Emergency Contact

by Mary H. K. Choi

  It was odd seeing people out of context. Like running into your priest at the 7-Eleven or catching Dr. Greene outside of Jude’s Skype window. Seeing your classmate in his “going out” shirt in the middle of the night felt like a glitch in the Matrix. He was with another dude. Shorter, brown-haired—with a face like a weak handshake—he wore white jeans and mirrored sunglasses. Sam would have had a field day.

  “Uh, hey,” she said.

  Andy leaned in, took her forearms, and air-kissed both of her cheeks. To Penny, who didn’t know what was happening, the first kiss was scandalizing, the second completely mortifying.

  He smelled of laundry detergent, chewing gum, and boy deodorant.

  “This is Penelope,” he shouted to his friend. “She goes to UT as well.

  “This is Pete. He’s kind of a twat.” He whispered the last part so close to her ear Penny withdrew reflexively.

  “Lovely to meet you,” said Pete, checking her out in a way that was less about appreciating her outfit and more about being caught eyeing her. Blargh. Penny wished she were wearing a hoodie. “Shall I get us another round?” asked Pete.

  “Fantastic idea,” said Andy. “Grab me a beer. Penny, what are you having?”

  “Champagne.”

  “Prosecco likely,” remarked Pete. Penny could tell he was making fun of her, though she couldn’t tell exactly how.

  “So,” said Andy. Penny delighted in how Andy’s Asian cheeks were as ruddy as hers from the booze.

  “I have a question.” He cleared his throat.

  Penny nodded.

  “Do you know where the hell we are?” he asked. “Pete, who again, for the record, is a terrible person, dragged me here.”

  Penny smiled. “No idea!” she yelled into his ear. “A girl who possibly hates me brought me.”

  “Perhaps as punishment,” he noted.

  “Perhaps,” she echoed, and found herself giggling.

  “Do you need to get back to her?” he asked. Penny noticed how twinkly his eyes were.

  “How about I wait for your obnoxious friend to bring us drinks.” Penny wasn’t sure she should keep drinking except that she preferred it to idly waiting for Jude or Mallory to return from making out with their dudes.

  Andy surveyed the room. “Clearly we need better friends; this place is hideous.”

  “It’s possibly the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” she agreed.

  He shook his head, dimples deepening. “This whole night has been insane,” he said.

  “Penny! There you are.” Jude grabbed her shoulder and handed her another red cup, splashing some onto her hand. “Where have you beeeen?”

  Jude hung on to the last word long enough that Penny knew she was drunk or high. Or at least solidly on her way to both.

  “Heeeeeeeey,” she said to Andy.

  “Heeeeeeeey,” he responded, subtly nudging Penny with his elbow.

  “Jude, this is . . .”

  “Andy,” he said, shaking Jude’s hand. Jude’s gaze lingered over him.

  “He’s a dear, dear friend,” Penny finished. It wasn’t a complete lie.

  “Fun,” said Jude, widening her eyes approvingly.

  She was right. Penny was surprised to realize, she was kind of, maybe, actually having fun.

  • • •

  When Penny opened her eyes the next morning her mouth tasted of wet wool socks that had stewed in a car for a month.

  Kill me now.

  Jude snored lightly.

  Penny was dressed in last night’s outfit with the addition of half a quesadilla, perched jauntily on her chest like a cheese-filled piece of statement jewelry. She had zero recollection of stopping for something to eat. As for how she got home, that remained mysterious as well. Penny sat up, head pounding, laid the old food gently on her nightstand, and picked up her phone.

  Six a.m.

  1 NEW MESSAGE

  Today 2:57 AM

  Hi

  It was Andy. Penny recalled giggling uncontrollably attempting to punch her number into his phone. In the end he’d had to commandeer the operation, and with their combined efforts and numerous opportunities to brush fingers, they’d managed to eke out the dispatch.

  Penny’s first class wasn’t until eleven, not that it mattered. She stumbled to the bathroom, scrubbed the furry taste out of her mouth, and scraped the makeup off her face.

  Her reflection was pale. Puffy too. Dark hair hung limply by her face. Her pores were enlarged, resembling thirsty little mouths.

  “Pretty,” she croaked.

  She shimmied out of her constricting bra that had crept up her left boob, and a card fell out onto the tile with a prim thwack. She picked it up. It was the party photographer’s business card. It said nothing more than “stooooooooooooooooooop.com.” Penny counted the number of O’s and plugged the URL into her phone. Under last night’s date was a gallery of pretty partygoers, and while Penny had been there and recognized some of the faces and outfits, scrolling through felt somehow voyeuristic. Everyone was so glamorous. Then she found her and Jude.

  It was like looking at a mannequin version of herself.

  Uncanny Valley . . .

  Used in reference to the phenomenon whereby a computer-generated figure or humanoid bearing a near-identical resemblance to a human being arouses a sense of unease or revulsion in the person viewing it.

  In the picture, Penny’s face was a mask. She remembered how startled she’d been when the photographer pounced. Yet wearing the black slip, with Jude’s arms encircling her waist, she appeared composed. The flash accentuated her pale skin and dark lips. Not only that, but her eyes were narrowed alluringly and her lips were curled in a confident smirk. It was Penny. Except it wasn’t. This was evil, sexy Penny. A Penny she hadn’t been aware of. Penny was captivated by her avatar.

  First off, Penny had had fun. Real fun. In-the-moment IRL fun. Not the sort of fun where she had to continually remind herself to have a good time. In fact, she hadn’t checked her phone at all. As far as she was concerned, alcohol was a miracle. She felt captivating. Penny belonged at that party. She felt, okay, not to be psychotic or pathetic or anything, but she felt like a MzLolaXO.

  As she scrolled through, she wondered if this was how it was to be a party girl. Regular Penny only ever took photos bearing the expression of someone attempting to pass a kidney stone the size of a chair. Yet last night there were two more party shots that were taken of her unaware. One with Mallory and Jude, doing the unimaginable—dancing in public. And another with her head thrown back, laughing at something Andy was telling her, with her hand firmly planted on his chest.

  She’d spent most of the evening chatting with Andy. And his dimples. Andy who’d gone to boarding school in Hong Kong and traveled the world and played rugby and had a six-pack that Jude had molested at a certain point in the evening. Even Pete had become substantially less irritating once enough booze had tobogganed down Penny’s piehole.

  Mostly they talked about school. It was liberating and electrifying to be at a party with someone you already had so much in common with.

  “Yeah, it’s way too hard to try to do it linearly,” he’d roared over the music about her story within a story. “Write them as two separate things and then sort of mash the second one into the first one.”

  By then Penny was on her sixth champagne, though blessedly, she’d remembered to take notes.

  “It needn’t be elegant,” he said. “Not at the beginning. Have you ever read Seven Wise Masters?”

  She hadn’t.

  “What about Homer’s Odyssey?”

  She shook her head.

  “Okay, you know the Itchy & Scratchy Show in The Simpsons?”

  Penny laughed. “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s the way to go. It serves to illustrate a larger theme of the episode. The first draft of that script probably says, ‘Itchy & Scratchy episode about blah blah blah goes here.’ Plonk it in when you’re about done, throw some icing around it,
and twiddle with it until it’s presentable.”

  Penny’s mind exploded. It wasn’t solely that writing two stories simultaneously was consistently tripping her up. It was that somewhere along the line, as she researched the court case of the real-life parents, she’d forgotten who the hero was. She’d misjudged which narrative took main stage. It was laughably small-minded. It was species-ist! The whole time Penny insisted that science fiction was boundless, yet here she was presuming human supremacy. The Anima was The Simpsons and the parents Itchy & Scratchy. Not the other way around.

  Penny reddened at the memory of hugging and kissing Andy on the cheek at the revelation. Even with her hangover, Party Penny had served her well.

  She’d also had a blast with Mallory and Jude. Lots of giggly joint bathroom visits.

  “Yours is hella cute,” said Mallory, meaning Andy. They’d shared the stall, and normally Penny would have way too much performance anxiety to go, but this time it was fine.

  “I know!” Penny exclaimed. By then her feet were bleeding and she could feel the slickness between her toes, but she didn’t care.

  Andy was cute. He was well read and sophisticated and taller than her in high heels and weighed more than her, which Sam plainly didn’t. All she had to do was exactly the opposite of what she normally would to be attractive. Simple as that. Screw Sam.

  Penny made a promise to never text him again. Or at least not until he texted first.

  Right then, as if by magic, her phone buzzed.

  It was her mom.

  Typical.

  Penny ignored it.

  SAM.

  Bastian Trejo was fourteen, looked twelve, and had started smoking when he was ten. And while the skate rat was nothing more than a runt in busted shoes, to Sam there was something intimidating about him. But after that first afternoon, by the time Bastian cadged three cigarettes and a Whataburger chicken finger meal off him, the kid let his guard down.

  The only rule they’d established for the documentary was that if him, James, and Rico were skating when they weren’t supposed to be Sam couldn’t get them in trouble with their parents. Sam agreed.

  “Yeah, Bastian’s mom is serious,” said James.

  “Yeah, Mom’s got enough going on,” Bastian said, flicking his cigarette.

  Beyond that, Bastian didn’t need any further convincing. The kid had a compulsively watchable face and knew it. Sam’s setup was too cumbersome with the DSLR, so mostly he shot with his phone, and the second it was up, Bastian was ready. Talking a mile a minute, rattling off sordid tales of every “bitch” he “bagged” and other girls who had “curved” him. He knew how to tell a story even if Sam suspected most of it was made up.

  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.

  “Why would Esmerelda leave her husband?” Andy asked. “He’s rich. He’s in love with her. They’ve been in a relationship for decades. The sex, for what it’s worth, is okay.”

  Penny tried to imagine sex between seventy-year-olds.

  “What would the motivating factors be? She’s not in the market for it. Not explicitly anyway.”

  “Well . . .” Penny thought about Vin, the younger guy. “Is he Esmerelda’s person? Does he say good morning to her in a way that’s reassuring? To where it feels as if he’s holding her hand for the entire rest of the day until he says good night? Would she be happy for him if his happiness meant that she couldn’t be with him?”

  “Sure,” said Andy flippantly. “But Jackson’s loaded.” That was Esmerelda’s husband.

  “You can be with the same person for a long time and have it be fine and meet someone else who instantly makes you see that it’s broken,” she said.

  “Just like that?”

  “Basically.”

  “God, women are such fickle bitches.”

  “It’s not women. It’s humans. It’s like a design flaw or something.”

  “Right,” he said. “I guess that’s why your story’s as dismal as it is. Robots glamouring humans to kill their babies and put them in prison.”

  “First of all, they got off,” she said. The parents had stood trial but not done considerable jail time. “And second, it’s only dismal from the family’s side of things. It’s actually quite triumphant from the machine’s point of view.”