Chapter 2 Nobody
Penny POV
Friday comes faster than I want it to.
I pack my duffel bag Thursday night while Mom sits on the edge of my bed watching me fold things. She has that look on her face the one she gets when she wants to say something but is choosing her words very carefully because she knows I will shut down if she says the wrong ones.
"You do not have to do this," she says finally.
I put three pairs of socks into the bag. "I know."
"We will figure out the bill another way."
"Mom."
"I just want you to know you have a choice."
I stopped packing. I turn around and look at my mother, who has worked double shifts for three years without complaining once, whose hands are rough from her cleaning job and whose eyes have circles under them that never go away anymore. She is telling me I have a choice while wearing the same shoes she has worn for two years because new ones are not in the budget.
"I want to do it," I say. It is half true. "It is good money and it is only on weekdays. I will be home every weekend."
She looks at me for a long moment. Then she opens her arms and I sit next to her and let her hug me and I think: fifty dollars a week is two hundred dollars a month and that is the electric bill and part of the water bill and maybe maybe a small breathing room in the space between what we have and what we need.
I can survive anything for that.
Even Jake Mercer.
The Mercer house is on the north side of town where the streets are wider and the lawns are actual lawns and not patches of tired grass. I take the bus and then walk four blocks with my duffel bag and I stand in front of the house for longer than I should.
It is not a mansion. It is just a regular house. A nice one, the kind that has always been taken care of with a basketball hoop in the driveway and a pair of small muddy sneakers on the front step.
Those sneakers make me feel better somehow.
I ring the bell.
Footsteps. Heavy ones, then the door opens and Jake Mercer is standing in front of me in sweatpants and a plain white shirt and his hair is damp from a shower and he looks absolutely terrible which means he still looks like the kind of person who should be on a poster somewhere and I strongly dislike everything about this moment.
We stare at each other.
He looks as happy to see me as I feel to see him. Which is to say: not happy at all. His jaw tightens slightly. His eyes do that thing where they move over me quickly not mean, not anything I can name, just a fast reading of the situation and then he steps back to let me in.
Neither of us has said a word.
"IIIIS THAT MY NEW BABYSITTER?"
The voice comes from somewhere inside the house at a volume that does not seem physically possible from something so small. Then there is the sound of running feet and a tiny person comes flying around the corner of the hallway and she has paint on both hands and something purple on her left cheek and wild dark hair going in six directions and she hits my legs like a small warm missile.
She wraps both arms around my knees and looks up at me.
She has Jake's gray eyes. On her they look like the most delighted thing I have ever seen.
"Hi," I say.
"I am Lily," she announces. "I am six. I know all the dinosaurs. Do you know all the dinosaurs?"
"Some of them."
She gasps like I just said something amazing. "I can teach you the REST."
Something happens in my chest. I do not have a word for it. It is like a door opening in a room I forgot existed. I look down at this tiny paint-covered person and I feel myself just slightly, just a little start to breathe.
"I would really like that," I told her.
She beams. She grabs my hand with her paint-covered one and starts pulling me into the house like she has known me her whole life.
Jake shows me around quickly. Kitchen, bathroom, laundry room, Lily's room, the guest room where I will sleep. He points. He names rooms. He does not make eye contact for more than half a second at a time. He is extremely good at giving information without actually talking to a person.
He shows me the last room of mine and steps back.
It is small and clean. A single bed with a blue blanket. A desk. A window that looks out at the backyard. On the desk someone has left a little handwritten note that says WELCOM PENNY with a drawing of what I think is supposed to be a dinosaur. Lily's spelling. Lily's drawing.
My chest does the door-opening thing again.
"She made that this morning," Jake says, looking at the wall instead of the note. "I did not ask her to."
"It is really good," I say.
He almost smiles. Just the edge of one. Then it disappears.
He looks at me directly for the first time since I arrived and says: "We do not talk about school here. What happens there stays there. Agreed?"
I think about the note on my back. I think about him at the water fountain. I think about his eyes moving away.
"Agreed," I say.
He nods once. Steps back. "Dinner is at six-thirty. Lily goes to bed at eight." He pauses. "She likes oatmeal with exactly five raisins in the morning. Not four. Not six."
"Five."
"Five." He looks at me for one more second. Then he turns and walks back down the hallway and I listen to his footsteps go up the stairs and I let out a long, slow breath.
Okay. I can do this.
I set my duffel bag on the bed and start unpacking. I hang up two shirts. I put my books on the desk next to Lily's welcome note. I set my phone on the charger.
That is when I hear his voice.
The walls here are thin. His room is directly above mine and his window must be open because his voice comes down clearly not every word, but enough.
"Yeah she showed up." A pause. "No, it is fine, Bri." His voice is low and careful, the voice people use when they do not want to be overheard. "It is just a babysitter thing. It is not a big deal." Another pause, longer. Then: "She's nobody. Don't worry about it."
The unpacking stops.
I am holding one of my books and I am completely still and the words are sitting in my chest like something cold.
She's nobody.
I put the book down on the desk very carefully. I sit on the edge of the blue blanket bed. I look at Lily's welcome note WELCOM PENNY and the lopsided dinosaur and I breathe slowly in and slowly out.
He is right. I am the babysitter. I am here for the fifty dollars and the electric bill and Lily's five raisins. I am not here for anything else and I do not want anything else and the fact that those two words stung at all is my own stupid problem.
She's nobody.
Fine.
From upstairs I hear him laugh at something the girl on the phone says. Easy. Relaxed. The laugh he never uses at school, where everything about him is performance.
I pick up my book. I opened it to page one.
Nobody is fine. Nobody is actually very safe.
But nobody, a small voice somewhere deep in my chest whispers, is also very lonely.