PENNY.
“Is this sheer?” Penny stood in front of the mirror in a white, knee-length cotton dress.
“Only when you’re backlit.”
“Is it slutty?”
Jude scoffed. An odd sound between a bleat and a laugh. “I don’t think you’re capable of slutty,” she said, sitting up in bed. “I mean,” she continued, “you’re wearing virginal white.”
Penny had chosen a summery sheath for her first date back with Mark. She wanted him to see her in color. Not that white was a color necessarily, but black extra-wasn’t, and she didn’t want to appear too funereal. If she was going to break up with the guy, she wanted to look good. Maybe her best. Humans were garbage like that.
“Is an official breakup necessary?” asked Jude. “I mean, you’re in college; he’s not. Everybody knows what that means.” Jude jokingly jerked off the air and mimed spraying the result into the sky.
“Ew,” said Penny, screwing her face.
“Listen, no shade,” Jude continued, laughing. “I don’t know your Tinder habits.” Her roommate nodded pointedly at the phone in Penny’s hand.
Penny smiled tightly.
Right then she and Sam were locked in a contest of who could capture the most boringly predictable Instagram photo. He’d just sent the most glorious sunset (#nofilter). Penny was dying to send back one taken from her car of someone posing in front of the “Hi, How Are You” frog mural on Twenty-First Street while wearing a “Hi, How Are You” frog mural T-shirt. It was meta and brilliant and a surefire winner except she first had to bumble through this awkward date with Mark first to feel proper triumph. Penny couldn’t wait for it to be over.
A breakup made sense. Anthropologically she and Mark were incompatible. When they were dating they only ever hung out one-on-one at each other’s houses to watch TV and make out. It was more a middle-school relationship than a real thing, and when he went to parties with his friends it was understood she wouldn’t accompany him. It suited them both most of the time. If anything, Penny was grateful he wasn’t big on conversation. She didn’t even know how to explain their arrangement to herself.
The plan was to drive home, see Mark, end it, and drive back. Celeste she’d deal with another time. Penny wasn’t in the mood to bond and chin-wag about boys and console her mother under the pretense of commiseration. This was between her and Mark.
Penny wondered if she was nervous and promptly yawned. Just as she cried when she was mad, she needed a nap when faced with anxiety. It wasn’t that she was disinterested. It’s that she became overwhelmed, went into overdrive, and shut down. Thing is, Penny hadn’t meant to blow everyone off. And she would have passed a polygraph when asked about it. She’d been meaning to go home the first weekend or else the second. Undoubtedly the third. By now, more than a month later, the natives were restless and thinking about it made Penny sleepy.
In the short while she’d been at college—a seemingly negligible sliver of time—her brain reset. The routine rhythms of her old life were booted from her operating system. Sure she missed having kimchi in the fridge or a Costco stash of triple-ply toilet paper stored above a washer and dryer you could operate for free, but whenever her mother texted or when Mark called, the interruption was staggering. Mind-blowing. She may as well have been getting messages from the spirit world. It was inconceivable that both college and home operated on the same space-time.
Exhibit A, from Celeste:
OMG P, I saw this girl on the street who I thought was u but she was way fatter!
What are you supposed to say to that, thanks?
Exhibit B, from Mark:
I got Rutherford for biz calc
Isn’t Rutherford the only BC teacher?
Yeah. Sucks
Yeah
Sucks
Sucks
Or this phone call from Mark:
“Baby, I missed you today.”
“Me too.”
“He missed you too.”
“Who?”
“. . .”
“Oh . . .”
Mark talked about his penis in the third person. It struck Penny as the least romantic way to broach the subject, and every time “he” came up, Penny pictured a penis wearing sunglasses and a fedora with a little jacket. It’s not as if Penny could blame him. Mark was a red-blooded male in a committed relationship with a college girl. Hence: sext to initiate sex. College people had sex. Especially people who had been dating for however many months they’d been dating. Penny counted back on her hands—it was seven. Seven whole months. Seven times longer than how long she’d been gone.
It wasn’t as if she didn’t want to have sex. She did. In theory. She’d tried going through with it once, with Mark, pretty early on, because honestly, why else would Mark go for Penny if not to have regular relationship sex?
In the end she’d gotten as far as getting naked with some fumbling third-base action. Until the dread came. A sticky inkiness that crept up her neck and swallowed her head whole. They’d maneuvered into a facilitating position and Penny started crying silently, which she didn’t realize she was doing until it scared him and he stopped. She fell asleep soon after.
And get this: They never talked about it.
Penny had braced herself for a confrontation, but it simply never happened.
Through the summer, however, he’d been coming up more frequently.
Penny pulled up at Jim’s, a diner with a red roof, cheap coffee, and surprisingly good soup. She was grateful most of the Saturday-morning crowd had cleared out. Mark kept hinting that they could go back to his house after lunch except that Penny was pretty sure they wouldn’t be seeing a movie after their talk. God. Unless they did. Penny could actually imagine amicably watching the new Avengers movie after the breakup and then heading home.
Mark was already seated when she arrived. The way his eyes lit up as she opened the door sent a small wave of revulsion through her.
“Hi, baby.” He stood from the booth, hugged her, and—horror—handed her a single red rose. It was wrapped in cellophane. And it appeared as if it had spent some time living in a Circle K.
Penny smiled, took the flower—hesitated—then drew her nose to it.
It smelled of printer cartridges.
“It’s stupid,” said Mark tenderly. He was wearing a powder-blue dress shirt and silver basketball shorts with flip-flops. “But I wanted to get you something.”
He was nervous, which made her nervous. Any established couple within stone’s throw would’ve cringed in sympathy.
“You hate it, don’t you?” he asked tentatively.
“No, it’s great.” Penny thought of the box of chocolates that the mailman had given her mom.
“You look beautiful,” he said, admiring her dress. “I don’t know that I’ve ever seen you not wearing black.”
Penny smiled stiffly. “Uh, yeah. Thanks.”
They ordered: tortilla soup for her, biscuits with sausage gravy for him.
“Not that I don’t love you in black,” he said quickly, handing his plastic menu to their server. “I love you in anything.”
Penny prayed he didn’t follow with, “I’d love you out of anything.” Heh heh.
On their first night sharing a room, at the mention of a “boyfriend,” Jude had set up a system. She would sleep at Mal’s if Penny needed, in Jude’s words, “a conjugal visit.” Jude had rabbited the air quotes wearing this ridiculous smirk. Penny threw a pillow at her.
She could imagine such a visit.
First, she pictured Mark naked. That part was easy. Not entirely unpleasant.
Then she imagined his pressure on top of her, mashing her, grinding away, with that well-meaning smile, calling her babybabybaby while she became catatonic and wanted to drown.
See, she could imagine it; she just couldn’t imagine wanting it.
Penny wanted to be normal. She was eighteen, for Christ’s sake, a respectable age to start having healthy consensual sex. Sexy sex with someone sexy.
Penny’s mind went to Sam. Tattoos. Scowl. Crinkly eyed laugh. She thought about how his veiny, inked arms would feel encircling her body. The heat emanating from his chest. How he would smell. It was the most pornographic scenario her mind had mustered in public.
Still, she wasn’t breaking up with Mark because of Sam. At least not in the sense that Mark was the only thing standing in the way of her and Sam being together. That was nuts. It was more that Sam was a type of human Penny couldn’t have previously fathomed. Sam was proof of life on other planets. If a Sam existed, she couldn’t be with a Mark. Not even if she couldn’t be with a Sam. To Penny it made perfect sense.
Their food came.
They’d both ordered wet food. It was a tactical error. Penny wasn’t in the mood for wet food. Eating it or observing it.
Mark’s plate glistened under a thick blanket of creamy, greasy, white gravy. Penny thought about how it would form a skin if left to cool. Penny watched Mark use the back of his fork to mash the bits of sausage into the biscuit and the sauce into a kind of paste.
Her small bowl of watery broth with chips floating on top and sprigs of green didn’t look so great either.
“Oh, no baby,” he lamented. “You forgot to ask for no cilantro. Want me to send it back? We’ll tell them you’re allergic.”
Penny peered down at the offending frond. Did Mark hate cilantro? She had no idea. His deep concern about the situation was written on his features, his thin upper lip lending an air of determination to his childlike face. Penny wondered if Mark was capable of physically hurting her. Or if he’d cry. She wondered how mad his mad could get.
Penny couldn’t take it anymore.
“We should break up,” she said.
He stared at her uncomprehending for a moment, then recoiled as if he’d been struck. His eyebrows scrambled skyward to his hairline. They didn’t watch Avengers.
• • •
“You’re back early.” Jude barely looked up from her laptop. She was sprawled on the floor with an apple core lying on the carpet beside her.
“Did he like your dress?”
“Yeah,” said Penny, walking into the bathroom. Jude followed, continuing to talk to her from the other side of the door.
“I called my dad.”
“Yeah?”
“I couldn’t bring myself to tell him about changing my major though.”
Penny sighed and washed her face. She unzipped the dress and pulled on her robe.
“You know,” said Jude, repositioning herself on Penny’s bed, “for the record, I think you could absolutely look slutty if you wanted to.”
Penny laughed.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” Penny said.
“Did Mark get mad?”
“Yeah.”
Mark had been enraged. In fact, he’d been so angry that it was the first time Penny had thought he seemed truly . . . masculine. Penny didn’t need Dr. Greene to tell her how messed up that was. When Mark let her have it, she zoned out. He’d called her a freak, which hardly qualified as observant. Penny yawned.
“What else?” asked Jude warily.
He then started crying about how the same thing had happened with his ex.
His Asian-ex, Penny thought.
“He ordered biscuits and sausage gravy.”
“And?”
“It was gruesome.”
“What was gruesome?”
“Biscuits and gravy. I don’t understand it as a food unit. It’s the most disgusting concept,” she said. “Congealed drippings over globs of flour and butter. How could anyone eat that in public?”
“Wow,” said Jude, staring at her.
Penny stared back at Jude.
“I ask you about a personal trauma and you tell me about the catering?”
Penny nodded.
“You’re bad at this.”
Penny nodded again.
“You need therapy.”
Penny nodded a third time.
“Are you sad?”
She was.
“Yeah.”
“You know you can tell me anything,” said Jude.
Penny regarded her roommate’s big, sorrowful eyes and knew it to be true.
“I’m going to hug you now,” Jude warned.
Penny nodded.
The pressure felt good.