Emergency Contact(60)



Sam had Fin cover a few of his afternoons, and he taped the three of them trying to land tricks on their crappy boards. Mostly, he let the kids do the talking. He learned that James had more money than the other two, and was easygoing about it. He shared the snacks he bought without complaint.

With no parents in sight, the boredom of a kid’s world was strangely stark and poetic. Even though so much of the town was about the college, the football games, the ever-expanding campus, they had no expectation that they’d ever go.

They weren’t fuckups or anything. In fact, other than cigarettes, they were straight edge—no drugs, no alcohol. Their only other vice was that they were seemingly obsessed with green juice, since Bastian’s mom worked at a fancy juice stand. This afternoon, the boys had come from there, and Sam was filming Bastian with his acai and kale smoothie. “The girls like it,” Bastian said, smiling wide. “It makes your jizz taste like flowers.”

When it got dark Sam thanked the guys, broke them off two cigarettes each, and got in the car. His phone buzzed, and he had an irrational hope that it was Penny. It was Fin checking in about his car. Sam hit him back and tried to shake off whatever he felt when he thought of her lately.

The last thing Sam had asked Penny was, “Why the escalation?” Then, “You good?” She hadn’t hit him back. Not once. He wanted to call her. He had said he would, before Lorraine sent him into a spiral. At this point who knew if she even wanted him to call? It had been almost two weeks. He didn’t know who was supposed to do what next.





PENNY.


Andy was kind of the worst. Or he was the best. Whatever he was, everything he wanted to do was a horrendous idea.

When Penny climbed out of bed, she cursed him. Him and his stupid handsome face and the cathedral to orthodontia that was his mouth. At least he had great lips. She wondered if he was a good kisser. Penny checked her phone out of habit and sighed. There was so much free time now that she wasn’t sending a thousand texts an hour to someone who didn’t have feelings for her in the first place.

Penny wondered briefly if Sam was okay and then told herself to stop worrying about him.

She put on some sweats, grabbed her running shoes, and marched out. It was a cool morning for once. Instead of heading toward campus, Penny started west to the running trail by the water. It was early enough that it was mostly sleep-deprived parents with strollers and overzealous dog walkers.

Andy was already at their appointed meeting place of “the trash can by the first set of benches” when she arrived.

“You’re late,” he said. He was draped in swishy gray high-tech running clothes and wore matching graphite sunglasses.

“Jesus, you look like someone we’d send to repopulate a new galaxy.” She yawned. “What is this outfit?”

Andy stretched his arms above his head. “There’s an optimal set of clothes for every activity,” he said. “This is my running ensemble.”

“Spoken like the last remaining hope for human civilization.”

He smiled winningly.

“You know I’m not running, right?” confirmed Penny. “I’m accompanying you around the lake primarily to rob you for ideas.”

Andy touched his toes.

Penny tried to touch hers. She reached to just below her knees.

“That’s fine,” he said. “I need to mine your brain for information on the female psyche, so it’s quid pro quo.”

Penny chortled. “Good luck.”

Truthfully, Penny wasn’t above getting some exercise. Camped out at her desk tapping away at her keyboard, writing about people who were obsessed with the computer, was messing with her head. Her haunches were taking on the consistency of veal, and there was a permanent crease above her belly button from all the sitting.

Besides which, she enjoyed Andy’s company. Penny wondered if it was because he was Asian or because they were into the same things. After the party they’d settled into an easy camaraderie. He was good for her. She was getting better and better at interfacing with real-life humans on a near-daily basis.

After that night, Penny had quickly disabused Andy of the notion that she wore glamorous dresses and drank champagne regularly. A few days ago she’d met him in the library in pajamas and ate so much beef jerky she got meat sweats.

“Enough with this indoor-kid nonsense,” he’d said as she’d groaned in her protein overdose. “Next time we’re doing something less disgusting.”

Hence the attempted jogging.

“Okay, what do you want to know?”

Andy began pacing. His arms bent in angles by his sides, pumping purposefully as he walked at a brisk clip.

“Ask me about the female psyche,” she challenged.

“Where did you read up to?” Andy was writing a sprawling May-December romance set in the sixties between a septuagenarian French woman and man forty years her junior who was Vietnamese. It was a play on Marguerite Duras’s The Lover.

“Okay, so they met at the bar and Esmerelda’s married and it’s terribly fraught on the boat.”

“Right,” said Andy. “And it’s not a boat, Penny. It’s a ship. An ocean liner.”

“Fine.”

“Here’s what I want to know. . . . Good morning!” He nodded at a woman in a sun visor walking in the opposite direction. Then he waved at a couple similarly attired in expensive athleisure clothing. He was the goodwill ambassador of whatever ten-yard radius he occupied.

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