Chapter 22 Teeth
PENNY POV
The googly eyes are wrong.
Penny knows it the second she glues the second one on. They're uneven, one slightly higher than the other, giving the cardboard T. rex head the expression of a dinosaur who has just been told some very surprising news. She holds it up and stares at it.
Lily stares at it too.
"I love it," Lily says.
"It looks confused."
"Dinosaurs were probably confused sometimes." Lily takes it from her and puts it on her own head. It slides down over her eyes immediately. "I can't see."
"That's because we haven't cut the eyeholes yet."
"Cut them now."
"I will, but you have to hold still."
"I AM holding still."
"Lily, you are spinning."
Lily stops spinning. She holds still for approximately four seconds, which is a personal record. Penny cuts the eyeholes. Lily shoves the head back on and stomps across the kitchen, making sounds that are somewhere between a roar and a very excited scream.
Penny sits back in her chair and looks at the kitchen table.
It is gone. Not metaphorically. There is no visible table anymore. There is only cardboard and paper plates and four open paint containers and a stack of googly eyes in three different sizes and two sets of green handprints that Lily made on purpose, and one set that Penny made by accident when she picked up the wrong thing. The floor has paint on it in places that Penny is choosing not to think about right now.
Her phone says 2:47 p.m.
Jake gets back from Saturday practice at four.
She has one hour and thirteen minutes.
"Okay," Penny says. "Scales next."
Scales are harder than expected.
The plan was to cut the cardboard into overlapping pieces and glue them in rows down the back of the costume body, which is an old green sweatshirt stuffed with newspaper. The execution involves Lily changing her mind four times about the scale shape, a brief crisis about whether T. rexes had scales or smooth skin, a five-minute research detour on Penny's phone, a compromise, and then an entire paper plate of glue getting knocked onto the floor.
Penny looks at it.
Lily looks at it.
"That was an accident," Lily says.
"I know."
"Are you mad?"
Penny gets the roll of paper towels. "Not even a little."
She isn't. This is the strange thing she has discovered about Saturday afternoons in this kitchen with a six-year-old and a craft project with too many moving parts. She is not performing well right now. She is just here. Her brain, which is usually running three tracks at once, the folder, the school week ahead, all the ways things can go wrong, has gone quiet in a way it rarely does.
She thinks about the unknown number text from last night.
She thinks about it the way you press a bruise. Carefully. Testing how bad it is.
Tell your little girlfriend to check her folder.
She checked it. Nothing was missing. Nothing was moved. But someone knew it existed, which meant someone had been close enough to know, which meant the circle was smaller than she thought, and someone inside it was talking.
She pressed Jake's arm on the drive home last night when he couldn't figure out who'd sent it. He was driving, and she could feel the tension coming off him in waves.
I'll find out, he said.
I know you will, she said.
And she meant it. That's the part that surprised her most.
"PENNY."
She snaps back. Lily is holding up the sweatshirt body with six scales glued to it. They are crooked. They are perfect.
"It's a real dinosaur," Lily says.
"It absolutely is."
At four-twelve, the front door opens.
Penny knows it's him before she hears his bag drop. She knows by the particular sound of that door, the way it sticks slightly at the top and has to be pushed through. She has learned the sounds of this house the way you learn a language you didn't mean to study without deciding to, just by being here long enough.
She doesn't turn around.
Lily does. Lily turns around so fast she nearly knocks over the paint.
"JAKE, IT'S A DINOSAUR."
She holds up the cardboard head with both hands. The googly eyes catch the light. The teeth which Penny painted in white with small black shadows that she's privately proud of are bared in what she intended as ferocious, and which landed somewhere between ferocious and gleeful.
Silence from the doorway.
Penny keeps her eyes on the scale she's gluing. She is very focused on this scale. It is the most important scale.
She hears him set his bag down.
She hears him walk across the kitchen.
She moves the glue brush. She does not look up. She is a professional. She is completely unbothered by the fact that he just walked in from practice and sat down across from her without being asked, and she can see him in her peripheral vision, reaching for a paintbrush like it's the most natural thing in the world.
"The teeth need to be scarier," he says.
She looks up.
He doesn't look back. He just pulls the cardboard head toward him and starts adding to the teeth. His brushstrokes are more confident than she expected. Not careful. Decisive.
She watches him for one second.
She looks back at her scale.
"They were plenty scary," she says.
"They were friendly and scary. I'm doing actual scary."
"There's a difference?"
"Yes." He adds a drip of paint, dark at the root of one tooth, lighter at the tip. "Friendly scary is fine for a school play. But Lily specifically said she wanted a T. rex that would make the kindergartners nervous."
Penny looks at Lily. "Is that true?"
Lily nods solemnly. "I want them to remember it."
Penny opens her mouth. Closes it. Picks up her glue brush.
"Fine," she says.
An hour later, the costume is done.
Lily is wearing all of it. The head, the body, and the tail were made from a pool noodle, spray-painted green, and attached with safety pins. She is walking in a circle around the kitchen table, making the sound, the specific sound, the one that started as a roar and evolved over the afternoon into something more personal.
Jake is leaning back in his chair, watching her.
Penny is cleaning paint off her hands.
She looks up and finds him looking at her. Not at Lily. At her. Direct, unhurried, the way he does when he's not remembering to be careful about it.
She looks back down.
She gets paint on her fingers again somehow.
"She's going to remember this," Jake says quietly. Not to Lily. To her.
Penny doesn't answer.
She folds the paper towel and sets it down.
Her phone buzzes.
She picks it up.
It's a number she doesn't recognize. Different from last night's. The message is four words and a link.
Thought you should see.
She clicks it.
Her own face loads on the screen.
It's a video. Taken through a gap in something, a locker, maybe a door. She's in the girls' bathroom. She's standing at the mirror. She doesn't know when this was taken but she knows exactly what moment it is because she remembers the expression on her face.
She was crying.
The caption underneath, already with two hundred comments, reads: scholarship girl having a moment lol
Penny's thumb goes still on the screen.
The kitchen is warm. The dinosaur costume rustles. Jake is two feet away.
She turns her phone face down on the table.
"I need some air," she says.
Her voice doesn't shake.
It never does.