Chapter 21 The Gravity of Small Things
JAKE POV
He doesn't tell Marcus the whole truth.
He tells him practice ran long, that he's just tired, that the protein shakes at the gym taste like chalk, and he'd rather shower at home. Marcus buys maybe thirty percent of this. Marcus has known Jake since fourth grade and has a very accurate internal detector for when Jake is lying, which is currently going off like a fire alarm.
"Is it the babysitter situation?" Marcus asks, towel around his neck, locker half open.
"It's fine."
"Because you've left early four days in a row."
"Five," Jake says, without thinking.
Marcus stares at him.
Jake zips his bag. "I just like being home."
He walks out before Marcus can turn that into a whole thing.
The drive takes eleven minutes.
He knows because he's timed it. Not on purpose. It just happened, the way you notice something without deciding to notice it, the way his eyes find Penny's face in a crowd before he's even looking for her. His brain started tracking the drive home the same way it tracks fourth-down yardage. Automatic. Involuntary.
Completely inconvenient.
He pulls into the driveway at four forty-seven.
The front curtain moves.
Not Penny Lily. He can see the small handprint on the glass, the way she presses her whole face to the window when she hears his truck. She has done this every single day for two years, and it still does something to his chest every time, this little sister of his who watches for him like he's the most important thing coming down the street.
He grabs his bag and goes inside.
"Shhhh," Lily says immediately, without looking up. She's on the floor, crayons in a perfect circle around her like some kind of kindergarten ritual. "We're at the good part."
Nobody was talking. Jake wasn't talking. He didn't even get a full step through the door.
"Sorry," he says anyway, quietly.
Penny is on the couch.
Not doing homework, not working on the folder, not doing any of the twelve productive things she's usually doing when he comes home. Just reading. A real book, paperback, bent spine, held with both hands and one knee tucked under her. Her hair is loose. She has a pen tucked behind her ear that she's clearly forgotten about.
She doesn't look up either.
Jake stands in the doorway for a moment. His bag is in his hand. His keys are in his other hand. The house smells like the pasta Penny makes on Wednesdays, the one Lily requests by full title, Penny's Special Twisty Noodles, and the heat is on, and it is completely, stupidly ordinary.
He sets his bag down without a sound.
He goes to the kitchen.
He gets two glasses of water without thinking about it. He just does it. He carries both to the living room and sets one on the side table next to Penny's knee and sits in the chair across from her.
She takes the water. Keeps reading.
He opens his phone.
He doesn't look at anything on it. He just holds it because otherwise his hands have nothing to do, and he doesn't fully trust his hands right now.
The quiet settles.
Lily colors. Penny reads. Somewhere outside, a car passes. The heater clicks. Lily says, very softly, mostly to herself, "green for the dragon," and moves her crayon accordingly.
Jake puts his phone face down on his knee.
He has had the same thought four times this week, and he has shut it down four times, and here it is again, pulling up like it owns the place: I don't want to be anywhere else.
Not at the gym. Not at Marcus's house, where there's always a game on and something to laugh about. Not anywhere that used to feel like enough before it didn't anymore.
Here. This room. These two people didn't even say hello when he walked in.
He is eighteen years old, and apparently, he has become the kind of person who drives home early to sit in a quiet living room and counts it as the best part of his day.
His phone buzzes.
He flips it over.
Coach: Film session moved to Thursday, 6 am. Be there.
Thursday, six a.m. He looks at the time. He thinks about his homework. He thinks about the English paper Penny helped him restructure last night, the one he read back at the end while his lips moved on the hard sentences, which is a habit he knows she noticed and chose not to tease him about, which somehow made it worse.
Not all of them, he said. About the words.
She folded her notes and put them in her pocket, and he still hasn't stopped thinking about it.
"Jake," Lily says.
He looks up. She's holding up a drawing. It's a house. There are three figures in front of it: one tall, one medium, and one very small with what appears to be a crown. The tall one has a football. The medium one has a book. The small one is clearly wearing a dinosaur costume.
"That's us," Lily says, with total authority.
Jake looks at it for a long moment.
He says, "Where's the dinosaur costume?"
"She's wearing it. You can't see it because it's the same color as the grass."
Penny makes a sound that is almost a laugh and covers it with a cough. Jake looks at her. She is looking very hard at her book, and her mouth is doing the thing where she's fighting a smile and losing.
He takes the drawing. He looks at it again. Three figures in front of a house.
That's us.
He folds it carefully and puts it in his jacket pocket.
Lily approves of this. She goes back to her crayons.
Three hours later, after dinner, after the bath, after the story that turned into two stories plus a negotiation about whether sharks have feelings, Jake is standing outside Penny's door.
He doesn't mean to be standing here.
He was going to his room. He was going to sleep. He was going to stop doing the thing where he finds excuses to be in whatever room she's in.
But there's a sound coming through the door.
Quiet. Almost nothing. Just barely there.
She's crying.
Not loud. Not dramatic. The crying that's been going on for a while already, the kind that's almost run out of itself. Small, controlled, exhausted. Like she waited until she was completely sure the house was asleep.
Jake stands very still.
He thinks about knocking. He raises his hand once. Puts it down.
He thinks about the folder and Marcus's text and the drive at midnight and the way she said, "Sit down, we need to finish tonight without her voice shaking even once."
He thinks about how long she has been carrying things alone and decides she has no other option.
He knocks.
The crying stops immediately. Silence. Then the careful voice, the controlled one, the armor she puts on in under three seconds.
"I'm fine."
Jake leans his forehead against the door.
"I know you are," he says quietly. "I just didn't want you to have to be fine alone tonight."
A long silence.
The door doesn't open.
But the light stays on.
And Jake slides down the wall and sits on the floor outside her room and stays there, back against the door, in the dark, not going anywhere.
Thirty seconds later, very softly, he hears her sit down on the other side.
Two doors. No space. Four inches of wood between them.
His phone lights up in his hand.
Unknown number. One message.
I know what she's building. Tell your little girlfriend to check her folder.