Emergency Contact(21)
It astounded her that a comic book featuring cartoon mice and cats could trick her into learning so much about World War II. Not only learn about it but care about it. She’d known about Auschwitz and how they told all the prisoners that they were going to take showers and instead, cutting off their hair, throwing it in a pile, and sending them to the gas chamber. Even kids. In history last year they’d had a quiz on the dates and significant events of the war, and she’d gotten a near-perfect score. Yet it wasn’t until she read Maus and lived it through the eyes of a father and son mouse, that she saw past the cold facts. That night Penny read Maus twice and cried. She knew then that she had to become a writer.
It made what happened at school the following Monday worth it. Amber told everyone in French that Penny had left abruptly because she had diarrhea. After that Penny was cured of ever trying to play nice with people from school again. Penny might have been unpopular, but so was Amber. Unless you were super-popular or second-most super-popular, the difference was negligible. You were a loser. What separated Penny from Amber was that anybody could smell Amber’s desperation. To Penny that was far more pathetic than simply being invisible. Penny would stop trying. Instead she’d spend time preparing for her future, living in books until the exciting part of her life would begin. Things would matter then. In fact, everything would be different.
? ? ?
Ten minutes in and Penny already knew her eight a.m. fiction-writing course on Thursdays would be her favorite. Notably, the class was full despite the agonizing start time. Held in a small classroom, it was incomparable to American History or regular English 301, which were both conducted in sprawling lecture halls with stadium seating and a screen suspended from the ceiling so you could see your professor’s face from the cheap seats. This classroom sat about twenty, with high school desks, the kind where the chairs were attached to the table.
J.A. Hanson was young for a professor. She was twenty-eight. At twenty-two she’d written the critically acclaimed Messiah, a classic post-apocalyptic tale she’d received a Hugo Award for. The hero was a teenaged girl and the ending blew Penny’s mind. That J.A. was a woman blew everyone else’s mind. The reviews and fansites were convinced J.A. Hanson was a dude. Especially since there were no pictures of her at the time and nobody knew what J.A. stood for.
Penny discovered science fiction shortly after Maus. She began writing her own short stories as a hobby, and though her high school had a literary magazine, Penny wouldn’t have dreamed of submitting anything.
It didn’t help that in AP English Lit, junior year, they’d read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which was basically The Hunger Games except it was written in the forties and had a twist at the end.
They’d spent a week in class creating a story with unpredictable endings, and Penny wrote hers from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old Swiss boy in the year 2345, who woke up knowing precisely when he’d die. The boy considered what his final acts would be and elected to spend the day doing exactly what he normally did, playing chess with his best friend, Gordy. He was cheered by the small, dependable routines most and the twist was that he didn’t die, waking up every morning with the same thought in an insane asylum, where he didn’t have any choice but to do what his doctors had scheduled for him.
Penny liked her story, yet Ms. Lansing gave her a B-, saying she’d been “hoping to hear more about Penny’s exotic point of view.” Penny couldn’t believe it. As if Zurich, 2345, wasn’t farflung enough. She knew what her teacher meant; she’d meant Asian despite Penny being born in Seguin, Texas, which was maybe twenty minutes away. Penny vowed not to show her work again until she respected who’d be reading it.
Over the years, Penny inhaled the classics—Ready Player One, Dune, and Ender’s Game, though it wasn’t until she was introduced to Messiah, ironically from a guy who was the worst dude in the history of dudes, that she realized sci-fi didn’t have to be so . . . boy. J.A.’s work was like Ender’s Game, yet where Ender was smart and getting conned ’cause he was a kid, J.A.’s hero Scan knew her worth.
A female protagonist made the stories more inspiring than voyeuristic. It was so much fun to write about who you could be. From then on Penny’s stories centered around women and girls. There wasn’t even a special trick. You wrote it exactly as you would for a guy, but you made pain thresholds higher since girls have to put up with more in the world and give them more empathy, which makes everything riskier. Plus, with sci-fi, you set up the rules at the beginning and you could blast it all to kingdom come as long as you did it in a satisfying manner. The fact that Penny could take a class from a published author made the whole communal-living college situation worthwhile.
J.A. Hanson had undeniable charisma. She was black with natural hair, dyed platinum, gathered in a pouf on top of her head. And she wore thick-rimmed white glasses to boot. J.A. made nerdiness glamorous. And not in some posery Tumblr way where girls played first-person shooters in their underpants to be attractive to guys.
“Does a Chinese writer get to write about a slave lynching?” It was an intense topic for 8:11 a.m., yet J.A. lobbed the topic into the room so casually Penny couldn’t be sure she’d heard her correctly. It gave the room an intimate, crackly energy, as if they were crowded around a dinner table. A dinner table that was unceremoniously lit on fire.
In Penny’s heart, the answer was absolutely yes. Though she also didn’t know how she felt as an Asian person telling a black woman that.