Chapter 6 The Warm Thing She Won't Name
PENNY POV
Penny counts the raisins out loud inside her head.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
She places the last one on top of the oatmeal and steps back. Lily stares at the bowl like it is a work of art hanging in a museum. Her mouth opens slowly. Her eyes go wide.
"You got it RIGHT," Lily whispers.
Like Penny just performed a miracle. Like, five raisins on oatmeal is the most important thing that has ever happened in this kitchen.
Penny sets the bowl in front of her and turns back to the stove. She tells herself the warmth spreading across her chest is just steam from the pot. Just heat. Just the normal physical result of standing near something hot. It has nothing to do with a six-year-old looking at her like she hung the moon.
She is still telling herself that when Jake comes downstairs.
He is in his practice jersey. Number seven. Bag over one shoulder, hair still damp from the shower, moving fast the way he always does in the mornings, like the day is already chasing him. He walks into the kitchen and goes straight for his keys on the counter, and then he stops.
He sees the oatmeal.
He sees the five raisins.
He looks at Penny for exactly one second. Not long. Not soft. Just one glance that lands on her face and then slides away like it was never there.
He grabs his keys.
Penny turns back to the stove and stirs nothing. The pot is empty.
He is at the door when he stops. She hears it in the pause, the small shift of weight. She does not turn around.
"There's food in the fridge," he says. "Help yourself to whatever."
The door closes.
Penny stares at the empty pot.
Lily is already eating, kicking her feet against the stool, completely unbothered by anything that just happened. "Jake leaves fast," she says, mouth full.
"Don't talk with food in your mouth," Penny says.
"He always leaves fast," Lily continues, ignoring this completely. "Even when he doesn't have to."
Penny rinses the pot. She does not think about that. She is not going to spend any time at all thinking about a boy who told someone on the phone she was nobody and then said, " Help yourself to whatever and walked out the door. That is not something worth thinking about.
She thinks about it the entire walk to school.
The hallway is loud when she gets there. It is always loud. Penny pulls her hoodie up, keeps her head down, and moves through the crowd like water moving around rocks. This is the system. Stay small. Stay quiet. Get to class.
She makes it to her locker without incident.
She is almost relieved when she hears, "Nice hoodie, Cruz."
Almost. Because she knows that voice and she knows what follows it.
Derek Mills. Football player. Jake's teammate. He is standing three lockers down with two other guys, and they are all looking at her with the particular kind of smile that means they already decided something was funny before they even opened their mouths.
Penny opens her locker. She gets her textbook.
"I'm serious," Derek says, louder now, because she didn't react, and that always makes them louder. "Where do you even find hoodies that big?"
The two guys laugh.
Penny closes her locker.
She turns around.
She looks at Derek for three full seconds without saying a word. Just look at him. Steady. Blank. Like he is a math problem she already solved and found boring.
Derek's smile flickers. Just for a second. Like he wasn't expecting that.
Then Penny walks to class.
Her hands are shaking inside her hoodie pocket. She makes them stop by pressing them flat against her thighs. She is not going to shake in a school hallway over Derek Mills. She refuses.
She sits down in English. She opens her textbook. She breathes.
Her teacher is writing the new essay assignment on the board. Penny copies it into her notebook without reading it yet. Her pen moves on automatic while her brain does the thing it always does after something like that in the hallway replays it, checks it, looks for what she should have done differently.
Nothing, she decides. She did nothing wrong.
She almost believes that, too.
After school, she picks Lily up, and they walk home, and Lily talks the entire way about a boy named Tomás who said dinosaurs aren't real animals because they're extinct, and Lily informs him very seriously that extinct means gone, not fake, and she feels this is an important difference. Penny agrees it is an important difference. Lily seems satisfied.
They get home. Penny makes a snack. She helps Lily practice her letters. She starts dinner. She does all of it on autopilot because her brain is still in the hallway with Derek's smile and Jake's one-second glance and the sticky note folded in her hoodie pocket that she has now read so many times the paper is getting soft at the fold.
Thank you for last night.
Six words.
She should throw it away. Keeping it is embarrassing. Keeping it means something, and she is not going to let it mean something.
She hears Jake's truck in the driveway at five-fifteen, which is earlier than yesterday. She does not look up from the pot when the door opens.
He drops his bag. He says hi to Lily. Lily launches into the Tomás dinosaur debate immediately, and Jake listens with his full attention, nodding seriously, asking follow-up questions like she is presenting at a conference.
Penny stirs the pot.
He comes to stand beside her at the stove. Not close. Just beside her. She can feel the space between them like something with weight.
"Smells good," he says quietly.
"Ten minutes," she says.
He stays there for a second. Just stands there. She keeps stirring.
Then he says, just as quietly, "Derek Mills is an idiot."
Penny's hand stops.
She looks up at him. He is looking at the pot. His jaw is set. His eyes are flat in the way she is starting to recognize, which means he is angry about something but has decided to be calm about it.
"I heard what he said this morning," Jake says. "By the lockers."
She stares at him. "You were there?"
He finally looks at her. "Around the corner."
The kitchen is very quiet. Lily is in the other room. The pot is starting to bubble.
Penny turns back to the stove. "It's fine," she says. "I handled it."
"I know you did." A pause. "I should have handled it, too."
She does not know what to say to that. She does not say anything. She stirs the pot. He stays beside her for another moment.
Then his phone rings.
She already knows before she looks. She can feel it. He pulls it out. The screen lights up.
Brianna.
Jake looks at the phone. He looks at Penny. Something moves across his face that she can't name.
He sends it to voicemail.
Penny's heart does something completely unreasonable.
Jake puts his phone back in his pocket and says, "Need help with anything?"
Penny looks at the pot. She looks at her hands. She says, very carefully, "You can set the table."
He does.
And she stands at the stove and tells herself this means nothing, nothing, nothing.
But the sticky note is still in her pocket. And he just sent Brianna to voicemail. And her heart is still doing that unreasonable thing.
She is in so much trouble.