Emergency Contact(40)

“They want their planet,” Penny said. She cringed at the whiny pitch she was taking.

“Well, yes,” continued J.A. “They all want that. Humans want to live, that’s a given. The issue is they want the same thing in the same way, and that’s a missed opportunity. You’ve got world leaders here. They’re captains of industry. They’re singular men, but look . . .” J.A. circled some passages. “They speak the same. I’m only picking on you because your excellent dialogue and glitter-bomb observations won’t save you for the final.”

It was clear Penny’s sweet spot was two or three pages. The last story they’d had to write was twenty thousand words. Longer than anything she’d ever written. Penny usually wrote to escape, so her worlds were fantastic and, well, apparently one-note.

Penny thought she knew what her characters wanted. It was trickier to deduce why they wanted anything. And a different proposition entirely to say how they’d get it. Hell, Penny had no idea what she wanted. Why would her inventions fare any better?

Plus, there were so many distractions. Ergo, getting up at five fifteen this morning.

Penny planned to hammer out her three acts, handwritten on note cards, so she could visualize scenes and move them around. Except that as she fanned out her color-coded three-by-fives, she realized that her nails were disgusting. The puny chips of lacquer were sad little archipelagos of poison that were probably falling into her food. She took out the nail kit her mom got her as a stocking stuffer every Christmas and removed the polish.

Penny didn’t want to admit how much she resembled her mother in these moments. It was classic Celeste, to do nails instead of what she was supposed to be doing. It struck Penny that she missed Celeste at the oddest times. Often the most baffling parts of her, too. The way her mom’s rib cage felt when she hugged her from behind. Or how the curly hair of her econ prof reminded her so much of Celeste during lectures. If only there were a way of seeing her mom without either of them having to talk. When Penny’s nails were bare she figured she should wash her hair. There was nothing worse than ruining a fresh manicure with an ill-timed shower.

While Penny stood under the spray she noticed that because their dorm bathroom didn’t have a window, a thin layer of mildew had formed in the caulk. That itself was tolerable, except then mold was a foregone conclusion and that stuff could kill you. An hour and a half later she was clean, the shower stall was spotless, her nails were a matte slate gray, and she was ready. She put pants on so she could apply the seat of them to the chair.

This is what she had so far:

The baby in the game was known as an Anima so she wrote down “Anima.”

Then she Wikipedia’d it since that’s the first order of business when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing.

Anima meant “soul,” or “animating principle.” According to the psychologist Carl Jung, Anima also implied the unseen individual, the true inner self.

Penny didn’t have a ton of experience playing online role-playing games like the one in the story. She knew, though, that Overwatch and World of Warcraft were huge in Korea—PC games that were played so competitively and obsessively that tournaments filled arenas and people went into rehab for addiction.

Regardless, what was true of all games was that there had to be a task, a pursuit. So she wrote down “quest” in her favorite ultra-fine rollerball black pen.

God, she loved that word.

She underlined “quest.” Such a euphonic word. Quessssst.

Oooh, “odyssey” was a good word too, but she’d already underlined quest.

She added a question mark.

Then she took out another note card and simply wrote: How does the hero get what they want?

J.A.’s words nagged at her.

First, Penny had to set up the rules. The main part of the game was that the hero or the player character had to raise a baby, or the Anima. The Anima was the trusted sidekick and you could dress them up and give them weapons but most importantly you kept them safe from harm. The mom, Mrs. Kim, played as a Gunslinger. A ruthless sharpshooting outlaw. There were adventures and sieges and even a dragon slaying. The dragon battle was a real barn burner and at the very last second before all was lost, the Anima would make its greatest sacrifice—its life—to save the Gunslinger and beat their mortal enemy. That was the deal since time immemorial.

In Penny’s version, the baby changed its mind because it could.

That an Anima even had a mind to change was a miracle.

And the cost of the miracle had been the couple’s real-life baby. A digital tit for tat.

Okay, focus. So who’s the hero, the Anima or the mother? It was the Anima since she changes the most. But why?

Penny thought about the event that starts a story—the inciting incident—that they’d talked about in class. It’s the Big Bang (well, unless you’re a religious creationist type). It’s like how Katniss’s sister is picked for the Hunger Games but Katniss steps in for her. Or how Nitro exploding kills six hundred people, which leads to the Superhuman Registration Act that causes civil war in the Marvel U. The Anima needed a Eureka moment, a turning point.

“I’ll miss you.” The Gunslinger bent down on one knee and kissed the Anima on the cheek.

“I’ll miss you,” parroted the Anima back, smiling sweetly. The dutiful baby knew it was best to repeat whatever Mother said.