Emergency contact (Reprint edition)

For Penny Lee high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she somehow managed to land a boyfriend, he doesn't actually know anything about her.

When Penny heads to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer, it's 79 miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can't wait to leave behind.

Sam's stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs.

He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he's a famous movie director but right this second the $17 in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him.

When Sam and Penny cross paths it's less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness.