Chapter 24 The Cost of Staying
PENNY POV
She almost doesn't go outside.
That's the thing she'll think about later. She almost stays in her room. She has homework. She has three new screenshots to add to the folder and a witness statement from a girl in her chemistry class who finally said yes after two weeks of maybe. She has completely legitimate reasons to stay at her desk and not go anywhere near the back porch.
But Lily asked her to check if the stars were out because Lily has decided she wants to be an astronomer, or possibly a dinosaur, or possibly both, and Penny told her she would look, and Penny does not break promises to six-year-olds.
That's the only reason she's outside.
That's what she tells herself.
Jake is already there.
He's sitting on the top step with his arms on his knees, looking at the street like it said something he's still thinking about. He doesn't hear her come out. She has one second where she could go back inside quietly, and he would never know.
She sits down.
Not close. There's a full step's worth of space between them, which is a reasonable, sensible, completely normal amount of space. The air is cool and smells like the neighbor's fireplace, and the sky has about four visible stars through the cloud cover, which she will report to Lily in the morning.
They don't say anything for a while.
This is one of the things about Jake that Penny did not expect and has not fully adjusted to. He doesn't fill the silence the way most people do. Most people get uncomfortable and start talking about nothing. Jake just sits in it. Like he's not afraid of it. Like he grew up in quiet rooms and learned to live there.
She keeps her eyes on the street.
A car passes. Then nothing.
"You're the first person," Jake says, "who has made this house feel like home since my mom died."
Penny doesn't move.
She keeps looking at the street. At the yellow pool of light under the streetlamp. The way it catches the edge of the parked car across from them and makes a thin bright line along the door.
She doesn't know what to do with that sentence.
Not because it's too small. Because it is exactly the right size and she has no container for it. She has containers for cruelty, for indifference, for the specific polite friendliness that means I tolerate you. She has been collecting those her whole life, sorting and filing and building systems for them.
She has nothing for this.
She can feel him looking at the side of her face.
She keeps her eyes forward.
The thing is, and this is the part she has been very carefully not thinking about for six weeks, the house feels like home to her, too. That's the problem. That is the entire problem, neat and complete. She came here for fifty dollars a week and her own bathroom and one quiet place to get through senior year without being destroyed. She did not come here to learn the specific sound of a door that sticks at the top. She did not come here to know that Lily needs her blanket folded a particular way or that Jake drinks his coffee before it's finished brewing because he's impatient in the mornings and polite about everything else.
She did not come here to feel like she belongs somewhere.
You are not allowed, she tells herself. You know exactly how this goes. You know what you are at this school. You know what he is. The house is not real life. The house is a temporary arrangement with a weekly rate and an end date.
She is very convincing. She almost believes it.
His phone buzzes.
The sound is small, and she's been braced for silence, so it lands like something much louder. Jake shifts. He pulls it out. The screen lights up.
She doesn't mean to look.
She looks.
Brianna.
The name sits there in white letters on the lit screen for exactly as long as it takes Jake to see it and for Penny to see him see it. Two seconds. Maybe less.
Everything in her goes very still.
Jake looks at the screen.
Then he looks at her.
It's the look that does it. Not guilty. Not apologetic. Something more complicated than that, something that looks almost like a question, or a choice, suspended for one moment right in front of both of them.
He answers it.
He stands. He goes inside. The door doesn't quite close behind him, and she can hear his voice, low, moving away down the hall toward his room.
Penny sits on the porch steps.
A car passes. Somewhere down the street, a dog barks twice and stops. The fireplace smell is stronger now, and the four stars are still there through the clouds, which she supposes is something.
She is not allowed to feel anything about Jake Mercer.
She knows this. She has known this. She has a list, internal, very organized, of every reason why. He is the boy who walked past. He is the boy who sat with people who laughed. He is a golden boy at a school that has made her life small, and she is a scholarship girl with paint under her fingernails and a folder full of evidence and a mother who works double shifts and a life that has no room in it for something that is going to hurt.
She is not allowed.
She sits there until the cold gets into her jacket.
Then she goes inside.
She passes his door without looking at it. The light is on underneath. She can hear his voice still, quiet through the wood, not the words, just the tone. Easy. Comfortable. The voice of someone talking to a person they have a history with.
She goes to her room.
She sits on her bed.
She opens her folder because the folder is real and the folder has a purpose, and the folder does not have feelings about phone calls at nine-fifteen on a Tuesday.
Her phone buzzes.
Unknown number. Again. Different from the last two.
She stares at it.
She opens it.
No words this time. Just a file. An audio file, eleven seconds long.
She puts her earbuds in.
She presses play.
It's her voice.
Her own voice, quiet and unguarded, recorded without her knowing, and she knows exactly when it was because she only said that particular thing once, to one person, sitting on a floor in the dark during a power outage while Lily slept between them.
I know what it's like to disappear, her own voice says in her ears. I've been doing it so long I can't always remember what I look like when I'm not hiding.
The file ends.
Penny pulls the earbuds out.
She sits very still.
Whoever has this recorded that night. That specific conversation she thought was safe, that private, dark, quiet exchange she let herself have because the power was out and Lily was asleep and she forgot, for one hour, to be careful.
She forgot to be careful.
Her hands are completely steady when she opens a new message to Jake.
Don't come to my room. Don't knock. Just read this.
She attaches the file.
She sends it.
Then she sits on her bed in the dark and waits, and listens, and somewhere past her door she hears the exact moment he plays it because his voice stops completely.
And the silence that follows is the loudest thing she has ever heard.