Sam remembered when he was their age and the city first put the new handrails in. It had been the big news in his crew for weeks. Most of the skaters with money, the kids with the fresh setups and new shoes every month, frequented dedicated skate parks that started springing up once the kids of the Austin tech set became of age. But these three boys were recognizably just as poor as he’d been. One had a board with a chipped tail that was plugged with peanut-buttery wood filler and sanded down, and even from a distance Sam could see their socks through the ollie holes in their soles.
Sam had been out here a couple times over the last few weeks. It was only ever the three of them, and there was something about the littlest one that was transfixing. He flung himself down the stairs repeatedly, as sure-footed as a bug.
Sam got out and walked over to them.
The three scowled as if to ward off a predator or undercover cop. With a dirty towel draped over his head and a cigarette dangling from his mouth, the youngest boy resembled those child soldiers you saw on Vice docs—with that thousand-yard stare that’s extra haunted on a kid’s face.
“Relax, I’m not a cop,” Sam said. He pulled out a cigarette and lit it.
“Yo, let me get a smoke,” said the kid, reaching toward him.
“You’ve already got one,” said Sam.
“Let me hold it for later though.” He flashed a wide grin, cigarette bobbing up.
The two other boys flanked him as if they were his backup. Sam felt conflicted about giving a child tobacco. Then he figured he’d be getting it elsewhere. Sam handed it over, and the kid tucked the loosie behind his ear.
“I seen you,” said the ringleader as he grabbed a lighter out of the back pocket of his filthy jeans and started playing with it. “Always wearing the same shit. You’re not some kind of emo child molester, right?”
Sam laughed and shook his head. “What child molester would tell a kid he was a child molester though?”
The kid laughed. “True.”
“What’s your name? It’s not Lester, is it?” The kid smirked again. “Last name molester.” His friends chortled on cue.
“Sam,” said Sam. “I used to skate here back when I was around your age.”
“What’s up, Sam? I’m Bastian. This is James”—he pointed at the shorter of the two boys, with slicked-back hair—“and Rico.” Rico nodded and cracked his knuckles. Sam nodded, stifling a smile. They were cartoon goons.
He thought about what Penny would do if he had brought her as his backup. Probably stare at them combatively, asking invasive questions. And confusing them later by offering Band-Aids and Neosporin from her kit as needed.
This morning she’d coached him on how to approach them.
None of this matters
We’re all biding time until we die anyway
He’s probably bored
Kids get bored
Go unbore him
“So anyway,” he said. “I don’t skate as much now because I’m a documentary filmmaker.”
PENNY.
My mom’s coming
It was 8:42 a.m. on a Saturday, perfect time to bring up topics she’d been avoiding for months.
Is that good or bad
Suboptimal
Not a fan?
Nope
Me neither
*Of mine
Why?
You go first
Penny always had to go first.
No you
Sam went first:
My mom shouldn’t have been a mom
Why?
She’s an alcoholic
Whoa
Yeah
Sucks
Yeah
What else?
Isn’t that enough?
You tell me
I think she hates me
She doesn’t hate you
Penny wrote before she thought about it. What the hell did she know? Some moms eat their young. Some do it without meaning to.
Hate’s a strong word but I don’t think it’s too far off tbh
K your turn
Lol
It’s so early for momtalk
Sorry
No tell me
Mine makes me sad
Why?
She thinks I’m GREAT
Tough crowd
She wants to do everything together
And?
I’m a huge disappointment
How?
We’re sooooo different
My mom wants to be besties
we’re not
AT ALL
The whole thing is so sad
It bums me out to think about
Oof
Are you gonna be ok?
She wondered if she would be. Celeste set her off so easily. She remembered the Apple Store fiasco and wondered if this trip would be a repeat. Penny didn’t have the energy for Celeste, with her hugeness and her sucking-up-all-the-air-in-a-room-ness. Her mom monopolized her life so completely, and Penny was only just getting her footing in a life that was hers alone. Hers and her phone’s.
God.
Honestly, if Penny had to choose between saving a puppy or her phone from an oncoming train, she’d lunge for the phone, and that was awful. The line that separated her phone from Sam was becoming increasingly blurred. Sam was her phone and her phone was Sam. Her rose-gold friend-pal in its little black outfit.
Whoa.
Sam was her Anima.
Shit.
It wasn’t a romance; it was too perfect for that. With texts there were only the words and none of the awkwardness. They could get to know each other completely and get comfortable before they had to do anything unnecessarily overwhelming like look at each other’s eyeballs with their eyeballs.
With Sam in her pocket, she wasn’t ever alone. But sometimes it wasn’t enough. Penny knew she should be grateful, yet there this was niggling hope, this aggravating notion running constantly in the background of her operating system, that one day Sam would think about her and decide, “To hell with all these other chicks I meet every day who are hot, not scared of sex, and are rocket scientists when it comes to flirting, I choose you, Penelope Lee. You have an inventive, not-at-all-gross way with snacks, and your spelling is top-notch.”
Penny was looking at her phone when the screen lit up in her hand.
It was a call.
From Sam.
Whoa.
Penny glanced over at a still-sleeping Jude, quietly got out of bed, and went into the bathroom.
“Hi.”
His voice was deep, as if he’d just woken up.
“Hi?”
Penny cleared her throat. “You called me.”
She heard him laugh.
Penny ran the shower, as if the room were bugged.
“I’m aware of that.”
“Why the escalation?” she asked him.
He laughed again. Penny had no idea why she worded it like that.
“I mean, why’d you call?”
“You didn’t answer me.”
“What?”
Penny’s heart was hammering. She sat on the floor.
“I asked if you were okay. You didn’t respond. I became momentarily worried.”
“Oh, sorry. Yeah, I’m fine. I was thinking about momstuff.”
“Well, it’s the responsibility of the emergency contact to inquire.”
“I’m going to be honest with you: The rules of emergency contacts continue to evade me.”
He laughed again. Penny smiled so hard it broke her face.
“Moms are rough.”
“Yeah.”
Penny thought how satisfying it would be to introduce Sam to Celeste as her boyfriend. He had so many tattoos. In fact, the only upside to Lorraine being pregnant is that it would scandalize Celeste that Penny’s boyfriend was a dad. For all her “I’m a cool mom” posturing, Celeste wanted Penny comfortably settled with Mark.
“I’ve been avoiding her since I got here,” she said. “I feel k
inda bad about it.” She adjusted the shower water so she wouldn’t waste so much of it.
“I haven’t seen my mom in a while either.”
“Where does she live?”
“Here.”
“Austin?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
They sat in silence for a bit.
“What’s yours called? Mine’s a Celeste.”
“Brandi Rose.”
Well, as names go Sam’s mom’s didn’t not belong to a stripper.
Penny checked for the mom dossier she had filed in her head. She carefully put “Brandi Rose,” “alcoholic,” and “not Sam’s emergency contact” in there.
“What’s a Celeste like?”
“Well, her birthday’s coming up. That’s a whole thing. There was this one year she accidentally double booked dates with two different guys. While she was out to dinner, the second dude came to the house and I thought he was a murderer. Good times.”
Sam laughed.
“How is that not the plot of an eighties movie?”
“I felt bad. I made the guy wait in his car and he had these flowers. It was the worst.”
“When was this?”
“It was before she had a cell phone, so I was eight?”
“And you didn’t have a sitter?”
Penny tried to think about the last time she had a sitter. They didn’t really do that at her house.
“Let’s just say when I was little and my mom was out, I’d go to bed with a ketchup bottle.”
“I already love this story so much. . . .”
“It was a foolproof plan. If the bad guys came in I could douse myself and they wouldn’t kill me because I was already dead.”
“Jesus, I can’t tell if that’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard or the absolute most sad.”
“Both?”
“God, I keep picturing tiny you in the dark frantically hitting the fifty-seven on the Heinz bottle and it not coming out.”
Penny laughed.
“I guess it’s cute and sad. What about Brandi Rose? Any cute-sads to share?”
“Well, Brandi Rose had this thing . . .”
SAM.
Sam didn’t know why he called. Only that he wanted to talk to her, like, actually talk to her, and more importantly, he wanted to hear her.
He hadn’t planned on bringing up his mom. He certainly hadn’t intended to divulge the story of the Worst Night and Morning of His Life. That night was about as country song as things got. In the fateful collection of hours, he’d lost his girl, his home, and his family. But Penny asked and he wanted to answer.
“What about Brandi Rose? Any cute-sads to share?”
Sam loved hearing Penny’s voice and the deep scratchy way she laughed. But, man, he should’ve peed before he called. Instead he settled onto his side and drew the comforter up. He felt as if he were at a sleepover.
“Well, Brandi Rose had this thing where she loved nothing more than watching the Home Shopping Network.”
It was true. It didn’t matter if it was a collapsible cross-country ski machine, an oil-free deep fryer, or a unisex sweater that also turned into a staircase for your dog. If it was peddled on the TV, Sam’s mom wanted it. The habit worsened after Mr. Lange divorced her, but everyone has hobbies and window-shopping through the one-eyed babysitter was hers. The trouble was that his mom was addicted to ordering it. The lot of it. Late at night.
That night—the Worst Night and Morning of Sam’s Life—Sam and Lorraine were torched on gin martinis. He’d suspected she was cheating on him, only he didn’t have proof past a gut feeling. He figured, stupidly, that a night on the town would be romantic, but then he ran out of cash. Sam headed home to pick up a few things, prize among them a small, stemmy stash of weed he’d left in his sock drawer, figuring he’d crash at Lorraine’s after, as he always did.
When Sam opened the door to his mom’s, he was taken aback by the smell, the way garbage stinks of rotting orange peels no matter what’s in it. He didn’t want to bring Lorraine in except that she needed to pee.
“Heya, Brandiiiiiii,” sang Lorraine, peeking from behind the door as she walked in. She burst out laughing when his mother glared at them from her chair in the front room. It had been weeks since Sam was home, and he was startled by the squalor. Without him to tidy, dirty dishes had stacked up. There were empty take-out boxes on every surface, and there was mail strewn on the floor that nobody had bothered to pick up.
Coming home after a night out had been a bad idea. Lorr was wearing a bra as a shirt, and Sam’s embarrassment for everyone ignited into a bright white rage. When he slid on a collection of crinkly envelopes, which made Lorraine cackle again, he snatched them up to discover they were addressed to him. Slender white envelopes stamped with angry red threats.
“She’d been opening up these credit cards in my name and running up thousands of dollars on junk,” he said.
“Jesus.”
“How white trash is that?” He cringed as he said it. He hated that term.
Penny didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.
“My mom lives in a trailer,” he said. “I lived in a trailer.”
“People live in trailers.”
Sam wished he could see Penny’s face. Though if it had registered pity or . . . disgust . . . it would’ve destroyed some part of him. Lorraine dumped him the morning after.
“There wasn’t enough space to keep the boxes inside,” he continued. “She’d stacked some outside under a tarp. It was demented. I couldn’t stop yelling. I wanted to shake her or push her. I was so drunk and so mad. . . .” Tears dampened his pillow.
“Did you shake her?”
“No.”
“Did you push her?”
Sam wiped his nose on his shirt.
“No. I thought for a second I was going to hurt her though. It’s why I left. I haven’t spoken to her since. Also, it’s why I don’t drink anymore. I don’t drink anymore, at least not really,” he added, thinking about Lorraine and their last hurrah.
Sam sat up, his nose was blocked. Shit.
He’d called her to cheer her up and now he was crying. Penny was like Sodium Pentothal to the jugular. He couldn’t stop telling her his worst truths. It was horrifying.
Penny was silent.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Sam felt depleted. Ragged.
“Why?”
“I don’t know where that came from. I called to see if you were okay.” He laughed dryly. “I genuinely thought I was going to tell you something profound and reassuring about the human condition or something. What a spaz, right?”
“We’re all spazzes.”
Sam nodded glumly. Uuuuuuuugh. He wanted to die of embarrassment.
“You probably needed to tell someone for a while, and I’m glad it was me. And, whatever, maybe you were right.”
“About what?”
“This is probably how emergency contacts work. You say something to your person before you go nuts and blow a gasket.”
“God forbid anyone has a panic attack,” he said.
She laughed. “Exactly.”
“So . . .”
“So.”
“As I was saying . . .”
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
She laughed again. “Yes. Thank you for asking. Are you okay?”
“Me? I’m fucking fantastic.”
“You win, you know.”
“At being fantastic?”
“No. You won the mom-off this round.”
Sam laughed.
PENNY.
Phone calls. Who knew phone calls were so intense? Penny thought about what Sam had told her. About Brandi Rose. The trailer. Penny didn’t know anyone who had grown up in a trailer. It was clueless, but she’d assumed she and Celeste were on the poorer side of the spectrum. Where Penny wore her Koreanness and her weirdness on the outside, you’d never guess that Sam wasn’t in the same tax bracket as everyone else.
&
nbsp; Sam trusted her. That was a big deal. Progress had been made. Not that she and Sam were trying to get anywhere specific. Or that phone calls necessarily led to hand-holding, which led to make-outs and dates and marriage and kids, but somewhere, somehow, a needle had been moved. Sam really trusted her, and she felt lucky for it.
They were getting closer. It was the best feeling in the world.
With Sam’s call, it was as if the best part of her day had already happened. As Penny showered, she wondered if her mother would see a change in her, if she appeared more worldly or something. Then again, Penny used to stare at her mom, silent-screaming about the bad things that had happened, and Celeste never got a clue.
She wiped down the foggy mirror. Penny never looked the way she thought she did in her head, like how your recorded voice sounds positively vile when you hear it out loud. She applied some of her mom’s lipstick and smiled as if she were posing for a picture. Was this her new life? Would she and Sam be calling each other now? She loved the interface—how they could tell each other anything on text, from silly trivial things to deep truths—and hoped that part would still happen. She’d bought an app that saved a copy of everything they’d said. Phone calls though . . . Oh man. They were something else. So heart-squishingly intimate. She could almost feel his breath when he laughed. Penny wished she could stay in that call forever.
“Is she tiny like you? Does she dress cool or super mommish?” Jude was dying to meet Celeste, so they rode the elevator down to the lobby together. It was a source of great curiosity that while Jude’s parents were over in California and Mallory’s mom had flown in twice from Chicago expressly to decorate her daughter’s dorm room, Penny’s mom, who at an hour away by car, remained a mystery.
Celeste was both easy and hard to explain. Penny thought about her first day of kindergarten. Even at a young age, she was mortified that her mom had required so much extra face time from her teacher, Ms. Esposito.
She recalled the way her teacher smiled with eyes widened over her mom’s shoulder at the other parents. The way that she—despite being younger than her—patted Celeste on the arm as she sniffled. None of the other parents were crying. Not to mention how Celeste had worn these completely incorrect tie-dyed tennis shorts and had dyed her socks to match. The worst was during recess when Penny saw her mom standing outside the school gates. Spying on her. She’d spotted her mom’s frothy permed hairdo crouching conspicuously behind the bus stop. At one point Celeste bought a Popsicle and sat on the bus bench to eat it, as if she’d forgotten what she was doing there in the first place.
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