Finally, she wrote back:
ok
Sam wondered if she was angry with him.
He texted her again:
I’m sorry. Fell asleep
She texted:
Sleep’s the best. HUGE FAN.
Hard to do it when your
emergency contact’s dead so . . .
Shit. She was pissed. Still, he smiled. Was he her emergency contact too? Maybe nobody knew how emergency contacts worked.
Sry
Srsly
TY!
I’m a dick
ugh
Good night
Night
He sent her the frowning emoji. The extremely contrite one with no eyebrows.
It wasn’t his style, but the moment required it.
PENNY.
Penny was in the shower when Sam texted again.
GOOD MORNING
Just like that.
All caps. No exclamation.
It sounded so sunny, so smiley. In fact, the text bubble seemed happy to see her. So much so that she went back to the conversation to make sure it was actually Sam from yesterday. She’d saved his number as “Sam House.” The jerk. She couldn’t believe he’d fallen asleep before he’d texted her. It was irresponsible and inconsiderate. She didn’t want to sound fussy and overbearing, but a text wasn’t asking too much.
As if the text bubble could read her mind, it spoke again.
IT’S UR EMERGENCY CONTACT
I REALLY AM SRY S2G
And then:
I’LL STOP YELLING NOW
FML
I feel HORRIBLE
Hope u didn’t lose 2 much sleep bc of me
I won’t ask u 2 forgive me but hope u will
Wow.
It was fascinating. The dispatch made her heart do a crazy dance. Not even a cute dance. More an erratic flailing, like those windsock things you see at car dealerships. She thought about his hot armpit again. And his cowlick. And the tattoos she didn’t entirely understand. It usually irked her when people wrote “u” instead of “you” and “2” instead of “to”—especially “too”—but telling people things like that was probably why she only got texts from her mom. And Mark. Crap, Mark. She had to call him.
Penny attempted to respond, hey. Her hands were covered in lotion and her stupid phone wouldn’t register her fingers as humanoid and that’s when Sam texted again . . .
Did I wake u?
And then:
I hope I didn’t wake u
O NO DID ME NOT WANTING
2 WAKE U RN WAKE U RN?!!
She closed her eyes and held her phone to her heart like a big dumb girl in a movie.
Then she wiped her hands on her towel and wrote back.
Please stop yelling
He texted back:
((hi)) <- denoting indoor voice of normal vol
Penny smiled. She typed:
I hope you feel better
And then:
You didn’t wake me
Penny padded quietly back into her room and got dressed. Her phone lit up again.
Did you get any sleep?
I can’t believe I did that to you
Penny smiled. Then she bit her lower lip. She noticed him noticing the “to/you” thing. Shit. He was so great. Penny thought of pregnant Lola. And then about her roommate’s Ironclad Friendship Ask. Jude was dead asleep in her bed a few feet away. Her eyelid twitched, detecting a disturbance in the force. Penny knew Jude would bug if she discovered Sam was in this much trouble, but these weren’t her secrets to tell.
Penny texted him:
Yes
Good
Have a good day
You too
Penny placed her phone facedown on her bed and allowed herself a tiny swoon. Besides. As far as Penny and Sam were concerned, there was nothing to tell. Nothing happened. Just because Jude was fast and loose with her personal life and her therapy sessions didn’t mean the same setup worked for everyone. Some people’s coping mechanisms were all about festering and secrecy and ruminating until you grew yourself a nice little tumor in your heart with a side of panic attack. Different strokes.
SAM.
Sam wasn’t stupid—at least when it came to the broken institution known as the American Collegiate Industrial Complex. It’s not that he believed by taking a single community college course on documentaries he was going to stumble ass-backward into stardom. It’s just that he’d tried on several occasions to make a movie and hadn’t succeeded. The way he saw it, taking a class was about placing an expensive bet on yourself. You couldn’t afford to blow the deadline.
The ACC film department was housed in a squat brown building from the seventies, complete with avocado-green carpet from the era. It was illogical to Sam that despite the entire course being conducted online, he still had to drag his meat suit to the campus to pick up his ID. The blue and white piece of plastic featured a blurry picture of his face, as though he’d run across the frame. The unimpressed sixty-year-old dude with dandruff in his eyebrows made it clear that there would be no reshoots.
Whatever. He tried not to dwell on the school’s resemblance to a prison and the sort of life that dictated a need for a vending machine in the hall filled with plastic-wrapped sandwiches and returned to work by bus.
When Sam was younger he took pictures constantly. Unlike cooking, photography kept you on your toes. It was chaotic and human—utterly unpredictable. To capture an unposed face you had to wait for it. It was spear fishing. You had to move between the competing rhythms of the world and strike. When his street urchin pals were stealing Twix and fat-tip markers from dollar stores, Sam would palm a couple of those old-school cardboard disposable cameras. He’d collect shoe boxes of them, pictures of his friends playing Edward Forty Hands or Amy Winehands (the super-sophisticated game where you’d duct tape bottles of malt liquor or wine coolers onto your palms). Or he’d capture skate tricks, backyard shows, or his crew hanging out in various parking lots across town. It cost ten bucks to develop, so he stockpiled the used-up cameras. When he turned fifteen he got a job at a one-hour photo expressly to process them. Sam got to be a pretty good lab technician, though the job was unspeakably depressing.
Only two types of people developed photos in those days, broke art kids and old weirdos. There was this fat fifty-something dude, Bertie, who’d take pictures of himself and his Weimaraner. He was naked, and the dog wore waistcoats and hats, and they were photographed doing unseemly things: sitting at the dinner table with a full Thanksgiving spread, or slow dancing, the dog upright and impossibly long on its hindquarters. They recalled William Wegman’s portraits except with human full-frontal, and though Sam didn’t know exactly what was going on, he called the ASPCA anonymously and quit a week later. It was bleak.
Sam was ready to move on to moving pictures anyway. It was on to janky VHS camcorders from the Goodwill after that.
People were odd. Sam loved and loathed that about them. Fiction was fine, but real life was the true freak show.
Sam’s syllabus at ACC was spare and he tried not to feel ripped off about it. Three months to complete a project, a twenty-two-minute short that would comprise most of his grade. He wouldn’t get anywhere near the Blackmagic Cinema cameras, since they required a five-thousand-dollar credit card deposit, but he was able to sign out an old Canon 5D Mark III with all the requisite lenses, some lavalier mics, and a better shotgun microphone than he’d normally get his hands on, as well as a tripod. He also grabbed a tiny stabilizer rig for his iPhone in case he wanted something more run-and-gun. Finding a subject felt like a hunger that would never be satisfied. He’d glance at Fin, narrow his eyes, and wonder if there was something there.
“In a world . . . where a guy who was forever number two, the perfect wingman, the middle born of three sons, the dude who didn’t get the girl and only got her slightly less attractive friend finally . . .”
“Quit it, puto.” Fin flicked a piece of celery at him. Sam was halfway through soup prep for lunch.
“What?”
“Seriously,” said Fin. “Your scheming face is scary as hell. Especially when you’re holding a knife.”
Sam had tried making a movie about Lorraine on several occasions (“In a world . . . where a beautiful rich girl with anger issues who at her truest most molten core only wants to be loved discovers that . . .”), but she’d catch him creep-shooting and blow her stack. As much as that girl loved a selfie, she wasn’t big on other people controlling the final product. What he needed was a willing subject, someone as hungry as he was. Someone who warranted a few minutes in the spotlight. Plenty of people craved attention. It had to be the right person, someone who naturally commanded it. Sam suspected most outwardly noisy people were boring on the inside. No more than the textbook swirl of insecurities and narcissism.
Penny would make a fascinating subject. All that twitchy energy. Plus, what was up with her bags of stuff? He could shoot an unboxing video where she could unfurl her possessions and explain the thinking behind it all. It could serve as a legend for a map of her brain.
Sam enjoyed texting Penny. They talked about work, sleep, food, random facts. It didn’t need to be anything important. Their last text had been what to eat for breakfast. Since Penny had seen him at his lowest, there was no reason to act cooler than he was. It felt easy, a bit like summer camp—their texts had no bearing on their actual lives. It helped that she didn’t seem to tire of him. No matter how dumb his questions.
Would you watch a documentary about a cat?
She texted back immediately.
Totally
Cats rule
And then:
Some are assholes tho
There’s this super cool guy that lives under our porch now
What else?
That’s pretty much it
K then maybe
At 2:34 p.m. Sam had cleared the tables, wiped them down, and steam-cleaned the espresso machine.
I have to make a documentary for a class
Ah
Ergo cat
Sam enjoyed it as a response. Ergo: cat. He couldn’t call what his new friend would say next. He tried to remember the last time he’d slipped so easily into conversation without the added diversion of skateboarding or drinking or sex. Talks with Penny felt good. Wholesome, normal, and curiously productive since they mostly discussed schoolwork. They were lab partners.