Emergency Contact

by Mary H. K. Choi

  Penny took notes, read everything over, and wondered if any of it constituted writing. Somehow it was seven forty. Twenty minutes to get to class, and Sam had texted good morning an hour ago. Maybe she should scribble out a story about an irresistible computer algorithm that haunted her phone and made her fall in love with it until she lost her mind and climbed into the shower hugging a still-plugged-in blow-dryer. Now, that would be believable.

  SAM.

  Sam heard the garbage trucks. Then the birds. His body knew it was morning before the light changed and the room warmed. It used to be that he’d be getting home with the trash collectors and self-satisfied joggers. Sam would marvel at the joggers—humans with whole separate wardrobes dedicated to particular tasks—people who owned camping equipment and tennis rackets. People for whom having kids made some kind of sense.

  Sam couldn’t tell if he’d slept. For weeks when he first stopped drinking he’d had terrible nightmares. Vivid dreams of fistfights with his father or Lorraine’s funeral—Psych 101 stuff. Then it flipped for no reason and he slept like the dead. Dreamless slumber he had to wrench himself from in the morning, pillow damp with drool, deep creases on his face where his skin had folded and he hadn’t moved. Now insomnia popped up once in a while to mix it up.

  Good morning! he typed into his phone.

  It was the first thing he did now.

  Sam showered. The hot water coursed over his body, poaching his skin. Seeing Lorraine had been discouraging. Sad. He felt emotionally hungover from the night before. As if he’d clenched all his muscles the entire time.

  He missed his friends sometimes. Gunner and Gash were entertaining, but without booze and bars, he knew they’d have nothing to talk about.

  Sam towel-dried his hair and shook it out. At the top of the summer, Gunner’s ex, April, came by to give him a cut. She’d come alone, which was awkward enough, and when they set up on the back porch, her hands lingered on the back of his neck, suggesting she had something else in mind. Sam couldn’t bear it. He sent her away with a coffee cake with promises to keep in touch, and when she never came back he was relieved.

  His phone buzzed.

  Tacos y pelicula?

  Shit, Jude.

  They’d planned on dinner tonight. Well, dinner and a movie. Sam had made the suggestion. Al Pastor tacos at the good taco spot, not the ruined shitty philanderer taco spot, followed by a late-night screening of Gremlins 2 at Alamo Drafthouse, where they’d have crème brûlées.

  Whenever Jude texted him, Sam unfailingly thought, Shit, Jude, despite his affection for her. Jude was a sweet kid. It’s just that he already saw her most mornings when she picked up coffee before class, and that was plenty.

  Sam made himself an espresso. Would it kill him to have dinner with her?

  Probably.

  He exhaled the breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, cringed, and typed.

  I’m so sorry J

  Have to work

  He pictured Jude staring at her screen and hating him.

  He typed again.

  Next week?

  Uuuuuugh. Why did he do that?

  Penny texted him back.

  Good morning!

  Did you know da vinci didn’t sleep

  Only naps

  30 mins/4 hrs

  He knew when she texted in bursts that she had something else going on. He checked the time. It was 8:08. She was either in her writing class or running late to it. Sam loved that he could talk to her all day without worrying about seeing her.

  Historically, communicating with girls wasn’t hard. When they show interest, you show interest back by asking a ton of questions. Penny was receptive to questions, though her responses were rarely coy or suggestive. Plus, she made zero effort to hang out. She seemed somehow immune to the mechanics of flirting. Sam wondered if she found him attractive.

  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 a
nd 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.

  What if Sam was married now? Jeez. That would make him about as tragic as they came. An impregnated Lola was his hamartia, or fatal flaw. Oh God, or maybe Penny was the tragic hero and Sam was her flaw. She tried to refocus on the assignment.

  Trouble was, Penny had to admit she only knew Sam because he was going through something. It was the classic fish-out-of-water scenario. Sam was a stranger in a strange land made up of millions of Penny’s text messages.

  It was bizarre how much time he had for her. Suspicious. He hadn’t mentioned family or friends other than Lorraine. Maybe he was in the Witness Protection Program. But that made zero sense, since Jude would be too much of a liability. Jude who just that morning complained that Sam was avoiding her.

  Sam had to be slumming to be talking to her this much. He was cooler than Penny empirically. It was opportunistic of Penny, as a tree frog, to take so much of Sam’s time.

  She vowed not to text him for the rest of the day.

  Mallory was lying on Penny’s bed with her shoes on when Penny got home from class. Jude was getting out of the steamy bathroom.

  “Hey, P!” Jude’s face lit up and she gave her roommate a hug. She was warm and wet. “Oh my God, I have so much to tell you!”

  “We’re going to get coffee at House,” said Mallory, rolling onto her back and pulling at the gum in her mouth. “Come with?”

  “I can’t,” said Penny. “I have to write.”

  “Didn’t you write this morning?” Jude flung her towel on her bed. She was such a naked person. Penny reflexively turned away. “You were up at six a.m. or something. That light was driving me crazy.”

  “Sorry,” said Penny. “I didn’t get very far.”

  Penny’s phone beeped in her bag.

  Mallory rolled her eyes.

  “Why? Because you were texting your new boyfriend?” Mallory nodded toward her stuff.

  “Mal,” said Jude.

  “Clearly she’s boning someone,” Mallory insisted. “She’s worse than I am with that thing.”

  Penny’s cheeks flushed.

  “I know you’re private, Penny, but it is obvious,” said Jude. “And it’s great. Isn’t that why you broke up with Mark?”

  “Not exactly,” muttered Penny.

  “Not exactly. I can’t hang out. I’m Penny, little miss serious writer with a shady new boyfriend I won’t talk about.” Mallory sat up with a dare in her smile.

  “Whatever, Mallory.” Penny turned back to her laptop.

  “Forget it,” she said, arching her eyebrow. “Come on, Jude. Shady Penny doesn’t want to hang out with us.”

  “Do you want anything?” asked Jude, throwing on a romper. “An Uncle Sam treat?”

  Penny shook her head.

  “Want to have dinner later?”

  “Maybe,” said Penny.

  “Well, make an effort,” said Jude. “We have so much to catch up on. Like, how I’m a freshly minted art history major who dropped her shitty marketing pre-reqs.”

  “Whoa, that’s amazing!” exclaimed Penny. “And your dad’s cool with it?”

  “Not exactly,” said Jude, rolling her eyes. “Mostly he shit-talked Mom’s trip to Europe, since she’s hate-posting it all over Facebook. I guess he’s finally paying attention to her.”

  “I need coffee,” whined Mallory, tugging on Jude’s arm.

  “Okay, okay,” said Jude. “Catch you later?”

  Penny nodded.

  As the door slammed, Penny could hear Mallory in the hall.

  “I don’t know what you see in her.”

  Mallory could throw salt all she liked. There was no way Penny would go to House and let Sam see her. That would ruin everything. Sam would take one look at her and be like, “Yikes, never mind.”

  Instead of writing, Penny snack-crastinated. She chewed a Lactaid, then grabbed a jar of Nutella and pulled out a heaping spoonful. She placed it in the middle of a cereal bowl and dumped a mini bag of Cheetos into it. She carefully dipped a twiglet into the hazelnut smear and popped it into her mouth. Then she checked her phone.

  SAM HOUSE

  Today 2:02 PM

  Do you know what the simulation hypothesis is?

  And when she didn’t respond immediately:

  Hello?

  unsubscribe?

  Is this thing on?

  So much for not texting for the rest of the day. She wrote:

  Jude and Mal are en route

  He texted back immediately

  Here?

  Yeah

  She dipped another Cheeto.

  Are you coming?

  Hell no

  Penny typed without thinking.

  Ahhahahah thanks a lot

  It’s not that they’d explicitly discussed it; they just knew.

  Is it crazy that we don’t hang out?

  Penny’s hand hovered over the keypad. Neon cheesy flavor crystals fleeced the thumb and forefinger of her non-texting hand. A brown-orange lichen she couldn’t wait to scrape off with her teeth.

  Hang out?

  She was stalling.

  There was no way she’d allow him to see her do 97 percent of her normal daily activities. She was a monster. A monster who was flat as a board with no ass. In fact, the only thing she had going on in the curves department was an enormous cystic pimple on her chin that hurt when she touched it. Yeah, no.

  Like for real?

  Yeah

  In a coffee shop

  Where your friends go

  And your other friend works

  Penny smiled at the mention of them being friends. But she also couldn’t tell if this was some kind of test. If she admitted to wanting to see him would that be disappointing?

  She wrote:

  No?

  He responded immediately.

  RIGHT?

  Whew. Correct response. So why did she feel so . . . sad?

  And ruin this?

  She mashed the spoon into the Cheeto. It probably wasn’t disappointment she was feeling, but GI distress. Between the hardened protein bars in her belly and this trash, she might never poop again. Penny took solace in the fact that she and Sam would never have to poop in the same city block, let alone the same bathroom.

  Srsly

  Feels sooooo good to be in our respective metal boxes

  #sealed

  #safe

  Free from the mortal coil

  Yeah

  What you said

  Lol

  So yeah no IRL for me

  Why break the fourth wall?

  No point

  We’re perfect in here

/>   It was true. Everything outside of the box was a mess. Penny’s “un-here” was no good. She shimmied off her bra with her clean hand and flung it onto her bed.

  If I could be perfect in here

  And in my writing

  I think I’d be satisfied

  Is that pathetic?

  Nope

  AGREED

  I think you only get to be good at

  two things at once

  Do you think we spend too much time talking and not enough working?

  He took a minute to answer.

  Probably

  Penny smiled.

  You have to find your movies

  And you have to write your

  big story and let me read it

  Maybe you only get to have one thing at once

  Lol

  Probably

  What if this is our one thing?

  Lol

  What like texting?

  Yeah

  Maybe this is what we’re good at

  I’m not mad

  Phones rule

  Humans drool

  Lol

  We’re the best

  This is the best

  And it was.

  SAM.

  After the lunch rush, Sam slipped out of work early and borrowed Fin’s car.

  He pulled up to the Texas Workforce Commission. The state government office on the East Side was covered with prairie oaks. It was shaded and featured a poured concrete ledge in front of the building with two metal handrails that were magnets for skate rats. As long as the kids didn’t break stuff, drink, or try to catch tags on the property, the cops rarely messed with them.

  Sam saw three boys dicking around on their skateboards. The smallest, a goofy-footed kid with chin-length straight hair nose-slid down the eleven-stair handrail. He had the ballsy, wiry, little-dude confidence that comes from a low center of gravity, moving as if he knew exactly what every part of his body was doing. Sam watched the other two, larger boys, attempt noncommittal backside shuvits and bailed kickflips, spending more time retrieving boards than riding away clean.