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.
SAM.
Sam woke with a start. It was Saturday—more than a week later—and his problems remained as they were. He was still broken up with Liar. He was still in love with Liar. Liar was pregnant. It was one p.m. It was his day off and he’d fallen asleep only two hours ago. Blargh.
Last night, after countless texts and missed calls, Liar finally deigned to come by House after work. Under Sam’s watchful eye she chugged gallons of water and walked back and forth to the bathroom to pee on six more sticks. It was both intimate and also very much not.
Period lateness check: four weeks and counting.
“Thanks a lot for buying the cheap ones,” Lorraine called out from the toilet. She had the bathroom door cracked open, and though they’d once been that couple where one person peed while the other showered, Sam looked away. He heard the flush.
“I get pee all over my hands with those things,” she said. Sam wondered how many pregnancy tests she’d taken over the years but knew better than to ask. It had taken days of badgering to get her to come over. She’d skipped the Planned Parenthood appointment and had so far failed to make a new one.
She washed her hands, lining up the results on the side of the sink.
“See, the good ones spell out ‘pregnant’ or ‘not pregnant,” she said. “They’re digital or something.”
Sam hadn’t known there was such a thing as a good one when it came to pregnancy tests. He’d sprung for the two-for-three deal. Sam reasoned six meant better odds so they’d know for sure, for sure.
They waited and watched. It was surprisingly hard to tell. Of the six, five were positive with faint plus signs. The last was a dud. The little white window remained completely blank. No minus sign. Nothing.
“So, you’re pregnant,” he said.
“I guess,” she responded.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“Pissed,” she said.
He nodded glumly.
“Like, how dumb is this?”
She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands and groaned.
“You really want to know how I feel?” she said after a while. “I want to break shit.”
“Come with me,” he said. Sam went behind the bar, grabbed his backpack from under the register, then led her through the kitchen and out the screen door.
It was an airless night.
Sam unzipped his bag and handed Lorraine his laptop.
She took it and looked at him quizzically.
“You said you wanted to break shit.”
He nodded at the gravelly parking lot.
“It’s backed up,” he said. “And broken. Put it out of its . . .”
Before Sam could say “misery,” Lorraine threw it on the ground by their feet.
Nothing happened. It lay there heavy and doltish.
She picked it back up, opened it, and this time pitched it farther.
“Fuuuuuuuck,” she yelled into the night.
It skittered yards away.
They walked over.
“You have a go,” she said, bending down to hand it to him.
Sam held the laptop above his head with both hands and threw it onto the ground, where it finally cracked. They chucked it and chucked it—working up a sweat—until the screen was totaled and the two halves came apart at the hinge. Lorraine took a photo of it and posted it on Instagram, tagging him.
After, without saying anything, they tossed the computer’s mangled carcass into a trash bag, threw in the pregnancy tests, and swung the bag into the dumpster.
“Did you get a new one?” she asked him, getting in her car.
Sam shook his head and yawned. He’d have to drop out of school and get a second job to pay child support anyway. Besides, the type of work he qualified for rarely required personal computing.
“Come by tomorrow,” she said, pulling him in for a hug. Her expression was unreadable.
At two thirty the next afternoon Sam took the bus over to Lorraine’s apartment, plugging in the pass code he knew by heart. When the gate rumbled open, he was notably relieved that not everything in the world had gone berserk.
She met him at the door, no makeup, hair up in a towel, barefoot in a pink-and-blue floral housedress. It was a punch in the gut. It was his private Lorraine. His favorite Lorraine. The Lorraine she was when it was just the two of them.
“You should’ve buzzed me,” she remarked irritably. She made him wait by the door, closing it partway so he couldn’t see in, and reappeared with a silver MacBook Air and a tangled power cord.
“Here,” she said, handing it over. The slender device struck Sam as strangely vulnerable. More expensive and aerodynamic than any computer he’d ever owned. Sam wondered if there was anything on it that he wasn’t supposed to see. Or better yet, something she’d deliberately left him to find.
“It’s wiped,” she said. “It’s got Final Cut Pro though. Photoshop, too, if you need that.”