She was feeling too frantic, too unable to focus, too worried about bills and the rent and her car that was just one blinking "check engine" light away from breaking down. How could she try to act, try to concentrate on acting, with all this other garbage crowding her mind?
The answer was that she simply didn't know. Her day off was being wasted, she could feel the minutes eeking away, she could feel herself doing nothing and becoming nothing. What had she become? An underpaid waitress, that was all she had become.
She was still morning groggy and stumbled over to her kitchenette to make some coffee. In her cabinet where she kept the coffee there was no coffee. In her other cabinets, because she didn't have an iron clad system for storing things, there was no coffee. She was out of coffee. She slammed her hand on the counter top.
It was indicative of everything. She couldn't even function well enough to keep an adequate stock of coffee. How could she function well enough to develop a craft like acting? How could she function well enough to get out of the minimum wage trap of her job? How could she overcome any of this? She couldn't even graduate from community college.
A brief storm of tears overcame her, rocking into her like a hurricane barreling up the eastern seaboard. The violent sobs shook her. No coffee, no career, no success. She was little more than a servant.
She decided to borrow coffee from Leonard and Sheldon because they were her providers, and she knew it. She depended on them for the balance of her rent when she was short, she depended on them for money for her lights and cable so they wouldn't be shut off, she depended on them for food and coffee when she didn't have any. They always had these things. She had to go to them.
What did it matter anyway? They made more money than they spent, and she spent more money than she made. It was a good thing they found each other. Still, she felt like a child and a loser always running to them.
She knocked, not caring that she was dressed in short shorts and a T-shirt and a flimsy pink robe. She leaned her head against the door, entertaining the possibility that they were both out. Who knew where they had went, even though it was Sunday morning. Maybe they were at a Renaissance fair. Maybe they were at some role playing card game tournament. Maybe they were at the comic book store. There was an endless list of places they could be.
"Who is it?" That was Sheldon, and his reply was unemotional and almost stern. She smiled.
"Penny!"
"Come in,"
She opened the door and saw Sheldon standing before that crazy erasable board, strange equations before him that appeared to have him transfixed. She looked at him looking at it, and she envied him. She envied him and Leonard both. She envied their ability to concentrate, to deal with such strange abstractions and to have a sense of the meaning of those things. She envied the very real possibility that they would make a difference in the field of physics and maybe to everything, if the discovery ran deep enough. And what difference was she making?
"Sheldon," she said, and he didn't respond, didn't really appear to have heard her. She felt reluctant to interrupt him, but she wanted coffee and she wanted some advice, some advice on how you concentrate like that, how you feel the certainty that you could make some kind of a difference. Maybe it wasn't for everybody. Maybe making a difference was reserved for the "beautiful minds" of Sheldon and Leonard, and maybe her common place intellect made her commonplace, made her unable to fulfill any sort of dream, made her just good enough to wipe up tables after people and to bring them fried hamburgers and cokes and cheesecakes.
"Sheldon," she said again, louder. He turned toward her, looking frustrated by the interruption.
"Yes, Penny?" he said, and she thought that she couldn't get what she needed from Sheldon. She wasn't sure he was capable of it, of the kind of existential comfort she wanted and needed at this moment. Leonard could do it, but she wouldn't believe him. She knew that Leonard said the things she wanted to hear, so she couldn't believe anything he said. Sheldon, on the other hand, told the truth. He told the painful truth. Maybe that was what she needed. Where were all the nice lies getting her, anyway?
"Can I borrow some coffee?" She was afraid to ask him the real questions, afraid to ask him if he thought she could succeed at anything other than being a glorified maid. She imagined he might come up with some statistics about the number of aspiring actors auditioning for a limited number of roles, and he might come up with a number that represented her chances of getting one of those roles. Or he might site her lack of success so far and that it may predict a lack of success in the future. She just didn't think that the math was on her side.
He nodded at her and went back to staring at the strange equations, and she stared at them over his shoulder. It looked like the writing that was chiseled into the sides of pyramids. It meant nothing to her. It was like the beautiful characters in the Chinese alphabet, stark black lines on a white background. What did he see?
She poured herself a cup of coffee and decided to talk to him anyway. Talking to him was sometimes as indecipherable as his equations. She pushed her hair back with the back of one hand and took a sip from the steaming cup in front of her.
"Sheldon? Are you busy?"
"Yes,"
"Okay, but can I ask you something anyway?"
"I suppose so,"
He wasn't stopping his gazing at that white board of his, and she sipped her coffee and didn't care. She needed something, feeling lost and like a failure and close to giving up. She needed to let someone in so that she could feel something besides this grinding fear, this worry like background static on a poorly tuned radio station.
"Do you think it was stupid for me to come to California?"
"What do you mean?" he said, glancing away from the equations to regard her, his blue eyes calm.
"I mean, coming out here to California to try and be an actress, to try and be...I don't know, something..."
He licked his lips and sat on the couch in his spot, and she stood behind the island in their kitchen, sipping her coffee, trying not to cry.
"California is where a lot of opportunities in acting exist, so the location was perhaps an adequate choice. Do I think it was stupid for you to come here? Do you mean, do I think you'll have a chance of success as an actress? I haven't really seen you act in anything, although I did hear you sing, and in that particular area you seem to be lacking skill and talent. So that alone excludes you from any production that would require your character to sing well, although it does not exclude you from a production in which your character would be required to sing poorly. You are excluded from portraying all character who are male, who are too old or too young, although you may be able to portray an age range, perhaps as young as 15 and as old as 35. Beyond those ages it wouldn't be plausible. Will you be able to procure a role in which the character is a female who does not sing well and who is between the ages of 15 and 35? I just don't have enough data to make any kind of determination,"
She sniffled, feeling somehow better by his analysis. It wasn't emotional like Leonard's would have been. She could just imagine him and what he would say, "Penny, you're so talented, of course you'll be successful," Garbage. Sheldon didn't rule out her success, but sort of qualified it. She wanted to kiss him on the cheek or at least give him a brief hug, but she did neither. She smiled at him and said a soft and cracking, "thank you," and he gave her a puzzled look before he stood up and returned to his whiteboard.