Chapter 13 What A B Plus Actually Means
JAKE POV
Ms. Ortega puts the essay face down on his desk.
Jake stares at the back of the page. He has a very specific feeling right now, the kind that lives in the space between your stomach and your chest, the kind that shows up before a big game or a hard conversation. He doesn't flip the page. He waits until Ms. Ortega has walked all the way to the front of the room and turned to the board.
He flips it.
B plus.
In blue pen this time. Not red. Blue.
He reads the feedback below it. Ms. Ortega's handwriting is small and neat, and it says: Argument structure is significantly improved. Your voice is clear and confident throughout. The third paragraph is particularly strong. This is the writer I knew was in there.
Jake reads that twice.
His voice. Clear and confident.
He sits in the plastic chair and stares at those words and thinks about how none of them are true. His voice was sideways and broken and folded up in a trash can. Penny's voice is clear and confident. He has no idea what his voice sounds like on paper because he has never actually heard it come out right before.
Except.
He reads the essay again, there in class, all the way through. And the thing is it still sounds like him. He can't explain it. Every sentence is cleaner, every argument actually lands, but it still sounds like someone who lost something and couldn't find the words for it until someone else handed them over. Ms. Ortega thinks that someone is Jake.
She is half right.
He goes straight home after school.
Not practice. Coach gave them a light day, film review only, and Jake sat through it without seeing a single play because his brain was somewhere else entirely. He drives home. He goes upstairs. He finds the folder still on his desk where he left it this morning.
He opens it.
He reads every change she made. Everyone. She moved whole sentences. She broke long ones into short ones. She built the third paragraph from almost nothing because the original version had the right idea buried under six lines that went nowhere. In the margins, her notes are small and careful: This is your strongest point, lead with it. And: You don't need this sentence, you already said it better above. And, next to the part about loss: Don't explain this. You don't need to. It lands harder without the explanation.
Jake sits at his desk for a long time.
She didn't make it hers. That's the thing he keeps coming back to. She had his essay in her hands for a whole night, and she could have rewritten every word and gotten him an A and impressed herself, and he never would have known the difference. But she didn't do that. She found what he was trying to say, and she cleared the path to it, and then she stepped back.
Nobody has ever done that for him before.
Not like that.
He doesn't know what to do with that feeling. It's too big for the room. He picks up the folder. He puts it down. He picks it up again.
He goes downstairs.
Penny is in the kitchen doing Lily's hair.
Lily is on the stool, very still in the careful way she gets when Penny is braiding, which means she is either concentrating on being good or she has fallen asleep sitting up, which has happened before.
Jake walks in. He holds the folder.
"That was my essay," he says.
Penny's hands keep moving. She doesn't look up. "I know."
"You went through my trash."
"You threw away a B plus."
He opens his mouth.
He closes it.
He stands there and tries to find the argument, and it just isn't there. She went through his trash. She stayed up past midnight fixing something he gave up on. She slid it under his door before six in the morning. She asked for nothing. She told nobody. And she just fixed it and went back to bed like it was a normal Tuesday.
He stands there for ten full seconds.
Then he turns and walks out the back door.
The porch steps are cold.
Jake sits on them in his practice jacket, holds the folder, and looks at the yard. His mom planted things out here once. He doesn't remember all of them. There's a rosebush on the left side that she loved. It still grows every spring without anyone taking care of it, which feels like something, but he has never figured out what.
He sits there and thinks.
He thinks about what Penny said last night at the counter. Because it felt wrong to let something real get a D minus. Like it was obvious. Like caring about something just because it deserved to be cared about was the most natural thing in the world.
Jake has people in his life who care about him because of what he gives them. His teammates like him because he wins games. His coaches believe in him because he has a future they want to be attached to. Brianna, because he doesn't know exactly, but he knows it has something to do with what he looks like next to her.
He cannot think of one person who has done something for him simply because it was right.
He can think of one girl.
He stays on the porch until the cold gets serious. Then he goes back inside.
Penny is at the stove. Lily is drawing at the table. The kitchen smells like whatever she's making, and it smells good, and the whole room has that feeling it gets in the evenings now, settled and warm, the feeling Jake didn't know he was missing until it started showing up every night.
He gets two glasses of water.
He puts one next to Penny without saying anything.
She looks at it. She doesn't say anything either. She keeps stirring.
He sits at the table and helps Lily with her drawing, and after a while, Penny says dinner is ready, and they sit down, all three of them, and Lily talks about something that happened at recess involving a puddle and two very bad decisions.
Jake eats. He watches Penny across the table. She's listening to Lily with her whole face, the way she does, like Lily is the most interesting person she has ever met.
After dinner, after Lily is in bed, Jake comes downstairs.
Penny is at the table with her homework.
He sits across from her.
She looks up.
He says, "I need help with the next one."
She looks at him for a moment. "The next essay?"
"It's due in three weeks."
She looks back down at her notebook. She turns a page. She says, without looking up, "Okay."
One word. Like it's simple. Like, she didn't just agree to spend three more weeks sitting across a table from him at night while everything between them gets more complicated and harder to name.
He opens his mouth to say something.
Her phone buzzes on the table.
She picks it up and goes completely still.
He watches her face change. The color doesn't drain exactly. It's more like her expression goes flat in the way it does when she is processing something bad and deciding how to hold it.
"What?" he says.
She turns the phone around.
The screenshot is from the school's anonymous gossip account. Someone posted it twenty minutes ago. It has a hundred and six likes already. At the top, the caption reads: " Update on the Mercer situation, sources say she's been helping with his homework. wonder what she's getting in return.
Jake's jaw goes tight.
He looks at Penny.
She has already turned the phone back around. She is already adding the screenshot to something. Some folder. She does it with the kind of calm that comes from practice, from having done this before, which makes it so much worse.
"Penny"
"I have three more pages of calculus," she says.
"We need to talk about this."
"Tomorrow." She picks up her pencil. "I'm fine tonight."
She is not fine.
He knows she is not fine because her hand is pressed completely flat on the notebook page, the way it gets when she is making it hold still.
He leans forward. He says quietly, "I'm going to find out who runs that account."
She looks up at that. Her eyes meet his. Something moves through them that he can't quite read.
"Jake," she says.
"What?"
"Don't do something that makes this about you."
He sits back.
She goes back to her calculus.
And Jake sits across from her in the quiet kitchen and realizes that the smartest person he has ever met is also the loneliest, and that somehow, without meaning to, he has been part of the reason why.
He is not going to be that anymore.
He just has to figure out how to prove it.