Chapter Two
Penny
I had stayed out late at a party the night before. I hadn’t wanted to go, but my best friend, Nicole Clare, had dragged me. “You have to get out sometimes!” she exclaimed. “You’ve gotta have some fun in your life.”
“But I have plenty of fun already,” I insisted. I liked being home at night with my fingers twined around a cup of hot cocoa, wearing a pair of comfy shorts, and working on one of my books. Parties weren’t really my thing. I’d gone to a couple back in high school but felt simultaneously bored and out of place. At one point, a boy had even tried hitting on me, but he was so drunk I could have been his brother and he wouldn’t have noticed. Eventually, I had gotten a tummy ache and ducked out.
Looking back, I probably shouldn’t have let Nicole talk me into the party last night, but I worried about her because she partied so much and seemed to go home with a different boy every night. In the end, I agreed to go, but only for her sake. We both knew girls who had blacked out at parties after accepting drinks from strangers and had woken up in a strange bed. I didn’t want her to be that girl, but she took a lot of risks and didn’t always play it safe.
The house belonged to one of Nic’s co-workers. It was a lake house with a second-story patio looking out over the moonlit Texas woods. We slipped in through the front door unseen by anyone. A pair of speakers on tripods were playing “Time to Pretend” so loudly that the room vibrated. Despite this, a woman sat at the piano in the corner of the room banging out an old rag-time tune. The effect was jarring, but nobody seemed to care or notice. A crowd of about twenty people swayed and danced lazily in the center of the room.
I ended up in a conversation with a sharply dressed guy named Andrew wearing a Western shirt with pearl snaps and a thick pair of glasses. He had the look of a man who played the banjo in a local indie folk band.
“We’ll start out with the boring questions,” he said, holding a red cup in one hand. “What do you do?”
“For a living or for fun?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Well, I work part-time at my dad’s auto parts store, and sometimes I babysit for families who live in the neighborhood. Not the most prestigious work, I know. I’m hoping to go back to college once I’ve saved up enough money.”
“Hey, nothing wrong with that,” said Andrew.
“I work really hard.”
“What do you to unwind?”
“Well…” I wasn’t used to getting this much attention, and I brushed a strand of hair out of my face shyly. “I like to write books. I like to play board games with my best friend—”
“Whoa, stop there.” Andrew held up one hand as though to call a timeout. “What sort of books do you write?”
This was one of those scary questions that I didn’t like to answer. “Mostly novels,” I said loudly, for someone had turned up the stereo. “I write stories about women trapped in hard situations, who don’t know if they’re ever going to make it.”
“Really? That’s awesome!”
“Thanks…” I could feel myself blushing.
“Any chance I can read one?”
“Maybe someday.” I shrugged and laughed; I’m not even sure why. I was scared he might ask whether they were published on Kindle because I didn’t want him to go and look them up.
“So what else do you do for fun? Do you just write all the time?”
“No…” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Nic tugging on a guy’s tie, smiling seductively. She obviously had him wrapped around her finger; he kept grinning in this embarrassed but also cocksure kind of way, and I knew it was only a matter of time before they either found a back room or left together. “Sorry, I… what was the question?”
“I had asked if you had any hobbies.”
“Oh yeah! Hobbies. Well, I like to cuddle with my stuffed animals, and sometimes I have dance parties alone in my room, and I take care of my dad who is sick.”
“What is he sick with?”
“I, uh…” I laughed in an embarrassed kind of way and tapped him lightly on the chest with my fist. “Why am I hogging all the questions? You should ask me something. Wait…”
Andrew smiled in surprise. “Are you drunk? I literally haven’t seen you once with a drink in your hand.”
“I don’t drink unless I’m forced to. Be right back, I’m gonna go talk to my sister—well, friend, but she’s like a sister. Hold my beer.”
“You’re not even holding a beer!” Andrew pointed out.
“I know, it’s just an expression.” I darted off to find Nic.
But Nicole was already striding toward me, pulling her guy along by the tie like a dog on a leash. “I think Jim and I are gonna get going. You can find your own way home, right?”
“That’s why I brought my own car. Are either of you sober enough to drive? How are you getting home?”
Nic pinched my cheeks, which was only slightly humiliating. I could feel them burning with shame. “Penny, you don’t have to be my mother; I can take care of myself.”
“I know, I just worry about you.”
“I know you do.” She walked past me out the door, dragging Jim behind her. He handed me his beer cup as he passed, perhaps not wanting to be caught driving with it. I stood there for a moment studying the amber liquid, trying to decide whether I should drink it and wishing I could have stopped her from going.
While I was standing there mired in hesitation, Andrew came striding over. I cringed inwardly; his constant questions were exasperating even when I wasn’t worried about my best friend.
“You okay?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I’ll be alright, I guess. You ever have one of those moments where you see someone heading down a dangerous road, and you want to intervene and save them, but you don’t know how?”
“Is this for a book you’re writing or did this really happen?”
I leaned back against the linoleum countertop and undid my ponytail. Waves of dark-blonde hair fell into my face. “Little of both, I guess,” I said as I put it back up. “Sometimes real life blends into my stories and vice versa. Sometimes it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.”
“Dang, what’s your favorite thing you’ve written?”
Ah, now we were getting into the “favorites” questions. This was always my cue to leave. “Listen, I think I’d better be heading home. I want to be there for Nic whenever she gets in.”
“You sure? Can I walk you to your car?”
“Nah, I’ll be fine. This is a pretty secluded lake house, and it looks like the party is dying down anyway.” In the living room, a couple girls were singing “You May Be Right” on karaoke, and a single guy waved his cell phone in front of them half-heartedly. “It’s gotten to the time of night when things are just sad.”
“Well, if you’re ever around, I’d love to talk sometime.”
“Sure, sure,” I replied, not knowing what else to say. Grabbing my keys off the counter, I noticed the red cup still sitting there. “Hey, would you like to have the rest of my beer?”
***
I stayed up half the night waiting for Nic to come home, but she never did. I fell asleep on my tummy with all my clothes on and was awoken the next morning by a loud knocking.
“Penny? Are you in there?” It was Nic.
“Unh,” I muttered, rolling over onto my side.
“I know you didn’t stay out all night. Come into the kitchen; I made you breakfast.”
That was enough to get me out of bed. I changed into a pair of gray running shorts and a t-shirt I won in the eighth grade for competing in the school spelling bee. I brushed my teeth and was still putting on my makeup when Nic knocked on the door again.
“Will you cut it out?” I yelled as I ran to the door. “You’ll wake up Dad!”
But when I opened the door, I found her standing there holding a plate full of grapes, gluten-free waffles, and sliced avocados in her mittened hand. “Oh, you shouldn’t have done that,” I moaned. “Now I feel awful!”
Nic laughed as if to say it was what I deserved. “Come eat with me!” she said, and I followed her into the dining room.
She had set up a workspace at the dining-room table with her new MacBook. The table was an old oak Victorian refectory table that she had recently bought at a thrift store, polished, and repainted. Not for the first time, I marveled at the texture of the wood as I took my seat.
“So…” said Nic slowly as she sliced up a cantaloupe into beautiful, perfect pieces. “How did things go with the boy last night after I left?”
I shrugged. “Not much happened between us, if that’s what you mean. I started getting tired and went home basically right after you left.”
“Penny, Penny, Penny.” She shook her head and clucked her tongue. “I should have stayed around a bit longer so I could explain how into you that guy was.”
“I could have told you that on my own.” I reached for the mug of hot cocoa she made me. “Anyway, he just wasn’t the right guy for me. At first, I thought he might be. I liked the way he looked at me and the way he talked to me. But he was really intense about it, and he started getting more intense as the night went on. Like, I was the only person he talked to the entire night.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that.” Nic handed me a cantaloupe slice. “I thought it was every woman’s dream to have a guy who’s slavishly devoted.”
“Maybe it’s your dream. You were the one leading your guy around on a leash.”
“It was a tie, okay!” Nic laughed. “He said he liked it when I stroked his tie, so I did.”
“What a weird thing to say to someone.”
She smirked and shook her head at me. “Honestly, Pen, sometimes I think you don’t understand what flirting is.”
“Sometimes I wish someone would explain it to me.” I took a sip of my cocoa, which was unusually bitter but warmed me up from the inside. I could feel the warmth spreading from my throat to the tips of my toes.
After breakfast, while Nic cleared the dishes, I went to check on Dad.
He had moved in with us a few months before after being diagnosed with testicular cancer. It wasn’t an arrangement that Nic had been entirely pleased with, but she knew better than to raise a fuss about it. My dad was dying. The doctors had given him, at best, a year to live. He had been undergoing treatments to lessen the pain and sickness, and lately a nurse had been coming over once a day at around noon to check on him. In the meantime, I had been running the shop without him.
When I came into his room that morning, I found him sitting upright with a couple pillows at his back. He was wearing a pair of gray flannel pajamas and idly leafing through an old copy of Reader’s Digest. The portable TV at the front of the room was turned to Matlock with the volume down low, but he didn’t seem to be paying it much attention.
His eyes lit up as I walked in. “Hey, sugar,” he said, setting the magazine down on his knees. “How’ve you been?”
I came over and gave him a hug. “Don’t you worry about me; you’re the one I worry about. How did you sleep last night?”
“I had a bowl of cabbage and cauliflower and went to bed at around ten. I didn’t wake up until about an hour ago. This treatment they’ve got me on has been a real improvement. At least—” He paused, as he always did when having to broach the subject neither of us wanted to discuss. “At least it won’t be painful.”
I stood there quietly for a minute stroking the back of his hand. How did you respond to a statement like that?
He turned and kissed my hand. “How’s work going?”
“It’s been okay. Everyone still asks about you, wants to know how you’re doing. I think we might have to fire Gary soon; he’s been stealing radiator parts and spark plugs. I think he might be trying to build his own car out of spare parts stolen from the shop.”
“If he manages to get it running, that would be very impressive,” Dad said. “Hell, I might even consider letting him have it.”
As we were heading out the door that morning, Nic asked me how he was doing.
“Still has his sense of humor,” I told her, trying to stay composed. It was never easy to see him like that, and I had needed a few minutes to myself before we left for work. “He seems about as cheerful as any man could be when facing the end of his life.”
“God, I don’t know how he does it,” said Nic with a shudder. “Knowing that by the end of the year you could just be—not of this earth. Wherever the dead go. That’s bad enough, but to know you’ll never get to see your daughter’s wedding, never watch your grandkids take their first steps—”
“That’s assuming I even have kids.”
“But even if you don’t, you’ll get married someday.” She paused at the edge of the stairs and shot me a look of suspicion. “You are planning on getting married, aren’t you?”
Nic had been horrified to learn recently that I had never slept with a boy and that my experience of dating had been limited to a clumsy make-out session at the back of the gym in tenth grade. Evander had asked me out at the beginning of the period and broken up with me by the end. In the ninety minutes between, there had been some awkward, sweaty kissing. Leaving the gym that day, I told myself, If this is what dating is like, I don’t really care for it.
“I could see myself getting married someday,” I said as we emerged onto a sunny street lined with cedars. “I guess I just haven’t found the right guy yet.”
“That’s because you’re still waiting for Mr. Perfect,” Nic moaned in a tone of frustration. “I’ve never met anyone who had such high standards for what they wanted in a relationship. That guy last night, Drew, he’d have been perfect for you. And he really liked you, and you weren’t willing to give him the time of day. How much better than Drew does a boy have to be before you’ll consider going out with him?”
“I guess we’ll just have to see,” I said quietly.
“Whereas me, I was totally fine going home with a guy I had just met. Sometimes I wish we could just switch places for a day, like a Freaky Friday thing, so you could know what it’s like just to want somebody in the moment and just go after it.”
“I’d have to want somebody first.”
“But haven’t you ever wanted to do physical things with a boy?” She froze and stared at me. “Oh my god, are you asexual? It’s totally cool if you are—it would be clarifying.”
“I’m definitely not asexual.” I could feel the heat coloring my cheeks, making my face flush. “There’ve been plenty of times I liked boys or had crushes on boys or wanted to do things with boys. I just never told them, I guess because I didn’t think it was worth bringing up. I always knew I would get over it before very long, and I did.”
Nic shook her head. “You are—and I say this out of love—by far the most confusing person I’ve ever met.”
I was still laughing as we got into her Subaru and drove to work.