Seventh Grade in the Life of Me, Penelope

by Alison Pollet

“It’s obvious,” retorted Stacy. Penelope noticed that the nicer Annabella was to Stacy, the more smug Stacy felt she could be to Pia.

  “Okay, maybe I’m dense, but I don’t get it,” said Annabella. “What does it prove?”

  “Well, I could be wrong, but …” Stacy was clearly enjoying having all eyes on her, and she prolonged the moment accordingly. “Remember this is just a theory,” she told them. “I don’t know this for a fact, but —”

  Annabella stamped the floor impatiently.

  “Okay, I hate to say it,” said Stacy. Now she was talking faster than her usual clipped pace. “But Tillie was the one writing the graffiti on the walls.” She surveyed the shocked faces surrounding her and grinned proudly at the power of her words.

  Penelope thought: When people start sentences with “I hate to say it, but,” they don’t mean it. They should really say, “I’m so excited to say what I’m about to say.”

  “I thought it was Tillie!” clapped Pia. “She was one of my suspects!”

  Pia and Annabella formed a two-girl-huddle while the rest of them watched. Penelope caught words like “plans” and “punishment.” And then Lillian Lang and a couple of other No-Newkers appeared, and Pia told them she’d call them tonight, they’d need to be prepped, they knew who was writing on the walls, it was Tillie, and they were going to do something about it.

  Stacy didn’t appear to regret her announcement, but right after the five-minute bell clanged and just before the group dispersed, Vicki called for everyone’s attention. “Maybe Tillie’s acting like such a weirdo,” she suggested haltingly, “because her mom’s cuckoo and her parents are getting divorced.”

  There were a couple of murmurs, and then Annabella replied flippantly, “Oh, everyone’s parents get divorced. I mean, not mine, but everyone else’s.”

  “Yeah,” Pia chimed in. “It’s no excuse to write on the walls. She wrote mean stuff about No Newks, which means she wrote mean stuff about you,” she reminded her. “About all of us!”

  Vicki acquiesced easily, and Penelope wondered whether she’d stuck up for Tillie more out of habit than conviction. With her head resting on Stacy’s shoulder, Vicki looked more than happy to be the one on the receiving end of pity this time.

  Penelope had been completely silent during these revelations. She’d thought about saying something in Tillie’s defense, but Pia’s last words had served as a rallying cry, and with two minutes until class, there was no hope of her formulating something to say.

  She consoled herself on the walk to English class, thinking, Pia is right. The person who wrote on the walls is mean. She’s a liar. She’s crazy. And she’s not very brave at all.

  That afternoon, a new piece of writing appeared on the back of the bathroom door in the Solden Science Center. Pia studied it, but couldn’t decipher if it was intended for the No Newkers, as it was a little more cryptic than the others had been.

  It said:

  The one girl who would have understood its true meaning, Tillie, left school early that day because she had a doctor’s appointment. She’d see it eventually — but it would be too late.

  Tillie’s newly visible neck and ears looked vulnerable when the girls surrounded her.

  “Admit it, Tillie,” ordered Annabella.

  “Admit it, Tillie,” echoed Pia.

  “I can’t believe you, Tillie!” charged Vicki.

  “Just say you did it,” commanded Stacy.

  They stood in the middle of the football field, which had lost its lush greenness to winter and was now the color of a Triscuit. As the circle around her tightened — Pia, Annabella, Vicki, Stacy, Penelope, along with Lillian Lang and Annie Reed — the yellow scarf around Tillie’s neck seemed to miraculously unwind itself. It was as if Pia, with her fashion industry expertise — her dad did own a mall! — had instructed the garment to leave poor Tillie as unprotected as possible.

  “Admit it, Tillie. Admit it, Tillie. Admit it, Tillie.”

  Penelope thought, If I mouth the words, but don’t say them, does it count?

  “Admit it, Tillie. Admit it, Tillie. Admit it, Tillie.”

  Tillie seemed to have expected this. “What do you want me to admit? That I told Dr. Alvin I signed The Pledge?”

  “You can start with that,” said Pia.

  “Fine,” huffed Tillie. “I did. Big deal. I would have done it sooner if I hadn’t been out of school. You know, if my mom —”

  There were several groans from the crowd.

  “Don’t try to turn this into a pity party, Tillie.” It was Vicki who spoke these words, which was funny to Penelope, since she had once been the most pitying of them all.

  Tillie turned to Vicki and fixed her with a piercing stare. She spoke slowly and methodically, like their Fundamental Languages teacher when she conjugated verbs for the class. “If … I … wanted … pity … Vicki … I … wouldn’t … come … to … you.”

  From Vicki’s mouth came a sound that was halfchortle, half-sob: “Bwah!”

  Stacy rushed to her defense. “You can’t make us feel bad for you, Tillie.”

  “I don’t think I could make you feel anything, Stacy,” snapped Tillie. It was an able response on Tillie’s part — at least Penelope thought so — but her voice wavered slightly, a sign to the circle to move in just a little bit closer. It reminded Penelope of an episode she’d seen of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom about what happens when packs of lions smell blood.

  Penelope thought, I am one of those lions.

  It was time, Annabella told them, to get to the point. “We don’t care that you told Dr. Alvin,” she told Tillie. She paused as a crackling wind blew brittle bits of twig at Tillie’s bare head.

  “We care about the other stuff.”

  “What other stuff?”

  “You know what you did, Tillie. You defamed us! You slandered us!” Annabella’s mother was a libel attorney who specialized in cases of unfair character assassination, so she knew a lot of the lingo. “And the most pathetic thing is: You were one of us!”

  “It’s pitiful!” shouted Vicki, who’d gained strength from the circle’s collective fury.

  “I de-what?-ed you!” cried Tillie, who was having trouble hearing over the roaring wind — it looked like it was about to rain — “I sland-ed you?”

  “What? You don’t speak English now?” shouted Pia, who took on the role of Annabella’s interpreter. “She’s saying: We know what you did. You wrote on the walls.”

  As a confused Tillie grappled to process this information, the circle closed in even tighter.

  Penelope thought, If I stand where I’m standing, but don’t move in any closer, does it count?

  “You think we’re dumb, don’t you?” hollered Pia. “You think you can write whatever you want wherever you want?”

  “Say whatever you want wherever you want!” prodded Annabella.

  The other girls formed a chorus, chanting these words as a refrain: “Write whatever you want! Say whatever you want!”

  Red blotches rose from the neckline of Tillie’s sweater up to her nose. Her eyes shone with tears, and her lips — chapped and purple from the cold — shook. “I can say what I want whenever I want,” she warbled. “It’s my right.”

  It was as if her own words propelled her into action, and she sprang toward the circle of girls caging her, hurling her twiggy body into Lillian and Pia. But they gripped each other’s hands and easily pushed her back in. She panted for breath, hands jammed in her pockets, eyes wild and scared, and waited for whatever was going to happen next.

  Annabella reacted to the flash of violence with an eerie calm. “Well, Tillie,” she said ominously, “if you can say whatever you want whenever you want, I can, too. And I can write whatever I want wherever I want.”

  And then, in an efficient burst of movement, Annabella — with the precision of a highly trained soldier — swiped an uncapped black Magic Marker from the sleeve of her light blue down jacket and sliced it across Tillie’s wrist,
leaving an oozy black gash of ink.

  “Hey!” cried a stunned Tillie, grabbing her wrist protectively.

  “Oops, sorry,” cooed Annabella. “And that’s permanent ink.”

  It was as if with the word “ink,” Annabella had shouted, “Ready, aim, fire!” From the sleeves of down jackets and peacoats came seven more markers primed for attack.

  They pecked.

  They speared.

  They poked.

  They jabbed.

  “Stop!” shouted Tillie. “Ow!” she shrieked.

  They made bruiselike splots, razor-thin slashes, jagged lines, leaky smears. In all different colors, on Tillie’s neck and forehead, across her hands and wrists, on her camel-colored peacoat, on her yellow scarf.

  Penelope thought, If I take out a pen and poke at the air with it but don’t actually touch her, does it count?

  “Please!” begged Tillie. She did a wobbly spin, her eyes grazing the faces of her attackers. From Annabella and Pia to Annie and Lillian to Vicki and Stacy to Penelope.

  “Penelope,” she whimpered. “You.”

  The five-minute bell rang, and as fast as the circle had gathered, it dissipated, flying in all directions across the bleached-out field. As Penelope’s legs took her storming across the field, she remembered how Tillie made her feel there were things about herself she hadn’t known before. She thought, Maybe she knows I didn’t mean it. Maybe she knows it wasn’t really me.

  She hovered underneath the bleachers and watched Tillie limp across the field — like an oily stain slowly spreading on her mother’s linen tablecloth. Tillie reached the wooden fence that separated the field from the cobblestone path. She wrapped her scarf around her neck and put the hood of her coat over her head, and Penelope figured she must be crying.

  If I go over to her now, will that take away what I did? thought Penelope.

  Someone else beat her to it. A small, dark figure ambled toward Tillie; at first Penelope didn’t recognize who it was. But when she wiped her eyes — she was crying herself now — she realized. The figure — who was tenderly reaching toward Tillie to console her, who was taking her backpack from her and helping her over the fence — was none other than Cass. She led Tillie away from the field, down a crooked walkway Penelope had somehow never seen before, and out of sight. It was the first time Penelope had seen Cass on campus.

  And then Penelope was crying in bursts so powerful, they made her run. She ran not toward Algebra class, but down the cobblestone path from Gritzfield Hall to the cluster of cottages that held Elston Prep’s admissions office and guidance counselors. She entered a gray stone house with a red thatched roof that looked like the gingerbread houses Penelope always wanted to make at Christmas but that Mrs. Schwartzbaum called tacky.

  She sped down a hall plastered with framed postersized pictures of Elston Prep in the snow, Elston Prep covered in fall leaves, Elston Prep in black and white circa 1946, when it was an all-boys school. It looked like a nice place to go to school, and for a moment Penelope forgot she went there.

  She found her way to a bathroom. It was a small bathroom, not like the kind students used, with only two stalls and a lock on the door. She stared in the mirror above the sink at her flat hair and swelling eyes, at the cold sore that hung like a tiny clump of raw hamburger meat on the side of her mouth.

  I could pull this off, she thought.

  I could pull out my hair, she thought.

  It made her feel strong, thinking these things.

  Except her body got weak like rubber cement. Her knees were all gooey; she was going to fall down. She made it into the stall; her knees hit the hard tiled floor, her back scraped against the toilet, and her forehead banged into the door as it slapped toward her.

  She pressed her chin into her kneecaps and cried, only it wasn’t regular crying; it was long, hard wallops so big, they made her entire body shake, like someone was punching her from the inside. She grabbed her backpack and cried into that, hoping it would muffle the sound her wails made — like The Love Boat coming into harbor, like Stacy’s cat Mitzi before she barfed. She cried until there was no cry left, until her chest sucked in and puffed out, and the loud wails became jagged breaths, like a donkey but slower:

  Hee … haw

  Hee … haw

  Hee … haw

  She wanted to be little, she wanted to shrink. She wanted to be tiny like that family in a movie she once saw where the people were an inch high and slept in mouse holes, who used handkerchiefs as blankets, cereal bowls as swimming pools, tongue depressors as diving boards.

  Or maybe she wanted to go back. She didn’t want to be twelve. She didn’t want to be in the seventh grade. She didn’t want to think about college or Algebra or divorce or Fred Something or affairs. Yes, that’s it. She wanted to go back! But what age would she be? Ten? Nine? Seven? Five? Maybe five. They all seemed too old.

  Huddled in the corner of the unfamiliar bathroom stall, making donkey noises into a backpack, Penelope couldn’t find an age that would make her as small as, at that very moment, she felt. She wanted to be so small, there was nothing left.

  She had no idea how long she sat there, how long it was before the hammering of knocks on the door became full-on pounding.

  “PENELOPE SCHWARTZBAUM, I KNOW YOU’RE IN THERE!”

  Dr. Alvin had been the one to collect Penelope from the bathroom, and she’d taken her straight to Mr. Bobkin’s office, where she got a stern talking-to about cutting classes. And to cut a class she was clearly struggling in, no less! Did Penelope realize, Mr. Bobkin wondered out loud, how very poorly she was faring in his Algebra class?

  And then there was the matter of defacing school property, and Mr. Bobkin relayed how perfectly appalled he’d been to discover, written on the very desk where she sat, “Penelope B. Schwartzbaum Was Here.”

  “It’s not the kind of thing you can blame on someone else,” he bellowed, though blaming someone else hadn’t crossed Penelope’s mind. In fact, not much was crossing Penelope’s mind.

  Dr. Alvin had a more plain-faced approach. “Why did you deface the desk in Mr. Bobkin’s room?” she inquired. Penelope told them she hadn’t meant to, and Dr. Alvin asked what she could possibly mean by that. Penelope said she hadn’t realized she was doing it when she did it, a response that so perplexed the literal-minded Dr. Alvin, she completely ignored it.

  “Were you claiming your territory?” she asked.

  Penelope had no idea what that meant.

  “Were you marking your spot? That’s what graffiti artists do, you know.”

  Penelope said she wasn’t a graffiti artist.

  “No, but you wrote your name where you’re not supposed to. I’m not sure I know the difference.”

  Penelope didn’t know what to say to that.

  “Here’s my question for you, young lady,” puffed Mr. Bobkin. “What kind of statement were you trying to make?”

  She wasn’t trying to make any statement, she told him.

  “The very act of vandalizing school property is a statement,” he blasted.

  They’d be discussing an appropriate punishment with the principal and the guidance counselor, Mr. Bobkin forewarned. They’d be calling her parents, Dr. Alvin added. She should go home, do her homework, and proceed as she normally would.

  They’d let her know what was going to happen to her.

  During the days that followed, Penelope felt like she was in a bubble. It was like the woozy feeling that had followed Penelope throughout the school year had finally captured her once and for all; it had swaddled her completely and now there was an invisible barrier between her and the world. She shook her head when she was supposed to; nodded when she was supposed to; stared straight at the blackboard when she needed to; ran around the track in gym; watched General Hospital. But she did it all from inside a bubble.

  She went to Bloomingdale’s in the bubble. She still hadn’t signed her new charge card. The woman ringing up her purple angora sweater dress would
n’t let her buy it without doing so. Penelope’s pen hovered above the blank white band. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the salesperson’s impatient fingertips drumming on the counter; and through the din of Bloomingdale’s instore music and the hum in her head, she heard a man behind her grumble, “Get a move on, kid, we don’t have all day.”

  She allowed her pen to glide along the card’s smooth surface, performing its ritual loops. There. It was done. Inside the bubble, decisions that had once been crucial seemed less so.

  Penelope even attended Annabella’s bat mitzvah in the bubble. She watched Annabella’s lips move when she gave her speech, which had something to do with the prophet Jeremiah, the threat of nuclear war, and planting trees in Israel. She stood when she was supposed to stand. She bowed when she was supposed to bow. She faced east when she was supposed to face east, though she wasn’t quite sure which way was east.

  At the party, a glassblower sculpted miniature blue dolphins and crystal unicorns with a blowtorch. Penelope drank three Shirley Temples. She danced to “The Time Warp” with Stacy and Vicki. She jumped to the left, took steps to the right, and screamed with everyone else: “It’ll drive you insane-ane-ane-ane.”

  Penelope watched Annabella’s uncles put her in a chair and lift her high above their balding heads as whooping guests wove vines around them. She watched Annabella’s high heel hurdle through the air straight for Pia’s forehead. She watched Annabella screech delightedly. She watched Pia cry in pain.

  She saw Stacy in her new Gunne Sax dress, white eyelet with red trim, get asked to dance by Ben, who turned out to be Annabella’s camp friend and therefore an acceptable new kid, the only one. She saw them dance a fast dance and then a slow one, then another fast one and another slow one. She saw Stacy whisper in his ear. She saw Ben give Stacy a crystal unicorn. She saw Stacy’s mouth twist into a grin, the kind Penelope hadn’t seen her make since the days when they hollered “West is best!” on the school bus, when scouring Broadway Nut Shop for new candy and collecting fortune cookies from Empire Szechuan were acceptable ways to pass the time.