Chapter 1 The Note
Penny POV
I have a system.
Head down. Hoodie up. Walk fast. Eat lunch in the library where nobody goes unless they have to. Do not make eye contact. Do not raise your hand too much in class even when you know every answer. Do not exist loudly.
I have followed these rules every single day for two years at Westbrook High and they have kept me mostly safe. Mostly invisible. Mostly okay.
Today my system fails before the first period even starts.
I feel it happens but I do not understand what is happening. A small tug on the back of my hoodie near my shoulder. I think someone bumped into me. I turn around but the hallway is packed and everyone is moving and nobody is looking at me, which is normal. I keep walking.
Head down. Hoodie up. Move fast.
I pass the lockers. I pass the trophy case with Jake Mercer's photo in the center, his arm raised, football mid-air, face split into the kind of smile that makes girls forget how to think. I do not look at it. I have trained myself not to look at it.
I pass the cafeteria doors.
That is where it starts.
Laughter. Not the normal kind. The kind that spreads. One person, then three, then ten, then the whole hallway catching it like a cold. I look up confused and find everyone looking at me no, looking behind me and then someone grabs my arm and pulls me to the side and it is Mrs. Patterson, the English teacher, and her face is doing something careful and painful.
"Sweetheart," she says. "Hold still."
She peels something off my back.
She tries to fold it before I can see it. She is not fast enough.
WIDE LOAD. Black marker. Big block letters. Someone stuck it to me sometime between the parking lot and here and I walked the entire length of the main hallway with it on my back like a sign. Past lockers. Past the trophy case. Past two hundred people who saw it and laughed instead of telling me.
The cafeteria doors are open. Every single person in there is looking at me.
I smile. I do not know why I smile. It is the worst possible response and my brain just does it automatically, like a defense my body built without asking me. A big, stupid, everything-is-fine smile.
Mrs. Patterson says something about the office. I say I am okay. I walk to the girls' bathroom at the end of the hall and I go into the last stall and I stand there with my back against the cold door and I breathe.
I do not cry. I stopped crying at school in eighth grade. Crying is a response and responses give people power. I breathe instead, slow and quiet, until my hands stop shaking.
Then I go to the sink. I look at myself in the mirror.
Brown skin. Natural hair stuffed under a gray hoodie. Round face. Round everything. Seventeen years old and built like a question, someone at this school has been making fun of me since the day I walked in on a scholarship with secondhand sneakers.
One more year, I tell my reflection. Just survive one more year.
I fold the note into the smallest square it will go and I drop it in the trash and I walk back out into the hallway.
That is when I see him.
Jake Mercer is at the water fountain ten feet away. His three best friends stand around him like planets around a sun, loud and easy and golden. He is taller than I remember from last year. How is that possible? He is in his practice shirt already, number seven, and he is laughing at something Marcus Webb said and the laugh is the most unfair thing I have ever heard in my life.
He looks up.
I do not know why he looks up at that exact second. But he does. His eyes find mine across the hallway and they are gray and I have spent an embarrassing amount of time over the past two years telling myself they are not that remarkable.
One second. We look at each other for exactly one second.
Then his eyes move away. Back to Marcus. Back to the conversation. Like I am a wall he glanced at. Like I am furniture.
He keeps walking.
I keep walking.
My next three classes are a blur of notes I take automatically, my hand moving while my brain stays stuck in that hallway. One second. He looked at me for one second and looked away and I did not care. I do not care. I have bigger problems than Jake Mercer's gray eyes and the fact that not one of his three best friends said anything when they definitely saw that note.
By lunch I have heard three different versions of the story. In one version I started crying. In another I ripped the note off myself and yelled something. In the real version I just smiled like an idiot and nobody cares about the real version.
I eat my sandwich in the library.
I do homework until the bell rings.
I survive the rest of the day the way I always survive quietly, carefully, one period at a time.
Mom is already gone for her second shift when I get home. She left a plate covered in foil on the stove and a note that says heat it up, mija, love you. I heat it up. I eat alone at our small kitchen table. I do my homework. I watched one episode of a show I have already seen. I am in bed by nine-thirty because there is nothing else to do and tomorrow I have to do all of it again.
My phone rings at nine forty-seven.
Unknown number. I almost do not answer. But Mom uses different phones sometimes when her main one dies and so I pick up.
"Penny? This is Ms. Delgado. Your school counselor."
I sit up. "Is everything okay?"
"Everything is fine." She pauses in the way adults pause when they are about to say something they practiced. "I am calling because a family situation has come up involving one of our students and I thought of you immediately. It is a babysitting position. Live-in, Monday through Friday. The pay is fifty dollars a week plus all meals included."
I look around my bedroom. The peeling paint near the window. The secondhand lamp. The electric bill on my desk that I found last week and put face-down because the number on it made me feel sick.
"Whose family?" I ask.
Ms. Delgado pauses again.
"The Mercer family," she says. "You would be caring for Jake Mercer's younger sister Lily. She is six years old. Jake's father travels for work and their usual sitter left without notice and "
I stop hearing the rest of the sentence.
Jake Mercer. The boy from the water fountain. The boy who looked at me for one second and looked away. I would be living in his house. Sleeping down the hall from him. Taking care of his little sister five days a week.
My eyes go back to the electric bill.
Fifty dollars a week. Every week.
"Penny?" Ms. Delgado says. "You do not have to decide right now. Take the night and "
"I will do it," I say.
The line is quiet for a second.
"Are you sure?"
I look at the bill. I look at my reflection in the dark window across the room round face, gray hoodie, girl who walked a whole hallway with a sign on her back today.
"I am sure," I say.
I hung up.
I lie back down in the dark and stare at the ceiling and think about gray eyes and one second and the way he kept walking.
I have made a terrible, terrible mistake.