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 kinda 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 . . .”