Chapter 9 The Boy Who Watched
JAKE POV
He hears the crash before he sees it.
The cafeteria is loud; it's always loud, but that sound cuts through everything. The tray is hitting the floor. Food scattering. The particular kind of silence that follows before the laughter starts.
Jake turns.
Penny is on her knees.
She is picking up a fork. Then a napkin. Then the empty juice carton, slowly, methodically, like she is taking inventory. Her head is down. Her hoodie is pulled up. Around her, six people are laughing, and Derek Mills is standing two feet away with his hands in his pockets and a smile that makes Jake's back teeth press together.
Derek. Of course, it's Derek.
Jake knows that smile. He has seen it aimed at a dozen different people over four years of sitting at the same lunch table. He has always told himself Derek is just like that, annoying but harmless, not worth the argument.
He watches Penny stand up.
She dusts off her knees.
She picks up the tray with both hands and walks to the trash like nothing happened, like she is just a person returning a tray. Like the laughter isn't still going, like Derek isn't still smiling.
She doesn't look at Jake once.
Not once.
Marcus is saying something next to him. Jake has no idea what. His fork is in his hand, and he puts it down on the tray, and he sits there and watches Penny disappear around the corner, and he thinks:
She didn't check.
She didn't look across the cafeteria to see if he was watching. She didn't look to see if anyone was going to step in. She already knew the answer. She factored him into her plan the same way she factored in Derek, the same way she factored in the laughter as something that was going to happen, something to survive, not something that might help.
She already knew he wouldn't do anything.
And she was right.
Jake pushes his tray away.
"You good?" Marcus asks.
"Yeah," Jake says.
He doesn't eat for the rest of lunch.
Practice is bad.
Not the football part. The football part is automatic. His body runs the routes, takes the snaps, and reads the defense. His body has been doing this since he was nine years old, and it doesn't need his brain anymore.
His brain is in the cafeteria.
It keeps replaying the moment. The crash. Penny on her knees. The way she stood up without looking around for help. The way she already knew.
After practice, Derek jogs past him toward the locker room and says, "Good session, Mercer," and slaps his shoulder pad.
Jake says nothing.
Derek doesn't notice. He never notices.
In the locker room, Marcus sits next to Jake on the bench and says, quietly, "That thing at lunch today was messed up."
Jake looks at him.
Marcus shrugs. "Derek thinks he's funny. He's not."
"Why didn't you say that at lunch?" Jake asks.
Marcus opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks at his shoes. "I don't know."
"Yeah," Jake says. "Me neither."
They sit there for a moment. The locker room is loud around them. Someone is playing music. Someone else is arguing about the upcoming game schedule.
Marcus says, "Is she okay? The girl from your house?"
"Her name is Penny," Jake says.
Marcus blinks. "Okay. Is Penny okay?"
Jake doesn't answer that. He doesn't know the answer. He grabs his bag and goes.
He gets home at five, and Lily hits him like a small missile the second he opens the door.
"JAKE." She wraps both arms around his legs. "I drew a picture of a volcano today, and my teacher said it was excellent, and I put a dinosaur inside the volcano because why not."
He picks her up. He squeezes her harder than he means to, and she makes a surprised sound and says, "Too tight, too tight," and he loosens his grip and just holds her.
Over her shoulder, he sees the kitchen.
Penny is at the table. Head down. Homework spread out around her. Pencil moving. She doesn't look up when he comes in, doesn't pause, doesn't give any sign that she heard the door at all.
He watches her for a second.
She gets to the bottom of a page and flips it without looking up.
He carries Lily to the living room. He sits with her while she shows him the volcano drawing. The dinosaur inside it is green with enormous teeth and a very happy expression considering it is inside a volcano. Jake tells her it's the best volcano he's ever seen. Lily says she knows.
At six-thirty, Penny calls them both for dinner.
They sit at the table. Lily talks about the volcano drawing again, in more detail this time, with hand gestures. Jake eats. He looks at Penny across the table. She is cutting Lily's food into smaller pieces without being asked. She is nodding at exactly the right moments in the volcano story. She is completely present and completely unreachable at the same time.
She doesn't look at him once during dinner.
After he helps Lily with her bath and her bedtime, he comes downstairs, and Penny is still at the table. She has switched from homework to a textbook now. Her highlighter moves in a steady line.
Jake stands in the kitchen doorway.
He wants to say something. He has been trying to figure out what that something is since lunch. He has turned it over all afternoon, during practice, during the drive home, during Lily's dinosaur volcano story, and he still doesn't have it.
I saw what happened today. Too late.
Derek is an idiot. Not enough.
I should have said something. True, but useless now.
He goes upstairs.
He sits on the edge of his bed and stares at the wall.
He thinks about the photograph on the windowsill. He thinks about Penny in the dark kitchen at midnight, putting a mug in front of him like it was nothing, sitting across from him in the quiet like she had nowhere better to be. He thinks about the sticky note he left on the coffee maker. Six words. He thought six words were brave. He thought that meant something.
It meant nothing.
Words on a sticky note while she is picking food off the cafeteria floor alone.
He lies back on his bed and looks at the ceiling, and stays there for a long time.
At nine-fifteen, he hears something.
He sits up.
Footsteps. Light ones. Penny's room is at the end of the hall, his is at the top of the stairs, and he can hear when her door opens because the floorboard just outside it has a specific creak that is different from all the others.
The creak happens.
Then nothing.
Then, very quietly, a sound he can't immediately identify. Like paper. Like something being unfolded.
Then silence again.
Then her door closes.
Jake sits on the edge of his bed in the dark, completely still.
He wrote on the back of the sticky note this morning. He did it at six-fifteen before practice, standing at her door for thirty seconds before he slid it under. He almost didn't. He almost peeled off just the original note and kept the back to himself.
But he wrote it.
He wrote: I saw what happened in the hallway yesterday. I should have said something. I didn't. That's on me.
And then, because he couldn't stop himself, below that:
I'm going to do better.
Five words. A promise he made to a folded piece of paper and slid under a girl's door at six in the morning.
He has no idea if she found it. He has no idea if she read it. She gave him nothing all day, not one look, not one sign.
But her light is still on.
He can see it under his door from the hallway.
She is awake.
And somewhere in this house, she is holding that note.
Jake lies back down and stares at the ceiling and realizes, with the slow certainty of something he cannot take back, that he is in serious trouble.
Not the football kind. Not the scholarship kind.
The kind that changes things.