Emergency Contact(66)
“Bobby was this whiz kid computer programmer.” Her voice sounded far away. Detached. “His dad was this big deal at IBM back in the day and was friends with my mom. Whatever, my mom was friends with everyone. Still is.”
Most of the time Penny didn’t give Celeste anything to worry about. She only ever got As and Bs. Then, at the end of sophomore year, when it was looking like Penny would end up with a C, Celeste called Bobby.
His teaching methodology was suspect at best. Bobby came by twice a week to show Penny pirated French movies that she’d seen before with the English captions switched off. Usually Amélie or Breathless. They’d read books from the artist Moebius and Asterix and Obelix comics, a series about two ancient warriors, and listened to French rap music that to Penny’s ears was exactly like American rap except way more politicized.
They spoke jokey nonsense French in horrible accents.
“Attend! Pourquoi le Sasquatch abandonnerait son sac à main?”
Wait! Why would the Sasquatch leave his handbag?
Or
“Asterix et Obelix veulent faire l’amour doux, doux, à l’autre. Il est évident, n’est-ce pas?”
Asterix and Obelix want to make sweet, sweet love to each other. Duh, right?
Bobby spoke four languages. When he turned fifteen he won a fellowship for one hundred thousand dollars to skip college and work in Silicon Valley, but he didn’t go because he said he didn’t want to be bourgeois. They ate snacks and secretly drank Celeste’s white wine while watching La Déesse!, a French cooking show where a well-intentioned woman with colorful blouses made elaborate meals for her husband.
He was the first boy she’d felt entirely comfortable around. She could eat wet foods in front of him and be opinionated and goofy. They even mostly argued well. He detested inconsistency or contradiction. When Penny told him she was lactose intolerant, Bobby acted as if he’d caught her in a lie when she ate tuna salad in front of him. He couldn’t believe mayo didn’t have milk in it until they Googled it.
August seventeenth was Bobby’s birthday. Celeste had gone to bed right after dinner, and Penny had snuck an entire bottle of zinfandel from her mom’s stash. She and Bobby passed it back and forth while watching Ysel, the star of La Déesse!, make duck aspic. They were sitting on the couch. Actually, he was sitting. Her legs were flung on top of his, and she was practically lying down. She had to sit up every time she talked to him in case she had a double chin from that angle, and she worried that her cheeks were as bright red as Celeste’s got when she drank. Her mom called it the Asian Flush and Bobby didn’t get it. You were supposed to take an antacid to combat it but she’d forgotten.
Even though it was his birthday, he’d gotten Penny a present. A copy of Zero Girl. He handed it to her in a black plastic bag and told her about it as she thumbed through the water-colored pages.
“It’s a classic,” he said. “And it reminds me so much of you. It’s about a high school girl who has these kinda bootleg superpowers and she vanquishes all her mortal foes and she shoots her shot with her guidance counselor, who’s a total G, by the way, and they fall in love . . .”
To Penny the subtext was clear. A dork with a crush on an older guy, a teacher even, and they end up together because she makes the first move! It was romantic.
“I kept watching his mouth,” Penny remembered. “That’s how you’re supposed to show a guy that you want them to kiss you. At least that’s what I’d read.”
Sam nodded.
It worked. Penny had willed Bobby to kiss her and he had. It hadn’t been her first kiss, but it was pretty close.
Her first kiss was Richard Kishnani at camp when she was thirteen. He had braces and she was attracted to him only because his mother worked at NASA.
And Noah Medina at the movies, whose teeth banged into hers as he was going in for the kill. He was from Florida and had put her hand on his junk. He was wearing crunchy nylon shorts that had to be a bathing suit. She excused herself to go to the bathroom and never came back.
With Bobby, Penny closed her eyes and moved her lips slowly and imagined how if anyone ever asked, this would be the story of her first kiss. This was the one that mattered. The one she’d worked for. Bobby’s mouth felt incredible. Warm. Soft but not too soft. Wet but not too wet. When his mouth opened and their tongues touched, she didn’t feel nervous. It wasn’t slimy or anatomical. It felt good.
By Penny’s count they’d hung out on sixteen separate occasions, which made them friends.
That’s why what happened next was so surprising.
Penny had said stop. She was sure of it. Or else she’d said no. In fact, she’d said it more than once, yet she wasn’t positive it qualified. He kept going.
“Maybe I said it too quietly.”
She hadn’t cried for help. Celeste was right upstairs. Penny hadn’t kicked him in the nuts, as any heroine worth her salt would have done. Instead Penny lay perfectly still and walked backward from her eyes until she was far enough in her head that she was safe. From the couch, pinned underneath him, she turned her head to the side to find Zero Girl open on the coffee table as Bobby stabbed her in the guts with his dick. His dick was purple. Cartoon purple. When he pulled on the lurid condom, she couldn’t believe it was such a bright and happy color. It had taken a few times for him to get it right, and Penny didn’t know why she didn’t scream or rip it out of his hands while he loomed above her. She just knew that she didn’t. She didn’t do any of the things that absolutely anyone with a brain knows to do. All she wanted was for Celeste not to see.