Emergency Contact(3)

“So, did you get it?”

Penny desperately wished she hadn’t.

Penny knew part of her lukewarm disposition toward Mark was that he was the type of guy Celeste would’ve picked out for her. He had dirty-blond hair and the preppy good looks of a Hollister model. Not on the billboard but easily in a catalog group shot. Toward the front since he was short.

Mark was also younger by a year, which was clutch when you were sorta-kinda-not-really-but-maybe dating since that meant he had a different lunch period. His crew qualified as popular since it included moderately popular soccer kids despite the rest of the squad being burnouts. Mark smoked a lot of weed and had a brain like a sieve. Which was unfortunate. Even the cute things that would have made good inside jokes were forgotten, like how autocorrect on his phone kept changing “goddammit” to “god donut,” so when Penny sent the donut emoji as an expletive he only ever thought she was hungry.

Mark was unwavering.

Penny blinked first.

“Do you want a snack or something?” She opened the fridge, grabbed a pitcher of sweet tea, and poured them both glasses. It was the only thing Celeste knew how to “cook.”

Penny thought back to the first day Mark talked to her after fifth period. Thing was, he was defective in a sense. Everybody knew he had “yellow fever.” His ex was this smoking-hot Vietnamese girl Audrey, whose dad was transferred to Germany with the air force, and in middle school he’d briefly dated Emily, who was half Thai.

“Well?” Mark wouldn’t be deterred. “Did you get it?” He grinned winsomely.

Penny drew her tea to her mouth with such force that she hit the glass with her teeth.

“Baby,” he said. Behind “bae,” Penny despised “baby” as a thing for a grown adult woman to be called. It was so prescriptive. Like dressing sexy for Halloween.

Mark sat on a stool on the other side of the kitchen island and gestured alluringly for her to come over. His hair fell over his right eye.

God, he was handsome.

Mark opened his arms and she walked into them.

“We may as well get used to communicating like this,” Mark whispered, breath tickling her ear. “We both hate talking on the phone, and you know what they say about pictures, Penny.” He paused for effect, Penny couldn’t believe he was going to continue. “They’re worth a thousand words.”

Wow.

Penny hitched her chin onto his shoulders. Mark smelled mildewy. It was comforting in a sense. Mark often smelled as if he hadn’t done laundry in a while. She weighed her options.

Possible gambits to mount a distraction for a boyfriend who’s prone to distraction:

1. Break up with him. A long-distance relationship based on cataclysmic levels of meh was soul-eating.

2. Have sex with him to change the subject.

3. Burst into tears and explain nothing.


“Yes.” Penny sighed. “I did get it.” Then she added, “Thank you.” She tried to sound sincere.

Technically “it” was a “they” and “they” were nudes. Penny recalled the twin pepperoni constituting her boyfriend’s nipples and inwardly shuddered. Mark thought sexts were an appropriate and fun way to christen a new phone. Penny thought vehemently otherwise.

Okay, so they weren’t full-on frontal—bless. Mark was still sixteen, and Penny didn’t need the FBI landing at her college dorm for kiddie porn. They were risqué, though. Each went slightly beyond the treasure trail. With a few different filters. Penny was even sure he’d Facetuned at least one, which was a quality she simply could not respect in a man. She knew that the proper, more sporting response was to reciprocate. A boob (hint of nip tops) would suffice. But she didn’t want to. At all. All she wanted to do was delete them, pretend none of this ever happened, and leave.

She’d be off the hook then. At least technically. The statute for follow-up nudes couldn’t extend beyond the city limits surely. Even so, Penny should have considered going out of state.





SAM.


Sam enjoyed an odd commute. A single staircase and about nine yards of hallway. On one hand, he could rely on experiencing zero traffic. On the other, he felt like he was always at work. House Coffee, where Sam was manager, was an Austin institution. It was a small, gray Craftsman with a gabled roof and a wraparound porch with a big white swing out front. It was, for lack of a better word, homey, and the first-floor café boasted creaky wood floors, large windows, built-in bookcases, and ratty sofas with mismatched chairs.

The upstairs contained four rooms, two baths, and resembled the domicile of some wackadoo hoarder. When Sam first moved in he’d snooped for hidden treasures that might fetch a fortune at auction. The actual findings were less Antiques Roadshow and more those TV specials where once the twin brothers die—both crushed under an avalanche of VHS tapes—they find forty-six dollars’ worth of stamps and thousands of empty Chef Boyardee cans where the changing labels denote the passage of time. Every room but one was overrun with boxes of files, books, clothes, and whatever else Al Petridis, the proprietor of House, couldn’t fit in his own house. In the smallest room, farthest from the stairs, there was a mattress on the floor.

That’s where Sam slept.

Like some orphan. Which he technically wasn’t, though he may as well have been.