Page 168 of On His Mind

“Forgive him. Forgive us. The rules of the house on Hawthorne have been broken. Yeah, we know it. It’s been years. But don’t you worry, little P. We are moving on.”

The girls stand in front of their man. Rowan is the only one without a girlfriend, but he doesn’t care. He third wheels with Benson and Lucy, throwing an arm over each of their shoulders.

And then Stanley holds up a hand, the singing stops, and he pulls a folded piece of paper out of his shirt.

“Things Percy Would Never Say,” he reads. “A dramatic reading. Performed by his brothers who love him.”

Oh no.

“Rowan.”

Rowan steps forward, puts a hand over his heart, and says, in a soft voice dripping with feeling, “Penelope. When I look at you, I see the architecture of my future.”

The room loses it. I put my hand over my mouth.

“Benson.”

“Your eyes,” Benson says, gravely, “are like two perfectly poured glasses of the mango-strawberry beverage I have devoted my life to.”

“He would rather die,” Gianna wheezes. “He would rather actually die—”

“Blue.”

Blue looks at the paper. Blue looks at me. Blue says, completely flat, “I am a river of emotion,” and it destroys the entire room. Stanley has to sit down on the coffee table, Mara’s crying with laughter, and I am laughing too. I’m laughing so hard it hurts, because the whole joke, the entire joke, is that Percy would sooner walk into the sea than say one word of any of this, and everyone in this room knows it, and they’re saying it all for him because he can’t.

And somewhere under the laughing, my chest fills with too much emotion. Because this is it. This is the thing he was avoiding. My living room is full of people he loves, and I love, up at six in the morning, being ridiculous on our behalf, and I have never once in my life had friends who cared this much about my happiness, especially not ones I’ve been keeping my secrets from.

I’m about to lose my entire composure. I feel it going. I press my lips together. It doesn’t hold, I don’t cry, but I’m close, helplessly, overwhelmingly close, and Gianna sees my face and her own face goes soft.

“Okay,” Stanley says, hopping down off the table. “Okay okay okay. For the main event.” He crosses to the door with a flourish, hand on the knob. “May I present, the man himself, the goalie, the legend, the reason we’re all awake at this ungodly—”

He opens the door.

There’s no one there.

Everyone holds their breath.

“Percy?”

Stanley leans out into the hall. Looks left. Looks right.

“He was right—” Stanley pulls his head back in. “Okay. Nobody panic. I promise this was his idea, this was ninety percent his idea, he’s just — he gets shy ––”

Everyone’s moving to the window. Mara gets there first and looks down.

“He’s on the bench,” she says as everyone looks down at him.

I get up.

“He’s just — he’s sitting on the bench downstairs,” Mara says as she turns and looks at me, and everyone’s looking at me now.

Stanley says, “I’ll go get him––”

“No.” Gianna catches his arm. “No. Let her go.”

And the whole room turns to look at me. I’m standing in my activewear on a red carpet with a bedazzled wine glass in my hand, and I understand that Percy let them do this for him, and then he called me on FaceTime a few hours ago because he was probably terrified and wanted to warn me. That’s why he’s not on the other side of the door right now.

I don’t remember the walk out. But the second I step onto the sidewalk, the cold air makes me remember exactly where I am.