53. Chapter Fifty-Three
Penelope
I see it when I wake up at five, before the alarm. I’m only grabbing my phone to turn off the alarm and seeing his name on my screen in the dark, from three hours ago, a little green missed-call icon next to it, shocks me to my core. I stare at it, and my heart does a flip.
It’s been a long time of nothing, not one word –– and then he’s calling me on FaceTime that late at night.
I don’t understand. I don’t know what it means.
I run the possibilities, thinking maybe he was drunk, he was hurt, something happened, someone got news.
The worry comes up fast, and I want to call him back.
I don’t.
I put the phone down on the nightstand, and I get up because I have a lot to do today.
I’m leaving in a few hours to drive to Chicago for the holidays.
It was a last-minute plan because my mom asked, and I immediately caved because I needed to get away.
The second I found out that the girls are all going on a ski trip with the Hawthorne house, I sat on the couch and pretended to care.
The girls kept insisting that I tag along, and I kept declining without telling them why.
So I’m going to Chicago instead. To the city I despise, to the mother who disapproves of my every move, to the audience she’ll have because I’m in town, and to my father’s back where he’ll pretend that none of it is happening.
But I’d rather be miserable there than watch everyone I love be happy in pairs for Christmas.
I get to the bathroom and wash my face. I do my hair with the curling iron.
I lay the travel clothes out on the bed, and then I pack everything I need for the two weeks.
I think I might cut it down to ten days.
I neatly fold everything, zip my suitcase, and I’m going to do Pilates in the living room before I eat, and then I’ll go.
I set my suitcase at my door and grab my mat and my little pink weights.
I open the door and Melly’s standing in the hallway.
She’s fully dressed. It’s six in the morning, so I’m utterly confused.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
“For what?” I ask, confused.
And then I hear movement in the apartment.
I walk towards the end of the hall, and there are people everywhere.
It’s a full house. Gianna, Lucy, Mara, Aspen, and behind them, impossibly, Benson, Rowan, Stanley, and Blue.
All of them up, all of them dressed, all of them in my apartment at six o’clock in the morning, and they are all wearing the same shirt.
The shirt has Percy’s face on it.
His actual face, his hockey headshot, blown up, and under it in big letters it says something I have to read twice — ASK ME ABOUT MY FEELINGS — and Stanley is standing on my coffee table.
“What,” I say. “What are you––” I look back at Melly and see that she’s wearing the same shirt. “Melly, what are you wearing––”
“I tried to warn you.” Melly’s already grinning. “I said sorry.”
“Good morning, Penelope!” Stanley shouts from my coffee table.
Gianna’s shoving something into my hand.
I stare at everyone, and then I glance down at what I’m holding.
It’s a wine glass, at six a.m., that is bedazzled with my initials in pink rhinestones down the side.
Looking at it makes me notice the red rug that I’m stepping on, and it leads to the front door.
I look around at my apartment. There’s a poster. A banner.
What gets me is that everyone looks so happy to see me.
“We have a presentation,” Stanley announces.
“You have a—”
“Sit her down. Somebody sit her down.”
Mara steers me into a kitchen chair someone has moved into the living room and turned to face the room like a throne, and I sit, because I think my knees are going to give out.
Someone starts singing, and I don’t know who because suddenly all four of the hockey players are snapping their fingers and singing a song of their own lyrics.
“Forgive him. Forgive us. The rules of the house on Hawthorne have been broken. Yeah, we know it. It’s been years. But don’t you worry, little P. We are moving on.”
The girls stand in front of their man. Rowan is the only one without a girlfriend, but he doesn’t care. He third wheels with Benson and Lucy, throwing an arm over each of their shoulders.
And then Stanley holds up a hand, the singing stops, and he pulls a folded piece of paper out of his shirt.
“Things Percy Would Never Say,” he reads. “A dramatic reading. Performed by his brothers who love him.”
Oh no.
“Rowan.”
Rowan steps forward, puts a hand over his heart, and says, in a soft voice dripping with feeling, “Penelope. When I look at you, I see the architecture of my future.”
The room loses it. I put my hand over my mouth.
“Benson.”
“Your eyes,” Benson says, gravely, “are like two perfectly poured glasses of the mango-strawberry beverage I have devoted my life to.”
“He would rather die,” Gianna wheezes. “He would rather actually die—”
“Blue.”
Blue looks at the paper. Blue looks at me.
Blue says, completely flat, “I am a river of emotion,” and it destroys the entire room.
Stanley has to sit down on the coffee table, Mara’s crying with laughter, and I am laughing too.
I’m laughing so hard it hurts, because the whole joke, the entire joke, is that Percy would sooner walk into the sea than say one word of any of this, and everyone in this room knows it, and they’re saying it all for him because he can’t.
And somewhere under the laughing, my chest fills with too much emotion.
Because this is it. This is the thing he was avoiding.
My living room is full of people he loves, and I love, up at six in the morning, being ridiculous on our behalf, and I have never once in my life had friends who cared this much about my happiness, especially not ones I’ve been keeping my secrets from.
I’m about to lose my entire composure. I feel it going. I press my lips together. It doesn’t hold, I don’t cry, but I’m close, helplessly, overwhelmingly close, and Gianna sees my face and her own face goes soft.
“Okay,” Stanley says, hopping down off the table. “Okay okay okay. For the main event.” He crosses to the door with a flourish, hand on the knob. “May I present, the man himself, the goalie, the legend, the reason we’re all awake at this ungodly—”
He opens the door.
There’s no one there.
Everyone holds their breath.
“Percy?”
Stanley leans out into the hall. Looks left. Looks right.
“He was right—” Stanley pulls his head back in. “Okay. Nobody panic. I promise this was his idea, this was ninety percent his idea, he’s just — he gets shy ––”
Everyone’s moving to the window. Mara gets there first and looks down.
“He’s on the bench,” she says as everyone looks down at him.
I get up.
“He’s just — he’s sitting on the bench downstairs,” Mara says as she turns and looks at me, and everyone’s looking at me now.
Stanley says, “I’ll go get him––”
“No.” Gianna catches his arm. “No. Let her go.”
And the whole room turns to look at me. I’m standing in my activewear on a red carpet with a bedazzled wine glass in my hand, and I understand that Percy let them do this for him, and then he called me on FaceTime a few hours ago because he was probably terrified and wanted to warn me.
That’s why he’s not on the other side of the door right now.
I don’t remember the walk out. But the second I step onto the sidewalk, the cold air makes me remember exactly where I am.
I shiver as I walk over to him, crossing my arms because I forgot my coat. I didn’t think about the weather when I saw him sitting on the bench. Now I’m shaking harder than I ever have. How is he out here without quivering?
He’s hunched forward with his elbows on his knees and his breath going up white in front of him. I can tell he’s been out here a while because his ears are red, his hands are red, and he’s got frost in his hair. When he hears me, he looks up.
And his blue eyes cut straight through me.
I feared this would happen if I ever saw him again –– that I’d forget why I even broke it off in the first place.
I have a soft spot for this man, and seeing him like this, like he’s in turmoil, is beyond me.
He looks like he’s been crying. And I realize right here, right now that I would do anything for him.
We just stare at each other. And it feels like no time has passed at all, but I can tell he doesn’t feel the same. He’s frozen half to death, looking at me like he can’t believe I exist.
“You’re freezing,” he says, looking down at my arms.
I had actually forgotten I was even cold.
“Percy—”
“Go back inside, Penelope. It’s freezing.”
I stay standing there, watching him.
He’s already standing, shrugging out of his own jacket, and before I can stop him, he’s put it around my shoulders, his hands quick and careful at the collar, and then he steps back, and now he’s in a sweater. I pull it around me, wrapping myself in the heat his body left in the jacket.
“You called,” I say. My voice isn’t steady.
“Yeah.” He sits back down.
I sit next to him, and the jacket takes most of the cold. “What’s that?” I ask. “In your hand.”
He looks down at it like he forgot he was holding it. Then, he hands it to me without saying anything.
It’s a card. Homemade, folded cardstock, and on the front, somebody’s drawn the whiteboard — the actual Hawthorne whiteboard, the rules, in pencil — with a big red line struck through all of the rules.
I flip it open, and the inside is filled with signatures.
All of them. Rule’s repealed. — Benson. And under it, We took a vote.
It was unanimous. Be with her. — Rowan. And Stanley’s, enormous, taking up half the space: I enforced the rules and I hereby un-enforce them, by the power vested in me by nobody.
GO GET HER. And Blue’s, at the bottom: She waited years.
Don’t make her wait more. And the girls have signed it too, all of them, little notes crowded into the margins.
I understand what I’m holding and the significance of it.