Chapter 26 Receipts
PENNY POV
The first comment appears at 10:47 PM.
Penny knows the exact time because she is in the middle of a calculus problem, and her phone buzzes, and she checks it without thinking, the way you do when your brain needs one second of escape from derivatives.
The notification is from an app she forgot she had. A photo she forgot existed. Science fair, two years ago. Seven kids in a row holding poster boards. She is second from the left in an oversized blue hoodie, hair pulled back, squinting at the camera like she already knew.
The comment says: who let her in lol
She stares at it.
She puts the phone down.
She picks it back up.
There are three more now. She watches the number climb the way you watch something fall too fast to stop, too awful to look away.
Westbrook is really accepting anyone these days, huh? Imagine standing next to that
. Does she know she exists
Anonymous accounts. Profile pictures of sunsets and cartoon characters. Names that mean nothing: user48821, xoxobri99, throwaway_lol. Fake. All fake. Constructed specifically for this, which means someone planned it, which means this is not a random cruelty but a deliberate one, which means
She knows.
She doesn't have proof. But she knows the way you know a storm is coming before the sky has done anything specific. She knows the way she has always known, the particular frequency of Brianna Cole's cruelty, the way it comes in waves and always after something.
After Jake stood with her on the porch steps.
After Jake's phone rang with Brianna's name.
She wonders if Brianna stayed on that call just long enough to confirm something.
Penny closes the app.
Opens it.
Twelve comments now.
She closes it.
She puts the phone face down on the mattress and presses her palm flat against the back of it like she can hold the screen down by force. She looks at the ceiling. The ceiling is white and cracked in one corner and has never done anything to her, and it is currently the safest thing in the room.
She breathes.
Don't spiral. Her own voice in her head, the one she has trained over years of practice. Don't spiral. Do the thing.
She picks the phone up.
She screenshots every comment. All twelve. She is careful, and she is methodical, and her hands are completely steady, which is a thing she has learned: her hands stay steady even when her chest is doing something terrible. She files the screenshots in a folder she created in her sophomore year when she realized that surviving required documentation. The folder is labeled MATH NOTES because no one ever looks twice at a folder called that.
She knows what she'll do with them. She doesn't know exactly when. But she knows.
She turns the phone off.
She opens her textbook.
She does her calculus homework.
She gets every single answer right.
She is on the last problem when she hears it.
Not a sound exactly. More like the particular quality of quiet that means the hallway is occupied, the small displacement of air that happens when someone is standing very still, very close.
She checks her phone. She turned it off. She left it off.
She turned it off after the audio file.
The audio file she sent to Jake.
She doesn't know why she sent it. She has been asking herself that question for twenty minutes with no satisfying answer. The honest answer is that she did not want to be the only person who knew. She did not want to sit alone in the dark with the knowledge that someone had been close enough to record her, specifically, saying something she only said because she thought the walls were down, and hold it by herself until it turned into something she couldn't carry.
She didn't want to be alone with it.
She is aware this is a problem.
She opens her door.
Jake is on the floor.
Not standing. Not leaning against the doorframe the way she expected. Actually sitting on the floor in the hallway with his back against the wall and his knees up and his practice clothes still on, which means he never changed, which means he came straight here from the porch and has been sitting on this floor in the dark while she was doing calculus and screenshots and breathing exercises.
She looks at him.
He looks up at her.
She sits down. Not close. But she sits down.
She holds out her phone. The account on the screen. The one the audio came from.
He reads it.
She watches his jaw go tight in the dark.
"You know who it is," she says.
It isn't a question. She could see it the second he read the name, the recognition, the specific kind of stillness that isn't surprise, that is the opposite of surprise.
He looks at her. Something in his expression is very careful.
"Yeah," he says.
One word.
She waits.
He turns the phone over in his hands like he is deciding something. Then he says, "Three weeks ago, Marcus mentioned she had a second number. Said she was using it to track your schedule." He stops. "I told him to mind his business. I didn't. " He exhales hard through his nose. "I didn't ask enough questions."
Penny absorbs this.
She thinks about Brianna tracking her schedule. She thinks about the comment section still growing on her phone because her phone is off, but the internet does not stop. She thinks about recording her own voice, saying something real in the dark, weaponized.
She thinks about Jake sitting on this floor.
"You could have texted me that," she says.
"I know."
"You didn't need to sit on the floor."
He looks at her sideways. "You said don't be alone when you hear something bad. I'm taking that literally."
She wants to tell him that the rule was hypothetical. She doesn't.
They sit in the dark, quiet hallway, and somewhere in Lily's room, there is the small sound of her shifting in sleep, the rustle of a dinosaur blanket, and for a moment, that sound is the whole world.
Penny says: "She's going to do something worse."
Jake doesn't ask who. He doesn't pretend it might be someone else.
"I know," he says again.
"The comments are small. They're testing something. Seeing if I react." She keeps her voice even. "Whatever's coming next is bigger."
He turns to look at her fully then. The hallway is dark, but she can see his face, and she doesn't look away this time. "What do you need?"
She almost says nothing. The word is right there, pre-loaded, automatic.
She doesn't say it.
"I need to know," she says slowly, "that when it happens, and it will happen, you won't walk past."
The silence that follows is the longest three seconds of Penny Cruz's year.
Jake holds her gaze.
"I won't," he says.
She nods once.
She stands. She goes back to her room. She closes the door.
She picks up her phone, turns it back on
Twenty-seven comments.
And below them, in the most recent one, a link.
A video link.
Her stomach drops before she even presses play.
Because she recognizes the thumbnail.
It's the locker room.
And she's in it.