Chapter 18 What Purple Feels Like
PENNY POV
She feels it before she understands what it is.
Cold. Wet. Spreading across her shoulders and down her back all at once, soaking through her hoodie in one second flat. She stops walking. She stands in the middle of the hallway and feels it happening, the cold seeping through to her shirt, dripping down toward her waistband, the smell hitting her, something fruity, something artificial, something purple.
Smoothie.
She doesn't fall. She doesn't drop her bag. She just stops and stands there while the hallway keeps moving around her.
She hears the laughter before she finishes processing what happened. Not one person. A group. Somewhere behind her and to the right, already walking away, already pretending it was an accident that required an audience.
She does not turn around.
She knows if she turns around, she will see exactly what she expects to see, and she will have to look at it and there are only so many times you can look at something like that before it starts taking pieces of you that you don't get back.
She does not turn around.
She walks to the bathroom.
The bathroom is empty.
Penny takes off her hoodie at the sink. The back of it is soaked in dark purple. She runs cold water over it, works it through the fabric with her hands, wrings it out. She does this three times. The color lightens but doesn't leave. She wrings it a final time and ties it around her waist.
She looks at herself in the mirror.
Plain t-shirt. Dark purple hoodie tied at her hips. Smoothie still drying on the back of her neck. She turns the water back on, rinses the back of her neck, and dries it with a paper towel.
She looks at her face in the mirror.
She looks at it for a long time.
She is not going to cry in a school bathroom on a Wednesday. She has a rule about this. She made the rule in ninth grade after the first really bad incident, and she has kept it for three years. The bathroom is not a place you leave evidence of yourself. The bathroom is where you fix what they broke and walk back out.
She walks back out.
She sits in fourth period with wet hair on the back of her neck and takes eight pages of notes.
Her teacher says something about the Civil War, and Penny writes it down. He says something about economic factors, and she writes that down too. Her pen moves across the page steadily and clean, and her face is completely neutral, and her shirt is damp under the tied hoodie, and she does not shift in her seat or touch her neck or do anything that would give the three people watching her the satisfaction of knowing it worked.
She already knows who it was.
Not Derek this time. Derek is loud and obvious, and this was calculated. This was someone who knew her route to fourth period. Someone who knew her schedule.
Brianna's group chat. The schedule. The text from the anonymous number two weeks ago.
She writes it down in the margin of her notes, small enough that nobody else can read it: Wednesday. 3rd to 4th period hallway. Purple smoothie. Coordinated.
She underlines coordinated.
She adds it to the folder in her head.
After school, she walks home the long way.
Not because she is avoiding anything. She just needs the extra eight minutes. She needs the cold air and the movement and the specific kind of quiet that comes from being outside and moving and not being watched.
She walks.
She thinks about Friday.
They have four days. Three now, after today. She and Jake sat at the kitchen table on Monday night until eleven, going through everything in her folder, cross-referencing dates, building a timeline of every incident since September. Jake kept his face very controlled the whole time, which she has learned means he is very angry and choosing carefully what to do with it. At one point, he stopped and put his hand flat on the table and breathed for a second, and she let him.
She didn't say it's fine. She has stopped saying that.
She walks.
She thinks about the party on Friday. About whatever Brianna is planning. About the timeline, she now knows. She thinks about Sofia in fourth period, who slid her another note today that said: I heard two of them talking. They have something from the locker room. Something worse than the first video.
Penny stops walking.
She stands on the sidewalk for three seconds.
Then she starts walking again.
She already knew there might be more. She had already prepared for more. She has been preparing for more since the first time she understood that Brianna Cole does not do things halfway.
She adds it to the folder.
She keeps walking.
She gets home at three fifty-five.
She takes her shoes off at the door. She goes to her room. She sits on the edge of her bed.
The hoodie is still damp. She unknots it from her waist and holds it in her hands. Purple stain blooming across the back of it, the color of something that was supposed to humiliate her in a hallway in front of a crowd.
She folds it.
She sets it on the floor.
She sits on the edge of the bed and puts her hands on her knees, and is quiet.
Not sad exactly. Not angry exactly. Something older and more tired than either of those things. The feeling of doing this for three years and knowing you still have months left, and the exit is not as close as you need it to be.
She sits there.
She gives herself ten minutes. This is also a rule. Ten minutes to feel it, and then you get up, and you do the next thing. The next thing is always something. There is always a next thing.
She is at seven minutes when she hears the knock.
Small knock. Low on the door, which means Lily reached up to the approximate correct height and knocked with the flat of her hand the way she does.
"Penny?"
Penny closes her eyes for one second.
"Yeah," she says.
"Can we make slime today?"
She takes one breath. Deep. All the way down.
"Yeah," she says. "Go get the glue."
She hears Lily's feet running down the hall. Running, because Lily does not walk to anything she is excited about, and Lily is excited about everything.
Penny stands up.
She changes her shirt. She runs a brush through her hair. She goes to the kitchen.
Lily is already on her stool with the glue bottle and an expression of total focus. She has also gotten out the glitter without being asked, which is either initiative or chaos, time will tell.
"What color?" Penny says.
Lily thinks very seriously. "Purple."
Penny looks at her.
Lily has no idea. She just likes purple. She picked it the same way she picks everything because it is her current favorite, and the world should reorganize itself accordingly.
Penny gets the purple food coloring out of the cabinet.
She sits across from Lily.
They make slime.
Jake gets home at five-thirty and finds the kitchen covered in purple slime and Lily wearing most of it and Penny cutting the stuck parts out of Lily's hair with small scissors and a look of intense concentration.
He stops in the doorway.
He looks at the purple everywhere. He looks at Penny's face. He looks at the hoodie drying over the back of a chair, the stain visible from across the room.
His jaw goes tight.
He doesn't say anything yet. He reads the room. He reads her.
He goes to the cabinet. He gets two glasses. He fills them with water. He puts one next to Penny's elbow without a word.
She looks at it.
She looks at him.
He says, very quietly, so Lily doesn't hear: "I found out who did the smoothie."
Penny's scissors keep moving. "I know who did it."
"I'm going to."
"Jake." She looks up. "Four days."
He breathes. "Four days."
She goes back to Lily's hair.
He sits at the table and helps Lily understand why you don't put slime directly on your head.
And Penny works quietly and steadily and does not let her hands shake and thinks about Friday and thinks about everything she has built and thinks about the fact that she is almost ready.
Almost.
Her phone buzzes on the counter.
She picks it up.
Sofia.
One line: it's not just a video. She has something from your old school too. something about why you transferred.
Penny puts the phone down.
She picks up the scissors.
Her hands are completely steady.
Four days.