It made what happened at school the following Monday worth it. Amber told everyone in French that Penny had left abruptly because she had diarrhea. After that Penny was cured of ever trying to play nice with people from school again. Penny might have been unpopular, but so was Amber. Unless you were super-popular or second-most super-popular, the difference was negligible. You were a loser. What separated Penny from Amber was that anybody could smell Amber’s desperation. To Penny that was far more pathetic than simply being invisible. Penny would stop trying. Instead she’d spend time preparing for her future, living in books until the exciting part of her life would begin. Things would matter then. In fact, everything would be different.
• • •
Ten minutes in and Penny already knew her eight a.m. fiction-writing course on Thursdays would be her favorite. Notably, the class was full despite the agonizing start time. Held in a small classroom, it was incomparable to American History or regular English 301, which were both conducted in sprawling lecture halls with stadium seating and a screen suspended from the ceiling so you could see your professor’s face from the cheap seats. This classroom sat about twenty, with high school desks, the kind where the chairs were attached to the table.
J.A. Hanson was young for a professor. She was twenty-eight. At twenty-two she’d written the critically acclaimed Messiah, a classic post-apocalyptic tale she’d received a Hugo Award for. The hero was a teenaged girl and the ending blew Penny’s mind. That J.A. was a woman blew everyone else’s mind. The reviews and fansites were convinced J.A. Hanson was a dude. Especially since there were no pictures of her at the time and nobody knew what J.A. stood for.
Penny discovered science fiction shortly after Maus. She began writing her own short stories as a hobby, and though her high school had a literary magazine, Penny wouldn’t have dreamed of submitting anything.
It didn’t help that in AP English Lit, junior year, they’d read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which was basically The Hunger Games except it was written in the forties and had a twist at the end.
They’d spent a week in class creating a story with unpredictable endings, and Penny wrote hers from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old Swiss boy in the year 2345, who woke up knowing precisely when he’d die. The boy considered what his final acts would be and elected to spend the day doing exactly what he normally did, playing chess with his best friend, Gordy. He was cheered by the small, dependable routines most and the twist was that he didn’t die, waking up every morning with the same thought in an insane asylum, where he didn’t have any choice but to do what his doctors had scheduled for him.
Penny liked her story, yet Ms. Lansing gave her a B-, saying she’d been “hoping to hear more about Penny’s exotic point of view.” Penny couldn’t believe it. As if Zurich, 2345, wasn’t farflung enough. She knew what her teacher meant; she’d meant Asian despite Penny being born in Seguin, Texas, which was maybe twenty minutes away. Penny vowed not to show her work again until she respected who’d be reading it.
Over the years, Penny inhaled the classics—Ready Player One, Dune, and Ender’s Game, though it wasn’t until she was introduced to Messiah, ironically from a guy who was the worst dude in the history of dudes, that she realized sci-fi didn’t have to be so . . . boy. J.A.’s work was like Ender’s Game, yet where Ender was smart and getting conned ’cause he was a kid, J.A.’s hero Scan knew her worth.
A female protagonist made the stories more inspiring than voyeuristic. It was so much fun to write about who you could be. From then on Penny’s stories centered around women and girls. There wasn’t even a special trick. You wrote it exactly as you would for a guy, but you made pain thresholds higher since girls have to put up with more in the world and give them more empathy, which makes everything riskier. Plus, with sci-fi, you set up the rules at the beginning and you could blast it all to kingdom come as long as you did it in a satisfying manner. The fact that Penny could take a class from a published author made the whole communal-living college situation worthwhile.
J.A. Hanson had undeniable charisma. She was black with natural hair, dyed platinum, gathered in a pouf on top of her head. And she wore thick-rimmed white glasses to boot. J.A. made nerdiness glamorous. And not in some posery Tumblr way where girls played first-person shooters in their underpants to be attractive to guys.
“Does a Chinese writer get to write about a slave lynching?” It was an intense topic for 8:11 a.m., yet J.A. lobbed the topic into the room so casually Penny couldn’t be sure she’d heard her correctly. It gave the room an intimate, crackly energy, as if they were crowded around a dinner table. A dinner table that was unceremoniously lit on fire.
In Penny’s heart, the answer was absolutely yes. Though she also didn’t know how she felt as an Asian person telling a black woman that.
Penny snuck a peek over her shoulder to see if anyone would pipe up.
“Obviously,” said the other Asian kid in the class. “I read about that in the Times as well,” he said.
The kid had boy-band hair and a clipped British accent that made sense for sentences like “I read that in the Times as well.”
“Why?” J.A.’s smile widened to her canines. It reminded Penny of when Sherlock Holmes announced, “The game is afoot!”
“Well, he’s not white,” he said. “Which helps.”
“But does it? Isn’t it the license of the fiction writer regardless of their identity to characterize whomever they want?” said a girl who was ethnically ambiguous.
Penny couldn’t remember ever having an honest discussion about race in a classroom.
“Well, there’s also that,” said the British-Chinese kid. “As long as you’re not a tragedy tourist or creating racist caricatures. As long as you’re . . . talented, it’s okay.”
“So as long as you’re adept and well intentioned, you get a pass?” asked J.A.
“It’s knee-jerk ‘PC’ garbage to say otherwise,” said another guy, who used scare quotes around “PC.”
“No, it’s not,” a redheaded girl chimed in. “It’s the Kardashians getting cornrows. You can’t shoplift the trendy parts of a culture and glamorize them but then not take into account the awful parts like getting killed by cops at a traffic stop.”
J.A. seemed pleased by the direction that the conversation was taking. It felt as though she was assessing them, coolly compiling notes on each, and Penny was sorry she wasn’t contributing.
“Look, I hate writing,” said J.A. after the initial din died down. “And I’m the type of writer who hates it every single time. But make no mistake: It’s something that you get to do. Especially fiction. I think of it this way.” She sat on top of her desk and crossed her legs in a lotus pose. “If there was an apocalypse—zombies, the sun explodes, whatever—fiction writing as a job would be the thousandth priority behind SoulCycle instructors.”
The class laughed.
“It’s a privilege, and part of acknowledging that privilege is doing it honorably. Create diverse characters because you can. Especially ones that aren’t easy to write. A character that scares you is worth exploring. Yet if you breathe life into a character and it comes to you too easily—say you’re writing from the viewpoint of a black man in America and you’re not one? Think hard about where your inspiration is coming from. Are you writing stereotypes? Tropes? Are you fetishizing the otherness? Whose ideas are you spreading? Really consider how you transmit certain optics over others. Think about how much power that is.”
J.A. locked eyes with Penny.
“It’s about finding the truth in fiction,” she said. “Which sounds contradictory. But the story will let you know if you’re close.”
Penny’s brain buzzed. J.A. had called writers powerful, which meant Penny was powerful.
It took Penny a moment to realize her mouth was hanging open a little. If Maus was galvanizing moment number one in Penny’s plans to become a writer, the heart-hammering feeling in J.A.’s class was two. Maybe two and three.
She’d been invited to a secret society. It reorganized her thoughts with such intensity that she had the sudden urge to pee.
Penny had been writing all the time, for years now. She’d never stopped even if she showed no one. Stories, lists of ideas, and strange chunks of amusing dialogue that came to her while she ignored whatever else was going on in her actual life. She knew she was decent. Only she wanted more. Penny wanted to get really good. And she wanted for J.A. Hanson to recognize exactly how good.
SAM.
Sam woke with a start. It was Saturday—more than a week later—and his problems remained as they were. He was still broken up with Liar. He was still in love with Liar. Liar was pregnant. It was one p.m. It was his day off and he’d fallen asleep only two hours ago. Blargh.
Last night, after countless texts and missed calls, Liar finally deigned to come by House after work. Under Sam’s watchful eye she chugged gallons of water and walked back and forth to the bathroom to pee on six more sticks. It was both intimate and also very much not.
Period lateness check: four weeks and counting.
“Thanks a lot for buying the cheap ones,” Lorraine called out from the toilet. She had the bathroom door cracked open, and though they’d once been that couple where one person peed while the other showered, Sam looked away. He heard the flush.
“I get pee all over my hands with those things,” she said. Sam wondered how many pregnancy tests she’d taken over the years but knew better than to ask. It had taken days of badgering to get her to come over. She’d skipped the Planned Parenthood appointment and had so far failed to make a new one.
She washed her hands, lining up the results on the side of the sink.
“See, the good ones spell out ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant,” she said. “They’re digital or something.”
Sam hadn’t known there was such a thing as a good one when it came to pregnancy tests. He’d sprung for the two-for-three deal. Sam reasoned six meant better odds so they’d know for sure, for sure.
They waited and watched. It was surprisingly hard to tell. Of the six, five were positive with faint plus signs. The last was a dud. The little white window remained completely blank. No minus sign. Nothing.
“So, you’re pregnant,” he said.
“I guess,” she responded.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Pissed,” she said.
He nodded glumly.
“Like, how dumb is this?”
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and groaned.
“You really want to know how I feel?” she said after a while. “I want to break shit.”
“Come with me,” he said. Sam went behind the bar, grabbed his backpack from under the register, then led her through the kitchen and out the screen door.
It was an airless night.
Sam unzipped his bag and handed Lorraine his laptop.
She took it and looked at him quizzically.
“You said you wanted to break shit.”
He nodded at the gravelly parking lot.
“It’s backed up,” he said. “And broken. Put it out of its . . .”
Before Sam could say “misery,” Lorraine threw it on the ground by their feet.
Nothing happened. It lay there heavy and doltish.
She picked it back up, opened it, and this time pitched it farther.
“Fuuuuuuuck,” she yelled into the night.
It skittered yards away.
They walked over.
“You have a go,” she said, bending down to hand it to him.
Sam held the laptop above his head with both hands and threw it onto the ground, where it finally cracked. They chucked it and chucked it—working up a sweat—until the screen was totaled and the two halves came apart at the hinge. Lorraine took a photo of it and posted it on Instagram, tagging him.
After, without saying anything, they tossed the computer’s mangled carcass into a trash bag, threw in the pregnancy tests, and swung the bag into the dumpster.
“Did you get a new one?” she asked him, getting in her car.
Sam shook his head and yawned. He’d have to drop out of school and get a second job to pay child support anyway. Besides, the type of work he qualified for rarely required personal computing.
“Come by tomorrow,” she said, pulling him in for a hug. Her expression was unreadable.
At two thirty the next afternoon Sam took the bus over to Lorraine’s apartment, plugging in the pass code he knew by heart. When the gate rumbled open, he was notably relieved that not everything in the world had gone berserk.
She met him at the door, no makeup, hair up in a towel, barefoot in a pink-and-blue floral housedress. It was a punch in the gut. It was his private Lorraine. His favorite Lorraine. The Lorraine she was when it was just the two of them.
“You should’ve buzzed me,” she remarked irritably. She made him wait by the door, closing it partway so he couldn’t see in, and reappeared with a silver MacBook Air and a tangled power cord.
“Here,” she said, handing it over. The slender device struck Sam as strangely vulnerable. More expensive and aerodynamic than any computer he’d ever owned. Sam wondered if there was anything on it that he wasn’t supposed to see. Or better yet, something she’d deliberately left him to find.
“It’s wiped,” she said. “It’s got Final Cut Pro though. Photoshop, too, if you need that.”
This wasn’t what he’d expected. Not that he’d thought they’d leap back into bed if he came over, but this felt too close to charity. The worst part was that he wasn’t in a position to refuse it.
“It’ll only be for a few weeks,” he mumbled.
“I upgraded,” she said. “Keep it as long as you want.”
That was Lorraine’s other secret side. While she was all too happy to cadge free drinks off his dirtbag friends and split cheap slices of pizza, most of the time it was an act. Lorraine’s lifestyle was heavily subsidized by her parents. She moved out of Twombly after freshman year and her parents continued to pay her rent even when she landed a job. Her mother bought all of Lorraine’s clothes from Neiman Marcus with the help of a personal shopper. The first time he’d spent the night and took a shower at her house, Sam spotted the price sticker left on her shampoo—$38. He’d put it back and used soap on his head.
Keeping up while they were dating was out of the question, and Sam had no idea what was expected from him as the father of her child. Not only was there nowhere to put a crib in his room, but he didn’t even have a car. And the prospect of walking six miles each way with a Babybjörn strapped to his chest made his testicles want to retreat into his body.
After he left Lorraine’s he walked home through Sixth Street to see if anyone was hiring. Calling his old friend Gunner about a barback gig would have been easy enough, but Sam didn’t want to explain his absence or his sudden need for cash.
Sweat slid down the back of Sam’s denim-clad legs. He would’ve loved to wear basketball shorts and flip-flops, resembling every carefree numbskull roaming the streets with status headphones, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Shrimping man-toes were an insult to nature.
Sam was tired. Lorraine’s laptop hit the base of his spine with every footfall.
The computer probably cost more than his life. Which made a kind of sense since it was decisively more capable than he’d ever been. The most money he’d ever made was eleven dollars an hour. He tried to enjoy the afternoon air and the meditative qualities of walking and failed.
Instead he considered the cost of diapers.
One time Liar sent him to the store to buy tampons and he was stunned by how expensive they were. Diapers had to cost about the same. Except that a period was a week a month, so you could space them out, but a baby needed diapers pretty much constantly for years.
Christ, he had to relax. Sam let his mind drift and panned out to orient himself on Planet Earth and reassure his brain that things were going to be fine.
His
brain had other ideas.
Okay, so if Lorraine was pregnant, it could also mean . . .
SHE COULD HAVE HERPES. WHICH MEANS THAT EVEN IF SHE’S NOT PREGNANT SAM COULD STILL HAVE HERPES BECAUSE PAUL DEFINITELY HAD HERPES.
Thanks, brain.
He walked past the old Marriott, where his mom used to work. It consistently struck him as funny that his mother spent any time in the hospitality business. Brandi Rose Sidelow-Lange was a piece of work. She had what in the old days they’d called moxie. Sam inherited his smart mouth from his mother, and like a snake eating its own tail, it only served to drive her crazy.
Once upon a time, though Sam never knew it, Brandi Rose had been a different person. Infinitely less pissed off. This was evidenced by a photo in the living room. The frame was blue and white with a sunflower on the bottom corner and featured his mom at sixteen, grinning with a Texas Elite Princess Pageant sash draped over her shoulder. Her hair a shiny brown and wearing a knee-length navy dress, Brandi Rose waved. It was a beautiful photo made more so by how happy his mother appeared. Mostly, though, it was displayed in the front room as a trap. Anyone who mentioned it would get the same bitter rejoinder.
“Well, that sash ain’t first place,” she’d point out, ice cubes clinking in her Long Island Iced Tea. “Bitsy Sinclair won. Her daddy, Buck, owned nine car dealerships from here to El Paso.”
According to Brandi Rose, rich people got everything.
“Second place is just about as good as first loser,” she’d continue. “I only did it for the state scholarship anyway. Fat lot of good that did me.” Clink. Clink.
His mother’s response to Sam’s happy addition would be more of the same. Tirades about how shit rolled downhill and how she had to be the one to take care of everything. The accusations would then turn to his father, which led right back to her dissatisfaction with her son. The rejection stung on all counts. Sam was a carbon copy of his father. Though despite the evolutionary wisdom that babies resemble their dads so they’d stick around, Caden Becker was immune to the charms of his tiny doppelgänger.
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