Chapter 127 Earned, Not Given

Chapter 127 Earned, Not Given
Penny POV

I slam my binder shut so hard the whole decathlon table jumps, and everyone around it goes quiet, staring at me.

"Sorry," I mutter, cheeks burning. "I just, I can't focus. Not today."

Jake's dad's revelation from yesterday is still spinning through my head, a phone number belonging to someone at the police department, called by his mom the night before she died. Add that to Detective Reyes's strange midnight email, add the dark car outside my mom's apartment, add the fact that regionals are in three days and I haven't studied a single flashcard properly in over a week, and my whole body feels like it's vibrating with too many things at once.

"You okay?" Marcus, who somehow ended up on our decathlon team's history rotation because Coach thought it would look good for scholarship applications, leans over with actual concern on his face. "You've read that same sentence like four times."

"I'm thinking about quitting," I blurt out, the words leaving my mouth before I've even fully decided them. "The team. Regionals. All of it."

The whole table goes still.

"Penny." That's Sarah, our team captain, blinking at me like I just spoke a different language. "You're literally our strongest competitor. What are you talking about?"

"I can't keep doing this," I say, voice cracking despite my best effort to stay steady. "There's so much happening right now. My whole family, Jake's whole family, it's all falling apart, and I feel like a horrible person sitting here worrying about vocabulary words for world history when actual investigators are digging into people I care about."

Sarah sets down her pencil slowly. "Penny, can I say something, and you don't have to like it?"

I nod, throat too tight to answer out loud.

"You've been working toward this since freshman year," she says gently. "Every single practice, every extra study session, every Saturday you gave up to memorize facts nobody else wanted to bother learning. You didn't get here because things were easy for you. You got here because you worked harder than literally anyone else on this team, even when things were hard back then too. Remember? The video scandal happened right in the middle of last season, and you still showed up to practice the very next day."

Something in her words lands hard, familiar, echoing back at me the same lesson I've been trying to teach myself all week without fully believing it.

"I just don't know if I have anything left," I admit. "I'm running on fumes, Sarah. What if I get up there and blank completely? What if I let everyone down?"

"Then you let us down having actually tried," Marcus says simply. "That's a whole lot better than not showing up at all and wondering forever what would've happened."

I don't decide anything right away. I go home instead, exhausted, and find my mom at the kitchen table again, same spot, same worn-out posture she's had all week since her hours got cut.

"I'm thinking about quitting decathlon," I tell her, dropping into the chair across from her.

She looks up slowly, studying my face for a long moment before she answers. "Why?"

"Everything's on fire, Mom. My whole life feels like it's tangled up in Jake's family's mess right now, and it feels wrong to sit around memorizing history facts while all of that's happening."

My mom is quiet for a moment, then reaches across the table and takes my hand, the same way she did the night she told me the truth about my birth certificate.

"Penny, listen to me carefully." Her voice is firm, steady, the voice she uses when she needs me to actually hear her instead of just nodding along. "You did not earn your spot on that team through luck. You earned it through years of sacrifice, years of choosing to work hard even when nobody was watching, years of believing in yourself before anyone else was consistently believing in you. Don't let this week, as terrifying and unfair as it's been, take that away from you. Don't let somebody else's chaos convince you that you don't deserve the thing you built with your own two hands."

Tears prick at my eyes. "What if I go up there and I can't perform? What if all of this stress ruins the one thing that's actually mine?"

"Then you'll know you tried," she says softly, echoing exactly what Marcus told me hours earlier, like the whole universe is trying to hand me the same lesson from every direction. "But baby, I think you're stronger than you're giving yourself credit for right now. You've survived worse than a stressful week. You survived that locker room. You survived watching your worst moment go viral. This is hard, but it's not the hardest thing you've ever had to walk through, and you walked through that one standing tall."

Something in her words finally breaks through the exhaustion, settling into my chest like a small, steady flame. I think about every practice I never skipped, every flashcard I made myself at midnight even when I was too tired to keep my eyes open, every single reason I actually earned this spot long before Jake, before his family's chaos, before any of this.

"Okay," I say quietly. "I'm not quitting."

My mom smiles, relief washing over her tired face. "That's my girl."

I spend the next two nights studying harder than I have all season, Jake dropping by to quiz me on world capitals between his own overwhelming stretch of practices and lawyer meetings, both of us finding small pockets of normal in the middle of everything else still crashing down around us.

The morning of regionals arrives fast, and I'm lacing up my shoes, nerves buzzing under my skin, when my phone buzzes with a text from Jake.

We're all coming. Me, Lily, Maren, your mom, even my dad's lawyer said he'd try to swing by between meetings. You've got this, Penny. You earned every single second of today.

Something warm floods my chest reading it, and for the first time in what feels like forever, I actually believe him.

I'm halfway out the door, bag over my shoulder, when my phone buzzes again, this time with an email notification that stops me cold in the doorway.

It's from Detective Reyes, sent at seven in the morning, subject line short and sharp enough to knock the breath straight out of my lungs.

We found the second victim. It's not who anyone expected.

My hand freezes on the doorknob, my whole body caught between the biggest day of my academic life and a message that promises to blow apart everything we thought we understood about Jake's mother's death, and for one terrible second I don't know which direction to run first.