CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

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2021

          Going back to school was the worst thing that had happened to me that month.

          Though I'd been here for well over three years, these four walls and long, dark hallways still felt foreign to me, and I had to make an extra effort to learn how to navigate the building. Time I spent attempting to find my way through an ocean of people was time wasted, as I'd quickly realized how the world didn't wait for anyone, not even me, and I couldn't bother with mundane tasks anymore, not when I had a senior project to plan and complete if I wanted to graduate. The clocks ticked, each passing of a second slicing right through me, and no number of words of reassurance could make it better.

          Nothing mattered.

          I could barely stay awake during my lectures now, including Film Theory, and I knew Chase had noticed this. I was certain he would have noticed it, even if I didn't sit in the front row to be the closest to him while respecting his legal and moral boundaries, and I knew he knew I was overworking myself. I had to overwork myself just to match the work rhythm of my peers, as most of them had nothing to prove to one another, and I didn't want to be seen as a nepotism baby. I wanted to be me, Penn, and not my parents' daughter, but my name would follow me everywhere I went.

          At least, in Chase's cabin, I could find some escapism from the real world. Even though I'd brought my laptop along, unable to part from it and not fill my empty time slots with college work, Chase had also been there. If anything, I'd been a distraction to him, not the other way around, with all my drama and crying over him hanging out with his peers, and, with each of my missteps, he was one step closer to leaving me for good. All in all, I was desperate now, clinging to the sliver of a bright future he and my family still saw for me, an alternate reality when I'd follow my dreams and get all I ever wanted.

          (You, Chase, you.)

          That reality wouldn't come as soon if I stayed like this. I sat in the front row, Savannah's fast typing on her laptop lulling me to sleep, and I could vaguely hear Chase in the background discussing our latest papers. He'd brought them all with him, graded, and, if there was something my brain was constantly on the lookout for, it was disappointment in his voice. My elbow slipped out of the edge of my table as soon as my brain detected it and, when I looked up, he was right there, standing in front of me.

          "See me after class, please," he asked. Cold, distant, non-committal—the way he needed to act when we were here, but also the way he'd been acting for days now. Then, he slid my paper face down over my keyboard, possibly to save me from the humiliation of other people seeing my grade, but his request had already said too much. People knew I was failing now and some of my worst fears were being brought to reality in a way I never thought possible.

          I never thought Chase would be the one to announce it.

          It was his job. With me being one of the Steele 5, it made sense for him to want to see me after his lecture ended, especially when I was the only one of us who had yet to declare a senior project. It still prickled the hair on the back of my neck, sending glaciers down my spine, and all I could do was weakly nod.

          Weak. That was all I would ever be. While staying here, I'd have to repeatedly be reminded of the power imbalance between me and Chase and dismiss every point he raised about the university's laws and rules that were the only things standing in our way. I didn't care about the so-called protection those things provided me when I wasn't in any danger, and they hadn't done a thing to protect me or all those other girls from the preying men in frat parties.

          "You okay?" Savannah asked me, once Chase had already walked away, resuming the lecture like he hadn't just left a crack in my heart. I took some time to remind myself she was asking that purely out of concern, like a friend would, but I couldn't forget about how she hadn't gotten a spot under Chase's supervision all because of me, and my brain attempted to detect the slightest hint of mockery in her words.

          You okay? Like, are you sure you're ready for this? Don't you think you're in way over your head? Don't you think you should have left your spot open for someone who actually has what it takes?

          "Yes," I replied, one second too late.

          "You don't look fine." I clenched my jaw, despising myself for having given anyone an opening to get a good glimpse at me. "No offense, Penny, but you haven't looked fine in a long time. When was the last time you got a nice night of sleep?"

          "Does it matter?" I crumpled my paper into a ball and tossed it into my bag, out of my sight. If Chase noticed any of this, he made no motion to acknowledge it; in fact, his eyes never even darted my way. "I have a degree to finish."

          "Last time I checked, so does everyone in this hall, and no one looks half as wrecked as you." I winced. Maybe that was her idea of being supportive, but the thing with Savannah and Ingrid was that support always translated into somehow making themselves feel superior over me and now, three years past, I'd grown quite fed up with it. "Do you need to talk? Maybe you should talk to someone."

          "Maybe you should mind your business, don't you think? If I'm failing, good for you. It's one less person standing in your way."

          She blinked, dumbfounded. "Sorry, what? You think this is about some competition between us?"

          "Hasn't it always been about the competition for you? The grades, the friends, Ingrid. Even when you didn't like Ingrid, you were always so threatened by her you went through great lengths to justify antagonizing her when she was just doing her own thing. After the frat party, you still wouldn't stop." She clenched her jaw, eyes glistening, and guilt struck through my chest like a missile. I didn't allow myself to dwell on it, that son of a bitch of an emotion that ate away at you until you wasted away. "Ever since she stopped accepting that bullshit treatment, you turned to me because I wouldn't say anything. I don't need you to patronize me, Savannah. I'm doing fine. If I ever need help, I know where to ask for it, and it's not with you."

          Savannah sniffled. "Wow, okay. Just so you know, I don't like the new you. The old Penny was nicer."

          She immediately reached out for her phone, like we weren't in the middle of a lecture, possibly to tell Ingrid about my sudden new attitude. I wasn't stupid and could tell they quite enjoyed whispering about me behind my back, spilling nasty assumptions to fill in the blanks of my life I wouldn't share with them, and I was content with keeping them at bay. 

          I didn't need that kind of conditional support, the support that only existed whenever I was perfect, whenever I conformed to their expectations of me, whenever I sat in silence and tolerated every dig at me, every backhanded compliment. I did that to myself more than enough already, not knowing any other way, and I'd expected something different from the two girls I called my best friends.

          I supposed that was why they kept me around, like a pet they could show off whenever my last name could open doors, whenever my awkwardness was just so cute, whenever I could be taken advantage of and be left alone. It was easy to keep me around so they would have someone to compare themselves to and feel better about themselves, as there wasn't much to me that could be praised in the circles we frequented, and I had clung to their admiration like lifelines. It hadn't been hard for me to get hooked on their attention, the slivers of respect they sometimes showed me whenever it was convenient, and no one had ever talked to me about how addicting and gratifying it was to feel wanted and needed.

          With my parents' friends, I had something to prove. They didn't need me more than I needed them and those were the people I needed to impress if I wanted to have a career, if I wanted to have a future, especially since I couldn't fully depend on Chase to do so. If it was just him, people would get suspicious, and I couldn't risk ruining his life just to further my career, a career that wasn't even a certainty. Out of the two, I wanted to keep him the most.

          And then the guilt came gnawing right back, when I made the mistake of glancing at Savannah from the corner of my eye. She was no longer typing on her phone or on her laptop, barely registering what Chase was talking about, and, though she stared at her lap, I could still see her eyes had glassed up with tears. Savannah, tiny, sweet Savannah, all bright-eyed and bird-boned, couldn't take a mean comment but could deliver them without hesitation, almost viciously so. 

          Even so, in spite of it all, this was the girl I shared an apartment with, who I'd laughed and cried with, and I didn't like fighting fire with fire. It wouldn't solve anything—it would only make her be even meaner in return and it was well established by now I couldn't take criticism any better than she could—and it just made me an overall shitty person, on top of having all but ruined her senior year.

          And yet, I didn't apologize.

          I kept my mouth shut, biting my tongue so hard I could have bled out in that lecture hall, and no one would have noticed a thing. Savannah certainly wouldn't have, and I knew she would harbor a grudge against me over my words to her for, at least, a month, but I still attempted to convince myself it hadn't been nearly half as bad as what I'd had to hear coming from both her and Ingrid since freshman year.

          Like I'd had to suck it up from the very start, she would have to do the same.

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          Staying behind after class used to be a privilege, a rare moment I'd get to have with Chase, made all so much more exhilarating thanks to how dangerous it was, the constant danger of being found manifesting as a rush of adrenaline. He rarely ever let students stay behind, always excusing himself, always in a hurry to leave and do bigger, better things, but there was an unspoken open-door policy for me—most of the time, anyway. With him, I felt like there was nothing I couldn't do, nowhere I couldn't be, and I was strong.

          Now, with him keeping me at arm's length, I felt crushed.

          I didn't know how to approach the subject. It all sounded so ridiculous now, getting worse every time I thought about it, and I felt mortified just by considering bringing it up to him. I couldn't ask him if he had called me out to publicly humiliate me, knowing very well he wasn't capable of such a thing, like he had drilled into my head over and over, and it felt like betrayal to even think otherwise.

          So, after everyone else had left and it was just me and him by his desk, I hung my head low, wishing I could occupy less space.

          Oftentimes, I tried to prepare every single thing I'd tell him in my head, plan every conversation, predict every scenario. The back and forth I went through in my bed, in the shower, in the library was obsessive, almost pathological, and I'd conserved enough strength of spirit to acknowledge that wasn't healthy, but I'd been doing that my whole life with multiple people—my parents, my high school teachers, waiters, cashiers. Chase, bless his soul, had spent a great portion of the past three years trying to get me to loosen up, worry less, live more, but I was so deeply terrified of the unknown, so painfully aware of the devastating consequences of doing or saying the right thing that I just couldn't afford to not do things this way.

          "So," he began, taking off his glasses and interlacing his fingers over his closed laptop. "What's going on with you?"

          "Regarding what, exactly?"

          He looked up at me, blue eyes so misty they looked gray under the lighting in the lecture hall. "You're unfocused. You lost track of your train of thought halfway through your paper." He nodded towards my bag, like he'd seen me stuff the crumpled-up papers in there. "While your paper wasn't bad, it wasn't your best work. It's obvious that you're distracted, and that ends up reflecting on what you write. It's messy. You start talking about something and it's a solid beginning, then try to make a connection to something completely unrelated, and everything goes downhill. You know, I usually look forward to reading everything you submit, but this just wasn't the best. That's why I wanted to talk to you in private. Graduation is right around the corner; you can't afford to mess with your GPA this late in your education, especially since you have yet to declare a senior project. If you had already done it, I could excuse this by arguing you're working hard on your project, but you haven't, so my hands are tied. I don't want to have to report this, but I don't know what to do here. I don't know what to do with you."

          "Oh."

          There wasn't much I could say in response to that, but I was determined not to show how devastating his disappointment in me was. It was consistently the one thing I devoted effort into avoiding and standing in front of him while he uttered an entire speech about how I'd failed miserably at meeting his expectations was one of the worst things that could have happened to me. He knew me better than anyone else in my life and knew what to do and say to make me feel safe, and yet I still felt so small, so overexposed like an open wound.

          "I want to help you," he continued, "but I don't know how because you won't talk to me. You won't tell me what's wrong."

          "I've been . . ." I took a deep breath, tried to relax my shoulders, but all my muscles were so stiff I felt like I'd grown a second skeleton. He eyed me carefully, though there was something else in his expression I couldn't quite decipher. "I guess I haven't been sleeping much. I'm tired. My thoughts feel like a jumbled mess when I don't sleep."

          That wasn't a complete lie, but my lack of sleep wasn't just affecting my ability to write a coherent paper. I was forgetting things, minor commitments like my turn to do the dishes, and even birthdays, which had earned me the saddest text message I'd ever gotten from my mother in return. My room looked like it had just been attacked by a tornado, with clothes tossed onto the floor, half empty mugs of coffee left behind, the bitter, earthy taste lingering in the air hours after I'd left, and there was a stack of overdue library books on my desk I never remembered to pick up and bring with me. I knew all of this; the theory of things always came naturally to me, but I repeatedly failed to apply that knowledge to my everyday life. 

          Mundane tasks had become so much harder to complete thanks to how straining they were, how boring they felt, and I didn't want to become boring by association if I bothered with them. It wasn't a sustainable system and my life was suffering because of yet another one of my stupid little obsessions, but I couldn't stop. I'd never known how to let things go.

          "I don't think that's all it is," Chase commented, leaning back in his chair, the one he always said killed his back. He was much more relaxed now that he'd managed to crack me open just a bit, whereas I remained apprehensive. "You've been tired before, never to this extent. You've never let it affect your work."

          It wasn't fair for him to tell me I was the one not talking to him, as our lack of recent communication hadn't been due to lack of trying coming from me, but I didn't tell him that. It would be even less fair to do so, knowing how much work he'd had since the school year started, even more than in the years prior, and I took every moment with him I could get like it was the last one I'd be getting for an unknown period of time. Even this conversation, one that was meant to be seen as a teaching moment, something professional and academic, wasn't something I could take for granted.

          Even with graduation being only a few months away, I still felt like I was running out of time. It was a suffocating feeling, akin to drowning, and it consumed me.

          "I know. I'm sorry. I'll do better next time."

          "I'll hold you to that." This time, there was no way of hiding the smile on his lips—I could even hear it in his voice while not having the courage to look him in the eye. Maybe my ingenuity was amusing to him, maybe it was just a reminder of how much I still had to learn compared to a veteran in academia, but I still prayed for the day I wouldn't feel inferior next to him. It felt so stupid, too, and I blamed those university laws for strengthening my anxieties, for making me see condescension when it was all just in my head. "Can you look at me? Please?"

          I did so. He was standing next to me now and I assumed he'd taken a glance at the door to make sure no one was standing outside because he was standing closer to me than normal, too close for a professor to stand in front of a student. I held my breath, like the smallest of exhales would blow him away from me, and he raised a hand to tuck a rebel strand of my hair behind my ear. It was long now, far too long for my personal taste and it often got in the way when I was studying, but Chase liked it like this, especially unkempt from how often he ran his fingers through it.

          "You're one of the brightest minds in this place," he told me, gentle now, free of the haughtiness imposed on him by his job. "It takes more than just brains to make it. You can spend all your life studying to be great, but, if your heart's not in it, then you'll burn yourself out. You need to have passion. It's why I chose you as an advisee. It's why Savannah didn't."

          "No one has ever told me I have passion before," I admitted, forcing myself to ignore the stab to the heart caused by the mere mention of Savannah's name. "I'm not sure I do."

          "That's not true. I've seen the stuff you've written. That's not just book smarts."

          I shook my head. "I feel like I'm fading into oblivion, you know? You can tell all my professors it takes passion, not just good grades to succeed, but passion alone won't make me not fail their classes. Nothing I do ever feels enough."

          "I'm one of your professors. I'd beg to differ on that one. I've seen what you can do." He placed his index finger under my chin, raising my face after I'd, once again, looked away. When his eyes found mine, the world around me blurred in that way only he knew how to. "You'll find your footing. You have everything inside you to do it."

          I briefly pondered if I should tell him about my argument with Savannah, as he could tell there was something else going on besides simple physical exhaustion, but ultimately decided against it. He'd always been pretty adamant about not having time for petty college drama, which this classed as, and I didn't want to bother him with my silly early-twenties problems that I should be solving by myself, anyway.

          "Do you want to do something tonight?" I tentatively asked, when his finger hooked on one of the hoops on my jeans. "I don't have any urgent papers to work on and I honestly need to get out of that apartment before I explode."

          He grimaced. "Not tonight."

          I deflated. "Oh. Okay."

          "It's just not a good day. I'm sorry. I already have some plans for tonight."

          "I get it. It's fine." I tried to move away, gather my stuff, afraid I'd lingered behind for too long, especially with Savannah having already filled Ingrid in every mean word I'd said to her, but he pulled me back. "I should go. I don't want to keep the girls waiting."

          "Look. I'm not just saying this to make excuses. I really do have plans."

          "I know."

          I was no longer trying to break free, but his insistence was leaving a bad taste in my mouth. I knew he had told me I had no reason to be jealous of his friends, even though I'd explained exactly what my problem was, but these constant feelings of inadequacy weren't easy to ignore. It was a persistent, gnawing fear of there being something fundamentally wrong with me, something that would scare him off for good.

          "I'm meeting up with your father."

          "Huh?" I blinked. "What for? Am I—"

          "No, no. You're not in trouble. It's not a parent-teacher meeting." This time, he was the one finding it hard to meet my eyes. I was the one to search for them, that sliver of blue in between all the monochromatic tones. "We've been talking for a while, and I didn't know how to tell you without it sounding like I'm taking advantage of you or using you in any way. It's not what this is. He . . . well, he once contacted me to say he was interested in reading my scripts. I guess Stephen tipped him off that I wanted to dip my toes in professional productions, so I took the opportunity. Naturally, none of this would have happened without you, so . . ."

          "Oh, Chase, that's incredible. Congratulations." His hand remained on the curve of my waist, warmer than any other part of my body, and it was the most intimate we could be. My heart threatened to explode with pride, even though they were just talking, and nothing was set in stone, but I was glad to repay him in any way I could, even just as a way to introduce him to stardom. My father was good at what he did, and he recognized talent when he saw it, but I had also believed in Chase since the beginning; in a way, I really had been the catalyst for all of this. "If there's anyone who deserves it, it's you."

          His grin widened and I saw them—I saw the stars in his eyes, the star he had always been meant to be. "Thanks, Penn. It means a lot. Still . . ." He paused. "It just means we can't run any risks, now more than ever. It would be one thing for people to know he was looking at your scripts"—I frowned; accusations of nepotism were nothing new to me—"but if they find that they're mine, they might start to wonder how that came to be. Using Stephen as a cover can only work until a certain point."

          "I know. I know." I risked stepping forward to kiss him just once, for a fleeting moment. Part of me wondered if I'd even be a footnote on a script he ever got to see on a big screen, or if I'd just be resigned to smiling for a photograph as my father's guest. "I won't ruin this for you."

          "We can't ruin this. It's bigger than everything I've ever done. If it goes well . . ."

          "You're going to be a superstar, Professor Steele."

          "That has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?"

          He eventually let me go, promising we'd meet again soon, and I clung to his words with all the strength he had left, oblivious to the fact I'd have to face Savannah in all my lectures for the day and then later at home. I almost believed I'd get away with it, the memory of our argument growing in distance by the second, but then my phone buzzed with a notification, and I was brought back to my less than flattering reality.

          I'd been summoned to the bathroom by Ingrid Vogel herself. Her tone was hard to read via text most of the time, especially when she was sober, and that gave me a window of opportunity to fool myself into thinking she wasn't angry, but I knew her better than that. If I didn't go, I'd have to face her eventually and I supposed it was better to confront her in a public place, where there would be witnesses.

          Huffing, I pushed open the door, knowing I'd find her there waiting for me.

          "Hey," Ingrid greeted, standing in her usual spot in the girls' bathroom. She held a cigarette behind her ear—unlit, fortunately, but I wouldn't put it past her to light it just because she could. "Care to explain why you're being a bitch to Sav?"

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