Emergency Contact(42)
EMERGENCY PENNY
Yesterday 4:37 PM
Dogs or cats?
It cracked him up that Penny was in his phone as “Emergency Penny” since none of her texts constituted an emergency.
Sam typed back:
BABY GOATS
He was pleased with that one. He had a supercut of goats ready to go. Sam pasted the link and hit send.
Whoa
Thursday 12:09 AM
Pie or cake?
Sam was making a pecan pie with an ornate lattice on top and wanted to show it off if pie won out. He’d perfected his crust with frozen butter that you grated like cheese.
Cake Sheet cake
From a box
What???
Gross
You’re insane
He slid the pie into the oven, feeling stupid for how deflated he felt.
Pie obviously. Cobbler above sheet cake. Ew. He wasn’t sure they’d recover from that.
Sam knew pie versus cake wasn’t their only incompatibility. He couldn’t imagine the space Penny would take up in his life if she sprang out of his phone. He couldn’t envision her from across the room laughing with people he knew. Or scooping peas into her mouth at a table. In fact, sometimes he could barely make out her likeness in his head since it had been so long since he’d seen her and there were so few images of her online. There was a photo from a school yearbook, but she looked so young and unhappy at having her picture taken that Sam felt strongly that he was trespassing.
His phone buzzed again. Jude.
It’s OK!
Next week is great
Good luck with work
Penny was still on some tangent about polyphasic sleep schedules.
Nikola Tesla too No sleep club
Or sleep sometimes club So tired
Did you sleep
HOW ARE YOU?
Penny always asked how he was doing.
No sleep!
It was a supermoon tho Makes your brain chemistry insane Shitty moon
Hate the moon
I tried to write this morning And?
Well I tried
Brb class
:(
Sam realized he’d also become way too accustomed to emoji. He felt like a teen girl. Penny was a teen girl, he reminded himself. He should really start thinking about women his own age, say, the one who was carrying his unborn child. Sam groaned into his empty room. Penny was Jude’s age, which made her seventeen or eighteen. Sam wondered about her birthday and what her favorite type of boxed sheet cake was. Probably chocolate with white icing. Some sprinkles maybe. Glittery black ones to match her hair. Not that it mattered. He imagined how horrified she’d be if he showed up at her dorm with an actual physical cake IRL.
Maybe they could be friends when she was old enough to count as a person. Perhaps when she was twenty-five and he, at twenty-eight or twenty-nine, could be the cool, older guy-pal who would give her tax advice and beat the living daylights out of any age-appropriate boyfriend who mistreated her. Or at least glare at him in a menacing way. God. Sam would be almost thirty by then. Disgusting.
PENNY.
Penny hoofed it to class. Her hair was that type of long where it got caught in her armpits at the worst times. She wanted to pull over from the throng of kids to flood Sam’s phone with questions about his date, but she restrained herself. Instead she talked about the varying sleep cycles of geniuses who later became psychos. As you do.
She’d been dying to text him last night. Instead she beamed the Internet into her eyes for distraction, stalking MzLolaXO, rendering sleep impossible. Penny’s own Instagram account was set to private and while her feed contained only six pictures, it was useful for anonymous lurking or as cover for the accidental deep-like. That MzLolaXO had a new photo in her feed of Sam’s hands—from a few weeks ago—dismantled her. MzLolaXO had tagged him holding a broken laptop, and Penny knew it was for sure him because of the horse tattoo. When Penny clicked through to his account, it had been deleted. Penny was relieved and a little butt-hurt—okay a lot butt-hurt—that he hadn’t mentioned seeing her that night.
At one a.m., eyeballs throbbing from the screen time, she’d eaten two of Jude’s protein bars without realizing they had sixteen grams of fiber in each. They lay heavy in her stomach—forming a kind of petrified roughage diamond—as she scrambled across campus.
Penny didn’t know why she was being such a headcase. It was better for the baby if Sam and Lola reconciled. It was the natural order of the universe for them to be together. If two gazelles gallivanted around the savanna, it was no business of the tree frog. Penny was the tree frog obviously.
When she got to class, J.A. was wearing a jumpsuit made—improbably—of complicated balls of twine. Needless to say, she looked amazing.
“Tragic heroes are hella fun to write,” she began. “Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Tony Soprano. They’re damaged, saddled with baggage. Plus, wherever they go, there they are, yadda yadda yadda.”
Everyone in Penny’s story was screwed up. The only innocent was the real-life baby who died. Ugh. So many babies to think about. What if there had been some big update about Sam’s baby? Would he have told her? Yes, he would have. At least she thought he would. Except that he hadn’t told Penny about seeing Lola weeks ago, so why would he tell her about last night? About how they’d driven to Vegas and eloped while Penny sat at home alone eating her feelings.