PENNY.
The three girls sat on a floral couch toward the back with Jude in the middle. They set down their drinks, and Penny noted that Jude’s femur was almost twice as long as hers.
“So.” Mallory leaned to address Penny. “Jude mentioned you were an only child too.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I have two little sisters,” Mallory continued, sipping her coffee. “Whereas Jude hasn’t had to share anything in her life, let alone a room.”
Jude jabbed her friend in the ribs and grabbed another donut.
“What Mal’s so subtly trying to tell you is that I’m a slob.” Jude took a bite, spraying crumbs in her lap to prove her point. “Look, I’m way too busy living life to mull over something as dull as cleaning. Besides, everyone knows geniuses are messy.”
Mallory plowed on.
“It’s just that I happened to notice earlier that you were highly organized,” she said. “It’s going to make things interesting. I live in Twombly, but you should expect me around a lot.”
Ah, Twombly. Rich-bitch housing.
Penny wondered why Jude couldn’t just visit Mallory at Twombly. They had a Pilates studio in the basement and a screening room that showed movies that were still in theaters.
Sam met them with an espresso and set it down on the coffee table.
“Can you visit more with us?” Jude asked him.
“In a bit,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
The girls watched him go.
“Whoa,” said Penny, realizing what should have been obvious. “It’s not just the shoes,” she whispered.
“What?” asked Mallory in an outside voice. Penny huddled closer.
“Me and your uncle are wearing the same outfit.”
Jude and Mallory craned their necks. It was true; they were both wearing black T-shirts with three-quarter-length sleeves, black belts with burnished silver buckles, and skinny black jeans with holes at both knees and black high-top Chucks.
“Oh my God,” said Jude. “He was such a skater when we were kids. I didn’t realize he’d crossed over to the dark side.”
Mallory snorted.
“Remember in sixth grade when you had the wallet chain and those enormous, disgusting khakis?” asked Mallory. “God, you were obsessed with Uncle Sam. Watch, Jude’s going to start dressing in mourning garb now.”
Sam was arranging dirty mugs on a tray. He had a cowlick on his head. An unruly little curlicue that rose off his otherwise very cool hair. He probably hated it. Penny loved when that happened. When a single detail rebelled against the package. She wanted to touch it. Penny looked away before she got caught staring.
Mallory bit into one of the donuts. “Ack,” she said, sticking her tongue out like a baby. “I hate pistachio.” She removed the offending clump from her mouth with her fingernails and set the damp mass on the table.
Penny silent-screamed.
“Then why pick the one that is clearly pistachio?” asked Jude. “It literally has visible pistachio pieces on it. Mal, it’s green!”
Jude picked up the offending pile of mash with her bare hands and looked for somewhere to deposit it.
Penny silent-screamed harder.
In a flash, Penny removed a package of wet wipes from her backpack and handed one to Jude. Then she squirted hand sanitizer in her hands since she couldn’t bleach her brain. Best friends were one thing, but this was perverse. Who touches someone’s half-chewed food? And who spits out half-chewed food in public in the first place?
“Thanks,” said Jude, bundling the lump into the wipe. “How’s the pie?”
“Good.” Penny passed the rest off and took another half a donut before Mallory tainted the rest.
“Shit.” Jude bolted upright. A lurid red dollop of filling toppled onto her white shirt.
With her free hand, Penny offered Jude another wet wipe and a stain stick.
“Seriously?” Mallory grabbed Penny’s kit from her lap before she could protest. “Clown car much? Are you going to pull out a ladder and a Volkswagen bus next?”
Penny wanted to ask who in the hell would put a bus in a car but was distracted by whether or not she’d packed anything mortifying in her go bag.
“Good Lord, it’s like doomsday prepping in here.” Mallory pawed through the pouch. “Band-Aids, ChapStick, tampons . . . I’ve heard of teen moms, but you’re a teen grandma or something. Let me guess—you have little packets of Sweet’n Low and coupons too? How adorable.”
“So adorable,” repeated Jude, smearing the stain stick onto her shirt.
Penny despised the word “adorable.” It was trivializing.
Mallory continued laying out the contents of Penny’s emergency crap bag onto the coffee table as if they were surgical instruments. Hand sanitizer, ear plugs, thumb drive, Advil, Q-tips, bobby pins, sewing kit, tiny IKEA pencil . . .
“Ooooh, and a single condom.” Mallory held the foil square between her thumb and forefinger.
That was it.
Penny snatched back the condom and the bag, gathering her things off the table.
“Mal,” Jude admonished, sweeping the rest of the items together. “Don’t be a dick.”
“I can’t be inquisitive?” Mallory objected. “Besides, I’m saying nice things.” She leaned back with smug satisfaction and regarded Penny. “You’re so organized. I bet you’re a math genius or something. Let me guess—you’re an overachieving Asian kid who skipped ten grades? Are you secretly twelve years old and a freshman in college?”
Penny glared.
“Come on, you can tell me,” said Mallory.
Reasonable responses to a mildly racist verbal attack that was also somewhat complimentary:
1. Slap the ever-living shit out of her with the other half of the pistachio donut.
2. Calmly tell her that you are a genius and a witch and that your binding spells had the added effect of rendering your enemies bald. Especially the asshole racist ones.
3. Scream at Jude, ban Mallory from their room. Slap everyone.
“Come on, Penny,” said Mallory after a while. “I was just teasing.”
“You know what?” Penny turned to Mallory. “I’m only being nice to you as a courtesy,” she said. “You don’t get to be bitchy for no reason, and you don’t get to be racist to me. And certainly not in such a lazy, derivative way.”
Penny felt the familiar prickle of moisture at her eyes. She rarely cried at sad things, mostly mad ones. It was a fun and easy way to lose arguments. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“Racist?” said Mallory. “Who the hell are you calling a racist? That’s such an offensive thing to say to . . .”
“Jesus, Mal,” said Jude. “Stand down.”
“I’m a lot of things,” huffed Mallory. “But I’m not racist.”
“Said every racist ever,” spat Penny. She rolled her eyes so hard she saw brain.
The three girls finished their coffees. Penny wondered if her entire college experience would be this much fun. It was like high school except that it followed you into your bedroom. Great.
Finally, Mallory broke the silence.
“My boyfriend got a new truck.”
The comment was met with more silence.
“This is my attempt at changing the subject,” Mallory said after a while.
Penny relented. “What kind of truck?”
“A Nissan.”
“Mallory’s boyfriend is Benjamin Westerly,” said Jude meaningfully.
“Who the hell is Benjamin Westerly?”
“He’s huge in Australia,” said Mallory.
“I have no idea what that means,” said Penny.
Jude chortled.
“Ben’s in a band,” Mallory explained. “He’s famous to roughly a hundred thousand people who absolutely worship him. His fan army’s very passionate. Plus, he’s twenty-one. Australia is incredibly progressive. They had a woman prime minister.”
To Penny, Australians felt like off-brand, bizarro British people. But then again, Penny didn’t personally know any Australians. Though it said something shady that every other place on Planet Earth went placental for their animals while Australians held on to marsupials. Wow, maybe Penny was racist too.
“That’s cool,” she said after a while.
“What did I miss?” Sam joined them, setting another espresso down next to his old one. Penny regarded the twin cups.
“Tepid,” he explained, finally taking a seat on the chair next to her. Penny loved that word. It was the most perfect way to describe the temperature. The word “pith” was the same. Everything about it recalled the spongy stuff in oranges.
Sam reached over her to grab a packet of sugar. “Pardon my reach.”
Penny held her breath and leaned back so she wouldn’t creepily fog up his cheek. She caught a part of the tattoo where the sleeve of his T-shirt rode up. It was either a hand or a set of hands. It easily ranked within the top three most erotic sights of her life.
“Everything was delicious, Sam,” purred Mallory.
Sam’s armchair was set slightly higher than them on the sofa and he crossed his legs elegantly. His right knee brushed Penny’s left and she almost passed out. With the comically small espresso cup in his thin hands, Penny wondered for a second if he was gay. Not that it was any of her business.
“So what classes are you taking, J?”
“We’re calling me ‘J’ now?” asked Jude. She was visibly pleased by this.
Sam laughed. “I’m trying it out.”
He rubbed his bicep to reveal a shadow of another tattoo under his other sleeve. It was some kind of animal. Penny’s knee felt warm where he had touched it, and she flushed. Penny wondered what the tattoo was. Potentially a horse head. A chess piece maybe. A black knight.
Penny would probably get a bishop tattoo if she were to get anything off a chessboard. They were discreet and effective. Total stealth movers. Mallory and Jude would get queens. So would Penny’s mother for that matter.
Uncle Sam.
Sam could have been in a band. A dreamy, brooding band. Penny thought cigarettes were pointless and smelled awful, but she imagined that Sam smoked and that he looked cool doing it.
God, she would totally smoke a cigarette if he offered her one. They’d be a striking pair in their identical outfits leaned up against a wall and smoking all cool.
As cool as glaucoma and lung cancer.
Penny had never had a cigarette in her life, and if they did smoke together Penny would probably have a coughing fit that lasted forever and ended on an audible fart.
Jesus, pull it together.
Seriously, what was happening to her? Besides, she had a boyfriend. She tried to conjure Mark’s face and got as far as the general slope of his nose plus his hair. Mark who’d gotten white-kid cornrows in fifth grade and wore the same navy-blue fleece all winter without washing it.
Sam was different. Sleek. Brooding and angular. An Egon Schiele portrait. Schiele if she remembered correctly had been a protégé of Gustav Klimt and had a propensity for drawing himself in the nude.
Nude.
“So,” Sam said, leaning back and crossing his arms. “What are y’all majoring in?”
Schiele probably didn’t say “y’all” though.
“Media studies,” said Mallory, fluffing her hair. “I want to be talent.”
“Marketing,” said Jude. “It was the least boring major Dad was willing to pay for. . . .”
Sam up-nodded, volleying the query to Penny. Penny hated this question. Her answer came off as pretentious.
“What was your major?” Penny deflected.
“Film,” he said.
“Oh, the film program at UT is excellent,” she said in a voice a full octave higher than her normal register. “I mean, it’s the birthplace of mumblecore, the Duplass brothers, Luke and Owen Wilson, Wes Anderson . . .” She couldn’t stop the word-vomit.
“Wes Anderson was a philosophy major,” Sam interrupted.
She blushed harder.
Kill me now.
Sam smiled disarmingly.
“I don’t know why I know that,” he said.
“Why film?” Penny squeaked. On some level she knew whatever you picked in college didn’t matter in the real world. People rarely pursued a career in accordance with their major, though it was a decent Rorschach test for self-perception. It said everything about how you saw yourself.
“I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker,” he said. Penny wondered about the past tense. “There are so many unbelievable stories going on in the world, just quietly happening around you. There’s this Hitchcock quote about how in regular movies the director is God and how in documentaries God is the director. I always loved that.”
He stacked his espresso cups.
Penny knew emoji hearts were flying out of her eyes. She was smitten mitten kittens. She’d never heard anyone her age talk about the work they wanted to do. Not that Sam was her age exactly. Penny swallowed the rest of her questions: whether he felt like a ghost trolling the living, mining their existence for ideas; whether or not he got lonely watching other people the way Penny did.
“Jesus, you’re emo,” observed Mallory, scrolling through her phone.
Sam chuckled. “I dropped out anyway. Couldn’t afford it.”
“Well, I think college is a sham.” Mallory shrugged. “I’m here as Jude’s plus one and to shut my mother up. We’re better off trying to invent an app or something.”
The four of them sat in silence considering the depressing reality.
“Just don’t invent an app that invents apps,” Penny piped up. “The job market’s bad enough without you taking robot jobs from the robots.”
Sam laughed.
Sam had resting bitch face until he laughed. Penny had never wanted anything as bad as to make him do it again.
“God, the app singularity is the worst thing I can imagine,” he said after a moment.
Penny was thrilled—Sam either read science fiction or knew enough about it to know what to call it when computers got smarter than humans and started to phase them out.
“Social media would be a mess,” she said, smiling. “Who’s catfishing the catfisher?”
“Do Android phones dream of electric sheep?” he asked.
They both groaned, but a dad joke with a Philip K. Dick reference was Penny’s sweet spot. Dad jokes were Penny’s favorite. (You didn’t need to be Freud to figure that one out.) His hotness was making eye contact unbearable, and her cheeks tingled pleasurably.
“Anyway,” sang Mallory impatiently.
Penny cleared her throat.
Sam cracked his knuckles in a super-attractive, kinda menacing way. With his arms in front of his chest, she could see more hints of tattoos at his throat. The French word for throat is “gorge.” And, Christ, his was indeed.
Mallory said something dumb about empathy and the value of the human spirit. Penny wasn’t listening.
Sam had somehow found the Perfect Shirt with the Perfect Collar, which was stretched out just enough to create this enticing peekaboo effect.
Penny thought again about Mark. Mark, who wore polo shirts on dates and only read self-help books that you could buy at the airport, from The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People to Who Moved My Cheese? And the old standby The 4-Hour Workweek.
Good Mark.
Uncomplicated Mark.
Mark whose calls she’d sent to voicemail twice today.
Sam absentmindedly patted his cowlick down, showing a flash of white above his armpit.
Even Sam’s armpit was hot.
“Do you want to have dinner with us?” Jude asked him.
“Can’t,” he said, and stood up suddenly. “Work.”
Jude nodded, her disappointment apparent. “Maybe next time?”
“Sure,” he said distractedly as he excused himself.
• • •
“Daaaaaamn,” whispered Mallory, ogling Sam as he left.
Daaaaaamn, thought Penny.
“I didn’t know Uncle Sam was such an intellectual,” Mallory breathed, fanning herself dramatically with her hand.
“Ew, stop.” Jude swatted her best friend’s leg. “That’s literally my father’s brother.”
“Former stepbrother, by marriage, for, like, five minutes,” corrected Mallory. “And he’s not old.”
“He’s twenty-one,” said Jude.
“First cousins marry,” said Mallory.
“Wow . . . ,” said Jude, shaking her head.
“What?” shot Mallory. “Seriously, what’s the deal? He’s so hot. Dark, but hot. And you.” Mallory turned to Penny. “What’s with your awkward bullshit and then pulling out your flirtation A game?”
“Yeah, you guys seemed to get along,” said Jude. Both pairs of eyes studied Penny with new interest.
“I’m being neighborly,” Penny demurred. She turned to Mallory. “I can be friendly as long as strangers don’t go rummaging through my personal effects.”
“Ha,” Mallory said. “Whatever, what’s his type?”
“Mal,” warned Jude.
“What?” Mallory blinked innocently.
“Mallory, you are not allowed to go for my uncle,” said Jude.
“Allowed?” said Mallory. “But what if he goes for me? Uncles love me.”
“Don’t.” Jude turned to face her friend. “I mean it. You know I don’t need any more drama with my family right now. I’m invoking an ironclad friendship ask.”
“Family?” retorted Mallory. “I’m about as related to Sam as you are at this point.”
“You know the rules. Ironclad asks don’t have to make sense,” said Jude, waving her hand dismissively. Her mouth was a firm thin line. Penny knew that face. It was when you were so mad you had to train everything to keep still or you’d cry.
“Whoa,” said Mallory. “Jude Louisa Lange. Do you have sexual feelings for your former uncle by marriage?”
“Stop!” hissed Jude back.
“It’s the only explanation,” countered Mallory.
“Ew. No. That’s not it at all. . . .” Jude sucked down the last of her coffee. “Friends hooking up with family makes things awkward and complicated. So can you not?”
“Aw, babe,” said Mallory, finally wrapping her arms around Jude. “Okay. Ironclad friendship ask invoked. You can’t fault a girl for wanting to be your best friend and your aunt.”
Jude laughed.
Penny eyed the two girls. Either Jude did have a crush on Sam and wasn’t admitting it, or something was up with her family for real. She couldn’t imagine Mallory backing down easily otherwise. Penny recorded the information in a new folder in her head.
“Besides,” continued Jude. “I think he had a rough summer too.”
“Why?” asked Mallory.
“Well, he didn’t exactly tell me and he’s impossible to spy on most of the time, but . . .” Jude opened Instagram on her phone. “Look . . .” She searched and found the page of a MzLolaXO and kept scrolling.
“I think he has girl trouble . . . ,” said Jude.
Penny wondered why “girl trouble” meant some dude had dating drama and that “women’s trouble” was about periods.
“Oooh, she’s super hot,” said Mallory.
MzLolaXO was hot.
In fact, Lola’s look was psychological warfare. She was pretty, by scientific and mathematical standards. The kind of attractive that compelled cornballs to come out with flouncy terms like “ravishing” or “exquisite” to describe women. They also almost always referred to them as “creatures” and definitely “females.” Lola was long and thin in the way that certain beautiful people “forgot” to eat or else only nibbled on aesthetically pleasing morsels like Ladurée macarons or sliced kiwi.
But it was also the way she dressed—incidentally—as if her destroyed denim skirt were placed to protect the modesty of a prudish audience. She was Instagram famous in the way that some girls just are. As if they were designed to indiscriminately detonate insecurities in other women. Basically, she was the perfect stylistic match for Sam. No wonder Sam dodged Jude’s offer for dinner. He probably had way better things to do than hang out with them.
Jude kept swiping, a terrorizing merry-go-round of Lola doing things while looking attractive.
“But who even has this many selfies?” said Mallory, wrinkling her nose. “Other than a total narcissist.”
Penny was willing to bet Mallory had more than this many selfies. They admired Lola stretching in a crop top to where the dagger tattoos on her rib cage showed.
“See,” said Jude. “Sam’s in literally every fifth picture from here. . . .” She continued scrolling up. “All the way to here.”
“That’s years,” said Mallory, impressed.
“That’s what I’m saying,” said Jude. “He was in this perfect relationship and now he’s not, and honestly, I’ve been talking to Dr. Greene about it and she thinks he’s depressed.”
“Dr. Greene is Jude’s therapist,” said Mallory.
If that were true, depression suited Sam.
“So, don’t confuse him, Mallory,” she finished. “He’s very vulnerable.”
Penny thought about the types of girls who loved vulnerable guys. Or else misunderstood ones. They were generally the types to marry serial killers on death row.
“Fine,” Mal relented. “I have a boyfriend anyway.”
“Thank you,” said Jude. “You, too.” She nodded at Penny, smiling broadly. “Please don’t date my uncle.”
“Pfft,” scoffed Mallory.
Jude reached over and tucked a tangled strand of Penny’s hair behind her ear and patted her cheek.