Penny Dreadful (7 page)

Penelope couldn’t help being a little jittery about moving to a strange new place at the age of (nearly) ten—a place where she knew nobody and nobody knew her, and where she’d probably be different from everyone else—but she also felt tingly at the thought of the adventures that lay ahead. Thrush Junction would be full
of new people, new friends.
There will be a school there
, she thought,
a real school full of kids
. She wondered, nervously and excitedly, what
that
might be like. As the miles sped by and Penelope had nothing to do but read (which she could only do for so long in the car before her stomach felt ooshy), she stared at the road and the green world around her and grew more and more excited.

Just after dusk the Greys stopped at a tiny motel called the Alpine Lodge. Penelope was tired and hungry from the drive, but she had never seen a roadside motel before, and she thought the place was wonderful. The Greys’ room was sweet and old, with walls painted the palest pink. The white sheets were clean and crisp. A small vase of wild roses sat on a table in the little front window of the room, and the soaps in the bathroom were shaped like roses too.

Penelope explored the room, small as it was. She stood in the sliding-door closet and opened and closed the little refrigerator, where her parents had already stowed the food from their cooler. She peeked under the bed (where she found a lucky penny) and called the front desk by mistake when she picked up the phone. She leafed through a pile of tired paperback books on a shelf and changed channels on the TV for more than an hour, lying on the little cot on wheels, which was just her size.

Penelope thought no meal could rival their picnic dinner of bread and cheese and sliced tomatoes and olives on the tiny porch outside their room. The Greys sat in plastic lawn chairs, and Penelope smiled in the blurry yellow light of the porch. She listened to buggy things crick and cheep and chirp. She stared at the vine of delicate purple blossoms growing up the drainpipe beside her. “What’s that called?” she asked her parents, pointing at the vine.

“Is that bougainvillea? I think that’s bougainvillea!” said Dirk, popping an olive into his mouth.

“No, dear,” Delia said gently. “That’s wisteria. I’m almost certain.”

“Same thing, pretty much, right?” said Dirk.

“Wisteria,” mouthed Penelope, memorizing the unfamiliar name. Starting tomorrow, there would be a lot of new things and places and names to remember.

The next morning the Greys were eager to be on the road again, but they were also ravenous, so they stopped for a good hearty breakfast in the first town they found. They sat down at their table in a place called Momma’s Happy Land, in clean clothes, with their hair still wet. After ordering omelets and toast and juice and coffee (for Dirk and Delia), the Greys found things slightly less perfect.

First, there was a hair in Delia’s water glass. Then the
coffee was cold. Once Agnes (the cranky waitress) had brought hot coffee, they discovered that the cream in the tiny metal pitcher was clumpy. After that, Dirk stuck his elbow in a smear of grape jelly, and Delia discovered a broken toilet in the ladies’ room. Finally, there was an awful, but appropriate, grand finale to a terrible meal: when the food arrived (after nearly an hour), Agnes managed to slide Penelope’s cheese omelet right off the plate and through the air, into her lap.

“Oh no!” said Penelope, stunned, looking down at her lapful of eggs.

“Sorry, kid,” said Agnes in a voice that sounded anything but sorry. She reached into Penelope’s lap and simply flopped the crescent of eggs back onto the plate with a none-too-clean hand. “I hate when that happens.” Then she dropped the plate in front of Penelope and walked back over to the cash register.

Dirk and Delia looked at Penelope in horror. Penelope stared at the eggs on her plate and then at the now-greasy lap of her favorite blue shorts. With a tiny paper napkin she attempted to wipe off the spot of grease. It only smeared into a bigger spot.

“We’ll get you a new breakfast right away,” said Delia efficiently, glancing over at the surly waitress and beginning to raise her hand.

“No.” Penelope shook her head. She tapped the eggs with the tines of a slightly dirty fork. “No,” she said. “No, these eggs are fine.”

“What?” said her mother. “Why on earth—”

“Really,” said Penelope. To prove it, she shoved a bite into her mouth as her parents stared. “They’re
fine,
” she said through the eggs.

As silly as Penelope knew this sounded, she needed for it to be true. The eggs
had
to be fine. Penelope had escaped from boredom and sadness and silence, and now she wanted
everything
to be good and fun and happy. She didn’t want to jinx the move by making things unpleasant now. She didn’t want to complain. The eggs would be fine if Penelope said they were fine.

Her father looked at her as though he seriously doubted the fineness of her lap eggs. “Don’t be silly, Penelope,” he said.

Penelope tried to convince him with a quick nod and another bite. “I mean it—they’re yummy. See?” As her parents continued to stare in disbelief, she shoveled the eggs into her mouth and nearly choked on a lump of congealed cheese.

Penelope wanted to get out of Momma’s Happy Land as quickly as possible. If they could just get away from this greasy place, things could go back to being perfect. She ate faster.

Penelope was still chewing grimly when Agnes headed over with the check and asked in a perfunctory, waitressy way, “Everything okay here, folks?”

“I
guess
so,” said Dirk with a doubtful look at his daughter. “We’re about done anyway.”

Delia just nodded stiffly, the way people do at the end of a meal that is not worth complaining about. “Fine, fine. I
suppose.
”

Penelope nodded too, with a grim smile and a mouthful of eggs.

But just as Dirk was reaching into his billfold and Agnes was tapping a toe to hurry him along, Penelope gagged on a bit of toast crust. She reached for her juice to wash it down, but when she drained the glass, she found herself staring at a bug. A big black fly, drowned and stuck to the bottom of her glass.

Penelope couldn’t help it. She retched.

Agnes asked again, “Everything okay, kid?”

Penelope retched again, and suddenly things weren’t okay at all. Looking at the fly, Penelope wasn’t afraid of jinxing anything anymore. She was too disgusted to care! “No,” she said, setting down her glass with a bang. “No, it’s
not
.”

“What’s that, Penelope?” asked Dirk, handing Agnes some money. “Everything all right over there?”

Penelope shook her head. “No. Everything is
not
all right. It is—
was
—awful. I don’t mean to be rude, but the eggs were cold, and I almost drank a fly just now.” She held up the glass for everyone to see.

Instantly, Penelope felt better.
Actually
, she thought,
it feels good to complain
. It was a little like stretching.

Agnes stared at Penelope, her mouth hanging open slightly. After some thought she said, “A fly, huh? Sorry, kid.”

“You know,” Dirk said to Penelope, “there are lots of nutrients in flies. Maybe we should be glad they don’t charge us extra. Right, Agnes?” He looked up at the waitress, who said nothing in reply.

Delia gave Dirk a light thwack on his shoulder. “Dirk!” To Agnes she said, “I’m terribly sorry for my husband’s bad joke.” Her lips twitched as she added, “He’s been a little addled since he joined the ranks of the unwashed unemployed. Please forgive him.”

Agnes shrugged, shook her head, and shuffled off, back to her spot at the register to fold napkins.

“Ugh,” Dirk whispered at Penelope across the table. “Really, that was the
worst
coffee I’ve ever tasted. Like engine oil. If there’s such a thing as
weak
engine oil.”

Penelope smiled.

“And those eggs!” hissed Dirk. “Tough as tire tread.
Were they even eggs?
Dinosaur
eggs, maybe!” Dirk screwed up his eyes, stuck out his tongue, and said, “Blech!”

Penelope giggled.

But Delia—Delia
snorted
!

Penelope blinked in surprise. She had never heard such a sound come out of her mother’s mouth. She stared at Delia, who was covering her mouth with a hand, her eyes wide. Delia snorted again!

Then Penelope began laughing out loud, and she couldn’t stop.

In a minute all three Greys were laughing at nothing, and everything.

They deserted their booth, still giggling and snorting and laughing. Grinning at each other, they fled the diner and walked speedily away from Momma’s Happy Land.

Happy.

“That was fun,” Dirk whispered to Penelope as the door swung shut behind them with a sigh.

Penelope had to agree.

Back in the car, filled with a terrible breakfast but a deep appreciation for her parents, Penelope drifted off to sleep, lulled by the hum of the road and the green forever of the trees and the tranquil hills outside her
window. Worn out from all the excitement and the travel, she slept a long time.

The next thing she knew, she was being roused by her mother’s voice calling out brightly, “This is it! Main Street, USA. Rise and shine, darling!”

W
ELCOME TO
T
HRUSH
J
UNCTION

P
enelope stared out the window.
This
was Thrush Junction, her new home, the answer to her prayers? This was hardly even a town. Whatever she’d imagined, she hadn’t imagined
this
. She remembered what her father had said about things being boring. Where
was
everyone?

In the late-afternoon sun the van moved slowly past a line of little shops that sat on a small hill—old-looking shops, just a few blocks of them, with wooden storefronts covered in peeling paint and saddled with sagging porches. The scrabbly yards were overgrown, and the sidewalks were cracked. On a few of the porches people sat, waving slowly as the Greys drove past.

LIVE BAIT AND TAXES
, read the sign on one store.

A restaurant proudly proclaimed
SOUP!!! WE GOT IT!
With three exclamation points
, Penelope thought,
it must be extremely good soup
.

They passed a storefront that said
JACQUELINE SANCHEZ, MD: SPECIALIZING IN FINE WHINES SINCE 1984
.

Dirk chuckled. “Well, they’ve got a sense of humor here, anyway.”

At the very top of the hill was a very old, very fancy, very official-looking building with a spire on top and a big bell. The entire structure was covered in some kind of bright green vine.

“What’s
that
place?” asked Penelope, peering up at the overgrown building.

“The sign says that’s the town hall. Also the mayor’s house, the police station, the firehouse, and the courthouse.” Delia squinted, reading the small print. “In a really small town, I guess everything is multipurpose. To make room for everything, and everyone.”

“And what’s that?” Penelope pointed to another building, a square, sort of ugly industrial building made of yellow brick. Painted on the side of the building were enormous red and purple letters that said
WAKE UP, KIDS
!

“A suggestion?” suggested Delia.

Penelope turned around to stare behind her at the funny square building. When she did, she noticed another, smaller sign that read
THRUSH JUNCTION ELEMENTARY/MIDDLE
. Penelope started to feel a little worried. It didn’t
look like the kind of small-town schoolhouse she’d read about in books. It barely had any windows!

Delia began to slow down as they passed a few houses, and then turned onto the narrowest, windiest dirt road Penelope had ever seen. There was no sidewalk, just green everywhere. The road was flanked by trees whose branches touched in the middle of the road, forming a verdant archway overhead covered in small white blossoms.