Penny waited for him to go on.
“I wanted direction. And I genuinely thought I could foist all my expectations and lack of motivation on this tiny blob and this baby would magically figure it out for me because now I had a reason to exist.”
He took another gulp of water. “Dumb,” he said. “Like so textbook.”
There was nothing Penny could think to say, so she stayed silent.
“Can I show you something?” Sam said, looking at her warily.
“Is it dead?”
“No.” He laughed. “What?”
Penny laughed too and shook her head. “Sorry, you just had this look.” She hopped off her stool. “Yes, you can show me something.”
He headed up a set of stairs left of the fridge and Penny followed him.
Sam flipped on a light and went down the hall. Penny briefly wished she had gum just in case.
The upstairs of House wasn’t anything you’d expect.
Sam walked into a dark room toward the back and switched on a lamp. “This is where I live,” he said.
SAM.
Talk about an escalation. He tried to see his bedroom through Penny’s eyes. Even sharing a dorm, it was probably smaller than what she was used to.
Penny followed him in.
“Grim, right?” he asked. He watched as she tracked his possessions. His mattress on the floor, the box of clothes by the door.
“Not at all,” she said. “It’s wild. I can’t believe I’m here.”
She walked to the window by his bed.
“So, this is your atmosphere,” she said, moving the curtain aside to peer out. Sam watched her reflection in the glass. “Good view. It honestly didn’t occur to me that House had an upstairs. It’s a great perch, the crow’s nest of a pirate ship. Do you like it here?”
He did.
He stood next to her. “Yeah,” he whispered.
She turned to him. “That’s good,” she said. She walked into the middle of the room and glanced at his ceiling. “Chill vibes,” she said.
He smiled.
“Oh,” she said. “So I really didn’t need to worry about you getting home that first day.”
He laughed. “I’m still sorry about that.”
Sam took a seat on the corner of his mattress. Penny sat down next to him.
“All of House is soothing,” she said. “I can’t believe you can’t sleep in here. I’d be out like a light.”
He wanted her to touch him, but she didn’t.
Penny.
Penny who smelled of dryer sheets.
He took off his shoes and leaned up against the back wall to get more comfortable.
“How long have you been here?” she asked.
“Since the beginning of the summer.”
“About the same time all that other stuff happened?”
“Yeah.”
Sam touched his hair. It was gross and curling. He tried to smooth it down and failed. He pulled his legs up and wrapped his arms around them, resting his chin on top of his knees. Then he decided it was too much the posture of a moody kid and unfolded himself.
“I lived with Lorraine off and on,” he said. “Or with friends. Or at home with my mom and her boyfriend. I was trying to save money for school.” He turned to Penny. “You think I’m a loser.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I would tell you.”
He believed her.
PENNY.
It was the hair that was her undoing. It was floppy. Fluffy even. He was sitting on the bed with his long legs stretched out in front of him, his back against the wall. She wanted to touch the tuft in the back, the craziest part of the cowlick, even though she knew it to be a huge violation of personal space. It also killed her that she couldn’t poke through the small hole in the knee of his jeans to see if it felt the same as the hole in her jeans. The whole thing was demented.
“So, yeah, I’m basically homeless,” he said.
Penny turned to face him. “Inaccurate,” she said, and scooched over to him, mindful to keep her shoes off his bed. “In fact, you’re lucky that you have a place to go.”
Penny placed her paw on top of Sam’s hand, which lay on the bed. She had no idea why. She hadn’t considered until that second how it might be a thing he noticed.
She faltered. Not quite knowing what to do next, she concentrated on keeping the pressure light. Nobody wanted a clammy dead hand on theirs.
“Besides, this place is cozy as hell,” she continued.
“You’re right.” He shifted his hand.
Then for no other reason than to up the ante on the awkward Olympics, Penny blurted: “Is it crazy that you’ve met my mom?”
He laughed. It was a good distraction. Penny snatched back her hand to pretend the incident hadn’t occurred and shoved it in her hoodie pocket.
“You seem mad at her,” he said.
“Yeah,” she responded glumly.
She was mad at her. It wasn’t as cut-and-dried as Sam’s thing with Brandi Rose, but Penny was furious at Celeste. Had been for a while.
“It goes back to when my mom got me a tutor because I brought home a C in French,” she began. “Not that she’s a stereotypical tiger mom or anything. Just that she thinks French is too ‘chic’ to flunk.”
Her tutor, Bobby, was nineteen, pale, kinda on the chubby side, with long, spidery fingers and brown hair that fell to his chin in front. He was half-white and half-Filipino, and pretty tall, though his clothes could’ve fit Penny. It was as if at fourteen he’d decided he was done buying new ones. His T-shirts barely covered his midriff, and it was a dead giveaway that he was peculiar. And his eyes . . . His eyes were beautiful. One yellow-green, the other gray-blue. It was called complete heterochromia. He’d explained how he’d gotten it—hereditarily speaking—and drawn a chart while talking about pea plants, but Penny didn’t harbor a crush yet, so she ignored the finer points.
“Bobby was this whiz kid computer programmer.” Her voice sounded far away. Detached. “His dad was this big deal at IBM back in the day and was friends with my mom. Whatever, my mom was friends with everyone. Still is.”
Most of the time Penny didn’t give Celeste anything to worry about. She only ever got As and Bs. Then, at the end of sophomore year, when it was looking like Penny would end up with a C, Celeste called Bobby.
His teaching methodology was suspect at best. Bobby came by twice a week to show Penny pirated French movies that she’d seen before with the English captions switched off. Usually Amélie or Breathless. They’d read books from the artist Moebius and Asterix and Obelix comics, a series about two ancient warriors, and listened to French rap music that to Penny’s ears was exactly like American rap except way more politicized.
They spoke jokey nonsense French in horrible accents.
“Attend! Pourquoi le Sasquatch abandonnerait son sac à main?”
Wait! Why would the Sasquatch leave his handbag?
Or
“Asterix et Obelix veulent faire l’amour doux, doux, à l’autre. Il est évident, n’est-ce pas?”
Asterix and Obelix want to make sweet, sweet love to each other. Duh, right?
Bobby spoke four languages. When he turned fifteen he won a fellowship for one hundred thousand dollars to skip college and work in Silicon Valley, but he didn’t go because he said he didn’t want to be bourgeois. They ate snacks and secretly drank Celeste’s white wine while watching La Déesse!, a French cooking show where a well-intentioned woman with colorful blouses made elaborate meals for her husband.