Penny on Another Planet
Fanfiction for a Book Called L8ER SK8ER
The following is an excerpt from a story nimbusing L8ER SK8ER, my horror novel about skateboarding, cults, and numbers. It’s unpublished as of this writing, but this cool video exists.
Sender: tepjep@nyu.edu
Recipient: maineel@bu.edu
Subject: YO BICH WUSZUPP
Can I show this to T or would he (rightfully?) jump the fucc out his mind at nah mentions and a whole three rolls full of yayyy lookit me free free in the cittayyy!
I NEED AD VICE (bc i love it n i feel it n i vaaaant it out but also i dont wanna hurt no one you know you know ??))
Also I swear I know I owe you like three video calls but can you pls pls give me the barest??? chica how the fucksticc is boston?? HOW U LIKE DEM APPLES!!>~!? but fr are you not yizzing rn to thots of how terribly tied miyawnda must be this instant (this very fucking instant!!) in LVCC, no shade no shade (for her -- since I hear that campus yawns ass-back into the roofless forever yahahahahaaha!!! devil devil girls, but still fuck her forever please and no thank you)
I love u with all my <3
(which these days feels maddingly crushed and also sadder than I can recall)
P
(girl lone in the city :,-)
Time-Capsuled Pre-Collegiate Fright-Fed Jottings
By Penapanedra Tepje, nevadense de mente pequeña pero con el gran corazón
It’s the night before I start college and I’ve never been so scared in my life. And I’ve been scared many times. I used to write about it, a lot a lot, and even got some wheres with some of the best of those pieces, but I archived a bunch of them ahead of My Big Move and honestly, this feeling of creeping onto the highway, the big part of the endeavor getting underway, talking about my life, has been as close to all those screen-fed realities as the sky is to this slanted ceiling above me.
Independence is terrifying, it’s huge. And I’m a proud wearer of my megalaphobia (which is thankfully not chronic). I dont know if it helps or hurts that New York City is an absolute drainpipe. I’ve been here for exactly eleven hours. It’s beautiful and awful, the loudest thing I’ve ever been around. I think I might love it. I know I absolutely hate it.
What am I doing in this giant armpit? Small literary desert Shimonah-ator comme moi? I tell you, I am the last one to know these big things circling me, little baby shark bait. I try to understand, but I find I’m incapable of reaching self-understanding purely through thought. I’ve read that some people can. I know many who can’t. There’s comfort in that. I want close friends. I hope there’s people I can talk to here. The introductory video call left a lot wanting, especially when they asked for questions and the silence was so loud and long it was like the absolute nothing after the gadget-implosion of Trinity, which I feel like if I dropped would get me black iron oxide eye rolls instead of hummingbirds of ayyyyy.
I don’t know. I get scared so easily. That might be the most basic part of me. But I like the fight. Because fuck them, that’s why. It’s enough to spend all my time looking monsters in their dirt-hideous faces. There’s so many of them. And some are pretty. Most are awful, pocked and slackened and eye-avoidant. All are fascinating. I’m trying not to think of the first time I really looked. I say I’m scared now, but I know you know I know what real terror is. Seen it. Filled a whole journal with it, l8er sk8er scrawled on the cover in red red. Saw a lot from it before, saw almost nothing after.
I feel like I’m on another planet.
I’ll be okay. I’m a big girl. Like Raya says, “We miss our mimby, but we can do hard things.” Yes, we can. I take my breaths and listen to my music.
I’m playing back-and-forth my two current song obsessions, “Oh Yoko!” by John Lennon, a bad man but nothing Dahmer, and “L’AMOUR DE MA VIE” by Billie Eilish, a perfect angel-goddess with the voice of life. Through the first song, I’m thinking big New York thoughts about sad New York boys, and through the second, I feel tugs of past misery and an awful gutted feeling of what I only imagine is future pain. The longer I wait, the worse it will be. Is that true? Could it possibly get better?
Is it a kindness? I don’t know. Is it a need need for freedom? I never feel as fucking American as when I think of my need and lust and love for liberty. Give me it all, give me everything.
I don’t know. This private school costs way too much for someone not riding an 80% tuition break off her dope ass writing skills (and even still definitely then), but it’s an icy opportunity to craft the bones of my existence. After that, I can embody them or me or however the fuck Gary put it on the video pitch that clearly made such an impression (I’m still sore Iowa only went up to 70, that would have made the decision thornier, or at the very least, thorny).
Short of it, I’m scared. Long of it, I’m here.
I’ll listen to my music. I’ll exhale my sorrows. I’ll sip my water. I’ll feel better. I’ll go to class tomorrow. I’ll make a friend. I’ll text the boy. And if I remember, I’ll look up at a skyscraper and try to wonder how it can be. I know it’s possible but I don’t know how. I feel that way about my life. I think it’s a good thing, and I could be wrong, but I’m dying to prove myself right.
The below poem addresses writing through the partial lens of the above character.
PENNY ON ANOTHER PLAN-8
This is how you write
The mind whispers
The heart hears
The fingers move
This is the life I will live
Until I die
And also
This is the death I will chase
With my life
Every morning
To cut through the fog
Climb into the chair
& sit before the page
Pen in hand
To match pen in heart
One morning
Ten years ago
I woke up with the name of a girl in my head
It wasn’t a name you find in the world outside
Five syllables
Some of them strange
She’s been with me ever since
—December 2023
Thanks to Ryan Tate for making this incredible video! (depicting Katie Korn, Tory Dembitzer, Natalie Garcia, a pre-8 atmospheric eye-hover, & Rabbi Dirt. No Penny, sadly.)
