Page 132 of On His Mind

“Nah. That’s it.” He claps my shoulder. “Thanks for the help, man.”

I nod, and I head back down.

That night I can’t sleep. The room’s bigger than the one upstairs and it doesn’t matter. I lie there and think about her anyway, because I always think about her at night. She was the last thing before sleep for a whole summer. Now there’s just the ceiling.

The ceiling creaks above me. I think it’s Stanley, heavy and shameless, crossing his room. A door bangs. Benson laughs at something, the sound coming down muffled through the floor. They’re probably still unpacking and talking in the hallway now. Something heavy hits the ground, and there are muffled laughs.

I wait for it to get under my skin.

It doesn’t.

I lie there in the dark and listen to the house fill up over me, and something in my chest that’s been fisted tight since she left Hawthorne two weeks ago eases open, just slightly. Not all the way. Maybe not for a good while yet. But enough to breathe around.

I can’t have her. She hasn’t texted once, and I haven’t either, and that’s the answer to the only question that matters.

I don’t have her anymore, but I have this. These loud idiots I’d open a vein for.

If that’s what I get to keep, then that’s what I’ll keep.

Chapter 45

Penelope

Ivory’sbeengoneforthree weeks, and her room’s still empty at the end of the hall. The bed stripped, a few hangers she didn’t want left in the closet.

She texts constantly. London’s five hours ahead, so the photos come in while I’m still asleep and I wake up to them — the Bartlett’s studios, an old courtyard, Ivory holding a coffee in front of a building she’s going to spend a semester learning to draw, glowing, alive, exactly where she wanted to be.

Ivory:You have to come visit! It’s insane here.

Ivory:How are you?

Penelope:I’m good. Miss you.

I let the phone drop on the nightstand. Whenever it buzzes, I have some stupid hope that it’s him.

The truth is I haven’t stopped crying since I left Hawthorne. It comes when I least expect it, and it comes often, and I can’t control it. My whole life has been about control, and I can’t do the one thing I’ve always been able to do. It just arrives, and I let it, because there’s no stopping it.

I wipe my face and go back to the elevation. My hand shakes and the line comes out wrong and I do it again until I get it right.

There’s a voice in me, an old one, one my mother put there and Percy just proved right, that says the reason is simple: I wasn’t worth the risk. I wasn’t good enough for him. Ivory told me once, years ago, that I keep everyone at a distance because I’m scared of exactly this, and I let one person all the way in, and this is what was waiting.

The tears don’t stop coming.

I should sublet Ivory’s room. The ad’s been half-written for three weeks. I sit with it open some nights, and I don’t post it, and I know exactly why. Because an empty apartment means no roommate. No witness. No one to hide from. If Percy ever texted me, ever showed up at my door again, there’d be nothing to sneak around anymore — it could just be us, in the open, in my own place. So I keep the room empty. I keep it empty for a boy who isn’t coming, and I know how that sounds, but I do it anyway.

Senior year starts and I carry the heaviest load of my life through it like a sleepwalker.

Senior Project Studio, Advanced Materials, the thesis prep — this is the year everything I fought for pays out, the year I’ve been building toward since I blew up Chicago and my mother’s plans for a storefront over a hardware store. I do the work, and it’s fine. The thing that used to light me up — a problem worth solving, a section that finally resolves — comes and goes and leaves me flat. I sit in studio at a desk I love and feel nothing.

The firm’s the same. I go in, I do the sheets, Renata grunts her approval, and I drive home thinking about quitting for the first time — not because the work got worse, but because I can’t feel it anymore. It’s still mine. I fought my mother for it, and I won, and it’s still the life I chose. I’m just too far under this month to reach it.

I get the girls back, and it’s the cruelest joke of the whole thing.

Gianna texts, and I say yes now, every time, because there’s no reason to say no anymore — no secret to protect, no boy to sneak to, nothing left to hide. So I’m in the group again, at the girls’ nights I bailed on all last year, folded back into the exact friendships I threw away to keep him.

I got them back by losing him.

When I sit in Gianna’s living room, I hate that I’m listening extra carefully when she’s talking about the team and how the season is starting next month. She never once mentions Percy, but I sit there straining for a scrap of him, desperately.