Work Text:
Come off it, cousin.
Think of your favorite, famous
so & so never feared what he
couldn’t yet do? Hmpf—think
you’re the first fool with a laptop
to ever arrive at a blank screen
& ask, is this enough?
—Marcus Wicker, “Ars Poetica Battle Rhyme for Really Wannabe Somebodies”
It all started because Schneider is a fucking idiot.
He’d been up to one of his stupid, ridiculous schemes, of course. She’d been insanely drunk from even the second they set foot in the city, and then Schneider had given himself a goddamned third-degree burn, because he really was a complete and total ignoramus of the highest order.
Schneider had been staunchly against taking any pain medication stronger than ibuprofen, even when he was literally screaming at the hospital. The doctors finally had to give him morphine when he started vomiting; Penelope drank more to deal with that.
The next morning they wake up entirely clothed in bed together with a marriage certificate and a wedding ring.
“You cannot tell Mamí about this,” Penelope says.
“I guess I legally changed my name to Alvarez?” Schneider says.
“I will kill you,” Penelope says.
“Spousal abuse! Spousal abuse!” Schneider cries.
Penelope seriously considers killing him with her pinky finger, but generously refrains.
And then they both kind of forget about the fact that they’re legally married. Penelope keeps trying to remember to annul the marriage, but between Alex’s drama and Elena’s drama and Mamí’s drama and being a full-time N.P., she only remembers the marriage when she grabs medication out of her nightstand and spots the stupid velvet ring box where she keeps the ring neither she nor Schneider remembers him buying. When she closes the drawer, she immediately forgets again, too tempted by the lure of sleep to deal with it.
It’s probably an Alvarez family secret-keeping record that nobody finds out until a full five months have passed. (Well, no, there was the garage. But maybe technically yes, now, because Schneider had known about that, and he had changed his name to Alvarez.)
It’s not even because of some dramatic situation Penelope’s managed to end up in—she just falls, and fucks up her bad shoulder, and when they all bring her to the hospital and Nurse Ginger says, “Family only,” Schneider says, “Oh, she’s my wife,” before Mamí can pitch a royal fit and curse Nurse Ginger’s lineage for generations to come.
“What?” Elena screeches.
“What,” Alex says flatly.
“Ay dios!” Mamí exclaims. “Lupita, what is this? What is Schneider talking about?”
“Kind of have a shoulder situation here,” Penelope manages, through gritted teeth. “Can we explain later, por favor? Though, yeah, he can come, we are…” She shudders a little, but finishes, “...married.”
“I need all of the details, right now, immediately!” Elena screeches.
“Shoulder!” Penelope yells. “Still very much injured! Still very much in excruciating pain, you guys!”
As they walk towards the treatment rooms, Lydia stage-whispers, “Does this mean he will pay her hospital bills?”
“Of course I will,” Schneider says. Penelope hates all of them. (She loves all of them.) So. Much.
So after all that they troop back to the Alvarez apartment and Elena bursts. “When did you guys get married? Where did it happen? Why did it happen? Are you two dating now? Does this—”
“Elena,” Penelope snaps. Elena, mercifully, quiets. “It was an accident.”
Lydia raises an eyebrow. “You accidentally got married?”
“Yes,” Penelope says. She blinks to clear her head, still a little out of it from the pain medication. “Remember when Schneider and I went to Reno? I was… um…” She doesn’t really want to tell her kids (or her mother) that she got blackout drunk in a strange city, but she can’t really think of a convincing lie. “There was a lot of alcohol involved,” she says. “And the hospital, when Schneider got that third-degree burn, they put him on morphine. Anyway, when we woke up we were married.” She shrugs. “Take it as a cautionary tale. Don’t drink, kids.”
“Why haven’t you gotten it annulled?” Elena asks.
“During what free time?” Penelope says. Alex snorts. “I keep forgetting, honestly.” She turns, and her shoulder screams at her in protest. “I can answer more questions later, but right now I really want to lie down.”
“Sorry!” Elena says, her face bright red. Penelope hides a smile.
“Go lie down, Lupita,” Mamí says. “I’ll make you sopa de pollo.”
Penelope nods gratefully and retreats to her bedroom. “Well,” she says to herself. “That could’ve gone a lot worse.”
Could’ve gone a lot better, too, her traitor brain says. Penelope ignores it. She falls asleep to the smell of sopa de pollo and the sound of her family’s voices.
She wakes up in the middle of the night, unable to fall asleep again, and after a while staring at the ceiling she grabs a butter container of soup and heads up to Schneider’s apartment. He lets her in wordlessly, taking the proffered soup and heating it up on the stove. Penelope doesn’t think about the weird domesticity of it. They eat dinner together all the time—why should it be different because they’re married?
The pain medication is making her loopy.
Schneider sits down on the couch next to her, handing her a bowl of soup. “Hey,” Penelope says.
“Hey,” Schneider says.
Penelope glares. “Great job at the hospital, Schneider.”
Schneider makes a horrible little squeaking sound and winces. “Sorry.”
Penelope sighs. “It’s okay. I guess it was going to happen sooner or later. Probably better that it was when they’re all feeling sorry for me.”
“Can I offer you this picture of a piglet eating an ice cream cone in this trying time?” Schneider says.
Penelope looks down at his phone, smiling despite herself. Her anger is subsided less by the actual photo than it is by the fact that it’s in an album called “PIX 4 PANICKED PEN,” though Schneider doesn’t need to know that.
“So,” Schneider says, a little hesitantly. “Do you wanna go ahead and get that annulment now?”
“I think it would be a divorce, at this point,” Penelope says. “And yeah, we should. But let’s deal with it later.” She yawns. “Fuck, my shoulder is killing me.”
“Come on,” Schneider says. “I’ll walk you back home.”
They don’t deal with it later.
Penelope is all too happy to ignore the whole marriage thing, to let it be just one of those weird things.
Lydia, however, has no such compunctions.
“Mamí,” Penelope says slowly, “is this a surprise wedding?”
“You have already disappointed me by marrying this man who is not Cubano,” Lydia says, entirely ignoring the way that Schneider seems to curl in on himself, the utterly ridiculous man. “But denying me a wedding? Lupe, that is simply criminal.”
It all feels kind of ridiculous, because it’s not like anything changes. Lydia tries to insist that they go on a honeymoon, eventually becoming so persistent about it that Schneider texts her one afternoon.
SCHNEIDER: do u think lydia will count it as a honeymoon if we take elena 2 go visit colleges
SCHNEIDER: she’s completely incessant i love her like my own 5th stepmom but im tired of hearing about how a real man wd take u to cúba 💃🏖 😣
SCHNEIDER: haha i guess she is my mom legally… wack
SCHNEIDER: getting on my nerves a little bit at this point tho 😂😂😂
PEN 💪🏽👩🏽⚕️ : Worth a shot
SCHNEIDER: obv we wouldn’t actually pound it out LOL yikes
SCHNEIDER: anyway i would pay for everything…...… obv 💸💸✈️
SCHNEIDER: but we could do east coast stuff for a weekend? visit yale & anything else elena’s considers
SCHNEIDER: *considering also has she looked at barnard? womens colleges are like 80% lesbians right?
PEN 💪🏽👩🏽⚕️ : What do you mean, yikes? I’m a catch! Some husband you are 👀🤨
PEN 💪🏽👩🏽⚕️ : And I think so on the lesbian thing
PEN 💪🏽👩🏽⚕️ : This is actually really thoughtful of you. Thanks.
Apparently they’ve both given up on the whole “divorce” thing. Whatever. Penelope has actual problems.
And it’s all well and good until Penelope meets Ramón.
He’s huge, probably 6’5”, and muscular, like a sexy oak tree, and he’s Cuban, and he’s a podiatrist, which means amazing foot massages. But no matter how obviously attracted to her he is (which is a lot, Penelope knows what’s up) and how blatantly she flirts with him, he always looks uncomfortable and turns away. Finally, she confronts him, because she needs to get laid bad. And she really does like him, as a person. And she needs to get laid.
“So what’s up,” Penelope says, “with all this flirting going nowhere, Ramón? Are you not interested?”
Ramón blinks at her, and says, “You’re married, Penelope.”
Penelope blinks back, then looks at her hand and laughs. “Ha! Schneider?” She laughs again. “Ha!”
Ramón, who has no idea who Schneider is, looks completely bewildered. “Do you normally care so little about what your husband thinks?”
“No, it’s not—” Penelope laughs again, then collects herself. “So, okay, technically I am married? Like, legally I am. But it’s not—we’re not together, like, at all. My mom just guilt trips me all the time if I don’t wear the ring. Cuban mothers, you know.”
Ramón has moved on from looking confused to looking suspicious. “I can’t tell if I believe you.”
“I got this,” Penelope says, and whips out her phone.
Schneider picks up during the first ring. Penelope puts him on speakerphone. “Hey, Pen!” he yells, his I’m on my stationary bike yell. “What’s up, girl?”
“Remember that guy I told you about at work?” Penelope asks.
“The sexy oak tree?” Schneider calls back. Ramón raises his eyebrows at Penelope, who resolutely refuses to be embarrassed in response.
“And you know how Mamí’s always bugging me about wearing that ridiculous ring you got me?”
“To be fair, I don’t remember buying it either,” Schneider says. “So it’s entirely possible that you picked it out.”
“I’m not the one with a didgeridoo in my apartment,” Penelope says. “I think that it’s pretty safe to say which one of us has terrible taste in every—Not the point!”
“What is the point?” asks Schneider, almost rhetorically.
“The point is that Ramón—”
“Who?”
“—the point is that the sexy oak tree guy thinks I’m trying to cheat on you. Can you please tell him we’re not together?”
“Oh, my precious baby bird, how could you!” Schneider howls dramatically. “Oh, my sweet dewdrop, I can’t believe you would tarnish our eternal love in so coquettish a fashion!”
“Okay, one,” Penelope says. “If you ever call me a baby bird again, I’m melting Wax Vanilla Ice. Two, if you ever call me ‘dewdrop’ again, I’m melting Wax Ice Cube. And three, if you ever call me a coquette again, I’m melting Wax Ice T.”
“But Ice T is the best one!” Schneider yells.
“Speak carefully, then,” Penelope replies, and grins despite herself.
“Fine,” Schneider says through an exaggerated sigh. “Yes, Muscle Boy, it’s true. Penelope and I are in an entirely loveless marriage.”
Ramón looks concerned. “I don’t get it.”
Schneider sighs again, but now he sounds annoyed. “Look, dude,” he says. “Me and Penelope are technically married due to an unfortunate confluence of morphine, alcohol, Reno, Lydia’s pushiness, and our combined lack of effort to get divorced, but I really, really don’t give a fuck who she fucks. Okay?”
“Okay,” Ramón says.
“Bye, Schneider,” Penelope says.
“Farewell, sugarplum,” Schneider says, and hangs up before she can figure out what property of his she’s going to destroy.
“Asshole,” Penelope mutters.
“You called me a sexy tree?” Ramón repeats.
“Well,” Penelope says, and steps forward. “I’ve always been a great climber.”
Schneider goes all out for Elena’s graduation; he hires a band, and a magician, and invites every Cuban in the state of California. He’s dragging her around the school grounds when a mom asks, “How long have you been together?”
Penelope laughs. “We’re not together.”
“Come on over here, honey buns!” Schneider yells. “We need some family portraits! I didn’t hire a professional photographer to leave my wife out of Elena’s graduation photos!”
The mom raises her eyebrows at Penelope.
Penelope sighs. “We’ve been married for about a year,” she says, startled that it’s true. “But we’re not together.”
Schneider goes all out for their one-year anniversary, in the most spectacularly horrible fashion possible. He gets Penelope gaudy golden flowers and a crude homemade snow globe of Reno and a (beautiful, not that she’ll admit it) set of stationary and a (wonderful, not that she’ll admit it) clock with a family portrait inside it.
Penelope laughs at him, but it’s weirdly moving, in its way.
All four of them go with Elena to move into the dorms at Reed.
It’s weird, Elena being gone.
Not that Elena isn’t still very present—she’s taken Penelope’s orders to call home daily to heart, and then some.
She calls at one point to complain about all the rich trust fund brats she’s going to school with, and Penelope says, “I hear you, honey, but you remember that Schneider is paying for your college, right?”
“UGH!” Elena yells, and hangs up on her. It’s almost like Elena never left.
But she did, and it’s clear, and it’s weird.
Her nest is empty, and she fucking hates it; when she tells Elena as much, she says, “Go be someone else’s mom, then. God knows there are enough displaced queer teens in LA to fill an entire hotel.”
The first kid to take Penelope up on her offer is a slight Black boy with huge eyes who introduces himself as “Jess.”
Elena calls at six o’clock, like clockwork, and Penelope sits down on the couch to talk to her while Jess and Alex are at the table doing their homework. “And how’s your Syd-nificant other?” Penelope asks.
Elena rambles for a while about homework and drama and trust fund brats and Syd. “Well, tell them I said ‘hi’,” Penelope says when the stream of words comes to a stop. “Love you, kiddo.”
“Love you too, Mom.”
Later that night, Jess knocks on Penelope’s bedroom door. “Come on in,” Penelope calls.
Jess sits at the corner of her bed, an anxious look on his face. “Ms. Alvarez?” he says quietly.
Penelope sighs. “I’ve told you to call me Penelope,” she says, though not harshly.
“Yeah,” Jess says. “Um, earlier I heard you talking to Elena. I wasn’t eavesdropping!” he says quickly. “But, um, I heard you call someone, um… ‘them.’”
“Yeah, that’s Elena’s Syd—significant other. They’re nonbinary.”
Jess gets a weird look in his eye. “That’s… that’s okay with you?”
Penelope tilts her head. “Of course,” she says. “Or, I can see to you it might not be ‘of course,’ but it is. No hate in this household, you know? No transphobia is part of that.”
Jess looks down, then stands up abruptly. “Ms. Alvarez—Penelope—when you asked why my parents—I lied to you.”
Penelope raises an eyebrow, tamping down on the urge to get upset. “About?”
Jess wrings his hands. “I—I’m—the reason my parents kicked me out was—”
Penelope takes pity as sudden insight comes to her. “You’re not a boy,” she says. “Are you?”
Jess looks away. “No. I’m not. I’m—I’m a girl.” She looks up, her eyes glistening. “My name is Jessica.”
Penelope smiles. “That’s beautiful,” she says. She stands. “Come here.”
As she wraps Jessica up in a hug, Jessica starts weeping.
So when Elena comes back home for Thanksgiving, her room is very much taken.
“Take my room,” Penelope insists. “I’ll just stay with Schneider.”
“I’m sleeping on your couch,” Penelope announces.
“Um, no, no you’re not,” Schneider says.
“Excuse me?”
“You have a bad back, Pen. You take the bed.”
“You have a bad leg!” Penelope glares at him, then glares and crosses her arms. “I’m not kicking you out of your own bed.”
Schneider appraises her, then nods. “Well, I’m not letting you sleep on a couch,” he says. “I guess we’ll have to share it. We’re married, after all. I think we can handle sleeping in the same bed.”
Penelope shrugs. “Okay, then. Shouldn’t you have, like, five beds in here, rich guy?”
“I used to have three,” Schneider says. “But they were both waterbeds. Didn’t combine well with my attempt to learn fencing.”
“Please tell me your bed isn’t a waterbed,” Penelope groans. Then she says, “Holy shit.”
The bed’s enormous, California King, whatever. “Yeah, I think we could conceivably sleep on this bed together and end up in different states the next day.”
Schneider laughs. “Okay, well,” he says. “I was going to practice my underwater basket weaving in the jacuzzi for an hour, but somehow I doubt that sounds exciting to you. Movie?”
“Sure,” Penelope says. She grins. “But only if I get to pick.”
It seems like it should be weird, leaning on Schneider’s shoulder as Kindergarten Cop plays, but it isn’t. When the credits roll, Penelope says, “Do you want to get divorced?”
Schneider shrugs, jostling her head a little. “Do you?”
Penelope shrugs back. “I dunno,” she says. “I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah,” Schneider says, sounding pensive. Odd look on him. “We can, if you want to.”
Penelope doesn’t quite laugh. “It just feels so… silly, I guess, that we’re still married, and we don’t love each other.”
“I love you, Pen,” Schneider says thickly.
“I know,” Penelope says. “And I love you, too. But we’re not in love with each other, you know?”
“Yeah,” Schneider says again.
“You’re not, right?” Penelope says, suddenly feeling panicky.
Schneider laughs. “No, of course not.” He pokes her leg. “Big ego you’ve got there, huh?”
“Oh, shut up.” Penelope grins. “Weirdo.”
“Paranoid,” Schneider says. “You got work tomorrow?”
“No.”
They don’t end up wrapped around each other; it has to be one of the worst nights of sleep Penelope has ever gotten in her entire life. She makes Elena take Schneider’s couch after that.
Penelope meets Eric at her and Ramona’s gay panic bar, though it’d started being just a regular hangout spot around the same time that Penelope had taken in Jessica. He’s bisexual, which is interesting in the abstract, but doesn’t make a ton of difference in the day-to-day practicalities of dating a new person.
She doesn’t bring him home until after the tenth date.
“So this is your new affair,” Lydia says, looking Eric over with appraising eyes. “Hm. Where are all his muscles?”
Eric blinks. “In my skin, where they belong, I hope.”
Lydia gives him a hard look, and then smiles and says, “At least he’s funny, Lupita.” She turns her hard look to Penelope. “Though I still do not think a married woman should be dating.”
Eric doesn’t blink this time, because he and Penelope have already had this conversation. On the fourth date, once Penelope had been reasonably sure he wasn’t a serial killer, she’d said, “So I’m trying this new thing where I’m honest with the people I date.”
Eric had smiled. “Sounds exciting. I’m in. Trade you?”
Penelope really liked this guy. “Okay. I have clinical anxiety and depression. I’m on antidepressants.”
Eric nodded. “Okay,” he said. “I’m bipolar. I’m on antipsychotics.”
Penelope smiled. “My mom is definitely going to hate you.”
A laugh. “I haven’t talked to my father since I was fifteen.”
“I was in the Army. I have a lot of trauma from that.”
“Most of my trauma is sexuality-related.”
“I’m married,” Penelope said, and looked away.
“Was that the big one, then?” Eric asked, and Penelope nodded. “Are you poly?”
“Poly?” Penelope repeated, and looked back up. “Polywhat?”
Eric smiled. “Polyamorous,” he said. “And I’m guessing you’re not, if you don’t know what it is. Are you cheating on your husband or wife, then? Or is it an open marriage?”
“Husband,” Penelope said. “I’m straight. And… kind of the last one, but not really.” He raises an eyebrow, and she says, “We accidentally got married, and we’ve never—the legal marriage has been pretty useful. He’s extremely rich, so—but he’s a good person too.”
“That sounds like a queerplatonic relationship,” he told her. She kind of wanted to remarry him after that.
Alex decides to start with community college. He doesn’t want to move away from home, yet, especially with Lydia’s health. Penelope knows that’s at least part of the reason that Elena chose Reed College over Harvard, too, along with her uncle being a train ride away in Seattle, and the fact that it’s the single queerest place Penelope has ever been. Penelope finds herself inordinately proud of her kids. She’s always proud of them, of course, but it’s an entirely different feeling that this brings to her. They’re brilliant, and that’s incredible, but they’re also extraordinarily kind and caring children. As much as Penelope talks up achievement, and believes in being the best person one can be, that includes more than just test scores and accolades. Her kids understand that family matters more than all of that, and it’s kind of beautiful.
Alex and Lydia are both out a lot, now, because of course now that Alex is in college he’s somehow managed to find a group of kids who adore Lydia as much as they like him. The one time Penelope had joined them, she’d felt out of place, stranded, unable to entirely integrate the way Mamí so easily has. Even when they come over to the house, it’s all in-jokes and references Penelope can’t parse.
So even though her nest isn’t empty yet, Penelope still finds herself oddly restless. It’s disorienting to come home and find the apartment empty, as though her family had always just been ghosts.
She starts spending a lot of time alone with Schneider, or over at Eric’s. Neither of them seems to mind.
“Can I give you some free advice?” Eric says. “Free information, really.”
“Of course,” Penelope says.
Eric gives her a sideways look. “I think you’re in love with Schneider.”
Penelope blinks, and then laughs. “What?”
“I understand that your relationship with him is platonic,” he says. “But I—whenever you plan for the future, it’s with him. I’m not sure—I think you’re attracted to him, but even if you aren’t, it’s—there’s definitely something romantic there. I really love you, Penelope, but I think—maybe I need to go find someone who wants a future with me.”
She weeps for about a month after that; she tells everyone they broke up because he got a job offer in Arizona. Which is true, though she’d thought he was going to turn it down.
It’s then, of course, that she finds the video.
Penelope’s on an organizational kick lately, which has also included her email. The extra thirty megabytes are in her drafts. When she opens up the video, curious, she moves pretty quickly onto mortified.
When she recovers enough to breathe, Penelope goes to Schneider’s apartment. “Hey, Pen,” he says.
“Hey,” Penelope says. “So. Uh. I found this video.”
They watch it together. Schneider’s eyes grow wider and wider the longer it goes on.
“Hey, Pen!” Schneider’s voice shouts. “I think my vows are going to make an epic YouTube video!”
“I hate you so much it’s disgusting,” Penelope says, and kisses him grossly.
“Yeah, I love you too,” he says. “You’re gonna hate me for this tomorrow, but now there’s no way you can stop me from paying for Elena’s college.”
The pastor rolls his eyes and leads them through the vows, and then they kiss again, and it ends.
“What do we do now?” Schneider asks quietly.
Penelope looks down at her hands. “I don’t know.”
“Are we in love with each other?” Schneider asks, sounding a little horrified.
Penelope laughs and leans into his shoulder. “I have no idea.”