Emergency Contact(30)
You too
Penny placed her phone facedown on her bed and allowed herself a tiny swoon. Besides. As far as Penny and Sam were concerned, there was nothing to tell. Nothing happened. Just because Jude was fast and loose with her personal life and her therapy sessions didn’t mean the same setup worked for everyone. Some people’s coping mechanisms were all about festering and secrecy and ruminating until you grew yourself a nice little tumor in your heart with a side of panic attack. Different strokes.
SAM.
Sam wasn’t stupid—at least when it came to the broken institution known as the American Collegiate Industrial Complex. It’s not that he believed by taking a single community college course on documentaries he was going to stumble ass-backward into stardom. It’s just that he’d tried on several occasions to make a movie and hadn’t succeeded. The way he saw it, taking a class was about placing an expensive bet on yourself. You couldn’t afford to blow the deadline.
The ACC film department was housed in a squat brown building from the seventies, complete with avocado-green carpet from the era. It was illogical to Sam that despite the entire course being conducted online, he still had to drag his meat suit to the campus to pick up his ID. The blue and white piece of plastic featured a blurry picture of his face, as though he’d run across the frame. The unimpressed sixty-year-old dude with dandruff in his eyebrows made it clear that there would be no reshoots.
Whatever. He tried not to dwell on the school’s resemblance to a prison and the sort of life that dictated a need for a vending machine in the hall filled with plastic-wrapped sandwiches and returned to work by bus.
When Sam was younger he took pictures constantly. Unlike cooking, photography kept you on your toes. It was chaotic and human—utterly unpredictable. To capture an unposed face you had to wait for it. It was spear fishing. You had to move between the competing rhythms of the world and strike. When his street urchin pals were stealing Twix and fat-tip markers from dollar stores, Sam would palm a couple of those old-school cardboard disposable cameras. He’d collect shoe boxes of them, pictures of his friends playing Edward Forty Hands or Amy Winehands (the super-sophisticated game where you’d duct tape bottles of malt liquor or wine coolers onto your palms). Or he’d capture skate tricks, backyard shows, or his crew hanging out in various parking lots across town. It cost ten bucks to develop, so he stockpiled the used-up cameras. When he turned fifteen he got a job at a one-hour photo expressly to process them. Sam got to be a pretty good lab technician, though the job was unspeakably depressing.
Only two types of people developed photos in those days, broke art kids and old weirdos. There was this fat fifty-something dude, Bertie, who’d take pictures of himself and his Weimaraner. He was naked, and the dog wore waistcoats and hats, and they were photographed doing unseemly things: sitting at the dinner table with a full Thanksgiving spread, or slow dancing, the dog upright and impossibly long on its hindquarters. They recalled William Wegman’s portraits except with human full-frontal, and though Sam didn’t know exactly what was going on, he called the ASPCA anonymously and quit a week later. It was bleak.
Sam was ready to move on to moving pictures anyway. It was on to janky VHS camcorders from the Goodwill after that.
People were odd. Sam loved and loathed that about them. Fiction was fine, but real life was the true freak show.
Sam’s syllabus at ACC was spare and he tried not to feel ripped off about it. Three months to complete a project, a twenty-two-minute short that would comprise most of his grade. He wouldn’t get anywhere near the Blackmagic Cinema cameras, since they required a five-thousand-dollar credit card deposit, but he was able to sign out an old Canon 5D Mark III with all the requisite lenses, some lavalier mics, and a better shotgun microphone than he’d normally get his hands on, as well as a tripod. He also grabbed a tiny stabilizer rig for his iPhone in case he wanted something more run-and-gun. Finding a subject felt like a hunger that would never be satisfied. He’d glance at Fin, narrow his eyes, and wonder if there was something there.
“In a world . . . where a guy who was forever number two, the perfect wingman, the middle born of three sons, the dude who didn’t get the girl and only got her slightly less attractive friend finally . . .”
“Quit it, puto.” Fin flicked a piece of celery at him. Sam was halfway through soup prep for lunch.
“What?”
“Seriously,” said Fin. “Your scheming face is scary as hell. Especially when you’re holding a knife.”
Sam had tried making a movie about Lorraine on several occasions (“In a world . . . where a beautiful rich girl with anger issues who at her truest most molten core only wants to be loved discovers that . . .”), but she’d catch him creep-shooting and blow her stack. As much as that girl loved a selfie, she wasn’t big on other people controlling the final product. What he needed was a willing subject, someone as hungry as he was. Someone who warranted a few minutes in the spotlight. Plenty of people craved attention. It had to be the right person, someone who naturally commanded it. Sam suspected most outwardly noisy people were boring on the inside. No more than the textbook swirl of insecurities and narcissism.
Penny would make a fascinating subject. All that twitchy energy. Plus, what was up with her bags of stuff? He could shoot an unboxing video where she could unfurl her possessions and explain the thinking behind it all. It could serve as a legend for a map of her brain.