Page 4 of Saving Penny
Penny and Tori had been best friends since high school. They had met on the first day of their tenth-grade year at Coral Springs High, and had been inseparable. College was no different. They were accepted into the same college and life had been good.
Penny didn’t know what she would have done without Tori. After her parents died, Tori had helped to keep Penny sane. She loved Tori as if she were her blood sister, but right now, she’d better have a good excuse for calling.
“Ha ha, bitch. If that were the case, I would have recorded myself screaming through my orgasm, just so you could remember what one sounds like.”
“Bitch,” Penny chuckled, flopping onto her back. “What do you want?”
“Someone hit the Mega Card. Someone is going to wake up a gazillionaire!”
“What? Was it you?” Penny screeched, flying out of the bed. She rushed out of her bedroom to find her purse.
“Hell no. I would have kicked your door down if I would have won close to a billion dollars.”
Penny reached her living room and turned on the lamp near her couch. Her purse lied just where she had left it last night when she had gotten home from work. She flopped down on the couch so that she could dig through her overstuffed bag.
“Any chance you have the numbers?”
“I memorized them, hoping that the numbers would miraculously appear on my tickets,” Tori groaned through the phone.
“What were they?” she asked, pulling her ticket out of her wallet.
“First number was nine.”
Penny’s first number was the same. She shook her head. No need for alarm.
“Thirty,” Tori said with a dramatic pause.
Okay, her next number was thirty. This had to be a coincidence. Her heart began to race as she cleared her throat and sat up on the couch.
“Stop being dramatic and tell me the rest of the numbers,” Penny demanded impatiently. Her breaths came hard, and she was trying to keep herself from hyperventilating.
“You’re no fun. Forty, sixteen, twenty, and the bonus ball was five.”
Penny stared down at her ticket, unable to move. That small piece of paper hung in her hand while she stared at it in disbelief.
“Tori,” she whispered, swallowing hard. “Read them to me again, please.”
“Penny, what is it?” Tori asked, excitement lining her voice.
“Just read them again.” The ticket became blurry as her hand began to shake. She feverishly wiped her eyes and blinked a few times to clear her vision.
“Nine, thirty, forty, sixteen, twenty, with the bonus ball being five.”
Holy mother of God.
Every single number was located in the exact same order that Tori read them off to her on her ticket.
A scream ripped from Penny as she jumped up on her couch and celebrated, not even caring that it was in the wee hours of the morning.
She was fucking rich!
Nine hundred million dollars richer.
“Penny!”
She paused and looked around, not having realized that she’d dropped her phone.
“Hello?” she gasped, snatching her phone up from the couch. She jumped down from the couch and began to pace the floor. Her hand shook as she put her phone up to her ear.
