Page 10 of On His Mind

I’m Percy Deveroux. Goalie. Freshman. Camden Wolves. A guy who lives on Hawthorne Street with four athletes and a whiteboard.

For a minute I don’t go inside. I stand in the doorway of a house that isn’t mine, trying to figure out how I got here. None of it adds up. When you don’t let yourself picture a life, and then the life shows up anyway, your head can’t process it — it’s like being handed a language you never learned and being asked to read something out loud.

This feels like a lie. It feels like a setup. Some part of me is standing here waiting for Mike Deveroux to come around the corner of the house with that look on his face, the almost-smile, the one that meant he’d already decided how the night was going to go and was enjoying knowing it before I did.

He’s not here.He doesn’t get to be here. I make myself say it in my head twice.

The street keeps going around me. Car doors shutting. More boxes being hauled into the houses. Laughter from somebody’s mother.

Life just continues, right in front of me, like mine didn’t split in half thirty seconds ago on a lawn.

Behind me, the kitchen goes off. Benson says something I don’t catch.

Rowan says, “We’re ordering pizza.”

Stanley makes a sound of betrayal.

Then a laugh.

I just stand holding the note while the house makes noise behind me, warm and strange and too much, and for the first time in my life, I don’t feel like running.

I step inside and close the front door.

Keep the past in the past.

Day one.

You vs you.

Chapter 2

Penelope

“There’sapackageherefor you!”

I’m elbow-deep in the second suitcase, which is the one I packed badly, because by the time I got to it I’d stopped caring and started shoving. Everything in it is going to need to be steamed.

“Bring it in here.”

Ivory shoulders the door open with a box under one arm and stops dead.

“Oh my God.” She looks at the floor. There are four piles on it, and one of them is only shoes. “Penelope, I’ve never seen you so unorganized.”

“I am organized.”

She laughs, setting the package down. I don’t have to look at it to know what it is. Ivory pulls out her phone and says, “I need to take a picture.”

“Of what?” I scoff.

“Evidence that you’re human like the rest of us.”

I shake my head. “This is why my door was shut.”

“Smile,” she says, pointing the phone at me.

I lift a shoulder and smile shyly.

“Open your package,” she says, jumping on my bed. “I want to see what your mom got you this time.”