Emergency Contact(57)

The flash blinded her momentarily.

“What was that?”

“Party photographer,” screamed Jude over the music, and handed the card over. She went to slide it into her pocket and remembered she wasn’t wearing jeans. Penny slipped it into her bra, as she imagined a girl dressed as she was might do.

The way everyone glanced at them and then glanced away was as if they were waiting for someone. Someone important. Someone who Penny, Jude, and Mallory clearly were not.

Jude reached for her hand in the dark, and Penny clung on for dear life. Jude, in turn, was latched on to Mallory, who was weaving through the crowd to find Ben.

Toward the back was a DJ booth and a blur of faces, outfits, and a topiary of provocative hairstyles. Penny felt the roving eyes and was relieved that she passed as someone of indeterminable importance. Penny glared so as not to appear too terrified.

“Okay,” said Mallory after they’d circled the room. “Now we can get a drink.”

In the back, surrounded by a crowd five deep, there were three bartenders, all with impressive butt chins and hair bleached white. They stood behind card tables covered with black tablecloths.

Penny worried she was going to get carded, but when Mallory elbowed her way in and ordered champagne, she and Jude did the same.

“Live bold, be bold, lie bold,” she whispered to herself, tugging at her borrowed dress. As if calling upon Celeste’s “scammer” coffee mug for moral support would help. Strangely, it did.

Penny took a big gulp of booze. The bubbles were prickly on her throat.

“So, is he here?” she yelled at Mallory over the noise.

“Yeah. Behind the DJ booth.”

“Aren’t you going to say hi?”

“No way. He has to say hi to me first,” she said. “He’s visiting me.”

A moment later a Blasian dude with a beard sidled over to them. He had green eyes and blindingly white teeth.

“Hey,” he said to Jude, eyes at half-mast.

“Hey,” the three girls responded just as listlessly.

“Is this your party?” he asked Jude.

“It’s my friend’s,” Penny heard her say.

Mallory pulled out a vape pen and inhaled. Penny watched the little blue LED light and wondered what was in it. Jude took it after her, and when she handed it to Penny, Penny shook her head. She had smoked weed only once, with Mark, and it made her fantastically paranoid. The constant stream of neurotic questions in her mind multiplied and amplified. It made Penny-head Pennier. It would be perfect if she had an anxiety attack at the party.

“Hey, baby.” Ben hugged Mallory from behind, and she squealed. He resembled the guy in the music videos only with a head so big it would’ve looked at home with smaller heads orbiting it. Mallory swiveled around, and they shared a lusty kiss. Penny had to hand it to her. She knew how to play it cool.

He drew Mallory into a dark corner.

With Mallory gone, Penny felt as if the locus of power of their circle had disappeared. She checked her phone battery. Fifty-four percent. Plenty to call a cab if she needed to. Jude and the green-eyed guy were deep in conversation, and when it was time for him to hit up the bar, Jude glanced at Penny to see if it was okay. Penny nodded. There was only one answer to those kinds of questions anyway. Jude followed her new friend and left Penny behind.

Penny stood in the middle of the room ignoring everyone as hard as she could and drank her drink.

She tried to conjure someone glamorous yet mighty—fierce—and thought of Jean Grey, a.k.a. Phoenix, arguably the most powerful mutant in the whole Marvel Universe. But then she remembered how Jean sorta lost her mind and didn’t wind up with Logan, a.k.a. Wolverine, who she so clearly should have been with. Then she thought about Sam. And how he was a total Wolverine and that’s when Penny became horribly depressed.

Screw it.

She marched over to the bartenders, got another champagne, and walked around. She made her way toward the front where a white wall was projected with different images of eyes. Cat’s eyes. Human eyes. Lizard eyes.

Ugh, why do people go to these things? There was no biological imperative for it. Was there any other species on earth that prized popularity the way people did? Did lemurs hang around preening in a never-ending competition of pretending to be over it? Humans were gross.

Penny recognized the guy who had let them in and tried to hold his gaze but failed. He whispered to the eyebrowless girl next to him before they both turned away.

The eyes projected onto the wall morphed into a sunrise.

The “show,” or whatever this was, was probably cool if you were on drugs. Not that it would have made a difference. Everyone was on their phones.

Penny leaned up against a wall and pulled out hers. She considered reading Sam’s old texts, as she often did when she had time alone, but resisted.

“Penelope?”

Whoever it was, he was tall and backlit. She walked into the light. It was Andy, from J.A.’s class. Penny couldn’t at all get a read on him. He often defended her writing in class, but the only direct interaction they’d ever had was an argument about whether or not Dr. Gaius Baltar was irredeemable in the TV miniseries of Battlestar Galactica. It wasn’t a fight Penny was invested in. Arguing with hard-core BSG fans was tedious. The only reason she engaged with him was to see if his English accent was real. Andy made her feel competitive as the class’s only other Asian, which didn’t even make any sense.