Chapter 34 Everything They Said
PENNY POV
Four hundred and twelve views.
She watches the number update in real time, sitting at the kitchen table with her coat still on, bag still on her shoulder, like she sat down for one second and forgot to finish arriving.
Four hundred and nineteen.
She should put the phone down.
She reads the comments instead.
She knows why she does this.
She has always known why, even when she pretends she doesn't. It is not because she is a masochist. It is not because she enjoys pain. It is because she has learned, over years of being this particular person in this particular world, that the worst thing is being surprised. The worst thing is walking into a room not knowing what they have already said about you. The worst thing is the moment when someone's expression tells you there is a thing everyone knows that you don't.
So she reads.
She reads until she knows every word. Until nothing in the comment section can ambush her tomorrow in a hallway, a classroom, or a cafeteria. She reads until the things they say become data instead of daggers, or that's what she tells herself. That's the argument. She is gathering information. She is preparing.
She reads: who told her she could go to Westbrook lol
She reads: " Imagine being that confident with that body
She reads: I actually feel bad. No, wai, I don't.
She readsJake Mercerer really downgraded, huh.
She reads: she looks like she's trying not to cry. so embarrassing
She was not trying to cry. She was not thinking about crying. She was somewhere else entirely, in the quiet place behind her eyes, thinking about the essay due Friday and whether Lily needed new shoes because the left one was starting to separate at the toe, and whether she had enough in her checking account to cover the bus pass renewal.
She was thinking about completely ordinary things while Brianna Cole said extraordinary cruelties into a phone camera.
Four hundred and fifty-one views.
She closes the app.
She puts the phone in the kitchen drawer. Not her pocket, the drawer, the one with the takeout menus and the dead batteries and the random screwdriver nobody remembers acquiring. She puts it in there and closes it the way you close something you need distance from.
She stands in the kitchen for a moment.
The house is quiet. Lily is at aftercare until five. Jake is she doesn't know where Jake is. She doesn't let herself wonder where Jake is.
She goes to her room.
She lies on the floor.
Not the bed. The floor is better right now. The floor is solid and cold and completely honest about what it is. The bed is soft in a way she doesn't deserve or want at this exact moment. The floor is just the floor.
She stares at the ceiling.
She thinks about what she said to Jake in the library.
Don't make this the story where you're the hero. You walked past me all year.
She meant it. She means it still. It was true when she said it, and it is true now, and she does not take it back. But she is also aware, lying on the floor of her room in the quiet house, of another thing sitting next to the truth. Something she is not going to say out loud to anyone, possibly ever.
She is grateful he came.
She hates that she is grateful. She has a whole argument against being grateful, a solid, well-constructed argument involving self-sufficiency and not needing saving, and the fact that walking into a library and sitting down does not undo a year of walking past. The argument is good. She stands by it.
And underneath it, below the argument and the anger and the three years of practice at not needing people, she is grateful he came to find her.
She is not going to say that.
She stares at the ceiling.
She thinks about his face when she said it. The way he had nothing. No defense, no excuse, no pivot to something easier. Just sat there and took it the way you take an accurate thing. She has handed accurate things to people before and watched them argue, deflect, or make it about themselves. Jake just sat there.
She doesn't know what to do with that either.
Her phone buzzes from the kitchen drawer.
She hears it through the wall.
She does not get up.
It buzzes again.
And again.
And then a fourth time, a different rhythm, a call, not a text.
She gets up.
She crosses the hallway in her socks, opens the kitchen drawer, and looks at the screen.
Mom.
Her stomach drops a full floor.
She answers.
"Hi."
"Hi, baby." Her mother's voice, the end-of-a-double-shift voice tired at the edges but warm all the way through, the voice that has been the safest sound in Penny's life for seventeen years. "How was school?"
The question lands like a physical thing.
Penny leans against the kitchen counter.
"Fine," she says. "Normal."
A pause on the other end. Her mother has always had a gift of the pause, which means I'm giving you room to change that answer.
Penny does not change the answer.
"You sure?" her mom says.
"Yeah. Tired. Long week."
"You eating?"
"Yes, Mom."
"Real food or just "
"Real food. I made rice last night."
Her mother makes a sound of approval. Another pause. "Lily good?"
"She named a worm Gerald Two."
Her mom laughs the real laugh, the one that starts in her chest, and for a moment, the kitchen feels warmer. "That girl."
"I know."
They talk for four minutes about nothing heavy: the bus schedule, the weekend, and whether Penny needs money for anything. Her mother does not know about the video. She does not know about Brianna Cole, the comment section, or the scholarship committee meeting on Monday morning. She does not know about any of this year, really, the full shape of it, the accumulated weight of it.
Penny has kept it that way deliberately.
Her mom works two jobs. She comes home at eleven PM and leaves at six AM, and she does it with love and without complaint,t and she does not need the additional weight of Penny's problems. Penny decided that sophomore year, and she has not changed her mind.
"Okay, baby," her mom says. "I'll call on Sunday. Get some sleep."
"I will. Love you."
"Love you more."
She hangs up.
Penny stands in the kitchen holding the phone.
She thinks about what her mom's face would look like if she saw the video. The specific expression is not anger first, not even hurt first. Something quieter than both. The face of a woman who has worked herself to the bone so her daughter could go to a good school and stand somewhere better.
Penny puts the phone back in the drawer.
She looks at the clock. Four forty-seven. She needs to get Lily in thirteen minutes.
She puts her shoes on.
She gets her bag.
She opens the front door.
Jake is sitting on the porch steps.
He is not on his phone. He is not doing anything. He is just sitting there in the cold in his practice gear, elbows on his knees, like he has been there for a while and intends to stay.
He looks up when the door opens.
She looks at him.
He says, "I'll walk with you to get Lily."
Not a question. Not an offer she can politely decline. Just a statement of what is happening, quiet and simple, the same way he sat down across from her in the library.
She stands in the doorway for a moment.
She steps out and pulls the door closed behind her.
She walks down the porch steps.
He falls into step beside her.
They walk the whole six blocks to Lily's aftercare program without a single word.
It is the least alone she has felt all day.
She does not tell him that.
But when Lily explodes out of the aftercare door and launches herself at both of them simultaneously, somehow, impossibly, grabbing one of each of their hands in both of hers, and starts telling them about a boy named Theo who said dinosaurs were boring and how she corrected him for eleven minutes
Penny almost smiles.
Almost.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket.
She glances down.
A new notification.
Not the video.
A school board email.
Subject line: Formal Complaint Filed Student Conduct Case #2024-117.
And the name on the complaint is not Brianna Cole's.
It is Penny's.