the holidays because you’d rather stay in that apartment drawing pictures of buildings that will never get built for a firm nobody’s heard of over a hardware store—”
“That’s exactly why,” I say, and my voice is steadier than my hands. “Because I have a life here now. A real one. And every time I come home, I spend a week apologizing for it, and I’m not going to do that this year.”
“Apologizing.” She says the word like it’s foreign. “Is that what you think happens when you come home? You apologize?”
“Yes.”
The silence goes long. I stand at my window in my brand new coat with the phone against my ear, and I don’t fill it. It takes everything I have not to fill it, because filling her silences is my oldest reflex.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” she says finally, and the concern’s gone thin, and underneath it is cold. “Someone has, clearly. This is not the daughter I raised.”
“Maybe not.” My throat’s tight. “I’ll call you on Christmas.”
“Do what you want, Penelope. You always do.” The line goes dead against my ear.
I stand there for a while with the phone in my hand and my heart galloping.
I’m shaking a little, and I don’t feel triumphant.
I feel like someone who just pulled her own hand out of a door that’s been closing on it for twenty years.
It hurts. It hurts exactly as much as I knew it would. But I held it. I didn’t cave.
I put the phone down, make more tea, and my hands take a while to stop.
I go to the firm in the afternoon because I need to be somewhere that isn’t this apartment and isn’t my mother’s voice.
Renata’s got the Halvorsen elevations up and a problem with the setback on the north side.
I get into it, and for two hours I’m solving a real thing on a real building, my hand sure, the work clean, the world narrowed to a fenestration pattern and a zoning envelope.
I check my phone at the firm. There’s nothing, and I put it away like I wasn’t checking.
I check it in the car. Nothing.
I check it at home while I heat something up that I don’t eat, and I hate that I’m checking. I make myself stop because I know exactly what I’m doing, I know exactly who I’m waiting on, and I know better than anyone alive what a fool’s errand it is to wait on Percy Deveroux to text first.
He doesn’t text me. A year and a half, and he texted first maybe twice, and I think it nearly killed him. He rations every word. I know now that he will not come to me. If I want him, I’ll have to be the one standing in the open.
And I already did that. Last night. I stood all the way out in the open. I’m not doing it twice into silence — I don’t have another one of those in me, not this soon, not after cracking myself open and driving home to nothing.
So I put the phone face down on the counter, and I tell myself that whatever happens now happens.
At 9:40, the phone lights up.
I turn it over.
Percy: Can I see you tomorrow?
I sit down on the floor of my room, leaning against my bed.
And I read it four times. Because anyone else in the world sends that, and it’s nothing — a question, the smallest possible normal text.
But it’s not nothing. I know what it took for him to type that out.
And I won’t ever tell him how much I appreciate this and how much I needed to hear from him.
Me: Yes.
Percy: Ivory home?
And there’s the problem, sitting right there.
Ivory will be home. Ivory’s always home.
My apartment isn’t a dark house I can sneak into off a side street — it’s a lobby with a front desk half the time, an elevator, a hallway, a roommate on the other side of a thin wall who misses nothing and asks everything.
Me: I’ll handle Ivory. Just tell me when.
Percy: Tomorrow. Late.
Me: She has a thing Thursday. I can come at eleven.
Percy: Can I come there?
Me: Yeah
Percy: I’ll text you when I’m close.
I read it back. He’s coming here. To my building, my floor, my door — which means he has to get out of that house without being noticed by four hockey players.
Thursday is the longest day of my life, which is a stupid thing to feel about a Thursday. I sit through a two-hour crit. I keep my sketchbook closed because I know what’s in it. I keep my phone in my bag because I don’t want to be counting the hours.
Ivory leaves at seven, thank God, in a cloud of perfume and a dress I helped her zip, off to Drew’s thing, telling me not to wait up like I ever do. The second the door shuts, I feel the apartment change. It’s all mine, empty, and waiting.
And then I have two hours to fill and no idea how to fill them.
I clean the apartment that is already clean.
I move a stack of drawings off the table and then put them back because the table looks wrong without them.
I catch myself in the mirror doing something to my hair and I stop, because I don’t do this — I have never once in my life fussed for a boy — and here I am, redoing the same piece of hair three times because a hockey player who barely speaks is coming to see me.
I make myself sit down. I fold my hands. I breathe.
It doesn’t work. I’m up in ninety seconds, checking the window I can’t see anything useful from, checking the clock, running the plan again.
At 10:52 pm, my phone buzzes.
Percy: Here.
I stand up too fast. My heart’s going like it grown wheels, and I have to press a hand flat to my chest for one second like that’ll settle it, and it doesn’t.
I look in the mirror one more time, and then I take the elevator down with my heart thumping hard against my ribs. The doors open, and there he is — too big for the little service hallway, hood up, hands shoved in his pockets — and the second I see him, the frantic thing in me goes still.
“Hi,” I whisper, opening the door for him.
“Hey.”
I bring him up the back way, quiet in the elevator, the two of us a careful foot apart. He smells like clean soap. He keeps his eyes on the numbers. I can feel him next to me the way you feel heat off a wall.
I get him into the apartment and shut the door. He stands there a second and takes it in — not like it’s new, because it isn’t, he’s stood in this exact room before. Freshman year. He was quiet then too, careful with my space the way he’s careful with everything.
His eyes go to the table, to the drawings fanned across it, and stay there a second longer than they need to. I wonder if he’s remembering when he was last here.
I take him to my bedroom. He steps in behind me, and I shut the door. Now we’re in the safe zone, and it’s just us.
He sits on the edge of my bed like he’s not sure he’s allowed. I sit next to him, closer than I need to, and the whole night narrows down to the six inches between us.
Neither of us says anything for a second.
“You texted me first,” I say. “You never do that.”
He doesn’t say anything.
“Why now?”
He looks at his hands.
Then at me.
His eyes are a soft blue right now, and I drink them in. My heart is flickering in my chest. And whatever’s coming, I can see it costing him, the way everything costs him.