Chapter 16 What Rumors Do In The Dark
PENNY POV
She hears her own name before she hears anything else.
That is always how it starts. Your name in someone else's mouth, said in a voice that means they don't think you're listening. Penny is in the last stall of the girls' bathroom between second and third period, and she went in there to splash cold water on her face and take thirty seconds of silence, and instead she gets this.
Two girls. She recognizes both voices. They are not mean girls exactly. They are the kind of girls who stand next to mean girls and laugh, which is its own kind of mean but quieter and harder to point at.
"I heard she's literally living at his house," the first one says.
"That's so weird," the second one says.
"Right? Like, what is that even about?"
"She babysits his sister or something."
"Still. Why her? Like out of everyone."
A pause. The sound of a faucet running.
"There has to be something wrong with him," the first one says. "Like you don't just" She laughs. "I mean, it's Penny Cruz."
The second one laughs too. Not a cruel laugh. Almost uncomfortable. Like she knows it's wrong, but she does it anyway because it's easier than not doing it.
The door opens. They leave.
Penny stands behind the stall door with her hand flat on the wall and breathes.
In. Out. Slow.
She knows how this goes. She has watched rumors move through Westbrook since freshman year. They start small, a whisper in a bathroom, a text in a group chat, and then they grow teeth and legs, and they move faster than anything true ever moves. By lunch, this will be a story. By Friday, it will be a fact that nobody can trace back to where it started.
She flushed the toilet even though she didn't use it.
She opens the stall door.
She washes her hands at the sink.
She looks at herself in the mirror for ten full seconds.
Brown skin, natural hair pulled back, dark circles she's been carrying since the anonymous text at one in the morning. She looks at her own face the way she looks at an equation, searching for the variable, the thing she can change, the thing that makes the answer come out different.
She has been looking at her face that way since sixth grade.
It never shows her anything useful.
She goes to class.
The third period is AP History. Penny sits in her seat, opens her notebook, writes the date and the title of today's lesson, takes notes in her neat, small handwriting, and does not think about the bathroom.
She does not think about why, like everyone.
She does not think that there has to be something wrong with him.
She does not think about the way the second girl laughed, like she was almost sorry but not quite.
She takes six pages of notes. Her teacher will say later that these are some of the most comprehensive notes in the class. Penny already knows this. Penny has always known this. She has been the best note-taker in every class she's ever sat in because notes require focus, and focus keeps everything else out.
She is very focused today.
Lunch is different.
Not because anything happens. Nothing happens at lunch. Penny gets her food without incident. She walks to her corner table. She opens her book. She eats.
But she can feel the room differently today.
She has always been able to feel it when a rumor is moving. There is a particular energy, like a current underwater, something you can't see but can feel against your skin. Heads are turning slightly. Conversations pause for half a second when she walks past. Someone at the popular table was looking at her and then looking quickly away.
She eats her food.
She turns a page.
Across the cafeteria, she can feel without looking where Jake is sitting. She knows the table. She knows the sound of his section of the room, louder than the rest, football energy. She does not look over there. She has not looked over there in three weeks, and she is not starting today.
She finishes her lunch.
She goes to the library.
Sofia finds her in the fourth period.
She doesn't say anything out loud. She just slides a folded note onto Penny's desk as she passes. Penny waits until the teacher turns to the board. She unfolds it.
It's moving fast. By tomorrow, everyone will have a version. Brianna's been busy. I'm sorry.
Penny folds the note. She puts it in her pocket. She adds it to the folder in her head, the one she has been building for weeks now, the one that is getting heavier every day.
She thinks about the drawing. Lily's drawing from Friday, the one she made of the three of them with crayons. Jake on the left, Lily on the right, Penny in the middle. Penny drawn biggest, which meant nothing probably, which was just how a six-year-old understood proportion, which had absolutely nothing to do with how Lily actually saw things.
She thinks about it all the way through fourth period.
She gets home at three forty-five.
The front door opens before she reaches it.
Lily is on the other side. Both hands behind her back, bouncing slightly on her toes, wearing the expression of someone who has been waiting for a specific amount of time and has things to report.
"I made something," Lily says.
"Okay," Penny says.
Lily pulls her hands from behind her back.
It is a drawing. Crayon on white paper, slightly crumpled at the corner where Lily was gripping it too tightly. Three figures. The tallest one on the left has yellow scribble hair, which is Jake. The small one in the middle has a green triangle on its shirt, which is Lily's dinosaur shirt. The one on the right is the biggest one.
The biggest one has dark curly hair and a big smile and is wearing purple.
Lily drew Penny the biggest.
Not taller. Just bigger. More space. More color. More presence, in the way that six-year-olds understand presence, which is that the most important things take up more of the page.
"That's you," Lily says, pointing at the purple figure. "I made you the biggest because you're the most."
Penny looks at the drawing.
She looks at it for a long time.
"The most what?" she says. Her voice comes out steady. She is very proud of that.
Lily thinks about it seriously. "Just the most," she says. "Of everything."
Penny takes the drawing very carefully. She holds it by the edges. She says, "This is the best drawing I've ever seen."
Lily says, "I know." She turns and runs back inside. "Jake said we can have crackers before dinner, but only six!"
Penny stands in the doorway alone.
She looks at the drawing.
She does not cry.
She holds it until the feeling passes enough that she can move, and then she steps inside and closes the door, and goes to the kitchen, and starts the cracker situation.
After dinner, after Lily is in bed, Penny is at the table when Jake comes downstairs.
He sits across from her. He looks at her face. He does that thing where he reads her, the thing she is starting to both appreciate and resent because nobody is supposed to be able to read her.
"You heard something today," he says.
"I hear things every day."
"Something specific."
She looks at her notebook. "The rumor is moving fast. By tomorrow, everyone will have their version."
Jake says nothing.
"It's fine," she says. "I expected it."
"That doesn't mean it's fine."
"Jake"
"I want to say something at school." His voice is flat and certain. "I want to"
"No." She looks up. "Absolutely not."
"Penny"
"If you say something, it becomes a bigger story. It puts a spotlight on both of us. It gives Brianna exactly what she wants, which is a reaction." She holds his gaze. "I have a plan. I just need more time."
He looks at her. His jaw is tight. His hands are flat on the table.
"How much time?" he says.
She opens her mouth to answer.
Her phone lights up on the table between them.
A notification. Tagged again. Both of them look at it at the same time.
Penny picks it up.
It's a video.
Not the locker room video. A new one. Someone filmed her today at the corner table during lunch, zoomed in, without her knowing. Eating alone. Reading her book. Just existing.
The caption says: she really thinks she belongs here lol
Four hundred and eleven views.
Posted forty minutes ago.
Penny puts the phone down.
She picks up her pencil.
She says, very quietly: "I need one more week."
Jake is looking at the phone. Something is moving through his face that she has not seen before. Not just anger. Something older and heavier than anger.
He says, "One week."
"One week," she says.
He nods.
He stands up. He goes to the counter. He fills the kettle.
He puts it on without asking.
Penny looks at the back of his head and thinks about the drawing upstairs on her dresser. The purple figure. The biggest one.
Just the most. Of everything.
She picks up her pencil.
She starts writing.
Not homework.
A list. Names. Dates. Screenshots. Every piece of everything she has collected since the first day of school.
One week.
She is going to need every single day of it.