Chapter 32 Fifty Views and Climbing
PENNY POV
The door closes.
That's the sound. Not Brianna's voice or the shuffle of four pairs of shoes or the specific silence of a room that was empty a second ago and now isn't. The sound is the door. The click of it. The finality.
Penny is at her locker with her back to all of it.
She finishes what she is doing. She closes the locker. She turns around.
Brianna is leaning against the row of lockers across from her like she has been there for hours, like this is simply where she lives, like the entire locker room is a room she owns, and Penny is the one trespassing. The four girls behind her arrange themselves the way they always do, not in a line, nothing that obvious, just spread enough to fill the space, to make the room feel smaller than it is.
Penny has seen this formation before.
She keeps her face flat.
"Didn't hear you come in," Penny says.
"That's okay," Brianna says. "We're here now."
She says everything out loud.
That is the thing about Brianna Cole that separates her from the others who have done versions of this over the years. The others whispered. Passed notes. Typed behind screens. Brianna says it directly, clearly, in a voice that does not lower itself for anyone, like she is reading from a list she prepared in advance and is simply getting through it efficiently.
She says things about Penny's size. About her clothes. About the scholarship, oh right, you need that, don't you, must be nice, and about the particular nerve it takes to exist in Jake Mercer's orbit when you are, and here Brianna's voice goes almost gentle, almost sympathetic, you.
Penny goes somewhere else.
She has been doing this for three years, and she is very good at it. She keeps her face neutral and her eyes on a fixed point, the third locker from the left in the row behind Brianna's shoulder, and she goes to a place inside herself that is quiet and small and unreachable. Her body stays in the room. Her expression stays assembled. But the part of her that feels things steps back from the glass and watches from a distance.
She does not see the phone.
She does not know one of the girls, the one on the right, standing slightly angled, slightly separate, is recording until she is already gone. Until she is out the door and in the hallway, and the world outside is loud and bright and completely indifferent.
Her phone buzzes.
Notification. Tagged in a video.
She stops walking.
She opens it.
Fourteen views.
She watches four seconds of it. Her own face on the screen, flat and careful and trying so hard, and Brianna's voice from off camera saying things that sound even worse played back because recorded voices have no mercy in them, no room for context, just the words themselves hanging in digital air.
She closes it.
Opens it.
Thirty-one views.
She closes it again.
She stands in the hallway,y and people move around her the way water moves around a rock automatically, without looking, and she watches the number in her head climb the way she knows it will climb, the way these things always climb once they start, and she thinks with the distant analytical part of her brain that has never once failed her: document first. fall apart later. document first.
She opens the app again.
Fifty views.
She screenshots. She screenshots the post. The caption. The account name. The tags. The timestamp. Everything. Methodical. Thorough. She has been doing this long enough to know that evidence disappears, and feelings are not admissible, but screenshots are.
She walks to the library.
The corner table is hers in the way that things become yours through repetition and necessity rather than choice. Third floor. Back corner. One window faces the parking lot; nobody looks out the windows that face the parking lot. She has sat here through two years of lunches and three separate crying sessions, she did not allow to last longer than four minutes each, and one complete rewrite of a history paper she'd left too late.
She sits down.
She puts her phone face down on the table.
She opens her textbook.
The words on the page are about the French Revolution and the systematic dismantling of existing power structures, and she stares at them and reads the same sentence four times and retains nothing, and then reads it a fifth time,e and something catches.
The structures did not fall because of one event. They fell because pressure accumulated over a long time in places no one was watching.
She looks at that sentence for a moment.
Then she takes out her notebook and starts on the assignment.
Seventy-three minutes late, e,r she has finished two assignments, drunk half a water bottle, and not looked at her phone.
She is reaching for it when footsteps stop at her table.
She looks up.
Jake is standing on the other side of the table,ble still in his practice gear. He should not be here. He has a fourth period off, and he uses it to sleep in the equipment room. She knows this because Lily told her, and Lily tells her everything. He should be in the equipment room.
He is here.
He looks at her.
She looks at him.
His face has something on it she cannot fully name. Not pity, she would leave immediately if it were pity. Something heavier than that. Something that looks like a person who has been walking very fast to get somewhere has arrived and does not know what to do with their hands.
"Penny," he says.
"Don't," she says.
He stops.
"Don't feel sorry for me." She keeps her voice level. "Don't make this into the story where you're the hero. Don't." She stops. Breathes. "I don't need that from you."
He is quiet for a moment.
He pulls out the chair across from her.
He sits down.
He does not say anything.
She looks at him sitting there in the chair across from the table at her corner table, where no one sits, at the table that is hers through years of eating alone, and something in her chest does something she cannot allow right now.
She closes her laptop.
She picks up her bag.
"I'm going home," she says.
She walks out.
She does not look back.
She makes it all the way to the front steps before she stops, and the September air hits her face, and she stands very still for exactly thirty seconds and breathes.
In.
Out.
You are not going to cry on the front steps of Westbrook High School.
She doesn't.
She gets on the bus.
She rides fourteen stops.
She gets off.
She walks the six minutes to the house,d puts her key in the lock, opens the door, drops her bag, and goes to the kitchen, puts the kettle on because that is what you do with your hands when your hands need something to do.
The kettle is heating when her phone buzzes.
She looks at it.
A message from a number she doesn't recognize.
Four words she has been waiting for without knowing she was waiting.
Check the school website.
She opens the browser.
The Westbrook student news page loads.
And there, at the top, posted seven minutes ago, is a new article.
The headline reads: Scholarship Student Penny Cruz: Who Is She Really?
And the byline is not a student journalist.
It is Brianna Cole.
And the article has a link.
And the link goes to a second video.
One Penny has never been seen before.
One that was not taken in the locker room.
One that was taken somewhere she thought she was safe.