Penny licked her lips and took another sip of wine. She drank a lot of wine, and she thought she was beginning to see the effect of that in her mirror, especially in the morning. Puffy eyes, puffy face, double chin. Wine had a lot of calories, she knew that. Like every good American girl she knew what packed the punches in calories. She knew she should eat fruit and celery and lean meats and fish. That was what she used to eat when she first moved to Pasadena, because Pasadena was near Hollywood and of course she was about to become a star. Wasn't that right? She laughed, a bitter and dark laugh, and she could feel the extra calories clinging to her thighs and her chin and her upper arms, she felt them clinging there like barnacles, and she was the whale.
Amy watched her laugh and smiled, and Penny knew Amy had no idea why she was laughing or the bitterness that was seeping its way into her soul. She envied Amy, despite her long plain face and her unremarkable body, she envied the sharp intelligence that she possessed.
Amy was drinking wine, too. She was quite a few glasses behind Penny, because she hadn't started drinking until a year or two ago and her tolerance would never equal Penny's. Penny could drink a bottle of wine herself and only have a headache to pay for it.
It was just her and Amy tonight, just here in her apartment drinking wine and talking. The truth was becoming that the party girls she used to surround herself with held nothing for her anymore. They seemed vapid and shallow. Was that how all her genius friends thought of her? She shook her head, her blond hair shaking around her skull, and she sipped more wine. This was a sugary white dessert wine, probably German. It was going right to her head. She felt things start to wobble.
She liked hanging out with Amy because Amy was so stunned by her, so awestruck, her eyes following her everywhere. Penny would bite her lips and smile, but she knew deep deep down there was little for Amy to envy. Lately she'd seen the newer girls out in the clubs, the ones in their early 20's, their skin smooth like a child's, their eyes large and glassy. They didn't have the cellulite born of late nights and binges on tacos and pizza and fried chicken. They didn't have the bags under their eyes caused from disappointment and the weariness of working as a waitress for years on end.
She poured herself a new glass of wine as Amy shook her head no, no after two glasses. Had she ever had such self control? Her motor control wasn't the best as the wine sloshed into the glass and ran over the side. She walked in an unsteady line back to the couch and perched herself on the top of it, her feet resting next to Amy. She thought about Leonard for a moment, not knowing what was going on with them. Did she love him? She said she did. But he could still infuriate her, acting like a little boy with comic books and games or acting jealous of nothing.
And what about Amy and Sheldon? That was mind blowing. Sheldon had a girlfriend. Of course she was a strange socially awkward scientist, but still, a girlfriend!
"Amy," Penny said, and watched as Amy's eyes turned to her with unhidden adoration.
"Yes?" she said, showing her little teeth as she smiled.
"What do you see in Sheldon?" she said, and gulped back some of her wine, and hoped she wouldn't regret it. How many glasses had she had by this time? Too many to count?
Amy took a moment to consider what it was she saw in him, and she wasn't offended by the question as some people might be, because it was just on the edge of rude. But she hadn't meant it rude, she wanted to know what it was she saw, how she decided to be with Dr. Sheldon Cooper, of all the wackadoodles in the world.
"Okay," Amy started, speaking as she did in her soft monotone, "besides his obvious unparalleled intelligence, there are other things,"
Penny closed her eyes for longer than a heartbeat, and felt the room begin to slightly sway. She used to think, when she was a teenager, that being just drunk enough allowed you to perceive the rotation of the earth, and it made you sick. She opened her eyes and began to pray she hadn't drank too much.
"What other things?" she said to Amy, when it didn't appear that she was going to go on.
"I like his eyes, they're so large and blue, like a baby's eyes, almost. There is this certain way he has of looking down, and you can't really see the color of his eyes when he does that, you can just see his eyelashes, but then he'll look up at you, and it's always startling, how blue his eyes are then, it's like I forget every time how blue they are,"
Penny suddenly remembered, in full detail and almost like a flashback, the first day she met Sheldon and Leonard. Her body was thinner, more toned, her hair a perfect flat sheet of shining platinum. She had been over at their apartment and she saw those crazy white boards of theirs covered in Japanese and hieroglyphics and she knew in that instance just how frighteningly intelligent they were, and she stood by Sheldon's board and said, "Leonard, did you do this?" and Sheldon jumped up and came over to it and said, "No, that's my board," and he had his hand resting lightly on the top of it, his head down and then he looked up at her just like Amy said, his blue eyes startling her. It was in that moment that she could have fallen in love with him, too, if he hadn't turned out to be so...strange. Leonard had been too strange for her then, never mind serious autistic savant strangeness like Sheldon.
She smiled at Amy, and she set her wine glass down on the coffee table. She'd had enough.
"Yeah, I get it. I see what you see in him,"