Penny Dreadful, page 1
ALSO BY LAUREL SNYDER
Any Which Wall
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains
Inside the Slidy Diner (picture book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2010 by Laurel Snyder
Illustrations copyright © 2010 by Abigail Halpin
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
A line from “Dream Song 14” from The Dream Songs by John Berryman, copyright © 1969 by John Berryman, renewed 1997 by Kate Donahue Berryman (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, 1969), appears on this page.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Snyder, Laurel.
Penny Dreadful / Laurel Snyder. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: When her father suddenly quits his job, the almost-ten-year-old, friendless Penny and her neglectful parents leave their privileged life in the city for a ramshackle property in Thrush Junction, Tennessee, where their tenants have never paid rent and the town’s shops include Praise God the Lord Hot Dog Shack and Fugate’s Feed Shop and Bridal Store.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89346-9
[1. Country life—Tennessee—Fiction. 2. Family life—Tennessee—Fiction. 3. Resourcefulness—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S6851764Pe 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009032104
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
For Mose and Lewis—my everything change
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by this Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
BOOK ONE: HEAVY BORED Chapter 1. Ever to Confess You’re Bored
Chapter 2. The Everything Change
Chapter 3. Penelope Opens the Door
Chapter 4. A Little Big News
BOOK TWO: CONSIDERABLY AWAY Chapter 5. Out of the Shadows of the Clouds
Chapter 6. Welcome to Thrush Junction
Chapter 7. Settling and Unsettling
Chapter 8. Finding a Friend
BOOK THREE: TRANQUIL HILLS Chapter 9. Messy Grown-up Stuff
Chapter 10. Better Sorry Than Safe
Chapter 11. Breaking the Rules
Chapter 12. Like Regular Life
BOOK FOUR: PLIGHTS AND GRIPES Chapter 13. More Country Cooking
Chapter 14. What Work Is
Chapter 15. Twent, Not Twent
Chapter 16. In Down-Betty’s Garden
BOOK FIVE: INNER RESOURCES Chapter 17. Turning the Knob
Chapter 18. Dark in the Deep
Chapter 19. A Way Out
Chapter 20. The End of the Beginning
Acknowledgments
About the Author and the Illustrator
BOOK ONE
HEAVY BORED
EVER TO CONFESS YOU’RE BORED
Penelope Grey knew she was lucky. She lived in a big stone mansion in the greatest city on earth, with a canopy over her bed, wonderful books to read, and lots of toys to play with. Her parents were delightful people. Her father was funny and her mother was sweet, and they both loved Penelope very much—of this she was certain. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to actually see her parents all that often, since her father tended to be busy with his important job at the top of a very tall building, and her mother had any number of social obligations and deserving charities that kept her tied up most days.
Still, Penelope knew she was lucky. She had a chef to prepare her meals and an extremely capable tutor named Joanna who taught her interesting things each day in the comfort of her very own home. She had occasional supervised outings to the zoo or the park, accompanied by pleasant girls with names like Jane and Olivia. She had a housekeeper, so she never had to pick up her room, and she had no grubby little brothers or sisters. It was all very tidy.
Yes, Penelope knew she had nothing to complain about. She had everything a girl could want. Unfortunately, knowing that she should be happy only made it worse that Penelope was not happy at all.
The truth was that Penelope was bored. Bored in a terrible, empty, ongoing, forever kind of way that made her sigh much more deeply than any ten-year-old girl should ever sigh. She was bored with the delicious meals and the polite playmates. She was bored with her great, echoing house. She was even bored with her name—Penelope Geraldine Grey—which she thought sounded like the name of an old lady with too many diamond rings and not enough hair. She was bored with her hazel eyes and her medium-length brown hair, which was not quite straight and not quite curly, and could not have been more boring. And when she caught herself thinking about all of this, she was bored with herself, which was worst of all.
This sorry state of affairs was only made more awful by the fact that Penelope had read enough books (they were just about the only thing that Penelope did not find boring) to know that bored little girls who live in mansions are usually spoiled. Penelope did not want to be spoiled. Spoiled girls in books were silly and selfish. Still, Penelope could not help it. Whatever she did, wherever she went, she was horribly, hungrily bored.
Penelope thought that perhaps things might improve in a few years, if only she could go away to boarding school. In books, boarding school was always very exciting, full of deep secrets and midnight escapades, and sometimes magic. But even if her parents agreed, that was still far off in the future, and in the meantime she could think of no other real solution to her problem.
One drizzly Saturday afternoon in May, Penelope was sitting on the window seat in the marble foyer at the front of the house. She had just finished reading the very last Anne of Green Gables book, and she was depressed at the thought of what to do next. She watched strangers pass by the front window in the spitting rain with their umbrellas, and she made a game of trying to guess which stranger might look up and smile or nod. So far, at least fifty people had passed, and not a single one had looked up at her from the wet pavement. Penelope was just about to stop playing the game when her father came down the stairs. He plunked himself beside Penelope on the wide window seat.
“You’re looking a little down in the mouth. What’s wrong, sport?” Dirk Grey asked his daughter in his usual jovial way.
“I’m bored, Daddy,” admitted Penelope with a slump and a sigh.
Dirk pondered this for a moment. “Hmm.” Then he cleared his throat, stuck an index finger theatrically into the air, and quoted at the ceiling, “Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources!”
Penelope looked at her father quizzically. “What’s that mean?” she asked.
“It means that when you’re bored, you need to think of something to do,” answered her father. “It means you can’t blame boredom on anyone but yourself. You can’t just wait for things to happen to you. You have to do things. Or anyway, I think that’s what it means. It’s often hard to tell with poetry!”
Then he stood back up and headed off in the direction of the kitchen, leaving Penelope to think sulkily that it hadn’t sounded much like poetry to her.
Even so, she was glad to have some advice to follow, and she took her father’s words to heart. From that day on, she tried to do things every single day. Since she had little experience with doing, and didn’t know where to begin, she turned to her books for help. Each morning she stood in front of her bookshelf with her eyes squeezed tightly shut and ran a finger down the spines of the bindings, stopping whenever the mood struck her. Then she’d pull out that particular book, flip to a random page, and do whatever the people in that book happened to be doing.
In this way, Penelope succeeded in exploring her (dusty) attic, planting some (cucumber) seeds, inventing her own secret language, starting a diary, roller-skating up and down the halls of the Grey mansion, putting on a puppet show (though there was nobody but Josie, the housekeeper, to watch it), and a handful of other fun-sounding things.
One day, inspired by a book called A Little Princess, Penelope asked her mother to invite Jane (or Olivia, if Jane was busy; it didn’t much matter) over to spend the night. She requested that Chef fill the fridge with his special triple-deluxe chocolate cheesecake squares, in expectation of a candlelit midnight feast. But when, around midnight, Penelope tried to rouse Jane with a flashlight to tiptoe downstairs “like poor orphans,” Jane stared silently up at Penelope from her sleeping bag in a way that made Penelope feel instantly bad.
“What’s wrong?” asked Penelope. “What did I say?”
“I was an orphan, Penelope,” said Jane. “In Russia. Before I came to America to live with my parents.” Then, without saying anything else, Jane buried her face in her pillow and went to sleep.
This left Penelope feeling terrible for Jane, and guilty about her blunder, but also bewildered that she’d known Jane for several years and never had any idea she was adopted. How had that happened?
Even with all her doing, Penelope remained bo
The more she mulled the situation over, the more frustrated Penelope felt. In books kids did fun stuff, sure. But also big things happened. People died and were born. Fortunes were lost and found. Magic talismans turned up and houses disappeared in tornadoes, and Penelope could imagine no way to make any of that happen.
Yes, Penelope decided. It is going to take something enormous for me to become unbored. It is going to take an everything change. For that she figured she’d just have to wait.
Then one day after her finger stopped on a book called Magic or Not? Penelope wandered out into the perfectly manicured lawn of her backyard, holding a folded scrap of paper. There was a decorative wishing well of sorts in the middle of the Greys’ lawn, beneath a little red maple tree. The well had been designed by a famous architect, and a picture of it was in a book her mother kept on the coffee table.
Penelope didn’t think the well looked very wishable or magical. It was too fancy and nicely kept. Besides, she wasn’t sure she believed in wishes anyway, but her finger (and the book) had determined what she must do, and so she would do it.
With an unfamiliar flutter in her chest, Penelope unfolded the scrap of paper and read what she’d written one last time.
I wish something interesting would happen when I least expect it, just like in a book.
Penelope refolded her wish carefully and tossed it into the well. Then she leaned over and peered down after it.
The well was only about six feet deep. The cement floor had a small mesh grate set into it, and Penelope fully expected to see her wish sitting on that grate, but funnily enough, Penelope couldn’t see her wish at all anymore. The well appeared to be completely empty.
That’s odd, thought Penelope, leaning over to examine all the shadowed corners of the well’s bottom. But the wish really did seem to have vanished, and after a few minutes Penelope straightened up and went inside, where nothing seemed any different at all.
So Penelope forgot about her wish. Mostly.
THE EVERYTHING CHANGE
About a week later Penelope was sunk deep in a red leather chair in the library of the Grey mansion, quietly reading a book full of unfortunate events, when suddenly she heard the front door slam open in the foyer one room over.
Penelope looked up, dropped her book, and climbed out of her big chair. She ran to a set of open French doors. On the other side of them she found her father looking decidedly wild-eyed, leaning against a wall. He was clutching a cardboard box full of papers.
Dirk Grey dropped his box on the shiny floor of the foyer, where it made a thunderous noise as it hit the marble. “I’ve had it! I did it! I’m done!” he shouted in a ragged voice, which echoed against the polished stone. He didn’t seem to have noticed Penelope.
She started to head toward him, but then, for some reason, she changed her mind. Instead, she ducked behind one of the doors and watched as Dirk ran his hands through his thick hair in a desperate kind of way. He shook his head from side to side so that the hair stuck out all over. It looked funny, but Penelope, hidden behind the smoked glass panel of the French door, did not laugh. She held her breath. There was something in her father’s posture, his strange glazed stare, that held her still and silent. She had no experience with this sort of situation, and no idea what to say. She could almost feel the questions hanging in the air, the maybe, the what if?
What happens now? she wondered. With prickles on the back of her neck, Penelope tried to breathe without making a sound.
Just then Penelope’s mother, Delia, emerged from the kitchen at the back of the house. “Done what, darling?” she called out in a lilting voice as her heels clicked across the marble floor. In a second she had joined her husband, holding a cookbook. Delia Grey didn’t like to cook, but she was very good at planning meals. (Chef took care of the rest.)
When Delia saw the state her husband was in, her cookbook fell to the floor with a thwop. “Darling?” she asked, rushing over. “Are you—all right?”
“I’m better than that!” said Dirk, looking at her with a strange gleam in his eyes. “I’m great! I’m free! I quit my job!” he shouted, though there was no need to yell anymore since Delia was standing right in front of him. Dirk reached out for her hands and danced her around on the slick floor in a manic way, so that her usually perfect hair stood on end too. “Isn’t that wonderful? Hurrah! I’m free! Let’s celebrate. Where’s the champagne? Chef!” Chef didn’t appear.
Penelope watched through the gap in the French doors as Delia extricated herself from the unexpected polka to step back and stare at her husband. She spit out a mouthful of her dark blond hair and whispered in a worried way, “Dirk—you aren’t serious?”
“Serious as a heart attack,” he said with a wide smile. “A heart attack I won’t have to have anymore since I quit my job!”
Penelope listened intently through the doors. This was by far the most interesting thing that had ever happened. Even better than the time all the power went out and they had to light candles in the bathrooms. This, now, might just be her everything change! Penelope remembered her wish and felt chills run down her spine, exactly like in all the books. She stared at her parents as though they were acting out the last scene in a very good movie.
Delia frowned. “What exactly do you mean by quit?”
“What does it sound like I mean?” said Dirk. “I mean that I went to work today like usual, but then I changed my mind. I hate Grey Investments!” He scowled.
“Now. Dirk. Dear. I think you’re overreacting,” said Delia in a cool tone. She planted a calm hand on her husband’s arm. “You don’t hate it. Maybe you find it tedious some days, but you don’t really hate it. You’ll feel differently tomorrow.”
Penelope watched as her father considered this for a second.
“Nope,” he said with certainty. “I hate it. I have for a long time. I just kept my mouth shut until now. I didn’t see any need to concern you, didn’t want to make any waves. But today—today I snapped. I couldn’t keep it bottled up any longer. I hate everything about that place. It’s boring and cold, and—and heartless.”
Heartless! Penelope hung on every word.
“But, Dirk,” said Delia, “even if you don’t exactly love the job, it’s your family’s company. You can’t just walk away from—”
“Family, shmamily!” cried Dirk, exasperated. “If my parents—God rest their souls—are really watching me from heaven above, don’t you think they want me to be happy? They probably understand better than anyone how soul-crushing that place is. Can’t you?”
Soul-crushing! Silently, Penelope cheered for her father. She understood! Penelope didn’t know much about her father’s job, and she didn’t exactly like the idea of her parents fighting, but she did know a thing or two about dull. If her father’s job was as bad as he said it was, Penelope didn’t see why he shouldn’t quit.
Dirk ran his hand through his hair again and continued. “Besides, I was no good at the job anyway.” Dirk looked at his feet sadly as he said this, before gazing up at the vaulted ceiling with a wrinkled forehead. “Sorry, Mum. Sorry, Pop. I didn’t mean to let you down.”
Penelope’s mother seemed to melt. She reached out a hand to smooth her husband’s hair. “Oh, darling, you haven’t let anyone down,” she said. “You’re a wonderful success! You’re president of the company, after all.”
Penelope was glad to see her mother soften, but Dirk didn’t seem to appreciate it. He looked over and flashed his wife a wry smile. “It’s called Grey Investments, Delia, and I’m the only Grey left. I don’t think my natural aptitude has much to do with my distinguished title.”
Delia frowned slightly at this. She planted her fists firmly on her hips. “I was trying to be nice. Are you just determined to feel bad today?”
“No,” said Dirk gruffly. “In fact, I was feeling excited. Until I started talking to you. Humph.”
