51. Chapter Fifty-One
Penelope
I turn in the senior project draft eleven days early.
My professor looks at the boards for a long time and then asks me twice if I’m sure I want to submit now, because there’s no rule against revising up to the deadline, and I tell him I’m sure.
The drawings are the best work I’ve ever done.
The north elevation resolves in a way I’ve been chasing for two years.
The section is clean enough to publish. He asks if I’ve thought about putting the elevation in the department show.
He says it’s the best student drawing he’s seen in six years, and Adler doesn’t say things like that.
“Thank you.”
I wait to feel the pride in my chest. It’s the sentence I’ve wanted from a professor since I was seventeen, since I sat at my mother’s dining table and told her I wasn’t going to do what she wanted. But nothing comes.
I thank him again and I go to work.
At the firm, I clear the Halvorsen backlog in a week and start on a set nobody assigned me. Renata comes by my desk on a Thursday, looks at the sheets, and says, “You’re ahead.”
“Yes.” I grin. “I hope that’s okay.”
“Slow down or I’ll have nothing to give you in January.”
“I’ll find something.”
She stands there a second longer than she needs to, and then she goes.
I’m up at five. I run and do Pilates. I make coffee and drink all of it.
I eat at seven and one and seven right on the dot.
I’m sleeping about five hours a night, and it’s fine — I get up and work instead.
There’s a great deal of work. Twice this week I’ve come back into myself at the drafting table and not known how long I’ve been sitting there.
Once with a line half-drawn under my hand.
I don’t know what happened in the gap. I put the pencil down and go make coffee, and when I come back it doesn’t happen again.
My hair looks better than it has in a year. I’ve been doing it properly every morning. It takes eleven minutes, and the routine is simple. My makeup routine is simple, too.
My mother calls on a Sunday.
“You sound well,” she says, which is the most praise I’ve gotten from her in a while.
“I am well. Busy. The project’s in early.”
“Early.” A pause of genuine interest. “That’s very good, Penelope. And the firm?”
“Renata’s giving me client work now.”
“Well.” I can hear her recalibrating. “I’ll admit the little office has done more for you than I expected.”
“It has.”
We talk for six minutes. She tells me about the Whitmores’ holiday party, about the caterer, about my father’s back. I say the right things in the right places and ask the two questions that keep her going, and she doesn’t ask me one thing about my life that isn’t a credential.
“You’ll come for Christmas,” she says. Not quite a question.
“I’ll let you know.”
“Penelope.”
“I’ll let you know, Mom.”
I sit with the phone in my hand after the call at my drafting table with the lamp on and the apartment quiet around me. I go back to the sheet I was working on.
The girls planned a study night twice this week, and the moment I walk into Gianna and Lucy’s apartment, the girls go quiet.
Mara picks up a new subject with a little too much energy. Gianna’s smile is running about fifteen percent hot. She hugs me twice, once at the door and once for no reason twenty minutes later.
“How was your week?” she asks.
“Busy. I turned in the project.”
“That’s amazing! That’s — you’re amazing.” She squeezes my arm. “You look amazing, too.”
“Thank you.”
Lucy hasn’t said much. Lucy doesn’t say much generally, but this is a different quiet — she keeps looking at me and then looking at her drink.
Mara asks what I’m doing for Christmas break, then asks how long the break is, then asks what day exactly we finish, which is three questions about a calendar from a woman who has never once known what day it is.
“Why?” I ask.
“No reason. Planning.”
“Planning what?”
“Things.” Mara waves a hand. “December things. Christmas things.”
I let it go, because the alternative is pressing, and pressing means acknowledging that something’s happening, and I know exactly what’s happening.
They know.
I don’t know how much, but they know enough. Somebody’s said something. Blue, maybe. Or it’s just visible on me in a way I’ve failed to control. And now they’re being gentle with me, softening their voices, avoiding whole categories of subject, hugging me at doors. Watching me like I’ll break.
I’d rather they didn’t.
There is nothing on this earth I want less than to be worried about. Every soft look is a little humiliation I have to sit still for.
So I get funnier. I ask Gianna about her mother and let her talk for ten minutes. I make Mara laugh twice. I refill everyone’s glass before they ask. I am the best possible version of myself for two hours and forty minutes, and when I leave, Gianna hugs me a third time and says, “Love you. Really.”
“Love you too.”
I drive home from a room full of women who love me, and I have never been lonelier in my life.
Not even when I was hiding. And I can’t tell them.
Not because he’s still a secret — he isn’t, not really, not anymore.
But to explain what I lost, I’d have to explain all of it, two and a half years, from the beginning, and there’s no version of that story where I don’t come out of it as the fool.
When Melly and I reach home, we walk in, and she hesitates, making the tension worse.
“Can I ask you something?”
I put my keys in the bowl and walk to the kitchen. “Sure.”
“Do you—” She stops. She actually stops mid-sentence, mouth open, and I watch her hesitate again. “Do you want tea? I was going to make tea.”
“I’m okay. Thanks.”
I grab my container of pre-cut fruit from the fridge, and she fills the kettle for tea, moving around me awkwardly.
Later, through the wall, I hear her talking on the phone. It doesn’t sound like she’s talking to Blue. Those phone calls are usually on FaceTime, and I can hear his voice, but right now, it’s only her talking.
I brush my teeth and spit in the sink. Then I go to bed and lie there doing sums on the Larchmont set until the early morning hours.
The next morning, I’m in the grocery store at the produce section with a basket.
I have a handwritten list of groceries in my hand.
I’m looking for the pineapple, but I hadn’t anticipated the fruit it’d be next to.
I glance down at the mangoes, and for the first time since that night, tears prick my eyes.
I try to get them to stop, but they don’t. They leak onto my cheeks, so I book it to the flour aisle where nobody else is, and I pretend I’m shopping for something on the top shelf, but I’m just using gravity to keep the tears in my eyes until whatever’s happening to me can stop.
For a minute, it doesn’t. I press the back of my hand to my mouth to hide my sobs.
Then I see someone step into the aisle, and I need to pull it together.
I grab a few boxes of Jell-O, and then I walk back to the fruit.
I get the pineapple and a mango, because I’m not about to let a fruit win over my emotions.
That night, I pick up my phone and open my text messages. Instead of reading what’s being said in the group chat with the girls, I look at Percy’s name and click on it.
I start scrolling, reading every exchange we’ve had.
Many of the texts are that he’s outside, or he’s asking me to come over.
They’re all simple. None of it was ever complicated with him.
And not hearing from him also feels simple, even though I want to complicate it.
I told him that I’m not happy, and that it wasn’t what I wanted, and he’s respecting it. That’s why he didn’t chase after me.
I swipe out of his name and put the phone down and pull the Larchmont sheet toward me, because there’s an exam Thursday and a set due after and none of it does itself.
I sharpen the 2B down to a point and start on the stair detail.
The 2B.
I stop with my hand still on the paper.
I’ve been using them since Christmas. Every sheet I’ve turned in this year. The project I submitted eleven days early, the north elevation Adler couldn’t stop looking at, the client set Renata put my name on — all of it, every line, drawn with the pencils Percy bought me.
I’ve never once bought myself a full set. He knew that too.
I look at the pencil in my hand.
And then I throw it.
It goes across the room and hits the wall by the window and drops on the ground. The sound it makes is so small that I sit there staring at the place where it went with my heart going like I’ve done something enormous.
I don’t get up to pick it up.
I flex my hand because they always cramp. Then I breathe. I pick up the 4H and finish the stair detail, and it takes me forty minutes.