Page 29 of On His Mind

The sandwich shop is a few doors down. It’s quiet with three tables and a simple menu. The man behind the counter looks up and says, “The usual, Mr. Whitmore?” before we’ve even reached him. I order a turkey sub off the menu with no changes, and then we sit and eat. In between bites, Oliver asks polite questions about my classes and how they’re going so far. I give good answers, and it’s pleasant.

When we get back to the office, he introduces me to another intern who appears to have just clocked in. She still has her bag on her shoulder when Oliver says, “Penelope, this is Lyla Gilmore. She’s a senior at Camden.”

I shake her hand.

“Nice to meet you,” she says.

I grin. “Likewise.”

Lyla looks at Oliver, and he clears his throat. “Lyla will show you the ropes, how to clock in, how to use the programs.” He points at the folder on my desk. “Don’t forget to log those into the system. Let me know when it’s done.”

“Yes,” I say, and then he’s walking into his office.

Lyla turns to me after setting down her purse. “Okay. Right this way, and I’ll show you how to clock in.”

For the rest of the afternoon, she’s teaching me how the programs talk to each other, how to log Oliver’s folder into the system under a project number. She’s easy to be near — dry, quick, a senior who’s clearly done all of this a hundred times and stopped being impressed by any of it. I like her immediately. I think we could be friends.

The afternoon flies by. I look up once and the light through the twenty-foot windows has gone gold. I look up again and it’s flat and gray, and the monitors down the row are winking off one by one as people gather their bags and leave.

“You’re fast,” Lyla says, watching me log the last of it. “He’ll like that.”

I came here to drop off a folder. Just a second, I said, in the doorway of my own morning. I look at the clock, and it’s almost six.

Oliver comes out of his glass office as I’m packing up, shrugging into his jacket.

“Good first day, Penelope.” He’s kind about it, meeting my eyes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

It feels like I’ve handed over my freedom. I nod at him before he walks off. The last few people still at their desks glance up when he walks past, telling him to have a good night. He doesn’t bother to tell them he’ll see them tomorrow.

Lyla walks with me to the elevator after we clock out. In the brushed-steel doors, I can see both our reflections, and she’s looking at me with something I can’t read all the way.

“Did he take you to lunch today?” she asks.

“Yeah,” I reply simply.

She nods. “The Whitmore men are nice,” she says. The elevator opens. “See you tomorrow, Penelope.”

When I get into my car, I start driving before I’ve even buckled my seatbelt. Oliver assigned me more tasks, and they’re sitting neatly in the folder on my passenger seat. I pull out into the evening and let the streetlights come at me one after another.

I keep waiting for the feeling I’m supposed to have. Lucky. Chosen. Privileged. This is the smart move, a good opportunity, my mother pleased for once in a way that I haven’t been able to please before. It should feel like winning something. Everything is moving exactly as it’s meant to.

The apartment’s dark when I get in. Ivory’s door is shut with no light under it. It’s quiet, so I don’t turn on the overhead light. I go to my drafting table by the window, where the pencils are still lined up the way I left them, 4H to 2B, and my own drawing is still pinned to the board from last spring. I pull the stool out and sit. I pick up a pencil, and I draw. The roofline pitched the way I want it. A window where the afternoon light would fall in a square you could sit in. The line goes down exactly the angle I think is best. Everything I draw is exactly as I want it. I don’t lift the pencil from the paper because for the first time today, I’m doing something that I want to do, something that is just for me.

Chapter 7

Percy

I’vebeenhereforthree weeks now, and I haven’t slept a full night since I got here. It’s not the bed. The bed’s fine. It’s that the second the house goes dark and quiet, the voices start, and they don’t stop. You should talk more, man. Why doesn’t this kid ever say anything? Goalies are weird. Loosen up. Have a beer. Say something, Deveroux, Jesus. They’re little things, most of them — stuff the guys tossed off and forgot about by the next drill. But my head doesn’t forget them easily. They stack up in the dark and loop, one on top of the next, until my skull aches with the whole pile of them, and the ceiling might as well be a scoreboard running my issues back.

So one night I quit trying to sleep. I unzip the front pocket of my bag and pull out a paperback. It’s written in French. There’s a sad-looking man on the cover. Mary had a thing for buyingme French-language novels. She said it was to keep the language alive in my head, but I never told her that I think in French –– that it’s my first language and my father’s voice in my head. He’d scream at me in French. It was easier for him to talk shit to me when nobody in America understood what he was saying. I smack the novel on my palm and take it downstairs. I know the guys are going give me shit for it, but when I stay in my room for too long, studying, Stanley barges in here and talks my ear off.

The guys clock the book by the end of the week. Deveroux and his little French novel. Stanley builds a whole routine around it. He can’t believe I can speak French. For some reason, people learn that you speak another language and a different set of respect is thrown your way.You must be smart. You’re so posh. Say this to me. What is it like in your brain?All the questions you can possibly think of, Stanley has asked. He is the loudest in the house and not sorry about it.

I take the same chair at the dining table every morning and every night, and the guys give me hell for that too, and I let them, because after a few days, the spot is mine and I like that it’s mine.

One night, Stanley drops into the chair across from me, mid-rant about how he should’ve picked a school with a beach, somewhere warm, somewhere that isn’t“cold-as-fuh-Michigan.”

Benson is at the counter taping a stick, and without looking up he says, “You’d drown inside a week,” and Stanley takes it as a compliment. Rowan snorts from the couch and doesn’t look up from his phone. Then Blue comes in, pulls out the chair on my left and sits. He says nothing at all, and the two of us just stay quiet in the middle of Stanley’s noise while he goes on about a beach nobody’s ever taking him to.