Chapter 8 One More Year Is A Lie
PENNY POV
The video has sixty-three views by the time Penny gets to school on Monday morning.
She knows because she checked at seven-fifteen, standing at the bathroom sink with the tap running so the sound of water could cover the sound of her breathing. Sixty-three people. Sixty-three strangers were watching a recording of her worst moment on loop like it was entertainment.
She put her phone in her bag. She put her hair under her hoodie. She walked to school.
That is the system. That has always been the system. You feel the thing, you fold it up, you put it somewhere small, and you walk.
So she walks.
The hallway is the first test.
Penny has a system for hallways, too. Eyes forward, pace steady, hoodie up, don't stop moving. If you stop moving, you become a target. Targets are stationary. She is never stationary.
She makes it to her locker.
She makes it to first period.
She sits in her seat and opens her notebook, and her hand is completely steady, and she is fine.
Then the girl two seats over leans to her friend and whispers something, and they both look at Penny and look away, and the friend covers her mouth when she laughs.
Penny writes the date at the top of her page.
She underlines it.
She is fine.
Between the second and third period, she sees Jake.
He is with Marcus and two guys from the team. They are taking up the whole hallway the way the football boys always do, not on purpose exactly, just because they never learned to make themselves smaller. Jake is in the middle, taller than the rest, laughing at something Marcus said.
Penny is on the right side of the hallway. He is on the left. They are going to pass each other in approximately four seconds.
This is the deal. Home and school stay separate. They agreed. It made sense when they agreed to it, and it still makes sense and she is going to look straight ahead, and so is he, and everything is going to be completely fine.
She looks straight ahead.
He looks straight ahead.
They pass each other with six feet of hallway between them.
She does not look back. She counts to five in her head. She turns the corner. She lets out one breath, controlled, quiet, through her nose.
Fine.
Completely fine.
She tells herself that all the way to the third period. She almost gets herself to believe it until she sits down and realizes her pen is shaking against her notebook, and she has to press her palm flat on the page to make it stop.
Lunch is where the system breaks.
Penny picks up her tray. She picks a path across the cafeteria, the one that goes around the edges, away from the loud tables, toward the corner where she always sits. She has walked this path every day for three years. She knows every table, every chair, every face she needs to avoid.
She doesn't see Derek until it's too late.
He steps out from between two tables right as she passes, and his shoulder hits her tray from underneath, and everything goes up and comes down. Her food. Her juice. All of it. On the floor. On her shoes. Some on the sleeve of her hoodie.
Six people laugh.
Penny stands very still.
She looks at the floor. She looks at the tray. She bends down and picks it up. She picks up the fork. The napkin. The empty juice carton. She stacks it all back on the tray slowly, piece by piece, like she is doing something ordinary and not currently performing the act of surviving in front of an audience.
She can feel the cafeteria around her. She can feel the eyes.
And she can feel, without looking, exactly where Jake Mercer is sitting.
She does not look.
She carries her empty tray to the trash. She sets it on the stack. She turns around and walks back to the corner table, sits down, and opens her book.
She reads the same sentence four times before the words start making sense.
One more year, she tells herself. Just one more year.
It sounds less true than it did this morning.
She gets through the rest of the day on muscle memory.
Fourth period. Fifth. Sixth. She takes notes. She answers one question in AP English because her teacher calls on her directly, and she can't pretend she doesn't know the answer because she always knows the answer, and everyone in that class already knows it, too.
The girl from the second period is also in AP English. She doesn't look at Penny this time. That is almost worse somehow. Penny isn't even worth the energy of a second look.
After school, she walks home.
She picks up Lily from the corner where the aftercare van drops her off. Lily is wearing one purple shoe and one green shoe and does not seem to notice or care. Lily takes Penny's hand and talks about her day for eleven straight minutes without pausing for breath. Penny listens to every word. She asks follow-up questions. She laughs in the right places.
She is good at this. Being present for Lily even when she is very far away inside herself.
They get home. Penny makes a snack. Lily sits on her stool, eats apple slices, and talks about a drawing she wants to make. Penny gets the paper and the crayons and sets them out and goes to start dinner prep.
She reaches into her hoodie pocket for her phone.
Her fingers find the sticky note first.
She stops.
She stands at the counter with the folded paper between her fingers and her eyes closed. She does not unfold it. She doesn't need to. She has read it enough times to see it on the inside of her eyelids.
Thank you for last night.
Six words from a boy who walked straight past her in the hallway today, like she was part of the wall.
She should throw this away. She has been telling herself to throw it away since she first found it. Keeping it is the kind of thing that gets a person hurt. She knows better than this. She has always known better than this.
She folds it smaller.
She puts it back in her pocket.
She starts dinner.
Jake comes home at five-thirty. He comes into the kitchen and says something to Lily, and then stops when he sees Penny at the stove. She can feel him looking at her. She keeps her eyes on the pot.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," she says.
He goes to the fridge. He gets a glass of water. He leans against the counter nearby, and she waits for him to say something about today. About the hallway. About the cafeteria. About the video with sixty-three views, that is probably a hundred and twelve by now.
He says, "How was school?"
Penny stirs the pot.
"Fine," she says.
A pause. Then, quieter: "Penny."
She turns around.
His face is doing something complicated. His jaw is set, but his eyes are sorry, and she recognizes that combination now; she has catalogued it, filed it away. It is the face he makes when he knows something he is not sure how to say.
She waits.
His mouth opens.
His phone rings.
Not Brianna this time.
He looks at the screen and something changes. He stands up straighter. He answers it and says, "Yeah, Coach," and walks out of the kitchen.
Penny turns back to the stove.
She stirs the pot.
And then, very quietly, without planning to, she takes the sticky note out of her pocket and unfolds it one more time.
Thank you for last night.
Below it, in the same cramped handwriting, the part she always reads last.
She turns it over.
There is new writing on the back.
Writing that was not there this morning.
Her breath stops.