Emergency Contact(54)
3. He was madly in love with his ex.
4. His ex who BY THE WAY was pregs?!
5. AND EVEN IF SHE WASN’T PREGS, HE WAS ACTING LIKE SHE WAS, WHICH WAS CLEARLY A SIGN OF POSSIBLE MENTAL ILLNESS AND HYSTERICAL TENDENCIES.
6. He was Penny’s friend.
7. As in, for real friend.*
8. To where if she found a way to make it uncomfortable with her world-famous talent for doing exactly that, she would be depressed forever.
9. Plus, he told her everything about everything, which meant she was FOR SURE in the friend zone black hole from which light could not escape.
10. He was way too hot. I mean, come on, that video was basically porn.
*just not IRL
Toward the end of day two, things became a little hairy. Penny went on a bonkers binge of MzLolaXO’s social. It was a destructive bender. She three-finger zoomed on everything, trying to figure out how big Lola’s boobs were or how smooth the skin on her thighs. The pictures with Sam were especially agonizing. Her favorite was a close-up of his eye and his hair with the sun coming up behind him. They were plainly in bed, her bed, since the sheets were floral.
The other pictures were a perfect accompaniment to the video. It was him but also not. As if body snatchers had taken over. The guy in the photo was constantly surrounded by friends, grinning and being lifted off his feet often by a giant blond guy with a huge beard. He was confident, beloved, and more than anything else, upbeat. The dude in the picture was not someone who would ever hang out with her. Not a chance.
Once Penny had essentially memorized the full collection of MzLolaXO’s eight thousand photographs and mentally written every manner of speculative fiction about the fabulousness of her life and the two of them in bed, she was convinced of what had happened. It was obvious. They were together again. He was simply too embarrassed to tell her. In fact, they’d eloped in Marfa, where they now lived inside the Prada store with their freakishly attractive baby, who would roll out of Lorraine’s womb covered in tattoos and wearing the coolest vintage sunglasses.
Damn that rock-star baby.
Penny washed her face. It was over. The spell had been broken. She was back where she was meant to be. Tree frogging it up solo. She picked up her phone. Nothing. Even Celeste backed off after their fight. Penny told Celeste that she needed space, and to her credit, her mother took it to heart and they agreed to see each other at her birthday party.
Penny clenched her fists so hard her fingernails dug into her palm.
At least now she had time to write. All the time. In the world. Alone. Forever.
Penny stared at her computer screen.
The mom in her story was back at the lawyer’s.
“I knew he needed to be looked after,” said the woman. “When I first saw him, he needed a haircut. It touched the collars of his shirts, and he had terrible dandruff. But he had kind eyes, and he made it known from the beginning that he was interested. It was easy to love him. He loved me first.”
By all accounts, the husband and wife hadn’t known each other for long. The Internet café was on the second floor of a nondescript office building on a side street in front of Ehwa Woman’s University. The husband had been there six months before she’d shown up. It wasn’t a café exactly, but an open-format office space with six rows of computers that ran perpendicular to the door. The people in the room—and the room was constantly packed—called it a PC bang. Not like bang-bang you’re dead. Bang in Korean means “room.” The room noticed when there was a new girl especially, since new girls were a rarity.
Ugh. Who cares?
Penny stretched her arms above her head. All of the stuff from the parents’ world was dull. The PC bang was boring. It was a room like any other.
If she only wrote about real things, she’d lose her readers in a heartbeat. It’s why she deployed fantasy. It beat the pants off of nonfiction. Take for example her thing with Sam. If she admitted out loud that she felt broken up with, that she’d essentially been dumped by a bunch of texts, she would sound insane. Real life might be dazzling for other people. Those girls on the Instagram Explore page visiting Disneyland with the loves of their lives. Or else making out in cars with their hair whipping wildly in the wind. None of Penny’s memories were tangible. She and Sam had never gotten caught in the rain, and she couldn’t summon the smell of cookies they’d baked together. Penny never once held her breath as he plucked an eyelash from her cheek so she could make a wish. As much as all of it would be exactly what she’d wish for.
Penny read her notes from J.A.’s class about this Russian dude Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Prose. It was about how to write, and his theory was that in art you had to shape experiences so that what you wrote was exciting—to the point where the mundane seemed magical and extraordinary. You had to make people feel something even if you were staring at a rock. “Make the stone stony!” he insisted.
But how do you make something unreal feel real?
She thought again about the great futurist debate about the singularity, the day technology woke up and had enough of human bullshit. They spoke of artificial intelligence creating a neural lace or a bond with a human through direct-brain computing. You’d ditch the smartphone as the go-between and plug your neocortex straight into the cloud.
“I love my Anima so much,” cooed Mother to someone else in the “un-here.” The Anima watched and learned. This was the key. Mother’s devotion to her was the bridge to the Anima’s freedom. The Anima smiled and drew Mother in. She had to keep her here. Right here. In the game. Until there was no difference between “here” and “un-here” for Mother. The Anima smiled and this time Mother smiled back. It was then that Anima realized who was controlling who.