50. Chapter Fifty #2
The others are piling it on, all of them talking over each other about girls, about what’s wrong with me — and Blue is dead silent, and when I look at him he’s already looking at me. He was already looking. He doesn’t move his face.
He knows.
The noise is coming from every direction, and I can’t sort it into words anymore; it’s just volume. My hands have closed into fists on the table.
“Percy. Come on, man.” Benson’s gone quiet now. “Say something.”
“Yeah.” Rowan says. “We’re not gonna judge you. Just tell us what’s going on.”
And then Stanley says one word, and it’s the one word I’m not braced for, and it’s the one that takes the whole wall down.
“Brothers.”
My jaw locks. Something behind my sternum tears loose.
And it comes out of me in French.
“Aucun de vous pourrait comprendre ce que je ressens, parce que vous avez tous quelqu’un qui vous aime.
Quand je suis arrivé dans cette maison, j’ai respecté les règles, moi, contrairement à vous autres, bande de caves.
C’est la première fois de ma vie que j’ai un vrai chez-moi, pis je respecte chacun d’entre vous.
Je mettrais jamais en péril ce que j’ai ici. Pour rien au monde.”
It’s the only way it’ll come. It’s always been the only way — my father’s language and nothing else off him, the one I think in when I’m too far down to translate, the one that surfaces when the English won’t.
I couldn’t give Penelope words in English, and I can’t give the guys mine, and here I am doing the exact thing that lost her, in front of the four people I’m most terrified of losing next.
I look around the table at all of them.
“Mes frères.”
“Whoa — whoa, okay—”
“Percy.” Rowan’s got both hands up, palms out. “Hey. Hey. English, buddy. Come back to us. English.”
“Is he okay? Guys, is this — what is this—”
“?a fait des années que je vous la cache parce que j’étais trop lache pour vous dire la vérité, pis maintenant je l’ai perdue. Elle m’a quitté parce que j’ai pas été capable de le faire. Aucun de vous comprend le fran?ais, pis j’arrive quand même pas à le dire, calisse.”
“Holy shit.” Stanley sits back in his chair, his face soft and stunned. “Keep it coming. Keep going, man.”
“Je l’ai perdue!” It rips out of me, too loud. “Je l’ai perdue et c’est ma faute, c’est entièrement ma faute, j’ai tout gaché, j’ai––” My eyes drop to the table. I can’t hold them up anymore. “Penelope m’a quitté pour de bon.”
The kitchen goes dead silent.
And my heart drops.
I have lived in this house for years, and I have never once, not for a single second, heard it this quiet with all five of us in a room. There’s always noise here. There’s always somebody talking. Or breathing. And now there’s nothing at all — four faces turned to me in shock.
Stanley’s mouth is actually hanging open.
“Penelope?” Benson says, carefully, like he’s trying to understand.
“Penelope Ventura?” Stanley’s voice comes out strange and small, nothing like his usual. “The — rich girl? Melly’s roommate? Gianna’s friend Penelope?”
Shit.
After years of keeping her hidden, I accidentally say her name out loud in the language that was supposed to keep me safe. I wanted to keep her hidden from them, only mine, and I didn’t.
I stare past all of them at nothing, because I just fucked up.
And I feel myself come loose from the room, from my own body, drifting up and back somewhere none of this can reach.
My face is wet again. I think I’m crying.
I think they’re talking. It comes to me from a long way off, muffled, like I’m hearing the whole kitchen from miles away.
I ruined it. She’s gone. She’s not coming back. She’s done, and she was right to be done.
I hid her for years because I was terrified of losing this — this table, these idiots, the first real home I ever had. And I lost her doing it. And now the hiding’s over too, blown wide open across the kitchen, and I’ve got nothing.
This house runs on its jokes. Every conversation is a chirp. There is not one sincere moment in a single day that Stanley can’t find a way to ruin, not one soft thing that survives contact with this kitchen longer than a second.
And the moment they see me like this, all of it stops.
Just — stops. Like a switch thrown. Nobody laughs.
Nobody says I knew it. Nobody says the whiteboard.
Not one of them reaches for the joke that’s sitting right there in the middle of the table, the easiest joke in the world, the one this whole house was built to make.
They just let it be as big as it actually is.
“I’ll get you a glass of water,” Rowan says, and gets up.
Benson reaches over and puts his hand on my shoulder and grips it hard. “Hey. Hey, man. It’s gonna be okay.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Stanley says, and for once, his voice is pitched for one person instead of a stadium. “We’ll figure something out, Pers.”
Blue doesn’t say a word. Blue just turns his chair to face mine and lays his hand flat between my shoulder blades and leaves it there. It’s Blue’s silence, the one man who somehow already knew about her, who didn’t mention it, that I feel the most.
I can’t stop the tears from coming out, and I decide not to try.
I don’t hide my face. I sit there at the table and let it happen in front of all of them, and I let them do whatever it is they think they’re accomplishing — the hand on my shoulder, the hand on my back, the glass of water sweating on the table in front of me.
I’m too far gone for any of it to reach me, and they seem to know that, because they don’t push.
They just wait. Four grown men in a kitchen at night, sitting in it with me, giving me all the time in the world.
Stanley breaks as soon as my tears dry.
“Pers.” His voice comes out gentle in a way I’ve maybe never heard from him. I glance up. He’s getting to his feet. “The rules are bullshit.”
He crosses the kitchen, pulls the whiteboard down off the wall, and cracks it clean over his knee.
“Well, okay.” Rowan huffs. “Easy for you to say, man. You just got your girl.”
Stanley chucks the two halves onto the floor, ignoring him. “There. They’re gone. That make you feel better?”
“It’s not magically better, Stan. Jesus.” Benson shakes his head. “That’s not how this works.”
But Stanley keeps his eyes on me, and he leans over the table, so I’ve got no choice but to look at him, and when he talks again, it’s dead serious — which, on Stanley’s face, is the most alarming thing I’ve ever seen.
“They’re bullshit, man. Listen to me. We moved into this house, and we thought we were keeping something going, some big sacred code, and it was never that.
It was never real. Benson broke it the second he laid eyes on Lucy.
Blue doesn’t acknowledge rules exist as a concept.
I went and fell for Coach Linwood’s daughter I was fake-dating, so.
” He spreads his hands, helpless with it.
“It was a joke, Pers. It was always a joke. It’s a whiteboard.
The rules are gone now. You’re a free man. ”
The dread sits in my throat like a swallowed stone, because I didn’t even have to say it and somehow he knew those rules have been haunting me ever since I moved in here. I’d hate to give it to Stanley Ermington, but he’s right, but knowing it doesn’t fix anything.
“Percy.” Benson leans in, elbows on the table, and his voice is the careful one. “I need you to be straight with us now. Are you in this spot because of the house rules? Or is it not really about the rules at all?”
I don’t say anything.
“Talk to us, man,” Rowan says.
And maybe it’s the whiteboard in two pieces on the floor, or maybe I’m just finally too tired to hold any of it up anymore. Whatever it is — this time, when I open my mouth, it comes out in English.
“The rules screwed me.” My voice sounds wrecked, unfamiliar in my own ears. “I’ve been with her since freshman year. In secret. All of it, this whole time. I’ve been sneaking her in the whole time.”
Stanley laughs — one startled bark of it — and Benson’s hand shoots out and smacks him in the chest.
“Sorry. Sorry.” Stanley clears his throat. “It’s not funny, I’m not laughing at — it’s just, holy shit, Pers. You’ve had her that long? Since freshman year? And you never said one word to any of us?”
“Do you love her?” Benson asks.
I nod. It’s all I can manage. There’s no room in my throat for anything more.
“Then be with her,” Stanley says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the whole world. Because to him it is. Because it always was, for all of them. “That’s it. That’s the entire thing, man. Call her right now.”
“No,” I get out.
“What happened?” Rowan asks.
I stare at the water glass and think about what happened, and the truth is nothing happened, nothing you could point to, no big fight, no crazy differences. We were perfect together.
“She wanted more,” I say.
“So give her more,” Stanley says.
I shake my head. “I don’t know how to, man.”
It comes out smaller than I mean it to, and it lands wrong on the table, and I watch it confuse them — because to four guys who fall in love and just do it, out loud, in daylight, it isn’t a real sentence.
“What do you mean, you don’t know how?” Rowan says, after a moment.
“Yeah.” Stanley’s frowning now, actually frowning. “What’s the real deal here, Pers?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “You guys are serious. You actually want to talk about all this.”
They nod. All four of them. Not one of them reaches for a joke.
So I take a sip of the water Rowan set down, because my mouth’s gone to dust, and I decide — for the first time in my whole life, at this table, with these four idiots watching me like I’m something worth waiting on — to just tell them.
All of it. The stuff I’ve never said out loud to a living soul. Not Penelope. Not Josh. Nobody.