2021
“He gave me a dicking so deep I got a fucking nosebleed.”
I pushed my thumb cuticle down with the 2021 penny I got yesterday from Marco’s Grilled Cheese. “Uh huh.”
“For real, look at this shit!” ▇▇ craned their phone camera towards their left nostril, a canyon black with the dried blood brought by deep lovers, apparently. “I got the receipts!” I saw my own nose wrinkle in the little picture of myself in the corner of my phone. ▇▇ retracted the lens. Their green eyes still had a post-orgasmic glow to them. “Shit, it was good.”
“Okay ▇▇,” I said in the voice I use solely for responses to ▇▇’s kinky sex adventures. The 2021 penny is smooth under my fingertips. I rarely have to polish 2021 pennies since they’re so new, they automatically go in my Clean Penny Box and don’t have to be scrubbed relentlessly with sand like the older ones I find.
The screen on their end shifted around and then ▇▇’s face appeared in it too. “‘Sup bitchass, fuck any good hicks yet?”
No matter how often I tell ▇▇ that the student population here isn’t soley farm boys, he still runs with it. He honestly thought that Iowa neighbored Alabama until I had to circle it on a map for him. The poor boy is a graphic design major, you can hardly blame him for the lack of virtually any geographical consciousness.
“Midterms are going fine,” I replied.
“I don’t care about that shit, I wanna know if cowboys are as good at riding as they say they are.”
“I think you’ve got that backwards.”
“What about doing it on the 50 yard line?”
“The what?”
“Any Trump supporter hate-sex?”
“You’re romanticizing political differences again and I thought we agreed that that was toxic.”
“It’s exhausting trying to think for you,” he disappeared out of frame and ▇▇’s face became center screen again. Their hair still had tints of purple in it, from when I dyed it when all of us went to Manzanita the weekend that kid got washed out to sea and I wrote my first love poem that I still adamantly deny is a love poem.
“Any cute guys with glasses?” ▇▇ knows my type.
“At my work there’s one, yeah.”
“Tea!”
“He’s texting with this girl though.”
“Fuck her.”
“I’m perfectly content with observing from a distance,” I defended. I told Glasses Boy that I collect pennies. I think he genuinely thought it was a cool pursuit, which is a first, but he still likes this other girl. She’s from San Francisco and is shorter than him and has colorful hair and makes her own jewelry and doesn’t collect pennies. I hate her and yet I’m on her private story, like a snake.
“Yeah but imagine how good it’d feel to get slammed against a wall and kissed,” ▇▇ said dreamily.
“In a broom closet,” ▇▇ added excitedly.
I worked my nail over the distended outline of Lincoln’s head (also not a metaphor for masterbation, as I guess I have to clarify for that one guy in an old workshop class) and stared into space thoughtfully. My friends are horny little shits, but that scenario did sound pretty nice.
“But I don’t know if I want a boyfriend. Holding someone’s hand sounds…” I squished the penny into the web of my thumb, branding myself with a reminder of the South’s defeat.
“Vulnerable.”
“You don’t have to be dating someone to have them take you in a broom closet, Erin,” ▇▇ said, in a knowing voice, ironically, since if he had actually ever gotten it on in a broom closet he would have told me immediately and in excruciating detail.
“Or a professor’s desk,” ▇▇ added.
“Please don’t go to college,” I begged them.
“How else am I supposed to cross fucking a professor off my bucket list?”
“How’s your book coming?” ▇▇ asked, completely disregarding ▇▇’s cursed statement, like we usually do when they say something that defies nature.
“Oh, god.” I shifted around on my bed. The mattress topper is disproportionate to the mattress and I can’t be bothered to fix it so I just live in constant lopsided misery. “If it’s ever published you all better buy 20 copies each so I’m reimbursed for the trauma of writing historical fiction.” I decided not to tell them that I’ve scrapped the whole project, ever since it got cut up in a workshop class a few weeks ago and made me question if I should be a writer at all.
“Will it have gay smut?” ▇▇ asked hopefully.
“No.”
“Boo, you whore.”
“I would never be able to look my dad in the eye again.” I stared at Lincoln’s side profile and imagined how he’d react to his daughter writing a scene where two men carnally shed each other of their 18th century layers and pound one another in the ass. Lincoln only had sons, but I imagine he would react similarly as my father would–utter shock and potential disownment. The main reason that I was hurrying to finish this book is because I want to publish it before my grandpa dies so he can read it, but reading gay smut his granddaughter wrote might just kill his silent-generation-from-the-Scottish-highlands body itself. “Besides, I don’t even know how to write that stuff,” I continued.
“Dig back through your tumblr likes, I’m sure you’ll find some inspiration,” ▇▇ said teasingly.
“Roasted!” ▇▇ cackled.
I ignored the truth that may or may not be in that burn and traced the 13 vertical stripes of the Union shield. “As much as it disappoints all of you, I’m still straight, so how am I supposed to write gay smut?”
▇▇ waved wildly at the camera. “Um? Hello? Your local slut is here to help!” There were supportive shouts of “yeah!” in the background. Everyone present was lying on ▇▇’s kitchen floor, even though ▇▇ goes to college in Pennsylvania now.
A lot of stuff has happened on ▇▇ kitchen floor, come to think of it. ▇▇ herself, all of 5’5, dragged Clark Campbell’s fucking useless 6’1 swim team star ass out by his feet when he came in looking for beer one time and literally kicked him off her porch. I posted a video I took of ▇▇ and ▇▇ doing yoga on the kitchen floor and Luke Smith reposted it on the school-wide Snapchat story with the caption, “fucking white people” and everyone laughed at us for a week. I always went to ▇▇’s house before swim meets and drank apple cider on the floor to keep me from having a panic attack. She lives right by Safeway so sometimes we’d all go there after school and get various snacks and eat them on her floor. I’d usually find pennies by the crosswalk signal. We had a “friendsgiving” one year and played guitar on the floor, and I have a video of ▇▇ blowing her hair with an air mattress pump and ▇▇ scurrying past behind her with a broom from when we all had a sleepover at her house.
“Or use your imagination. Put yourself in the story.” A quizzical frown appeared on ▇▇’s face, “that’s how writing works, right?”
“Not for smut between two people with anatomies I don’t have.”
“I’ll Facetime you during my next hook-up and you can take notes,” they offered, then paused. I watched their pupils widen as they stared into the distance. “Shit, that’d actually be kinda hot.”
“So we don’t have enough time to unpack all of that,” I quoted our lord and savior John Mulaney to get us to change the subject again.
I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable sharing my writing with my friends. After I wrote a poem encouraging them not to kill themselves and then performed it to them and 1,500 other people instead of us going to see Avengers: Endgame, I figured that was tossing them into the deep end of the wild shit it is that I write. But they’re all too busy to read anything that I write nowadays.
“Not to kill the mood but have y’all filled out the FAFSA yet?”
▇▇ flicked ▇▇’s temple. “Hush child! We don’t speak of that wretched thing!”
“Fuck, I forgot about that!” I dropped the penny and frantically opened my laptop. I found the email I got a couple days ago and flagged but never got back to, like every email I flag.
“Auto-fill, bitch,” ▇▇ said, with the entitlement of a person who’s major requires fluent technological competence.
“I can’t, I didn’t have a job last time, so now I have to add my income.”
“Do you have an income? Do you really?”
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek in thought for a moment and then closed my computer. He was right. I got a .30 cent raise at work recently but it didn’t make much of a difference since I developed a liking for the green apple Monster Energy drinks. I could have gotten a larger raise if I’d applied for a higher up position like all the other sophomores, but I was too scared and now they’re all managers and I’m stuck with freshmen who ask me if I want them to show me how to use the deep fryers as if I don’t know exactly what angle to take the jalapeno poppers out so the grease doesn’t get all over the floor and we have to use cardboard to soak it up.
“9.50 an hour-looking ass.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, defeated by America’s pathetic excuse for a livable wage. “My card got declined buying bubble tea the other day and I had to leave the store. Do you know how embarrassing it is to come out of a bubble tea store bubble tea-less?” I usually use cash for everything so I can get more pennies as change, but there was a long line behind me and I didn’t want to hold everyone up by desperately ripping bills out of my wallet like an Apple Pay-less peasant. I started pawing around my blanket for the discarded penny.
“Become a stripper,” ▇▇ suggested. She and I watched Hustlers at the Roseway when it came out and now she’s obsessed with the idea of pole dancing for self-hating businessmen. I don’t know if there’s a strip club in Iowa City but I know people who would know. I wonder if the spectators throw coins at the strippers. “Or sell feet pics.”
“Ma’am, this is a Wendy’s,” I told her, feeling proud that I know that TikTok despite not having TikTok, because I know that if I do get the app I’ll get irreversibly pissed off at the fact that there are people who think being pretty makes them talented and they’re making more money by having a thin body than I will ever make in my life. I tossed Bruce, my stuffed shark from IKEA that ▇▇ bought me after my wisdom teeth surgery, on the ground in my increasingly-violent pursuit of the penny.
“What about becoming a TikToker?” ▇▇ offered next.
I made a face like the coughing cat meme.
“What was it you said the other day? Naked Smoothies could fuck me and I wouldn’t be mad about it?”
“I will die on that hill.” I gave up trying to find the small copper coin in the folds of my blanket and huffed. It had surrendered to the beer-stinking yellow fabric that I haven’t washed since the water polo tournament at the University of Illinois. I really should wash it soon since it probably has chlamydia.
“Addison Rae could fuck-ing-ne-ver.” ▇▇ clapped her hands in tune to the syllables. The thought that any famous TikToker would hate my life, that Dixie D’Amelio or some shit would kill herself if she got splashed with pasta-soaked dirty dish backwash at 6am and had to walk to her useless logic class in wet socks through packs of LuLuLemon girls who don’t smell like orange chicken and sour cream just to squeeze into half-sized desks in an earth-toned lecture hall with a flickering light and incels who dominate class discussion, got me through most days where those things happen to me.
“Y’all see her at the Met yesterday?”
“Oh god,” ▇▇ rubbed his temples. “This year’s Met Gala happened and the doomsday clock ticked one hour closer.”
“Cheers, I’ll drink to that, bro.” I held up my wine glass of chocolate milk like I was making a toast. I bought the glass from Target a couple weeks ago after rewatching season 2 of Downton Abbey, like I do every fall. I only ever drink chocolate milk out of it, since fake ID’s are like a hundred bucks and I would feel like a traitor if I pretended to be from any other state besides Oregon. The glass has some sand in the bottom, from when I accidentally drank from it in the midst of a penny-scrubbing session without dusting my hands, and for some fucking reason no matter how often I rinse it, there’s always still sand in it.
“The only outfits I saw were the ones in Kelsey and Cody’s fashion review video. Megan Rapinoe was really out here.”
“Oh yeah, ▇▇ is gonna flip her shit when she sees it.”
▇▇ loves Megan Rapinoe, even though she used to play for our worst enemy–Seattle. Ugh. Seattle. They think they’re the shit because they invented Starbucks and have a baseball team and we don’t. Who the fuck watches baseball? People come through the dining hall wearing Seahawks merch sometimes and I don’t know what pisses me off more–the fact that they’re never from Washington, or that they’re wearing Seahawks shit to begin with.
▇▇ is in Sandy fighting fires right now, otherwise she’d be on ▇▇’s kitchen floor too. None of us have heard from her in a couple days, which has me wondering if they publish the names of dead firefighters when they die, or if it’s just “dead firefighter.” I’ve heard stories of campers having to abandon their camps because the fire is spreading so quickly, and I wonder if they leave loose coins behind. I made a note to look up how hot a fire would have to be to melt zinc because that would actually be so sick. I let the dish room workers at my work use my lighter sometimes though, so I don’t know how much fluid it has left.
“I watched the thing Emma Chamberlain did, but that’s it. Half-expected her to show up in Doc’s.”
“They’d probably call it a ‘moment.’”
“Yeah, right. We all know living on the edge is wearing your Crocs without the safety strap, not dressing down for the fucking Met gala.” I’ve been keeping a list of things I’d heard people say since sophomore year of high school, because Trent Ryan sat across from me in chem and was always talking and sex and drugs and I wanted to feel cool because that’s what TV shows about high schools tell you is the correct way to leave your teenage years. The Crocs’ safety strap quote is one of the first quotes that’s on the list, and I feel proud that my friend’s know it.
▇▇ banged his fists on the kitchen floor in tune to a chant, “eat the rich, eat the rich, eat the rich.”
“I’d 100% eat Timothée Chalamet,” ▇▇ said, not even looking up from his phone.
“Love to find him in my kung pow chicken,” I agreed with a significantly outdated Cards Against Humanity reference.
“They kept saying “unprecedented” and “unexpected” and “triumphed,” like not having the gala for a year was what made 2020 fucking suck.”
▇▇ shivered. “Fuck, in 30 years someone is going to say “unprecedented” and I’m gonna convulse.” They looked at me with worry. “Can I make that joke?”
I waved my hand like I was commencing a speech. It’s been a couple years since my last proper seizure, if you don’t count the faint-and-seize I did after my first Covid shot that scared the university hospital half to death and wondered if they should call the CDC, or the faint-and-seize I did at work and woke up with Gale aka Mr. Mainsplain’s face in my own and now he thinks he’s my savior and comes over every time I’m grabbing a sheet of breadsticks from the top shelf. Sometimes I have this fantasy that I have a seizure in front of my friends and they all take me to the hospital.
I checked the watch I wasn’t wearing. Anytime I wear a real watch it makes me sad because my dad lost his dad’s old watch. “Hey, my laundry’s done, I’m gonna go.”
“Take us with you! Maybe you’ll see a hot baseball player in the elevator again!”
I live in the dorm where they stockpile all the athletes, so when I’m leaving for class they’re all coming back from their workouts, and when I come back from class they’re leaving for another workout and it’s this whole cycle that really highlights my mediocrity. Their population means it’s generally a pretty chill dorm, no one gets fucked up because they have to take frequent drug tests. Travis plays his podcasts really loud in the shower and Will and I play chess, and a girl I work with who lives on the west end still has the vodka I got from the water polo secret Santa party from when we hung out on her birthday, and there’s usually coins around the meters outside. My roommate brushes her hair a lot and we watch Dance Moms together sometimes but I don’t like walking next to her because she’s like a foot shorter than me and it makes me feel unfeminine.
“Or a soldier!” ▇▇ stuck their tongue out and panted like a dog.
The plethora of people in uniform was one of the first things I told my friends about when I came to Iowa. I’d never seen a soldier before. There’s hardly any American flags in Portland, like our nationality is this unspoken historical tragedy, far less all the ROTC guys who I check into the dining hall right when we open at 7am like fucking psychos.
“There’s no service in the elevator. K bye.” I hung up.
My friends know that I hate goodbyes. I’m not very good at them. They make me painfully aware that I have a heart and a form and a place and that people know me. It’s always made me uncomfortable to know that people can know me, that permanency and its consequences arrive hand in hand, always.
In a final desperate attempt to find the penny I flapped my blanket around. Something shiny flew off of it and splatted against the opposite wall. My eyes followed it as it sank down the side of my roommate’s bed. Luckily there’s literally nothing on her wall, unlike mine that is covered head to toe in posters and pictures, which I think says a lot about both of us psychologically.
Whatever, the penny was from 2021 anyway, there’s tons like it.
/
It’s easier to construct an entire fake phone call with the friends that I don’t speak to anymore, pretending we’re the same people that we were in high school and that I ever meant as much to them as they meant to me, that blocking out their names when I write about them is just easier that way, wondering if I’ll ever get over the pain of putting us in imaginary situations that will never happen, wondering if I’ll get over the way quarantine broke a friendship, pretending that it was quarantine that actually broke it anyway, that imagining myself in a romantic relationship gives me butterflies and not a nasty nausea of a telltale disorder, that I am aromantic but if he texted me I’d abandon that completely and be his, that some of us dated one another or almost dated one another, that there isn’t a luminous gash in everyone who has the unfortunate nature to be born into our generation where you graduate to empty chairs and what ifs, that some of us are actual alcoholics and addicts with eating disorders and divorces, that we’re encroaching on the shadows of our dying parents and they’re encroaching on the shadows of their dead parents, cloaked in ancestor’s flags and battleground maps, pretending that pennies are worth writing about, pretending that I was ever someone else other than the empty collector that I am now; it’s all easier when I have a penny in my hands.
Erin Challenor (she/her) is an undergraduate at the University of Iowa, studying creative writing, political science, and American studies. Originally from Portland Oregon, she likes pennies, sticky notes, slam poetry, and misses her two cats dearly. She likes writing about the Generation Z experience and is Managing Editor for the literary magazine The Jupiter Review.