“Seven weeks.” Penny bit into her sorbet angrily. She wished her mom would go home. She wished her mom hadn’t come and forced her to see Sam at her ugliest, and mentioned her freaking boyfriend when she knew nothing about anything, and then bulldozed her into watching that video.
“You know what I mean,” said Celeste. “It hurts my feelings. I was worried. You go days without calling me back. Not a peep. I mean, you lucked out with Jude. I’m less worried to know that you’re living with a girl who’s so social and sweet, seeing as you can be so . . .”
“What, Mom? Antisocial and poisonous?” Penny shouted, proving her mom’s point. She stomped up the capitol stairs ahead of her.
“That’s not what I said.” Penny watched her mom eye her dessert for the perfect bite, and she could tell by her distracted expression that Celeste was liable to say something truly offensive.
Penny stared at the shimmering city. If you looked straight down Congress from the front of the capitol, everything was arranged in a perfect cross. Penny wondered if the bats were out.
“It’s just that your thing, you know, that thing you do can be tough in these situations,” she said. “Alienating. You’re either talking a mile a minute with these ten-dollar words or your eyes are darting all over the place. I know you didn’t have a lot of friends in high school, and lately, I don’t know, baby . . . And what’s going on with you and Mark? Last week he posted a picture of him and another girl. . . .”
Penny walked away and threw her cone in the trash. Her foul mood worsened.
“Pictures of Mark?”
“Well, honey, he and I are Facebook friends,” said Celeste. “Now, I know you don’t love that, but I’d called so many times and texted, and I wanted to know how things were . . .”
Celeste touched her arm with an outrageously sappy expression.
“Is he cheating on you? I messaged him to say hi and gather intel, and you know, he never wrote me back. Is everything okay between you two?”
Celeste licked her cone again. She had sushi seaweed stuck in her front tooth. Penny couldn’t believe her mom had the gall to message her ex-boyfriend. It was mortifying. Celeste was out of control. And Sam still hadn’t called. Not even a text.
Penny had never been more frustrated in her entire life.
So, of course, she burst into tears.
SAM.
Sam opened his eyes. His phone was lodged between his cheek and his mattress, optimally positioned for face-cancer transmission. He grabbed it. The screen was black and inert. He lifted his cumbersome, seemingly sand-filled head to see where his charger was. The room swung. His eyes narrowed on the tiny white cube clear across the floor. It might as well have been in Guam. Never mind that plugging the cord into the tiny hole on his phone would be about as easy as refueling a jet engine in midflight.
“Why?” he asked the empty room. He wished someone would at least come over and turn out his light. Maybe pass him the bottle of Wild Turkey that he’d left by the door. Actually, no. He didn’t want that at all.
His phone was dead. At least he noticed when his phone died. If Sam died no one would care. He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes while the room sloshed around him. Thank God he was home. He might have been an idiot, but at least he’d had the foresight to keep his freak-out contained. He took off his shirt. Then he kicked off his stiff pants like a petulant child.
Sam wanted to take a bath. Actually, what he needed was someone to bathe him.
It was still dark out, and the streets were quiet. Sam stood up, steadying himself against the wall as the blood flooded out of his head. He grabbed his towel and pushed off the wall by the mattress and stumbled to lean on the wall by the charger. He was an inelegant trapeze artist. Spider-Man three sheets to the wind. It took him a few tries before he eventually got his phone set up.
The thing about living where you work is that calling in sick was tricky business. So far he hadn’t attempted it. For a while he’d call in a couple of times a month, or else have to stick his toothbrush down his throat to expel some of the liquor before going in still drunk. That hadn’t happened since he’d moved in. Al hadn’t made any sweeping declarations about rules, but as with everything with Al, they were implied—keep your nose clean and don’t bother him.
Sam tipped his head up and gawped at the popcorn stucco before grabbing the doorframe for support. He wondered if there was asbestos in the ceiling silently killing him. It would serve him right, mooching off of Al like this. A hot tear slid down his cheek.
So that was it. He and Lorraine were properly over. Huzzah and good night.
As he’d learned yesterday (and bless any day that you learn something new) there was such a thing in the world as a chemical pregnancy. A knocked-up limbo. There’d been enough hormones (HCG, Sam had researched it later) in Lorraine’s pee to trip a few sticks and that was it. Liar had miscarried only technically since she’d only been phantom pregnant. When she waltzed into the coffee shop to deliver this fascinating science lesson, she appeared unequivocally euphoric. She’d known for four days and stayed for exactly forty seconds and had thought to tell him in person solely because she had a hair appointment next door.
It took almost a week for her to tell him. That was how much he factored into any of this. They’d only briefly been parents to a teeny-tiny smudge of a suicidal sea monkey, yet Sam felt bereft. He’d been tense for weeks waiting for an answer, and when he knew definitively, his profound relief spiraled into a type of mourning.
So he got wasted.
He catapulted from the bedroom wall to his most death-defying act of bravery yet—to hurtle down the entire length of the hallway and into the bathroom. The air in the bathroom felt cool. He clung to the sink with both hands and rewarded himself with a long slug of water, which he promptly heaved into the toilet, along with the battery acid that bourbon turns into after you toss half a bottle of it down your throat.
Late period count: negative five days. Or was it six?
Days it would take to get over Lorraine (this time): twenty-eight (or maybe fifty-six to be safe).
Days it would take Sam to stop hating himself for drinking again: two million.
Sam ran the tub and sat in it. The heat prickled. An army of pins and needles on his skin. The sun was coming up. The water rose around his bony arms and hollowed stomach, and in the muted light he decided he was ugly. Decorating his skeletal figure with tattoos perhaps hadn’t been the best idea.
God, he was depressed. Sam couldn’t recall the last time he felt joy for any number of days he could string together. He pictured himself at Lorraine’s birthday dinner two years ago, a potluck with enchiladas, and the fight they’d had for no reason other than being so shitfaced off fireball shots because there were no mixers and zero ice. When April got her GED last summer they’d had her graduation at the bar, and for Labor Day, when Gash got alcohol poisoning on a tubing trip, they’d dropped him off at the clinic and continued drinking.
Sam thought about how it felt to talk to Penny and how dark their darks got sometimes.
EMERGENCY PENNY
Wed, Oct 18, 2:13 AM
Do you ever feel dead?
Tired?
No
Deceased
Um no?
What?
Sorry
I’ve been having the craziest dreams ME TOO!
You first
OMG and it was a death dream!
I was buried alive
Textbook anxiety nightmare
It wasn’t a nightmare tho Not really
I wasn’t scared
I was in this coffin
Someone knew that I was still alive Because there was this IV of blood That was dripping into my mouth Well that’s just a tube
doesn’t count as an IV
You’re the worst
Lol it’s true
Fine A TUBE
I must have been a vampire
Because it was nourishment And there was also this tube of oxygen pumping in Complicated setup
All I know is that I could breathe Wait
Someone you knew buried you?
But was keeping you alive?
Exactly
Interesting
And the crazy thing is
I think it was you
Why tho?
You must have deserved it
It was strangely comforting
Are you harboring any desires to bury me?
Not yet
Haha
Kk back to my thing Do you know what Cotard’s syndrome is?