FIC: Do You Know (no no no) | big bang theory
Title: Do You Know (no no no)
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, some language.
Word Count: 4400
Disclaimer: BBT isn't mine, etc.
Summary: Prompt was: Penny decides to give up on acting for a while, Sheldon tries to be supportive (and mostly fails, naturally): platonic or shippy
AN: Written for Paradox's 2011 Saturnalia, for ishie.
Originally posted here, posting here for archival reasons mostly.
Do You Know (no no no)
It’s a Friday when Penny makes up her mind. It’s not just that Friday, of course-it’s been long days and crap pay and customers who are too stupid to exist and it’s more than that, too, so much more than all of it, and she knows this isn’t what she wanted, and she knows this isn’t where she wants to be. But still. She’s dealing.
But it’s a Friday when Penny comes home, soup on her uniform from the bratty kid with bad parents at table seven, feet sore from having to stay an extra two hours because Katie called in “sick” when everyone knew she was just in bed with her boyfriend getting high. She put the last ten dollars she had in her car for gas on the way home after her card declined, again, and she can’t handle the prospect of going rounds with the card company, she can’t handle the prospect of anything at all, except when she strips in the middle of her living room, throwing her uniform on the floor (screw the stain) and grabs for any comfortable clothes while flipping the television on-
Local news with the local fricking commercial that she auditioned for three months ago. And the girl chatting away, grinning pathetically at the television screen-what the hell does she have that Penny doesn’t? Penny knows herself-she can rack up her good points and bad points, and she’s a pretty dependable judge of character, and the girl might be pretty but she’s not prettier than Penny herself. She might be bubbly but Penny can fake bubbly. She’s-
Penny considers the bottle of wine in her fridge, and then the bottle of tequila in her cabinet, but in the end she manages half a bite of chocolate before her tears make it impossible for her to eat. She crawls under her covers, but the stress keeps her up, the red numbers on her digital clock circling from three to four as she wills everything away.
She’s got Saturday off, so when she wakes up at ten with a pounding headache she doesn’t have to call in sick. She wants-she wants to take her car and drive and never look back, but she can’t even afford a full tank of gas, and she’s got nowhere to run. Instead, she stays in bed.
Around eleven she crawls out of bed and finds her way to her couch. On the floor, kicked underneath the table, she finds a notebook, and tucked underneath a couch cushion she finds a pen.
Right, she thinks. Need to fix this.
Penny likes lists. She’s always liked lists. In high school, when she was supposed to be paying attention to Mr. Daniels droning on about photosynthesis, she was sketching out plans. They changed each time she wrote them, and she never kept to them all that well, but still.
She pulls a blanket over her and scans her room, before idly jotting down
1.laundry
2. dishes
3. call credit card bastards
4.
She pauses, pen tapping on her lips, and then tears the page off with a frown. She throws it somewhere behind her, not paying too much attention to the mess. Sheldon would have a heart attack, she muses lightly.
The problem with the list is that she doesn’t have an end goal like she used to. In high school, her lists would be
1. move to California
2. get auditions
3. get an apartment
4. get breakthrough role
5. graciously visit home to rub it in bitchqueen Sally’s face
6. hook up with a hottie in my ~limo~
7. win an award
8. get a part across from Clooney or Pitt…or Damon, maybe. Or Marky Mark
9. buy a couple of houses
…
(and that’s usually when she’d have to hide the paper because Mr. Daniels was glaring at her, waiting for her to answer some question)
The point is, though, that she does plans, and lists, and she’s always known she was going to be a famous actress someday, but now…well. Sometimes it’s just hard to keep hoping when everything just seems so utterly shit.
She drops the notebook and pen back on the floor and then rummages around for a sweatshirt before grabbing orange juice out of the fridge. Most days she’d have coffee, but right now the thought of it makes her stomach churn. She hunts through the “random crap” drawer in the kitchen until she finds a bottle of Advil, and swallows back two. She puts away the dry dishes that’ve been hanging out on the counter for the last two days.
Finally, juice still in hand, she collapses back on the couch. She keeps the notebook in her lap, her pen tapping relentlessly against her thigh, staring blankly at the wall. After a long pause, she uncaps the pen one-handed and then writes at the top, in firm block letters:
Goals
She frowns, scratching the back of her neck distractedly, and then, before she can over think it more than she already has, she writes
1. check all upcoming auditions
She stares at it, and then crosses it out, angry at herself, angry at the way she’s wasting her life, angry at everyone who ever told her how stupid it was to try to be something she’s not.
1. get a better job
she writes instead. Her throat is tight as she stares at the words, and she tries to ignore the sudden weight behind her eyes.
2. stop expecting things to happen on their own
she writes next, and then before she can linger too long over that, before she has to face what she wrote, she continues, faster now:
3. look into taking community college classes
4. stop buying food out when I can’t afford it
5. stop pretending
6. start cleaning my room
7. take a break from men
8. grow the fuck up
When she’s done, her heart is tight in her chest and her lungs are having a hard time finding air. She jerks herself to her feet, the notepad falling to the ground, and then shoves on shorts and a sports bra and a tank top and socks and sneakers and grabs her keys and hits the hallway already at a jog.
There’s no one out there, and once she’s outside, the feel of the sidewalk under her shoes, she runs and runs and runs until she’s bent over gasping for breath, sweat clinging to her back, hair damp around her face.
Okay, she thinks. Okay.
When she gets back to her apartment, she jumps in the shower and keeps the water cold, feeling it soak down beneath her skin. In the living room she starts grabbing the random clothes and pulling them into a pile in her bedroom.
When she looks underneath the kitchen cabinet, she’s only a little left of that cheap, multipurpose cleaner she bought ages ago, so she walks across the hall rather determinedly. When Sheldon hears her request, and gets a good look at her in her cleaning clothes, hair tied back with a bandana, she just can make out his soft Thank goodness.
He hands her three different cleaners, five sponges, and then, holding a bucket of other cleaning things he follows her back to her apartment, and before she can quite manage to get a word in through his lecture on cleanliness, they’re doing what’s evidently going to be the deepest deep clean the apartment’s ever met. Which, hell, considering that’s what she’s trying to do with her life, she just kind of goes with it.
When he grabs the notebook off the floor and glances at her, though, she jumps up and grabs for it.
“Penny?” is all he says, quietly prompting, and she shrugs.
“Just trying to make some improvements,” she says, trying to pass it off as nothing. Which it’s not, really, it’s not anything to anyone but her, and if she hadn’t just tried to grab the notebook away like a psycho he probably wouldn’t even have thought twice about it, but now he’s still staring at her like she’s some rare alien specimen (which, given it’s Sheldon, is really quite ridiculous).
He frowns a little but hands her the notebook and then demands she help him move the couch so he can clean underneath it. Clean underneath it.
About an hour later, while they’re scrubbing the kitchen floor and she’s struggling against laughing or making inappropriate comments about seeing him down on his knees (which he probably wouldn’t get anyway), Sheldon clears his throat.
“Is everything all right?” he asks. Everything about him is tense, and Penny can’t help but soften at the way he forces the question out.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m just…” She trails off with a frown, glancing at the brush in her hand.
Sheldon focuses on a spot on the floor.
“Do you want some ice cream?” he offers at last. “Is this about another romantic failure?”
Penny winces.
“No,” she says. “Look, it’s okay, I know you suck at the friend thing, you don’t need to keep trying.”
Sheldon quiets at that, and the only sound in the apartment is the cleaning products on the floor. If she didn’t know better…
“Sheldon…” Penny says, because there’s a niggling idea in the back of her head but she can’t quite make it out.
“Yes?” he asks, looking up at her wide-eyed, and from the yellow gloves on his hands to the apron around his waist, she has to bite back a smile.
She shakes her head. “Never mind,” she says.
After lunch, when she’s got laundry going downstairs and she’s deterred Sheldon from them having to deep-clean the carpets and clean the outside of the windows (and how he was going to manage that she really doesn’t want to know), they grab their respective laptops and sit on the couch. Leonard’s out with Leslie, so he doesn’t ask why Sheldon also brings a smaller, spare whiteboard over as well.
She’s a little surprised when she realizes she’d spent all day hanging out with Sheldon. And that he’d helped her. And that it hadn’t all been terrible.
“Thanks,” she says, and then, because that doesn’t seem quite enough, because she woke up feeling like her life was falling to pieces, and the list was all her, but the cleaning and even his snarky remarks and backhanded compliments really did help. “Really,” she says, and she smiles, standing as well, “Thank you, Sheldon.”
He hesitantly shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “You’re welcome, Penny,” he says, and then, looking vaguely terrified that she might become emotional, takes off to the other apartment.
Penny works on Sunday, and on Monday morning, and when she gets back to the apartment at six she’s just exhausted. Instead of just climbing onto the couch and vegging out, though, she flips on her computer and starts researching, looking for job openings and community college registration times and fees.
The conversation that Penny expected goes something like this:
She’s in the boys’ apartment, and they’re eating Thai. She says, “Guys, I’ve decided to take a break from acting.”
Raj stares at her wide-eyed.
Howard says, “Aw, man, you’re too hot to give up like that!” in what he probably means to be an endearing manner.
Leonard says, “What are you going to do instead?”
Sheldon takes another bite of food and doesn’t look at her.
“I was thinking of taking some community college classes,” she says.
“Probably for the best,” Leonard says. “It’s good to set realistic goals.”
“Realistic goals?” Penny repeats, voice sharp.
“It’s hard to be an actor,” Howard says, shrugging it away.
Sheldon still hasn’t said anything.
“Good,” she says. “I’m glad you guys approve of my decision.”
She’s up and out the door before they can say anything else. She doesn’t even know why she’s so mad.
“She doesn’t want to talk to anyone,” Leonard says, clearly irritated as he walks back into the apartment. Sheldon raises his eyebrows.
“Did she say she didn’t want to talk to anyone?” he asks. Leonard frowns at him.
“What?”
“Did she says she didn’t want to talk to anyone, or she didn’t want to talk to you?”
“I-does it matter?” Leonard says. Sheldon sighs heavily.
“Leonard,” he says. “From experience, we’ve seen that she is often more likely to be able to talk to me than to you, most likely given your carnal history. As her friend, I am obligated, as much as I might wish I could shirk the duty, to check on her well-being.”
“Really?” Leonard says, clearly taken by surprise. “Did she make you sign a contract?”
Sheldon glares at him. “Come now, Leonard,” he says, “Pettiness doesn’t suit you.” Sheldon stands up, setting his laptop carefully down on the coffee table. “Observe that which you are incapable of doing-helping Penny,” he says.
Sheldon knocks on her apartment. On the third knock, she yanks open the door in order to throw a notebook at his face. “I don’t want to see anyone, Sheldon!”
Leonard, leaning in the doorway, nods sagely. “Ah, yes,” he says, “I see, you’ve shown me well, Master.”
Sheldon glares at him.
The next morning, when Leonard gets up, Sheldon is already wake. His hair is in mild disarray, as if he’d been pulling it, and Leonard warily eyes the mess of the white board.
“Sheldon?” he prompts.
“Mm,” Sheldon says, waving in his general direction in a thoroughly dismissive manner. “Busy.”
“You all right?” Leonard asks, looking closer at the white board. He frowns, seeing a notebook in Sheldon’s hand. “Is that Penny’s?”
“Yes,” Sheldon says. “She gave it to me.”
“She threw it at your head, Sheldon.”
“I’m merely-” Sheldon breaks off, frustrated. “She has a list that doesn’t make sense. Lists help with planning, they help make sense of things, but it’s as if Penny doesn’t even…doesn’t…”
“Doesn’t understand what she wants?” Leonard asks. Sheldon shrugs reluctantly. “Look, as shocking as it is, I get that you’re trying to help her, but I think this is something she has to figure out on her own.”
Sheldon frowns. “Just because you failed in that regard, Leonard,” he says, “Doesn’t mean I will. Anything I work toward, I’m fully capable of realizing.”
“Like driving,” Leonard says, deadpan. “Or, yeah, that, what you’re doing now, trying to blow my brain up, how’s that going?”
Sheldon is far too mature to slam the door to his bedroom after stalking off. Clearly.
The conversation that Penny never saw coming goes something like this:
“Penny,” Sheldon says. “I think you should major in theater.”
Penny’s sitting on her couch, cross-legged, class list up on her computer. Sheldon is standing in the doorway.
“What?” she asks, clearly surprised. Sheldon takes a hesitant step into the room.
“I think you should major in theater,” he repeats. “At the very least, you should consider a minor. If you change your mind after this semester, you’ll have plenty of time to reconsider what direction you’d prefer.”
“Sheldon,” she says. “I’m done with theater. I’m done with acting. I’m not good enough.”
She’s not a crier. She’s never been a crier.
Sheldon proffers chocolate and a box of Kleenex he’d kept behind his back, and takes another step forward.
“Consider it,” he says. “You have a week before registration opens.”
“Sheldon…” she says, but he’s already turned on his heel, chocolate and Kleenex perched on the table, eager to avoid any emotional outbursts on her part.
Five days later, two days before registration, Penny kidnaps Sheldon on the way home from picking him up from work.
“Penny-” he says, voice pitching to previously unheard levels of unhappiness as she turns the wrong way. She ignores him.
They pull up at a park, and Penny gets out and stalks over to the swingset. Sheldon waits in the car for seven point six minutes, and then gets out and follows her.
“Penny, why are we here?” he asks. Penny leans back further into her descent, feeling the air woosh past her, eyes shut. Sheldon watches her as she goes back and forth, back and forth.
He sits down in the swing next to her. “Penny?”
“Did you ever swing as a kid?” Penny asks, eyes still shut against the wind. Sheldon lets his fingers trail along the chain of the swing he’s sitting on.
“I was fascinated by the physics of it,” he says at last. Penny barks out a laugh, eyes flashing open as she looks at him.
“Of course you were,” she says. “You’ve always known what you wanted to do, didn’t you?”
Sheldon shrugs, uneasy with the way the conversation is progressing. “Penny, is this about registration?”
She’s silent for a long moment, focusing on swinging. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “Why do you think I should major in theater? I thought you, of all people, would want me to be more practical.”
This time, it’s Sheldon who’s quiet.
“Why did you want to be an actress?” he asks at last. Penny lets her legs hang limply, let’s her body slowly start to drag the swing to a stop.
“What does that matter?” she asks. “I’m not going to be an actress,” she says.
Sheldon frowns and rubs a hand along his plaid pants. “I never wanted to do anything other than what I’m doing,” he says.
Penny lets her feet catch in the dirt below. “Well, you’re smart,” she says. “You can do what you love.”
Sheldon doesn’t say anything more.
Penny drinks half a bottle of wine when she gets back to her apartment.
Penny registers for Acting 101, Set Design, Costume & Design, and Tech-all basic requirements for the Theater major.
Three weeks into the semester, Penny goes into the boys apartment full-out snarling.
“Penny?” Leonard prompts carefully.
“He said it was cliché,” she spits.
“Your set design?” Sheldon frowns. Leonard glances at him, confused that Sheldon appears to be clearer on the situation than he is.
“Cliché and derivative,” she says. “That pretentious bastard!” Penny says, pacing in circles around the apartment.
“Well, that’s not a big deal, is it?” Leonard asks. Sheldon starts shaking his head, but Leonard doesn’t understand in time. “I mean, you want to act, so what does it matter if you’re bad at sets?”
Penny turns on him. “Oh,” she says, “Oh, I’m not bad at designing sets,” she says. “That stupid man wouldn’t get talent if it punched him in the face, although, hey, I’m not saying that option’s not on the table.”
“She likes set design,” Sheldon says in a soft undertone to Leonard. Leonard peels himself off the back of the couch, where he’d been momentarily flattened by her anger.
“Yeah, I get that, now,” he says, glaring at Sheldon.
Penny mostly stops eating at the boys’, mostly because she’s broke, and eating out is really stupid when she has no money.
She starts making homemade meals-at first, straight from the box, but after a couple of weeks she starts actually making things where she had to check ingredients and cut up vegetables and make sure she has the right proportions. It’s kind of relaxing, to be honest, although she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t admit that to anyone.
A week or so after she all but disappears from meals, Sheldon shows up an hour before dinnertime with a bag of groceries.
“Eating out isn’t healthy,” he says, “And given I fully intend to live a long and productive life, benefiting the world with my genius, I’ve decided to change my schedule slightly.”
Penny bypasses the heart attack and goes right for the obvious. “Why do you have a bag of groceries?”
Sheldon scoffs at her naiveté and walks past her, into the kitchen. “I’ll need to see what utensils I have to work with,” he says. “I assume you have the basics? Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were making everything in the microwave.”
“You know how to cook?” she says. Sheldon shrugs.
“My mother taught me the basics,” he says, “And I researched online. I doubt it will be difficult.”
Penny doesn’t kick him out, and Sheldon doesn’t burn down her apartment, but it’s a close call on both counts.
“Your professor didn’t like it?” Leonard asks as Penny flies into the room.
“Oh, no, no he said it was great,” she says, advancing on the boys. Raj and Howard spare terrified glances around the room, trying to figure out where to run. Leonard winces. Sheldon takes another bite of food. “Fantastic, even,” she continues. “His exact words? ‘Fantastic, but it misses the feel of the play.’”
“But…if it’s fantastic?” Howard says, his voice dropping lower and lower as Penny looks at him.
“He thought I missed the feel of the play, Howard!” she says.
“Did you explain why you thought the use of all wood furniture added to the main characters resolve?” Sheldon asks, before taking another bite of food. Most of the fight seems to have gone out of Penny as she perches on Leonard’s armrest. Leonard valiantly doesn’t run away. Raj scoots closer to Howard.
“I tried to,” she says. “He said if a set needed to be explained, it wasn’t finished. That the set should help tell the story, not add more complexity to it.”
Sheldon finishes chewing his bite and wipes his mouth. “Is he right?”
Penny lets out a huge, labored sigh. “Sheldon,” she says.
Sheldon stays silent, waiting.
“Maybe,” she says. She’s glaring as she stands up, and pauses by the door to look back. “But only maybe!”
After she’s gone, the other three turn to look at Sheldon. It takes him a minute to notice their stares. “What?” he asks.
“What was that?” Leonard prompts. Sheldon shrugs.
“Penny appears to be having some problems with her class,” he says, before taking another bite.
Sheldon makes dinner in Penny’s apartment. Penny’d chip in, but truth be told she had a long day and it’s simply not worth the aggravation of pissing off Sheldon and his special cooking rituals.
Instead, she sits at the kitchen table and starts sketching out costumes for one of her classes. Sheldon, naturally, leans over her shoulder and delivers a running commentary. She mostly tunes him out, except when she has to explain something, or he actually makes a good point, or he nearly spills sauce all over her notes.
He talks work while they eat, and she tries to follow as best as she can. The best thing about theater, she’s pretty sure, is that she gets to be condescending and pretentious to him, too.
For a bit, Penny paints her nails black, and starts wearing all black clothes that hang loose on her and hide her frame. Sheldon starts actively staying in his room when she comes, and Raj avoids all eye contact with her. Even Leonard seems skittish. Howard, naturally, reverts to levels of creepiness not seen in years.
The phase only lasts about two weeks, and they’re all quite grateful when Penny comes in with a pink camisole and cut offs. She never tells anyone about the black hair dye tucked underneath her sink that she’d almost used.
Penny’s discovering that “finding herself” isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
Plus, it’s kind of hard.
“I’m glad you’re doing set design, now,” Leonard says one afternoon. Penny frowns around the handful of popcorn.
“So you don’t have to hear me fail at acting?” she says, overly defensive. Leonard sighs.
“That’s not what I said. And you know I always tried to support you. I just mean…” Leonard pauses, frowning as if perplexed. “You seem happier, now,” he says at last.
“I…I am,” she says. She shrugs, a little amused at herself. “I like being good at something,” she says.
Leonard nods. “It’s good you stayed with drama,” he says. “I’m glad you didn’t listen to me.”
Penny leans back into the couch. “Yeah…” she says. “Yeah, I guess it’s good I didn’t listen to me, either.”
Penny runs into Sheldon going up the stairs. Her notebooks are spilling out of her messenger bag, and she’s in a rush, but she stops as soon as she sees him. “Sheldon!”
“Penny?” Sheldon says, wary.
“You-you did this!” Penny says, gesturing widely in the contained space of the hallway. Sheldon takes a small step back.
“Penny, I’m not sure what you’re-”
“This-this big thing, with the school, and the set designs, and-”
“Penny,” he says, his voice pitched a little lower, as if to calm a savage beast. She’s torn between crying and laughing.
“I’m good at this,” she says. “I mean, I’m really good at this, and it’s not just people saying I am. I am.”
“Penny, that’s good,” he says.
She shakes her head. “I’m not good at acting, am I?”
He shifts from one foot to the other. “I’m not qualified to-”
“You knew I wasn’t good at acting, but you talked me into these classes, anyway, when I was going to give up acting and theater and everything for good, and-and I just-”
“I didn’t know you’d be any good at set design, Penny,” he says, voice sharp.
She shakes her head. “Thanks,” she says. She grabs him and pulls him into a hug.
He’s stiff at first, arms at his sides awkwardly as he looks down at the top of her head, but when she heaves in a deep breath and then slowly exhales it, relaxing against him as if some weight has finally been released from her shoulders, he unbends. He frees his arms and folds himself down to encompass her, his fingers tightening against her back.
“You’re welcome, Penny,” he says, his breath ruffling her hair, and she smiles into his shoulder. She’s getting better at hearing what he doesn’t say.
Sheldon makes her favorite dish the night of her first dress rehearsal.
The play’s at the community college, and she’d worked hand in hand with her professor, but the set is all hers. Her baby, she thinks, and then smiles into her glass of wine at how corny she is.
Sheldon glances at the food, and then at her. “Good?” he asks.
She smiles at him. “Very,” she says.
Finis
.
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, some language.
Word Count: 4400
Disclaimer: BBT isn't mine, etc.
Summary: Prompt was: Penny decides to give up on acting for a while, Sheldon tries to be supportive (and mostly fails, naturally): platonic or shippy
AN: Written for Paradox's 2011 Saturnalia, for ishie.
Originally posted here, posting here for archival reasons mostly.
Do You Know (no no no)
It’s a Friday when Penny makes up her mind. It’s not just that Friday, of course-it’s been long days and crap pay and customers who are too stupid to exist and it’s more than that, too, so much more than all of it, and she knows this isn’t what she wanted, and she knows this isn’t where she wants to be. But still. She’s dealing.
But it’s a Friday when Penny comes home, soup on her uniform from the bratty kid with bad parents at table seven, feet sore from having to stay an extra two hours because Katie called in “sick” when everyone knew she was just in bed with her boyfriend getting high. She put the last ten dollars she had in her car for gas on the way home after her card declined, again, and she can’t handle the prospect of going rounds with the card company, she can’t handle the prospect of anything at all, except when she strips in the middle of her living room, throwing her uniform on the floor (screw the stain) and grabs for any comfortable clothes while flipping the television on-
Local news with the local fricking commercial that she auditioned for three months ago. And the girl chatting away, grinning pathetically at the television screen-what the hell does she have that Penny doesn’t? Penny knows herself-she can rack up her good points and bad points, and she’s a pretty dependable judge of character, and the girl might be pretty but she’s not prettier than Penny herself. She might be bubbly but Penny can fake bubbly. She’s-
Penny considers the bottle of wine in her fridge, and then the bottle of tequila in her cabinet, but in the end she manages half a bite of chocolate before her tears make it impossible for her to eat. She crawls under her covers, but the stress keeps her up, the red numbers on her digital clock circling from three to four as she wills everything away.
She’s got Saturday off, so when she wakes up at ten with a pounding headache she doesn’t have to call in sick. She wants-she wants to take her car and drive and never look back, but she can’t even afford a full tank of gas, and she’s got nowhere to run. Instead, she stays in bed.
Around eleven she crawls out of bed and finds her way to her couch. On the floor, kicked underneath the table, she finds a notebook, and tucked underneath a couch cushion she finds a pen.
Right, she thinks. Need to fix this.
Penny likes lists. She’s always liked lists. In high school, when she was supposed to be paying attention to Mr. Daniels droning on about photosynthesis, she was sketching out plans. They changed each time she wrote them, and she never kept to them all that well, but still.
She pulls a blanket over her and scans her room, before idly jotting down
1.laundry
2. dishes
3. call credit card bastards
4.
She pauses, pen tapping on her lips, and then tears the page off with a frown. She throws it somewhere behind her, not paying too much attention to the mess. Sheldon would have a heart attack, she muses lightly.
The problem with the list is that she doesn’t have an end goal like she used to. In high school, her lists would be
1. move to California
2. get auditions
3. get an apartment
4. get breakthrough role
5. graciously visit home to rub it in bitchqueen Sally’s face
6. hook up with a hottie in my ~limo~
7. win an award
8. get a part across from Clooney or Pitt…or Damon, maybe. Or Marky Mark
9. buy a couple of houses
…
(and that’s usually when she’d have to hide the paper because Mr. Daniels was glaring at her, waiting for her to answer some question)
The point is, though, that she does plans, and lists, and she’s always known she was going to be a famous actress someday, but now…well. Sometimes it’s just hard to keep hoping when everything just seems so utterly shit.
She drops the notebook and pen back on the floor and then rummages around for a sweatshirt before grabbing orange juice out of the fridge. Most days she’d have coffee, but right now the thought of it makes her stomach churn. She hunts through the “random crap” drawer in the kitchen until she finds a bottle of Advil, and swallows back two. She puts away the dry dishes that’ve been hanging out on the counter for the last two days.
Finally, juice still in hand, she collapses back on the couch. She keeps the notebook in her lap, her pen tapping relentlessly against her thigh, staring blankly at the wall. After a long pause, she uncaps the pen one-handed and then writes at the top, in firm block letters:
Goals
She frowns, scratching the back of her neck distractedly, and then, before she can over think it more than she already has, she writes
1. check all upcoming auditions
She stares at it, and then crosses it out, angry at herself, angry at the way she’s wasting her life, angry at everyone who ever told her how stupid it was to try to be something she’s not.
1. get a better job
she writes instead. Her throat is tight as she stares at the words, and she tries to ignore the sudden weight behind her eyes.
2. stop expecting things to happen on their own
she writes next, and then before she can linger too long over that, before she has to face what she wrote, she continues, faster now:
3. look into taking community college classes
4. stop buying food out when I can’t afford it
5. stop pretending
6. start cleaning my room
7. take a break from men
8. grow the fuck up
When she’s done, her heart is tight in her chest and her lungs are having a hard time finding air. She jerks herself to her feet, the notepad falling to the ground, and then shoves on shorts and a sports bra and a tank top and socks and sneakers and grabs her keys and hits the hallway already at a jog.
There’s no one out there, and once she’s outside, the feel of the sidewalk under her shoes, she runs and runs and runs until she’s bent over gasping for breath, sweat clinging to her back, hair damp around her face.
Okay, she thinks. Okay.
When she gets back to her apartment, she jumps in the shower and keeps the water cold, feeling it soak down beneath her skin. In the living room she starts grabbing the random clothes and pulling them into a pile in her bedroom.
When she looks underneath the kitchen cabinet, she’s only a little left of that cheap, multipurpose cleaner she bought ages ago, so she walks across the hall rather determinedly. When Sheldon hears her request, and gets a good look at her in her cleaning clothes, hair tied back with a bandana, she just can make out his soft Thank goodness.
He hands her three different cleaners, five sponges, and then, holding a bucket of other cleaning things he follows her back to her apartment, and before she can quite manage to get a word in through his lecture on cleanliness, they’re doing what’s evidently going to be the deepest deep clean the apartment’s ever met. Which, hell, considering that’s what she’s trying to do with her life, she just kind of goes with it.
When he grabs the notebook off the floor and glances at her, though, she jumps up and grabs for it.
“Penny?” is all he says, quietly prompting, and she shrugs.
“Just trying to make some improvements,” she says, trying to pass it off as nothing. Which it’s not, really, it’s not anything to anyone but her, and if she hadn’t just tried to grab the notebook away like a psycho he probably wouldn’t even have thought twice about it, but now he’s still staring at her like she’s some rare alien specimen (which, given it’s Sheldon, is really quite ridiculous).
He frowns a little but hands her the notebook and then demands she help him move the couch so he can clean underneath it. Clean underneath it.
About an hour later, while they’re scrubbing the kitchen floor and she’s struggling against laughing or making inappropriate comments about seeing him down on his knees (which he probably wouldn’t get anyway), Sheldon clears his throat.
“Is everything all right?” he asks. Everything about him is tense, and Penny can’t help but soften at the way he forces the question out.
“I’m fine,” she says. “I’m just…” She trails off with a frown, glancing at the brush in her hand.
Sheldon focuses on a spot on the floor.
“Do you want some ice cream?” he offers at last. “Is this about another romantic failure?”
Penny winces.
“No,” she says. “Look, it’s okay, I know you suck at the friend thing, you don’t need to keep trying.”
Sheldon quiets at that, and the only sound in the apartment is the cleaning products on the floor. If she didn’t know better…
“Sheldon…” Penny says, because there’s a niggling idea in the back of her head but she can’t quite make it out.
“Yes?” he asks, looking up at her wide-eyed, and from the yellow gloves on his hands to the apron around his waist, she has to bite back a smile.
She shakes her head. “Never mind,” she says.
After lunch, when she’s got laundry going downstairs and she’s deterred Sheldon from them having to deep-clean the carpets and clean the outside of the windows (and how he was going to manage that she really doesn’t want to know), they grab their respective laptops and sit on the couch. Leonard’s out with Leslie, so he doesn’t ask why Sheldon also brings a smaller, spare whiteboard over as well.
She’s a little surprised when she realizes she’d spent all day hanging out with Sheldon. And that he’d helped her. And that it hadn’t all been terrible.
“Thanks,” she says, and then, because that doesn’t seem quite enough, because she woke up feeling like her life was falling to pieces, and the list was all her, but the cleaning and even his snarky remarks and backhanded compliments really did help. “Really,” she says, and she smiles, standing as well, “Thank you, Sheldon.”
He hesitantly shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “You’re welcome, Penny,” he says, and then, looking vaguely terrified that she might become emotional, takes off to the other apartment.
Penny works on Sunday, and on Monday morning, and when she gets back to the apartment at six she’s just exhausted. Instead of just climbing onto the couch and vegging out, though, she flips on her computer and starts researching, looking for job openings and community college registration times and fees.
The conversation that Penny expected goes something like this:
She’s in the boys’ apartment, and they’re eating Thai. She says, “Guys, I’ve decided to take a break from acting.”
Raj stares at her wide-eyed.
Howard says, “Aw, man, you’re too hot to give up like that!” in what he probably means to be an endearing manner.
Leonard says, “What are you going to do instead?”
Sheldon takes another bite of food and doesn’t look at her.
“I was thinking of taking some community college classes,” she says.
“Probably for the best,” Leonard says. “It’s good to set realistic goals.”
“Realistic goals?” Penny repeats, voice sharp.
“It’s hard to be an actor,” Howard says, shrugging it away.
Sheldon still hasn’t said anything.
“Good,” she says. “I’m glad you guys approve of my decision.”
She’s up and out the door before they can say anything else. She doesn’t even know why she’s so mad.
“She doesn’t want to talk to anyone,” Leonard says, clearly irritated as he walks back into the apartment. Sheldon raises his eyebrows.
“Did she say she didn’t want to talk to anyone?” he asks. Leonard frowns at him.
“What?”
“Did she says she didn’t want to talk to anyone, or she didn’t want to talk to you?”
“I-does it matter?” Leonard says. Sheldon sighs heavily.
“Leonard,” he says. “From experience, we’ve seen that she is often more likely to be able to talk to me than to you, most likely given your carnal history. As her friend, I am obligated, as much as I might wish I could shirk the duty, to check on her well-being.”
“Really?” Leonard says, clearly taken by surprise. “Did she make you sign a contract?”
Sheldon glares at him. “Come now, Leonard,” he says, “Pettiness doesn’t suit you.” Sheldon stands up, setting his laptop carefully down on the coffee table. “Observe that which you are incapable of doing-helping Penny,” he says.
Sheldon knocks on her apartment. On the third knock, she yanks open the door in order to throw a notebook at his face. “I don’t want to see anyone, Sheldon!”
Leonard, leaning in the doorway, nods sagely. “Ah, yes,” he says, “I see, you’ve shown me well, Master.”
Sheldon glares at him.
The next morning, when Leonard gets up, Sheldon is already wake. His hair is in mild disarray, as if he’d been pulling it, and Leonard warily eyes the mess of the white board.
“Sheldon?” he prompts.
“Mm,” Sheldon says, waving in his general direction in a thoroughly dismissive manner. “Busy.”
“You all right?” Leonard asks, looking closer at the white board. He frowns, seeing a notebook in Sheldon’s hand. “Is that Penny’s?”
“Yes,” Sheldon says. “She gave it to me.”
“She threw it at your head, Sheldon.”
“I’m merely-” Sheldon breaks off, frustrated. “She has a list that doesn’t make sense. Lists help with planning, they help make sense of things, but it’s as if Penny doesn’t even…doesn’t…”
“Doesn’t understand what she wants?” Leonard asks. Sheldon shrugs reluctantly. “Look, as shocking as it is, I get that you’re trying to help her, but I think this is something she has to figure out on her own.”
Sheldon frowns. “Just because you failed in that regard, Leonard,” he says, “Doesn’t mean I will. Anything I work toward, I’m fully capable of realizing.”
“Like driving,” Leonard says, deadpan. “Or, yeah, that, what you’re doing now, trying to blow my brain up, how’s that going?”
Sheldon is far too mature to slam the door to his bedroom after stalking off. Clearly.
The conversation that Penny never saw coming goes something like this:
“Penny,” Sheldon says. “I think you should major in theater.”
Penny’s sitting on her couch, cross-legged, class list up on her computer. Sheldon is standing in the doorway.
“What?” she asks, clearly surprised. Sheldon takes a hesitant step into the room.
“I think you should major in theater,” he repeats. “At the very least, you should consider a minor. If you change your mind after this semester, you’ll have plenty of time to reconsider what direction you’d prefer.”
“Sheldon,” she says. “I’m done with theater. I’m done with acting. I’m not good enough.”
She’s not a crier. She’s never been a crier.
Sheldon proffers chocolate and a box of Kleenex he’d kept behind his back, and takes another step forward.
“Consider it,” he says. “You have a week before registration opens.”
“Sheldon…” she says, but he’s already turned on his heel, chocolate and Kleenex perched on the table, eager to avoid any emotional outbursts on her part.
Five days later, two days before registration, Penny kidnaps Sheldon on the way home from picking him up from work.
“Penny-” he says, voice pitching to previously unheard levels of unhappiness as she turns the wrong way. She ignores him.
They pull up at a park, and Penny gets out and stalks over to the swingset. Sheldon waits in the car for seven point six minutes, and then gets out and follows her.
“Penny, why are we here?” he asks. Penny leans back further into her descent, feeling the air woosh past her, eyes shut. Sheldon watches her as she goes back and forth, back and forth.
He sits down in the swing next to her. “Penny?”
“Did you ever swing as a kid?” Penny asks, eyes still shut against the wind. Sheldon lets his fingers trail along the chain of the swing he’s sitting on.
“I was fascinated by the physics of it,” he says at last. Penny barks out a laugh, eyes flashing open as she looks at him.
“Of course you were,” she says. “You’ve always known what you wanted to do, didn’t you?”
Sheldon shrugs, uneasy with the way the conversation is progressing. “Penny, is this about registration?”
She’s silent for a long moment, focusing on swinging. “I don’t know what to do,” she says. “Why do you think I should major in theater? I thought you, of all people, would want me to be more practical.”
This time, it’s Sheldon who’s quiet.
“Why did you want to be an actress?” he asks at last. Penny lets her legs hang limply, let’s her body slowly start to drag the swing to a stop.
“What does that matter?” she asks. “I’m not going to be an actress,” she says.
Sheldon frowns and rubs a hand along his plaid pants. “I never wanted to do anything other than what I’m doing,” he says.
Penny lets her feet catch in the dirt below. “Well, you’re smart,” she says. “You can do what you love.”
Sheldon doesn’t say anything more.
Penny drinks half a bottle of wine when she gets back to her apartment.
Penny registers for Acting 101, Set Design, Costume & Design, and Tech-all basic requirements for the Theater major.
Three weeks into the semester, Penny goes into the boys apartment full-out snarling.
“Penny?” Leonard prompts carefully.
“He said it was cliché,” she spits.
“Your set design?” Sheldon frowns. Leonard glances at him, confused that Sheldon appears to be clearer on the situation than he is.
“Cliché and derivative,” she says. “That pretentious bastard!” Penny says, pacing in circles around the apartment.
“Well, that’s not a big deal, is it?” Leonard asks. Sheldon starts shaking his head, but Leonard doesn’t understand in time. “I mean, you want to act, so what does it matter if you’re bad at sets?”
Penny turns on him. “Oh,” she says, “Oh, I’m not bad at designing sets,” she says. “That stupid man wouldn’t get talent if it punched him in the face, although, hey, I’m not saying that option’s not on the table.”
“She likes set design,” Sheldon says in a soft undertone to Leonard. Leonard peels himself off the back of the couch, where he’d been momentarily flattened by her anger.
“Yeah, I get that, now,” he says, glaring at Sheldon.
Penny mostly stops eating at the boys’, mostly because she’s broke, and eating out is really stupid when she has no money.
She starts making homemade meals-at first, straight from the box, but after a couple of weeks she starts actually making things where she had to check ingredients and cut up vegetables and make sure she has the right proportions. It’s kind of relaxing, to be honest, although she’s pretty sure she wouldn’t admit that to anyone.
A week or so after she all but disappears from meals, Sheldon shows up an hour before dinnertime with a bag of groceries.
“Eating out isn’t healthy,” he says, “And given I fully intend to live a long and productive life, benefiting the world with my genius, I’ve decided to change my schedule slightly.”
Penny bypasses the heart attack and goes right for the obvious. “Why do you have a bag of groceries?”
Sheldon scoffs at her naiveté and walks past her, into the kitchen. “I’ll need to see what utensils I have to work with,” he says. “I assume you have the basics? Of course, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were making everything in the microwave.”
“You know how to cook?” she says. Sheldon shrugs.
“My mother taught me the basics,” he says, “And I researched online. I doubt it will be difficult.”
Penny doesn’t kick him out, and Sheldon doesn’t burn down her apartment, but it’s a close call on both counts.
“Your professor didn’t like it?” Leonard asks as Penny flies into the room.
“Oh, no, no he said it was great,” she says, advancing on the boys. Raj and Howard spare terrified glances around the room, trying to figure out where to run. Leonard winces. Sheldon takes another bite of food. “Fantastic, even,” she continues. “His exact words? ‘Fantastic, but it misses the feel of the play.’”
“But…if it’s fantastic?” Howard says, his voice dropping lower and lower as Penny looks at him.
“He thought I missed the feel of the play, Howard!” she says.
“Did you explain why you thought the use of all wood furniture added to the main characters resolve?” Sheldon asks, before taking another bite of food. Most of the fight seems to have gone out of Penny as she perches on Leonard’s armrest. Leonard valiantly doesn’t run away. Raj scoots closer to Howard.
“I tried to,” she says. “He said if a set needed to be explained, it wasn’t finished. That the set should help tell the story, not add more complexity to it.”
Sheldon finishes chewing his bite and wipes his mouth. “Is he right?”
Penny lets out a huge, labored sigh. “Sheldon,” she says.
Sheldon stays silent, waiting.
“Maybe,” she says. She’s glaring as she stands up, and pauses by the door to look back. “But only maybe!”
After she’s gone, the other three turn to look at Sheldon. It takes him a minute to notice their stares. “What?” he asks.
“What was that?” Leonard prompts. Sheldon shrugs.
“Penny appears to be having some problems with her class,” he says, before taking another bite.
Sheldon makes dinner in Penny’s apartment. Penny’d chip in, but truth be told she had a long day and it’s simply not worth the aggravation of pissing off Sheldon and his special cooking rituals.
Instead, she sits at the kitchen table and starts sketching out costumes for one of her classes. Sheldon, naturally, leans over her shoulder and delivers a running commentary. She mostly tunes him out, except when she has to explain something, or he actually makes a good point, or he nearly spills sauce all over her notes.
He talks work while they eat, and she tries to follow as best as she can. The best thing about theater, she’s pretty sure, is that she gets to be condescending and pretentious to him, too.
For a bit, Penny paints her nails black, and starts wearing all black clothes that hang loose on her and hide her frame. Sheldon starts actively staying in his room when she comes, and Raj avoids all eye contact with her. Even Leonard seems skittish. Howard, naturally, reverts to levels of creepiness not seen in years.
The phase only lasts about two weeks, and they’re all quite grateful when Penny comes in with a pink camisole and cut offs. She never tells anyone about the black hair dye tucked underneath her sink that she’d almost used.
Penny’s discovering that “finding herself” isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
Plus, it’s kind of hard.
“I’m glad you’re doing set design, now,” Leonard says one afternoon. Penny frowns around the handful of popcorn.
“So you don’t have to hear me fail at acting?” she says, overly defensive. Leonard sighs.
“That’s not what I said. And you know I always tried to support you. I just mean…” Leonard pauses, frowning as if perplexed. “You seem happier, now,” he says at last.
“I…I am,” she says. She shrugs, a little amused at herself. “I like being good at something,” she says.
Leonard nods. “It’s good you stayed with drama,” he says. “I’m glad you didn’t listen to me.”
Penny leans back into the couch. “Yeah…” she says. “Yeah, I guess it’s good I didn’t listen to me, either.”
Penny runs into Sheldon going up the stairs. Her notebooks are spilling out of her messenger bag, and she’s in a rush, but she stops as soon as she sees him. “Sheldon!”
“Penny?” Sheldon says, wary.
“You-you did this!” Penny says, gesturing widely in the contained space of the hallway. Sheldon takes a small step back.
“Penny, I’m not sure what you’re-”
“This-this big thing, with the school, and the set designs, and-”
“Penny,” he says, his voice pitched a little lower, as if to calm a savage beast. She’s torn between crying and laughing.
“I’m good at this,” she says. “I mean, I’m really good at this, and it’s not just people saying I am. I am.”
“Penny, that’s good,” he says.
She shakes her head. “I’m not good at acting, am I?”
He shifts from one foot to the other. “I’m not qualified to-”
“You knew I wasn’t good at acting, but you talked me into these classes, anyway, when I was going to give up acting and theater and everything for good, and-and I just-”
“I didn’t know you’d be any good at set design, Penny,” he says, voice sharp.
She shakes her head. “Thanks,” she says. She grabs him and pulls him into a hug.
He’s stiff at first, arms at his sides awkwardly as he looks down at the top of her head, but when she heaves in a deep breath and then slowly exhales it, relaxing against him as if some weight has finally been released from her shoulders, he unbends. He frees his arms and folds himself down to encompass her, his fingers tightening against her back.
“You’re welcome, Penny,” he says, his breath ruffling her hair, and she smiles into his shoulder. She’s getting better at hearing what he doesn’t say.
Sheldon makes her favorite dish the night of her first dress rehearsal.
The play’s at the community college, and she’d worked hand in hand with her professor, but the set is all hers. Her baby, she thinks, and then smiles into her glass of wine at how corny she is.
Sheldon glances at the food, and then at her. “Good?” he asks.
She smiles at him. “Very,” she says.
Finis
.