PENNY.
When Penny was in ninth grade, two events of great portent occurred. One, she read Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus. Two, she figured out that she wouldn’t be popular until she was a grown-up and that was fine because life was a long con.
Penny had Amber Friedman’s birthday party to thank for this wisdom. Amber Friedman was a girl from French class who famously woke up at five forty-five every morning to straighten her curly hair only to set it in differently shaped curls. Everybody figured she was well off since her dad was a music journalist for Rolling Stone. And while life was tough for Penny as the daughter of a MILF, having a dad with more Instagram followers than God was also a monumental suck. Amber’s dad cast a long shadow. It didn’t help that his daughter wasn’t cute. Not that she was ugly. She simply had one of those faces where the features were crowded into the middle like a too-big room with tiny furniture.
Then there was her personality. Amber loved butting in to finish other people’s sentences—even with teachers—and sneezed with a high-pitched “tssst” at least a half-dozen times. To Penny it seemed a bid for the wrong kind of attention. Anyway, Penny hadn’t been properly invited to the get-together. Amber’s mom and Penny’s mom were friendly from an Ethiopian cooking class they’d taken years ago and happened to run into each other at the market.
“But, Pen, Amber’s going to be so disappointed,” said Celeste, adding, “I got you both the new nail gel kits from Sephora.” Celeste dangled two shiny black bags.
Penny was more susceptible to bribery then. She rode her bike over and figured there’d at least be snacks and cake and enough people that she could bail inconspicuously.
When she arrived, six pairs of eyes bored into her from the living room of the pokey ranch house. It smelled as if cat pee had been doused liberally with Pine-Sol, and Penny couldn’t help thinking about how if you could smell anything it was because you were breathing particles of it into your body. Penny encouraged her face not to betray her thoughts as she said hi to Melissa and Christy from school and two girls Amber knew from temple. Huge silver Mylar balloons that spelled out AMBER clung to the ceiling except for the B that hung about midroom and kept sticking to the back of Amber’s hair.
Over the next two hours, they made personalized pizzas that Amber’s mom baked in the oven and sundaes for dessert. When clear plastic boxes of beads were presented so they could make earrings with fishing wire, Penny discovered her limit for boredom. She excused herself to go to the bathroom, listened carefully for anyone else in the house, and quietly began canvassing the area. Amber’s room featured no less than five black-and-white posters of Audrey Hepburn, and atop her canopied bed lay an orange cat grooming itself. It stopped to glare at Penny before deciding the intruder wasn’t worth the attention. When Penny poked her head into what she figured was Amber’s dad’s office, she hit pay dirt. Mike Friedman, music critic, had every graphic novel ever. Ever. EVER. Stacks. From Spider-Man to Superman to huge volumes of collected editions with shiny hard covers, organized by subject.
Penny couldn’t believe it. Mere feet from the inane small talk (“isn’t it, like, so awk how some people say caramel and other people say carm-el?”) and bullshit pizza toppings like (gag) cubed pineapple were thousands of hours of genuine entertainment. He had everything. From Swamp Thing to V for Vendetta and Persepolis, from We3 to Runaways.
Mr. Friedman’s room smelled of new books—pulp and varnish. After a whole shelf filled with a cute, pudgy character called Bone, Penny found Maus.
Penny had wanted to read Maus ever since she learned that it was the first comic to win the Pulitzer Prize, and upon realizing that Mr. Friedman had two copies—a hardcover and a soft—Penny did what any kid would. She stuck the soft down the back of her jeans, slid her sweatshirt over it, pretended she had a stomachache, and hightailed it home.
It was among the most shameful moments of her life. Never mind the karma of a total non-Jew stealing a book about the Jewish Holocaust from a Jewish person.
Except that the book changed her life.
Penny knew Maus was going to be formative. Not that she was going to become a career criminal, more that she felt destined to make something that made someone else feel how she did when she read it.
Penny believed with her whole heart that there were moments—crucial instances—that defined who someone was going to be. There were clues or signs, and you didn’t want to miss them.
It astounded her that a comic book featuring cartoon mice and cats could trick her into learning so much about World War II. Not only learn about it but care about it. She’d known about Auschwitz and how they told all the prisoners that they were going to take showers and instead, cutting off their hair, throwing it in a pile, and sending them to the gas chamber. Even kids. In history last year they’d had a quiz on the dates and significant events of the war, and she’d gotten a near-perfect score. Yet it wasn’t until she read Maus and lived it through the eyes of a father and son mouse, that she saw past the cold facts. That night Penny read Maus twice and cried. She knew then that she had to become a writer.
It made what happened at school the following Monday worth it. Amber told everyone in French that Penny had left abruptly because she had diarrhea. After that Penny was cured of ever trying to play nice with people from school again. Penny might have been unpopular, but so was Amber. Unless you were super-popular or second-most super-popular, the difference was negligible. You were a loser. What separated Penny from Amber was that anybody could smell Amber’s desperation. To Penny that was far more pathetic than simply being invisible. Penny would stop trying. Instead she’d spend time preparing for her future, living in books until the exciting part of her life would begin. Things would matter then. In fact, everything would be different.
• • •
Ten minutes in and Penny already knew her eight a.m. fiction-writing course on Thursdays would be her favorite. Notably, the class was full despite the agonizing start time. Held in a small classroom, it was incomparable to American History or regular English 301, which were both conducted in sprawling lecture halls with stadium seating and a screen suspended from the ceiling so you could see your professor’s face from the cheap seats. This classroom sat about twenty, with high school desks, the kind where the chairs were attached to the table.
J.A. Hanson was young for a professor. She was twenty-eight. At twenty-two she’d written the critically acclaimed Messiah, a classic post-apocalyptic tale she’d received a Hugo Award for. The hero was a teenaged girl and the ending blew Penny’s mind. That J.A. was a woman blew everyone else’s mind. The reviews and fansites were convinced J.A. Hanson was a dude. Especially since there were no pictures of her at the time and nobody knew what J.A. stood for.
Penny discovered science fiction shortly after Maus. She began writing her own short stories as a hobby, and though her high school had a literary magazine, Penny wouldn’t have dreamed of submitting anything.
It didn’t help that in AP English Lit, junior year, they’d read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which was basically The Hunger Games except it was written in the forties and had a twist at the end.
They’d spent a week in class creating a story with unpredictable endings, and Penny wrote hers from the point of view of a sixteen-year-old Swiss boy in the year 2345, who woke up knowing precisely when he’d die. The boy considered what his final acts would be and elected to spend the day doing exactly what he normally did, playing chess with his best friend, Gordy. He was cheered by the small, dependable routines most and the twist was that he didn’t die, waking up every morning with the same thought in an insane asylum, where he didn’t have any choice but to do what his doctors had scheduled for him.
Penny liked her story, yet Ms. Lansing gave her a B-, saying she’d been “hoping to hear more about Penny’s exotic point of view.” Penny couldn’t believe it. As if Zurich, 2345, wasn’t farflung enough. She knew what her teacher meant; she’d meant Asian despite Penny being born in Seguin, Texas, which was maybe twenty minutes away. Penny vowed not to show her work again until she respected who’d be reading it.
Over the years, Penny inhaled the classics—Ready Player One, Dune, and Ender’s Game, though it wasn’t until she was introduced to Messiah, ironically from a guy who was the worst dude in the history of dudes, that she realized sci-fi didn’t have to be so . . . boy. J.A.’s work was like Ender’s Game, yet where Ender was smart and getting conned ’cause he was a kid, J.A.’s hero Scan knew her worth.
A female protagonist made the stories more inspiring than voyeuristic. It was so much fun to write about who you could be. From then on Penny’s stories centered around women and girls. There wasn’t even a special trick. You wrote it exactly as you would for a guy, but you made pain thresholds higher since girls have to put up with more in the world and give them more empathy, which makes everything riskier. Plus, with sci-fi, you set up the rules at the beginning and you could blast it all to kingdom come as long as you did it in a satisfying manner. The fact that Penny could take a class from a published author made the whole communal-living college situation worthwhile.
J.A. Hanson had undeniable charisma. She was black with natural hair, dyed platinum, gathered in a pouf on top of her head. And she wore thick-rimmed white glasses to boot. J.A. made nerdiness glamorous. And not in some posery Tumblr way where girls played first-person shooters in their underpants to be attractive to guys.
“Does a Chinese writer get to write about a slave lynching?” It was an intense topic for 8:11 a.m., yet J.A. lobbed the topic into the room so casually Penny couldn’t be sure she’d heard her correctly. It gave the room an intimate, crackly energy, as if they were crowded around a dinner table. A dinner table that was unceremoniously lit on fire.
In Penny’s heart, the answer was absolutely yes. Though she also didn’t know how she felt as an Asian person telling a black woman that.
Penny snuck a peek over her shoulder to see if anyone would pipe up.
“Obviously,” said the other Asian kid in the class. “I read about that in the Times as well,” he said.
The kid had boy-band hair and a clipped British accent that made sense for sentences like “I read that in the Times as well.”
“Why?” J.A.’s smile widened to her canines. It reminded Penny of when Sherlock Holmes announced, “The game is afoot!”
“Well, he’s not white,” he said. “Which helps.”
“But does it? Isn’t it the license of the fiction writer regardless of their identity to characterize whomever they want?” said a girl who was ethnically ambiguous.
Penny couldn’t remember ever having an honest discussion about race in a classroom.
“Well, there’s also that,” said the British-Chinese kid. “As long as you’re not a tragedy tourist or creating racist caricatures. As long as you’re . . . talented, it’s okay.”
“So as long as you’re adept and well intentioned, you get a pass?” asked J.A.
“It’s knee-jerk ‘PC’ garbage to say otherwise,” said another guy, who used scare quotes around “PC.”
“No, it’s not,” a redheaded girl chimed in. “It’s the Kardashians getting cornrows. You can’t shoplift the trendy parts of a culture and glamorize them but then not take into account the awful parts like getting killed by cops at a traffic stop.”
J.A. seemed pleased by the direction that the conversation was taking. It felt as though she was assessing them, coolly compiling notes on each, and Penny was sorry she wasn’t contributing.
“Look, I hate writing,” said J.A. after the initial din died down. “And I’m the type of writer who hates it every single time. But make no mistake: It’s something that you get to do. Especially fiction. I think of it this way.” She sat on top of her desk and crossed her legs in a lotus pose. “If there was an apocalypse—zombies, the sun explodes, whatever—fiction writing as a job would be the thousandth priority behind SoulCycle instructors.”
The class laughed.
“It’s a privilege, and part of acknowledging that privilege is doing it honorably. Create diverse characters because you can. Especially ones that aren’t easy to write. A character that scares you is worth exploring. Yet if you breathe life into a character and it comes to you too easily—say you’re writing from the viewpoint of a black man in America and you’re not one? Think hard about where your inspiration is coming from. Are you writing stereotypes? Tropes? Are you fetishizing the otherness? Whose ideas are you spreading? Really consider how you transmit certain optics over others. Think about how much power that is.”
J.A. locked eyes with Penny.
“It’s about finding the truth in fiction,” she said. “Which sounds contradictory. But the story will let you know if you’re close.”
Penny’s brain buzzed. J.A. had called writers powerful, which meant Penny was powerful.
It took Penny a moment to realize her mouth was hanging open a little. If Maus was galvanizing moment number one in Penny’s plans to become a writer, the heart-hammering feeling in J.A.’s class was two. Maybe two and three. She’d been invited to a secret society. It reorganized her thoughts with such intensity that she had the sudden urge to pee.
Penny had been writing all the time, for years now. She’d never stopped even if she showed no one. Stories, lists of ideas, and strange chunks of amusing dialogue that came to her while she ignored whatever else was going on in her actual life. She knew she was decent. Only she wanted more. Penny wanted to get really good. And she wanted for J.A. Hanson to recognize exactly how good.