The three girls finished their coffees. Penny wondered if her entire college experience would be this much fun. It was like high school except that it followed you into your bedroom. Great.
Finally, Mallory broke the silence.
“My boyfriend got a new truck.”
The comment was met with more silence.
“This is my attempt at changing the subject,” Mallory said after a while.
Penny relented. “What kind of truck?”
“A Nissan.”
“Mallory’s boyfriend is Benjamin Westerly,” said Jude meaningfully.
“Who the hell is Benjamin Westerly?”
“He’s huge in Australia,” said Mallory.
“I have no idea what that means,” said Penny.
Jude chortled.
“Ben’s in a band,” Mallory explained. “He’s famous to roughly a hundred thousand people who absolutely worship him. His fan army’s very passionate. Plus, he’s twenty-one. Australia is incredibly progressive. They had a woman prime minister.”
To Penny, Australians felt like off-brand, bizarro British people. But then again, Penny didn’t personally know any Australians. Though it said something shady that every other place on Planet Earth went placental for their animals while Australians held on to marsupials. Wow, maybe Penny was racist too.
“That’s cool,” she said after a while.
“What did I miss?” Sam joined them, setting another espresso down next to his old one. Penny regarded the twin cups.
“Tepid,” he explained, finally taking a seat on the chair next to her. Penny loved that word. It was the most perfect way to describe the temperature. The word “pith” was the same. Everything about it recalled the spongy stuff in oranges.
Sam reached over her to grab a packet of sugar. “Pardon my reach.”
Penny held her breath and leaned back so she wouldn’t creepily fog up his cheek. She caught a part of the tattoo where the sleeve of his T-shirt rode up. It was either a hand or a set of hands. It easily ranked within the top three most erotic sights of her life.
“Everything was delicious, Sam,” purred Mallory.
Sam’s armchair was set slightly higher than them on the sofa and he crossed his legs elegantly. His right knee brushed Penny’s left and she almost passed out. With the comically small espresso cup in his thin hands, Penny wondered for a second if he was gay. Not that it was any of her business.
“So what classes are you taking, J?”
“We’re calling me ‘J’ now?” asked Jude. She was visibly pleased by this.
Sam laughed. “I’m trying it out.”
He rubbed his bicep to reveal a shadow of another tattoo under his other sleeve. It was some kind of animal. Penny’s knee felt warm where he had touched it, and she flushed. Penny wondered what the tattoo was. Potentially a horse head. A chess piece maybe. A black knight.
Penny would probably get a bishop tattoo if she were to get anything off a chessboard. They were discreet and effective. Total stealth movers. Mallory and Jude would get queens. So would Penny’s mother for that matter.
Uncle Sam.
Sam could have been in a band. A dreamy, brooding band. Penny thought cigarettes were pointless and smelled awful, but she imagined that Sam smoked and that he looked cool doing it.
God, she would totally smoke a cigarette if he offered her one. They’d be a striking pair in their identical outfits leaned up against a wall and smoking all cool.
As cool as glaucoma and lung cancer.
Penny had never had a cigarette in her life, and if they did smoke together Penny would probably have a coughing fit that lasted forever and ended on an audible fart.
Jesus, pull it together.
Seriously, what was happening to her? Besides, she had a boyfriend. She tried to conjure Mark’s face and got as far as the general slope of his nose plus his hair. Mark who’d gotten white-kid cornrows in fifth grade and wore the same navy-blue fleece all winter without washing it.
Sam was different. Sleek. Brooding and angular. An Egon Schiele portrait. Schiele if she remembered correctly had been a protégé of Gustav Klimt and had a propensity for drawing himself in the nude.
Nude.
“So,” Sam said, leaning back and crossing his arms. “What are y’all majoring in?”
Schiele probably didn’t say “y’all” though.
“Media studies,” said Mallory, fluffing her hair. “I want to be talent.”
“Marketing,” said Jude. “It was the least boring major Dad was willing to pay for. . . .”
Sam up-nodded, volleying the query to Penny. Penny hated this question. Her answer came off as pretentious.
“What was your major?” Penny deflected.
“Film,” he said.
“Oh, the film program at UT is excellent,” she said in a voice a full octave higher than her normal register. “I mean, it’s the birthplace of mumblecore, the Duplass brothers, Luke and Owen Wilson, Wes Anderson . . .” She couldn’t stop the word-vomit.
“Wes Anderson was a philosophy major,” Sam interrupted.
She blushed harder.
Kill me now.
Sam smiled disarmingly.
“I don’t know why I know that,” he said.
“Why film?” Penny squeaked. On some level she knew whatever you picked in college didn’t matter in the real world. People rarely pursued a career in accordance with their major, though it was a decent Rorschach test for self-perception. It said everything about how you saw yourself.
“I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker,” he said. Penny wondered about the past tense. “There are so many unbelievable stories going on in the world, just quietly happening around you. There’s this Hitchcock quote about how in regular movies the director is God and how in documentaries God is the director. I always loved that.”
He stacked his espresso cups.
Penny knew emoji hearts were flying out of her eyes. She was smitten mitten kittens. She’d never heard anyone her age talk about the work they wanted to do. Not that Sam was her age exactly. Penny swallowed the rest of her questions: whether he felt like a ghost trolling the living, mining their existence for ideas; whether or not he got lonely watching other people the way Penny did.
“Jesus, you’re emo,” observed Mallory, scrolling through her phone.
Sam chuckled. “I dropped out anyway. Couldn’t afford it.”
“Well, I think college is a sham.” Mallory shrugged. “I’m here as Jude’s plus one and to shut my mother up. We’re better off trying to invent an app or something.”
The four of them sat in silence considering the depressing reality.
“Just don’t invent an app that invents apps,” Penny piped up. “The job market’s bad enough without you taking robot jobs from the robots.”
Sam laughed.
Sam had resting bitch face until he laughed. Penny had never wanted anything as bad as to make him do it again.
“God, the app singularity is the worst thing I can imagine,” he said after a moment.
Penny was thrilled—Sam either read science fiction or knew enough about it to know what to call it when computers got smarter than humans and started to phase them out.
“Social media would be a mess,” she said, smiling. “Who’s catfishing the catfisher?”
“Do Android phones dream of electric sheep?” he asked.
They both groaned, but a dad joke with a Philip K. Dick reference was Penny’s sweet spot. Dad jokes were Penny’s favorite. (You didn’t need to be Freud to figure that one out.) His hotness was making eye contact unbearable, and her cheeks tingled pleasurably.
“Anyway,” sang Mallory impatiently.
Penny cleared her throat.
Sam cracked his knuckles in a super-attractive, kinda menacing way. With his arms in front of his chest, she could see more hints of tattoos at his throat. The French word for throat is “gorge.” And, Christ, his was indeed.
Mallory said something dumb about empathy and the value of the human spirit. Penny wasn’t listening.
Sam had somehow found the Perfect Shirt with the Perfect Collar, which was stretched out just enough to create this enticing peekaboo effect.
Penny thought again about Mark. Mark, who wore polo shirts on dates and only read self-help books that you could buy at the airport, from The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People to Who Moved My Cheese? And the old standby The 4-Hour Workweek.
Good Mark.
Uncomplicated Mark.