Penny Dreadful, page 18
Penny stopped walking and stared. She almost didn’t want to be there. It was too hard to see her friends, knowing that she’d be leaving so soon. She felt jittery about not having seen Luella for days, and nervous about why that was. But the news of the baby was burning inside her, and she couldn’t wait to tell the others. Besides, she told herself, I’m leaving. I can’t go away without saying goodbye.
As she neared the gazebo, she took a deep breath. The air smelled like honeysuckle and citronella, and the tables groaned with food. Penny’s friends were sitting in a circle with paper plates on the lawn. She waved and ran over.
“Hi,” she said to Luella, feeling shy.
Luella was her usual snarky self. “Hey, stranger,” she said. “What are you waiting for? Grab a plate before all the good stuff is gone and you have to eat my mom’s mushroom-tofu scramble.” Luella made an ew face.
Penny laughed and made a face back. This would be just fine. Luella wasn’t mad.
Then Penny headed over to the food tables, where she fixed herself a plateful of shish kebabs, deviled eggs, three-bean salad and twice-baked potatoes. She found a spot on the grass between Luella and Duncan. Jasper had come to the picnic too, and was spending the night with Luella and Alice, who was sitting across from Penny in the small circle, beside Twent.
“You can sleep over too,” said Luella. “Of course. Or we can come up to your place if you want us to.” She looked from Alice to Jasper and added, “Her dad makes the best breakfasts!”
Penny noticed that when she spoke to Alice, Luella looked straight at her and spoke very clearly. So Penny tried to do the same. “Hi, Alice,” she said carefully. “I’ve heard a lot of nice things about you.” Penny blushed and hoped it was dusky enough that nobody could tell.
But Alice just laughed with her mouth full of hamburger and said, “You too, Penny!” Her voice sounded exotic to Penny, almost like she had a foreign accent. Her voice is curvy, Penny thought, soft around the edges. It was a wonderful voice, a friendly voice. Penny laughed back. Someday, maybe, she would ask Alice what Luella had said with her hands that day. But not tonight.
Munching her dinner, Penny watched her mother and father carefully from afar. She wondered whether they were sharing the awfulness with the people at their table—the Gulsons and Willa and a woman who must be Jenny. Then she wondered if they were sharing the wonderfulness with them too. Delia’s hand seemed to be permanently fixed to her midsection, and she did seem to be talking to Willa a lot. Penny wanted to hear the conversation, but not enough to waste a minute of her last night with her friends.
Then Penny forgot all the serious grown-up thoughts, lost them in a gloaming game of hide-and-go-seek and too many slices of watermelon.
I will never forget this night, she thought, not ever. It was a deliciously fun party, and yet—as each bit of fun slipped past her, as each magic moment happened, she knew she was saying goodbye.
Watching Twent the rabbit jump around the clearing, she said, “Goodbye, Twent,” softly.
Watching Duncan taste his first piece of coconut cream pie ever, with a grin on his face and his parents looming over him, she said, “Goodbye, Duncan,” into the night air.
Watching Jasper point out where an owl sat high on a branch above them, she whispered, “Goodbye, Jasper.”
But Penny could not say goodbye to Luella, not even in a secret whispery way. Each time she tried, she had to close her eyes and breathe deeply. She was filled with too much—something. There was too much to say, so there was nothing she could say.
It was a wonderful, difficult, magical night, and it had to end. Just as everyone was sitting around the fire pit staring at the flames, listening to the music of Old Joe’s fiddle and Down-Betty’s guitar, Delia suddenly stood up, cleared her throat, and said, “Excuse me, everyone? Excuse me? Ahem! I have an announcement to make.”
The music stopped. Penny’s heart stood still. Everyone looked up at Delia standing above the fire. Everyone except Penny, who couldn’t bear to watch.
“First of all,” Delia said, “my family and I would like to thank you nice people for making us feel so welcome. Thrush Junction is a special place. We had no idea it would be so special, and we cannot believe our good fortune in finding it. Yet …”
Penny closed her eyes. She felt a flutter in her chest. She opened her eyes, looked at the fire, and tried to focus on the flames so she wouldn’t cry.
Meanwhile, Delia forged ahead ruthlessly, in a strong voice that Penny could not ignore. “Yet I’m afraid I have some very sad news. When my aunt Betty left us the house, she also left us a great pile of debt, debt we cannot hope to …” Delia paused again and seemed to consider her words carefully.
Abbie Gulson stood up, her wild halo of curls glittering in the firelight. “Why don’t you just sit down,” she said in a friendly way. “There’s no need! You don’t have to—”
“I do have to,” said Delia firmly, “so please, let me get this over with. You see—we’re going to lose the house.” She looked around at the circle of faces before her. “The bank will foreclose.”
Down-Betty shouted from a lawn chair, “Delia. Really. This is silly. Stop fretting. You’ll ruin the picnic.”
“No,” said Delia. “You don’t understand. It isn’t just us. I wish it were. But this affects us all. All of you. Because if we lose the house, you’ll likely be turned out into the streets. I’m sorry. It’s not what my aunt intended. But there’s not much I can do.”
“We understand perfectly,” said Willa, walking over to Delia and setting a hand gently on her arm. “It’s you who doesn’t understand. Please, listen to us. Here.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a little piece of paper. “Here you go!”
Penny turned away from the fire now to stare. Whatever was happening, it was nothing she’d expected.
“What?” Delia took the piece of paper and tried to read it in the uneven light. “What is this?”
Then the other tenants—Mr. Weatherall and Old Joe and Down-Betty and Abbie and a man who must have been Alice’s father—pulled small slips of paper from their pockets too, and they passed them around the circle to Delia until she held a small pile of paper.
“They’re checks, of course!” said Willa. “Maybe not as much as we’d like to give you. But a little something—to help as much as each of us can afford each month.”
“But I’m not allowed to charge rent,” explained Delia. “It says so in the deed.”
“You’re not charging us!” said Down-Betty.
“No, we’re giving it,” said Abbie. “Did you really think we’d all stand by and watch a neighbor be thrown out into the street? That’s not how it works in Thrush Junction. Dirk can pay us back in chowchow, just like Down-Betty’s been paying in cucumbers for years. And maybe you can teach Luella some manners!” She shot her daughter a funny, wicked look. “Lord knows I can’t.”
“But how did you know?” asked Dirk, confused.
“Penny told me,” Luella called out over the fire pit. “And I told my mom, and she told the others.” She turned to Penny. “Sorry for being such a snitch, but I’m not much good with keeping quiet. It’s my one flaw.”
Penny looked over at her friend, who stuck out her tongue.
Then Penny flew at Luella. Without thinking, she grabbed her and pushed her to the ground in a gigantic, crazy hug to end all hugs. It was a hug that could not be stopped.
“Thank you!” Penny whispered. “Thank you so much.”
After that Delia and Dirk told everyone they were speechless about two hundred times, and everyone shook hands a lot and said, “Oh, it’s nothing special,” when of course it was incredibly special. Dirk decided to have “one more little drink to celebrate” and Down-Betty said she couldn’t stand to watch him drink alone. Delia and Willa got lost in conversation again, both with their hands on their bellies now.
So Luella and Penny ran off to lie in the grass by themselves and stare at the stars. For a few minutes they were silent, and then Penny rolled over to look at her friend.
“Luella?” asked Penny.
“Yeah, Penny?” said Luella, rolling over too.
“I’m really, really happy we’re staying. Only—”
“Only what?” asked Luella.
“Promise not to laugh?” said Penny.
Luella nodded.
“It’s just—I really thought I was going to find the treasure.”
“I know,” said Luella. “At first I actually wondered if maybe you’d found a map or something and not told me about it.”
Penny sighed. “No, no map. But there were—oh, I don’t know—all these signs. Almost like foreshadowing, kind of. I guess that sounds funny, but it’s how I felt. Like it was fate that we go find that treasure. Like that was supposed to be the end of the story. I was making these wishes that I thought might actually be coming true, and it felt—like it was my adventure, like it was my mission to fix everything.”
Luella pondered this. At last she said, “But it was! You did fix things. You told me, and that was the beginning of things getting fixed, right?”
Penny shook her head. “It isn’t the same. The signs all pointed to the treasure, to the cave. I could feel it.”
“Well,” said Luella slowly, “if we hadn’t gone looking for the treasure, and if you hadn’t thought you had found the treasure, you never would have gotten disappointed and upset enough to tell us the truth, so really, the solution was in the cave, if you think about it the right way.”
Penny tried to think about it that way. It wasn’t very satisfying. “Still,” she said, “it would have been nice to find the treasure. If this were a book, I would have found the treasure.”
Very suddenly, Luella sat up. “Penny,” she said sharply.
“Yes?” replied Penny.
“That,” said Luella, “is the stupidest thing you have ever said.”
“But—”
“Because you don’t live in a book. Nobody does, silly. Things never happen the way they would in a book. There isn’t foreshadowing.” She shook her head.
“But I thought—” said Penny.
Luella kept on. “Problems don’t always get fixed. Lots of the time things are boring and dumb for no good reason. Or even terrible. And you can’t do anything about it. That’s life.”
Penny thought about this for a minute. Then she sighed. “I know,” she said.
She thought about it some more. “Or maybe I don’t,” she said. “But I’m starting to, anyway, I guess.”
There might have been other good things to say about that, but just then a shooting star flew through the inky darkness, causing both girls to gasp.
“Quick,” said Luella, pointing at the sky. “Make a wish.”
But Penny didn’t.
Sprawled in the clearing beneath the big night sky, Penny looked up at the shooting star and decided not to wish.
Instead, she rolled over and buried her face in the grass, breathed deeply, and smelled the dirt beneath her. She reached out her arms and felt the prickling of the grass blades against her bare skin.
Lying like that, quiet and full and tired and home, Penny knew that everything was as it should be; everything was perfect.
Just like she knew that someday soon everything wouldn’t be again.
But that was okay.
The stars weren’t going anywhere.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There’s no way to thank everyone who helped me with Penny Dreadful. I have many wonderful friends. I have a supportive and loving family. I have babysitters, teachers, and colleagues who keep my world in orbit. I have the incredible people at Random House behind me. I wish I could thank all of these people by name, but I can’t. It isn’t possible. That’s how lucky I am. So I’m not even going to try this time.…
But there are three people I must thank. Three people without whom this book could not have been written.
First—I need to thank my husband, Chris Poma, who makes lunch and changes diapers and rushes home from work so I can scribble madly at odd hours. I don’t always appreciate him. I nag the poor guy mercilessly. But I couldn’t do anything without him. He’s my foundation.
Second—I need to thank my agent, Tina Wexler, who keeps me working, keeps me laughing, keeps me sane, and keeps me believing in books. She’s my first reader and my best advocate, but most of all, she’s my friend—an honest, kind, funny woman. I need her.
Third (and most of all)—I need to thank my editor, Mallory Loehr. A book can be a slippery thing, and this one nearly slid through my fingers, but Mallory caught it! Mallory is the kind of editor a writer dreams about, and I’m humbled by the time and energy she spent on Penny Dreadful. Mallory is careful but quick, supportive yet critical. She is a practical dreamer, and the clearest-eyed reader I’ve ever known. I owe her much.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND THE ILLUSTRATOR
LAUREL SNYDER, like Penelope Grey, ran away to the mountains of East Tennessee at an impressionable age, where she (like Penelope) found a world of wonderful people, winding roads, lush foliage, and wishes come true. She now lives in Atlanta with her family, and online at www.laurelsnyder.com. Her past works include Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains, Inside the Slidy Diner, and Any Which Wall.
ABIGAIL HALPIN grew up drawing in a tiny town on the Maine coast. Since that time, she’s lived in a faraway city and visited distant states, but never quite felt at home. With pens and pencils in tow, she moved back where she grew up: Wells, Maine. She spends her days drinking tea and illustrating; her work most recently appeared in Maybe Yes, Maybe No, Maybe Maybe by Susan Patron. Visit Abigail online at www.theodesign.com.
Laurel Snyder, Penny Dreadful
