Chapter 5 — Getting to Know Penny
In Martin's experience — both lifetimes of it — there was a universal constant that held regardless of geography or dimension: if a guy accidentally walked in on a girl in the shower, there would be awkwardness. The only variable was how long it lasted.
Sometimes it lasted days. Sometimes it calcified into a piece of shared history that nobody ever quite forgot. And occasionally — rarely — it dissolved in about the same amount of time it took to towel off and find a clean t-shirt.
This, apparently, was one of those times.
"Penny, I owe you a genuine apology. I came home, saw everyone deep in work mode, went straight to my room to change, heard the shower running, assumed it was Raj — he uses our bathroom constantly, the water pressure in his place is apparently unacceptable — and didn't think twice. I'm sorry."
Penny, now changed into a Columbia sweatshirt and leggings that she'd apparently had in her bag, waved a hand with the easy generosity of someone who'd decided not to make it a thing.
"Honestly? Don't even worry about it. I'm very comfortable with myself."
"The mole just above your left hip is very symmetrically placed, by the way."
"Martin Scott."
"—And I will never mention it again."
"Good."
Done. Awkwardness: resolved. Total elapsed time: approximately four minutes.
Rajesh arrived twenty minutes later, slightly out of breath, carrying what he held up like a religious artifact: a VHS tape in a cracked plastic case, labeled in faded marker — Hawking, Caltech Lecture Series, 1983.
The effect on the room was immediate and total.
Sheldon turned from the whiteboard. Leonard stood up from the table. Howard, who'd been about to leave, sat back down. All four of them converged on the tape with the focused reverence of archaeologists handling a Dead Sea Scroll.
"Where did you get this?" Leonard breathed.
"My cousin's roommate's professor," Raj said. "Don't ask follow-up questions."
They unearthed the VCR from the closet behind the board games neither of them played, connected it to the television with the careful deliberateness of a surgical team, and pressed play.
The screen flickered. Then: a lecture hall, circa 1983. A younger Stephen Hawking at a chalkboard — standing, moving, speaking in his own unassisted voice — working through what appeared to be an early version of his work on black hole radiation.
The four of them arranged themselves on the floor in front of the TV without discussion, cross-legged, completely still, like children at a very advanced story time.
Martin settled onto the couch. Penny dropped down next to him, looked at the screen for a moment, then looked at the four physicists, then back at Martin.
"Is this normal?" she whispered.
"For them?" Martin kept his voice low. "This is basically church."
Penny stifled a laugh. On screen, 1983 Hawking was writing an equation that appeared to take up the entire left half of the chalkboard. Sheldon leaned forward approximately three inches, unconsciously.
"I genuinely want to say it's just a TV, people," Martin murmured, "but it feels like the wrong move."
Penny pressed her lips together, shoulders shaking silently.
After a moment, she turned to look at Martin with an expression he couldn't quite read — curious, a little evaluating.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"You're a doctor too, right? Like them?"
"JSD. Doctorate in law, yeah."
Penny glanced between him and the four figures on the floor. "So how are you so... normal?"
Martin considered this. "What's your definition of normal?"
"Like." Penny gestured vaguely at the tableau in front of them — four grown men sitting on a hardwood floor watching a forty-year-old VHS tape with the emotional investment of people watching their team in the Super Bowl. "You know what I mean. You look like a regular person. You talk like a regular person. You don't correct my grammar or explain things to me like I'm a golden retriever."
"Sheldon explained something to you today?"
"He explained why I was sitting in the wrong spot on the couch. For about six minutes."
"Yeah, that tracks." Martin stretched his arms over his head. "The easy answer is that law is a humanities field. History, philosophy, rhetoric, human behavior — that's the raw material. You spend enough time in a courtroom reading juries and you get pretty good at meeting people where they are."
Penny thought about this. "So what you're saying is — stuff you can understand is humanities, and stuff you can't understand is natural science."
Martin looked at her. "That's... a surprisingly efficient summary."
"I'm not as dumb as I look."
"I never thought you were."
She held his gaze for a beat, then looked away, and he had the distinct impression he'd passed some kind of test he hadn't known he was taking.
On screen, Hawking moved to a new section of the chalkboard. Howard made a sound like a man watching a great athlete do something impossible.
"Can I ask you something now?" Martin said.
"Sure."
"You and Sheldon. You've been neighbors for — what, six hours? And you've already had the spot lecture?"
Penny laughed outright this time, not bothering to keep it quiet. Leonard glanced back briefly, then returned to Hawking. "He's intense," she said. "Like, I get that he's a genius. Leonard explained that on the stairs. But does he have, like, a setting below a hundred percent?"
"No," Martin said simply. "He doesn't. But here's the thing about Sheldon — and I say this as someone who's known him since we were kids — he's not actually difficult to get along with. He just has very specific things he cares about, and most people don't bother to learn what they are."
Penny turned to look at him more carefully now.
"He was eight years old when he tried to build a semiconductor transmitter from Radio Shack parts," Martin continued. "He was eleven when he designed a plan to build a small-scale reactor to provide power to our neighborhood. He'd actually sourced some of the materials before my mom called his mom, who called the city, who called someone at the DoE, who sent two very serious men in dark suits to our street." Martin paused. "Sheldon was furious for about a month. Said the government was afraid of innovation."
Penny was staring at him. "That actually happened."
"He was eleven. He was completely serious."
"And he's your friend."
"He's been my neighbor my whole life. There's a difference, though I'm not sure it matters much at this point." Martin looked at Sheldon's silhouette, leaned forward toward the screen, posture rigid with attention. "The thing about people like Sheldon, and Leonard, and Howard and Raj — they're not complicated once you understand what they're actually like. They care intensely about a very specific set of things. If you don't dismiss those things, they're easy. If you do, they're impossible."
Penny was quiet for a moment.
"You're very kind," she said.
Martin looked at her. "We were talking about Sheldon."
"I know. I'm talking about you."
He didn't have a ready response to that, which didn't happen very often. He settled for: "Thank you."
A brief, comfortable silence. On screen, the 1983 lecture moved into a Q&A section. Raj leaned over to Howard and whispered something that made Howard nod slowly with the gravity of a man receiving wisdom.
"Okay, my turn," Martin said. "How'd you end up in New York? You said Nebraska, right?"
Penny pulled one knee up to her chest. "Omaha. And — honestly? Bad breakup. Live-in boyfriend, the whole thing. Came home one day and just thought, I cannot be here anymore. So I packed my car." She said it lightly, the way people talk about things they've processed enough to carry without showing the weight. "I've been trying to get into acting for a couple years. Did a few commercials out in L.A., some extra work. But L.A. is..." She shook her head. "It's a lot."
"New York theater scene is real," Martin said. "Independent film too, though—"
"Though what?"
He chose his words. "Independent film people can be hit or miss. Some of them are genuinely talented. Some of them are using a Canon DSLR and a dream as an excuse to be awful to people. Just trust your instincts, and if anything ever feels wrong — a callback, a meeting, a producer who wants to talk over dinner somewhere that isn't a restaurant — trust that feeling." He paused. "And call me."
Penny looked at him sideways. "You didn't give me your number."
"You're right. I forgot." He took out his phone, handed it to her. "Fix that."
She typed her number in with the focused speed of someone who'd done this many times and handed it back. Her expression, just for a moment before she reassembled it into something more casual, was genuinely touched.
"You're going to be a very confusing neighbor," she said.
"I've been told worse things."
The tape ran for just under an hour. When the screen went to static, the four physicists surfaced from whatever depth they'd been at like divers slowly ascending — blinking, stretching, gradually re-engaging with the physical world around them.
Leonard stood up, rolled his shoulders, and glanced over at the couch. His eyes moved from Penny to Martin, registered their proximity — the easy body language of two people who'd had an actual conversation — and something in his expression went briefly, involuntarily complicated.
He walked over and sat on Martin's other side, and with the unconvincing casualness of a man executing a plan he hadn't fully thought through, put his arm around Martin's shoulders.
"So," he said, a little too broadly. "What were you guys talking about?"
Martin looked at the arm on his shoulder. Looked at Leonard. "The relationship between the Medieval Renaissance and the Inquisition's campaign against folk medicine."
Leonard processed this. "...Huh."
"Also," Martin said, "your arm is on my shoulder."
"Oh!" Leonard pulled it back immediately. "I've been sitting on the floor for an hour. Stretching."
He proceeded to demonstrate this by raising both arms above his head in an action that bore no resemblance to any stretch Martin had ever seen performed by a human being.
Martin looked at Penny. Penny looked at Martin. Her expression said: I told you this would happen.
His expression said: I know. I watched this show. I know exactly what's happening.
Howard and Raj left around ten-thirty. The apartment settled into the particular quiet of late evening — the hum of the city below, the refrigerator, Sheldon already back at the whiteboard with a fresh marker.
Martin stood up. "I'm going to shower. Penny—" he glanced at her with a perfectly straight face — "you're welcome to come watch. I'll try not to scream."
"Get out of here," she said, grinning despite herself.
He was almost at the bathroom when he heard Leonard's voice behind him — slightly elevated in pitch, with the cadence of someone improvising.
"Penny, hey — why don't you just take my room tonight? You'd be way more comfortable, and Martin and I can—"
"Leonard, I really don't want to put you out. If you have a sleeping bag I can just—"
"We don't have a sleeping bag!" The pitch went up another half step. "I mean. We might. Somewhere. But we definitely — it's not — you should just take the bed."
Martin stopped walking. He turned around.
Leonard and Penny were looking at him. Leonard with the expression of a man hoping Martin would either help or disappear. Penny with the expression of a woman politely trapped in a social situation she couldn't extract herself from gracefully.
Martin pointed at Leonard. "You. Sleep in my room."
Leonard blinked. "What?"
"We have a perfectly good queen bed in there. Take the far side. You can even have the extra pillow, I know you like the extra pillow." He looked at Penny. "You take Leonard's room. It's clean, the sheets are fresh, and nobody will bother you." He looked back at Leonard. "And you need to shower before you get in my bed."
Leonard and Penny stared at him with matching expressions of faint horror.
"What?" Martin said.
"You just—" Leonard started.
"You said—" Penny started at the same time, then stopped.
"I said Leonard sleeps in my room," Martin said patiently. "Why does everyone look like I suggested something weird?"
Sheldon, from the whiteboard, without turning around: "For what it's worth, I found the solution perfectly logical."
Nobody found this as reassuring as Sheldon intended.
Martin went to take his shower.
From the hallway, he heard Penny start laughing — the real kind, unguarded, the kind that fills up a room. And then Leonard, reluctantly, unavoidably, started laughing too.
Yeah, Martin thought, under the hot water. This building is going to be something else.
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