PENNY.
It was the hair that was her undoing. It was floppy. Fluffy even. He was sitting on the bed with his long legs stretched out in front of him, his back against the wall. She wanted to touch the tuft in the back, the craziest part of the cowlick, even though she knew it to be a huge violation of personal space. It also killed her that she couldn’t poke through the small hole in the knee of his jeans to see if it felt the same as the hole in her jeans. The whole thing was demented.
“So, yeah, I’m basically homeless,” he said.
Penny turned to face him. “Inaccurate,” she said, and scooched over to him, mindful to keep her shoes off his bed. “In fact, you’re lucky that you have a place to go.”
Penny placed her paw on top of Sam’s hand, which lay on the bed. She had no idea why. She hadn’t considered until that second how it might be a thing he noticed.
She faltered. Not quite knowing what to do next, she concentrated on keeping the pressure light. Nobody wanted a clammy dead hand on theirs.
“Besides, this place is cozy as hell,” she continued.
“You’re right.” He shifted his hand.
Then for no other reason than to up the ante on the awkward Olympics, Penny blurted: “Is it crazy that you’ve met my mom?”
He laughed. It was a good distraction. Penny snatched back her hand to pretend the incident hadn’t occurred and shoved it in her hoodie pocket.
“You seem mad at her,” he said.
“Yeah,” she responded glumly.
She was mad at her. It wasn’t as cut-and-dried as Sam’s thing with Brandi Rose, but Penny was furious at Celeste. Had been for a while.
“It goes back to when my mom got me a tutor because I brought home a C in French,” she began. “Not that she’s a stereotypical tiger mom or anything. Just that she thinks French is too ‘chic’ to flunk.”
Her tutor, Bobby, was nineteen, pale, kinda on the chubby side, with long, spidery fingers and brown hair that fell to his chin in front. He was half-white and half-Filipino, and pretty tall, though his clothes could’ve fit Penny. It was as if at fourteen he’d decided he was done buying new ones. His T-shirts barely covered his midriff, and it was a dead giveaway that he was peculiar. And his eyes . . . His eyes were beautiful. One yellow-green, the other gray-blue. It was called complete heterochromia. He’d explained how he’d gotten it—hereditarily speaking—and drawn a chart while talking about pea plants, but Penny didn’t harbor a crush yet, so she ignored the finer points.
“Bobby was this whiz kid computer programmer.” Her voice sounded far away. Detached. “His dad was this big deal at IBM back in the day and was friends with my mom. Whatever, my mom was friends with everyone. Still is.”
Most of the time Penny didn’t give Celeste anything to worry about. She only ever got As and Bs. Then, at the end of sophomore year, when it was looking like Penny would end up with a C, Celeste called Bobby.
His teaching methodology was suspect at best. Bobby came by twice a week to show Penny pirated French movies that she’d seen before with the English captions switched off. Usually Amélie or Breathless. They’d read books from the artist Moebius and Asterix and Obelix comics, a series about two ancient warriors, and listened to French rap music that to Penny’s ears was exactly like American rap except way more politicized.
They spoke jokey nonsense French in horrible accents.
“Attend! Pourquoi le Sasquatch abandonnerait son sac à main?”
Wait! Why would the Sasquatch leave his handbag?
Or
“Asterix et Obelix veulent faire l’amour doux, doux, à l’autre. Il est évident, n’est-ce pas?”
Asterix and Obelix want to make sweet, sweet love to each other. Duh, right?
Bobby spoke four languages. When he turned fifteen he won a fellowship for one hundred thousand dollars to skip college and work in Silicon Valley, but he didn’t go because he said he didn’t want to be bourgeois. They ate snacks and secretly drank Celeste’s white wine while watching La Déesse!, a French cooking show where a well-intentioned woman with colorful blouses made elaborate meals for her husband.
He was the first boy she’d felt entirely comfortable around. She could eat wet foods in front of him and be opinionated and goofy. They even mostly argued well. He detested inconsistency or contradiction. When Penny told him she was lactose intolerant, Bobby acted as if he’d caught her in a lie when she ate tuna salad in front of him. He couldn’t believe mayo didn’t have milk in it until they Googled it.
August seventeenth was Bobby’s birthday. Celeste had gone to bed right after dinner, and Penny had snuck an entire bottle of zinfandel from her mom’s stash. She and Bobby passed it back and forth while watching Ysel, the star of La Déesse!, make duck aspic. They were sitting on the couch. Actually, he was sitting. Her legs were flung on top of his, and she was practically lying down. She had to sit up every time she talked to him in case she had a double chin from that angle, and she worried that her cheeks were as bright red as Celeste’s got when she drank. Her mom called it the Asian Flush and Bobby didn’t get it. You were supposed to take an antacid to combat it but she’d forgotten.
Even though it was his birthday, he’d gotten Penny a present. A copy of Zero Girl. He handed it to her in a black plastic bag and told her about it as she thumbed through the water-colored pages.
“It’s a classic,” he said. “And it reminds me so much of you. It’s about a high school girl who has these kinda bootleg superpowers and she vanquishes all her mortal foes and she shoots her shot with her guidance counselor, who’s a total G, by the way, and they fall in love . . .”
To Penny the subtext was clear. A dork with a crush on an older guy, a teacher even, and they end up together because she makes the first move! It was romantic.
“I kept watching his mouth,” Penny remembered. “That’s how you’re supposed to show a guy that you want them to kiss you. At least that’s what I’d read.”
Sam nodded.
It worked. Penny had willed Bobby to kiss her and he had. It hadn’t been her first kiss, but it was pretty close.
Her first kiss was Richard Kishnani at camp when she was thirteen. He had braces and she was attracted to him only because his mother worked at NASA.
And Noah Medina at the movies, whose teeth banged into hers as he was going in for the kill. He was from Florida and had put her hand on his junk. He was wearing crunchy nylon shorts that had to be a bathing suit. She excused herself to go to the bathroom and never came back.
With Bobby, Penny closed her eyes and moved her lips slowly and imagined how if anyone ever asked, this would be the story of her first kiss. This was the one that mattered. The one she’d worked for. Bobby’s mouth felt incredible. Warm. Soft but not too soft. Wet but not too wet. When his mouth opened and their tongues touched, she didn’t feel nervous. It wasn’t slimy or anatomical. It felt good.
By Penny’s count they’d hung out on sixteen separate occasions, which made them friends.
That’s why what happened next was so surprising.
Penny had said stop. She was sure of it. Or else she’d said no. In fact, she’d said it more than once, yet she wasn’t positive it qualified. He kept going.
“Maybe I said it too quietly.”
She hadn’t cried for help. Celeste was right upstairs. Penny hadn’t kicked him in the nuts, as any heroine worth her salt would have done. Instead Penny lay perfectly still and walked backward from her eyes until she was far enough in her head that she was safe. From the couch, pinned underneath him, she turned her head to the side to find Zero Girl open on the coffee table as Bobby stabbed her in the guts with his dick. His dick was purple. Cartoon purple. When he pulled on the lurid condom, she couldn’t believe it was such a bright and happy color. It had taken a few times for him to get it right, and Penny didn’t know why she didn’t scream or rip it out of his hands while he loomed above her. She just knew that she didn’t. She didn’t do any of the things that absolutely anyone with a brain knows to do. All she wanted was for Celeste not to see.
“It’s not as if he beat me up or anything,” said Penny.
“It was so embarrassing,” she continued. “And the thing that’s so confusing is that I didn’t get mad. It felt inevitable in some ways. An obvious conclusion. I saw him two more times after that and was polite.”
She gazed at Sam. He had a serious expression on his face.
“I’m practically fluent in French now,” she said. “My mom thinks it’s because of him when it’s not. He was proficient at best.”
Penny was dying to know what Sam was thinking. She’d never told the story to anyone else.
“Do you think I’m broken?”