Seventh Grade in the Life of Me, Penelope

by Alison Pollet

  Penelope didn’t know what this meant. Jenny was moving to England? For the summer? Forever? She glanced at Nathaniel huddled in the oversized big T-shirt. He was caught up in the frenzy, laughing with Jenny — how could he help it? — and Penelope saw he didn’t understand what perhaps had just happened: that Jenny’s good news might very well be bad news for them.

  She’d have to break it to him later — or maybe she wouldn’t — maybe she’d just be there when he figured it out for himself.

  Cass hadn’t been joking about dessert. There was a whole new set of FonDon’t crocks. They dipped apple slices into hot melted caramel for Caramel Apple Fon-Don’t, marshmallows into melted Hershey bars for Hot Chocolate FonDon’t, and butter cookies into hot raspberry sauce for Fruity FonDon’t.

  Tillie’s mouth was full of Fruity FonDon’t when Bea asked her how her mom was doing. Tillie struggled to swallow, but the words still sounded garbled: “She says that for the first time in a long time, she feels unstuck.”

  To Cass and Penelope, the last word was completely indecipherable. “Unstunk? Untucked?” they asked. Tillie had taken a bite of butter cookie and stared at them, while chewing.

  “Unstuck, you goofs.” Doris laughed, coming to Tillie’s rescue. “Like she’s not stuck anymore.”

  “I still don’t get what it means,” said Cass in her usual blunt manner.

  “According to my mom,” Tillie explained, “it’s like seeing the world from a whole new angle.” Cass said that sounded cool, then proceeded to load her mouth with marshmallows, washing them down with a hefty gulp of the melted chocolate crock.

  “Unstuck is very cool indeed,” said Bea, sending a kind smile Tillie’s way. “You must be very proud.” Tillie was, and to prove it she chugalugged straight from the crock of raspberry sauce.

  Penelope watched her friends laughing, and gobbling food and knew exactly how Cherry Warner felt. If she’d thought she’d never been this full in her life before dessert, she was wrong. She’d gone from full to bursting.

  Finals arrived, and Penelope didn’t know how it had happened. When had February turned to March to April to May? Seventh grade had started slow, but it sure was ending fast. Soon it would be June, and she’d be trading her faded Levi’s for Dolphin racing shorts, her tube socks for Peds — and she was hoping for the kind that had pom-poms.

  With Bea Levin’s seal of approval — despite her association with Fred Something, it still carried weight — Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzbaum enrolled Penelope at the same camp Cass was attending. “It’s a beautiful place in Vermont,” boasted Bea Levin, “for artists. They teach writing and painting and filmmaking.”

  When Penelope protested that she wasn’t an artist Bea waved her off: “Somehow I don’t think it’ll take much to find an artist in you, Penelope,” she said. She tried to sell Cherry Warner on the camp as well. That way the three girls could spend the summer together. But Cherry and Tillie were taking a road trip — just the two of them — starting in New York City and heading who-knew-where. “You can’t be more unstuck than that!” praised Bea.

  The night before Tillie left, she, Cass, and Penelope had a slumber party. They had Penthouse C to themselves, as Mr. and Mrs. Schwartzbaum were attending a gallery opening in SoHo. They were leaving the girls in charge of Nathaniel — good preparation, Mrs. Schwartzbaum reminded Penelope, for next year, when she and her brother would be on their own after school.

  As it turned out, Jenny would be their last mother’s helper ever. Mrs. Schwartzbaum acted like she was rewarding Penelope when she dubbed her “old enough to take care of Nathaniel.” The truth was that Jenny was moving to London for good, and had given her resignation to Mrs. Schwartzbaum. Penelope thought, It’s not that I’m old enough to take care of Nathaniel, it’s that I want to. She was pretty sure there was a difference.

  On Tillie’s last night, they ate pizza while watching television, listened to Elvis Costello, and, when it was time, put Nathaniel to bed. The girls took turns reading to Nathaniel from the book Charlotte’s Web. Tillie read: “ ‘There in the center of the web, neatly woven in block letters, was a message. It said: SOME PIG! Lurvy felt weak. He brushed his hand across his eyes and stared harder at Charlotte’s web.…’ ”

  Cass leaned over to Penelope and whispered, “See, Charlotte was a graffiti artist, too.”

  They made sleeping bags of blankets and went to sleep on the floor of Penelope’s room, which was halfpacked, half-not. Mrs. Schwartzbaum had offered to have it redone over the summer, which made Penelope think back to Stacy’s room, with its rainbow sheets and empty shelves. She decided against it, but asked if she could make some room by storing stuff she didn’t use, like her foreign doll collection.

  Snug in the blankets, Tillie, Penelope, and Cass talked about all sorts of subjects — like where Tillie would go on her trip, whether Cass and Penelope would be bunk mates at camp, and if Fred Something and Jenny would eventually get married.

  Cass, of course, said she sure hoped not.

  “What if Bea gets married? You’re not going to be happy for her?” asked Tillie.

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “But what if it does?” Tillie had gotten used to Cass’s confident declarations and liked to challenge them.

  “If it does, I’ll be happy for her. Bea says it’s okay to question tradition, but I still have to accept people who embrace it.”

  “I just hope my mom doesn’t get married again soon,” Tillie said. “She just started to get happy”

  Tillie and Cass fell asleep before Penelope. They breathed so differently — Cass in deep hmmms, Tillie in soft asthmatic snores — it was like listening to two different radio stations playing at once. Penelope found it difficult to fall asleep herself.

  Her tossing woke Cass. “What’s happening?” she murmured. Penelope explained, and Cass suggested they try to breathe together. She counted down:

  3

  2

  1

  Breathe!

  But keeping the same pace was very difficult. They’d get it right for a few breaths, and then Cass would cough or Penelope would sniffle or they’d hear Tillie wheeze, and they’d have to start over again.

  It turned out breathing at the same pace with someone was impossible, and Penelope suddenly felt very bad for married people who slept in the same bed every night. Would Jenny and Fred Something be able to breathe together? Could her parents?

  Penelope looked over to Cass. She’d fallen back to sleep, and a tiny puddle of drool had formed on her pillow. It was funny that somebody with so many ideas in her head, so many opinions, could sleep so soundly. Sometimes Penelope wondered if, by making this new friend who thought so many things, she’d simply traded one set of opinions for another. That was a scary thought, a bad thought, even, but she had to let herself think it from time to time.

  Penelope had been wrong about so many things, and she wondered if maybe she was thinking about breathing wrong, too. Maybe it was this: There were all sorts of people in the world, and maybe it wasn’t about breathing together or matching, maybe it was about learning not to breathe together and learning not to match.

  Wondering about this, she fell fast asleep.

  Lookout Mountain Camp for the Arts looked very different from Elston Prep, with its rolling hills and clapboard houses. Penelope and Cass lived in a cabin painted toothpaste green. They spent their days rowing boats, swimming in the lake, doing ceramics and macramé. Penelope signed up for a cooking course and a calligraphy course; Cass took short story writing; and two nights a week they watched old black-and-white movies in the camp’s dining hall.

  Tillie sent postcards from strange places like Tucson, Arizona, and Palm Springs, California; Nathaniel mailed tapes of songs he’d written and performed, including a duet with Bea and Sylvia Hempel; and Jenny sent pictures of herself and Fred Something in front of London tourist spots like Buckingham Palace and Big Ben.

  June turned to July. Cass finished four short
stories, and Penelope created a recipe for Purple Cow FonDon’t. And when July turned to August, they started talking about going home and what eighth grade at Elston Prep would be like, whether Geometry would be harder than Algebra, and whether Penelope should get clear or metal braces.

  The air, gnatty and steamy when they arrived, was clear and cool now; and soon came their final day at camp. Bea was having a FonDon’t party the night of their return. The Schwartzbaums would be coming; Tillie and Cherry, too. So, as sad as Cass and Penelope were to leave, they were excited to get home.

  On their last morning they stripped their beds, packed their trunks, and ate one final breakfast in the dining hall. They said good-bye to their bunk mates and their counselors, promising to return next year. And when Cass dashed off to make one last purchase at the camp canteen, Penelope said a private good-bye to their cabin. She wanted to give it something to remember her by She already had a spot picked out.

  She removed a blue felt-tip calligraphy pen from her jeans shorts pocket, and on the wall above the bed where she’d slept all summer, she wrote:

  Somebody was here.

  She could have written more, but that was all she had to say. Anyway, she had to go. Cass was waiting.

  All Cass’s life, her favorite subject was English. But with one glance at the reading list for Ms. Glitch’s fourth-period class, she knew that was about to change. Every single book was about an orphan. Oliver Twist, Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre. Orphan, orphan, orphan! What kind of sicko assigns a million books about orphans?

  Cass was mulling this over, when suddenly everyone in the classroom was talking at once. Cass turned her attention away from the reading list and toward the commotion.

  Here was something Cass had observed: You could tell a lot about a person based on how she entered a room. Some people (like Penelope) shrunk when they entered a room, but others (like Bea) made a room shrink when they entered it. On the first day of school, most students skidded into class, fidgety and squirreleyed: “Am I in the right place? Is this English class?” But Annabella Blumberg, the eighth grade’s most popular girl, simply glided in.

  Cass wasn’t obsessed with Annabella — at least not in the way everyone else was. She didn’t care about how pretty Annabella was or what clothes she wore. She definitely didn’t want to be friends with her, but she did like watching her — in the way scientists on nature shows observe their subjects, anonymously and from a safe distance.

  Annabella didn’t look around to see who else was in the class, or double-check her schedule, or even catch a glimpse of the teacher. She sauntered over to a desk and slunk into a chair, as if to say that any place she ended up was the right place to be.

  TO PENELOPE

  (Open When Bored)

  I wish for my sake you were in my English class, but I’m glad for your sake you’re not.

  #1. This teacher might be psycho.

  #2. Guess who’s in this class: Yup, LILLIAN LANG, and.…

  #3. ANNABELLA DUMB BERG (Yes, 1 know, I’m immature!)

  Ms. Glitch had a burbly way of speaking, as if her voice was coming from inside an aquarium instead of the front of a classroom. “Levine, Cass? Are you here? Cass Levine, hello?”

  Considering the dread she’d invoked in Cass, Ms. Glitch was a surprisingly puny woman. Cass coughed loudly — as if a frog in her throat was what had delayed her response. “Yes, I’m here,” she told the teacher, “but it’s Levin. Cass. Levin.” Cass hadn’t meant to sound haughty, but she wasn’t upset that she did.

  “Oh dear, my mistake,” warbled Ms. Glitch apologetically, scribbling a correction in her notebook. “Okay, who’s next, let’s see.… Ah, we have a new student. Punkin, Rod? Rod Punkin? Please say I have that right.”

  The response came from directly behind Cass. “Positively presently present is Punkin, Rod!” barked a boy with the rat-a-tat precision of a machine gun.

  There was tittering in the room. “I’ll interpret that as ‘Here,’ ” said Ms. Glitch after it died down.

  Cass whipped her head around. A crazy grin gawked back. Rod Punkin was a spiky-headed boy in a striped T-shirt unraveling at the neck. On his desk, facing her, was a piece of loose-leaf paper propped up like a triangle.

  HEY, LEVIN NOT LEVINE, WANT TO GO

  DOWN THE HILL WITH ME? MAYBE WE CAN

  GET DUMB BURGERS. ROD

  Next to the word “burger,” he’d drawn a picture of a cheeseburger wearing a dunce cap. Cass turned back to face the teacher, her head exploding with all the horrible things “Go down the hill with me” might mean. She clapped her notebook shut, then, for extra protection, propped her elbows on top of it.

  “Now, I know we’ve got a lot to cover this year,” Ms. Glitch was saying, “dangling participles, thesis sentences, split infinitives.… But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun.” At the word “fun,” Ms. Glitch picked up a copy of the reading list that drooped in the dull afternoon air. “On this reading list are some of my absolute all-time favorite books.”

  Some of your favorite books ABOUT ORPHANS, Cass thought crossly. What DOES “go down the hill”mean?

  “We’re going to read them. We’re going to write about them. We’re going to talk about them. And that brings me to the first order of the day.” Ms. Glitch sunk to her knees to open a desk drawer, from which she pulled a large hat. The act reminded Cass of a bad magician who tries to pull a rabbit from a hat but gets only air. “In this hat are numbered pieces of paper,” she announced mysteriously. “The number indicates which discussion group you’re in.” The room crackled with confused murmurs. “That’s right, discussion groups. There are four students per group. You’ll meet every Friday. I want you to see this as an opportunity.”

  “I want you to see this as my socks-are-hurting-me,” said Rod Punkin in a whisper loud enough for only Cass to hear.

  “You might think it odd at first,” Ms. Glitch warned them. “All I ask is that you try to be open-minded.”

  “You might think this Rod’s the worst. All I ask is you try not to be blinded.”

  Cass opened her notebook and scrawled another note to Penelope, this time in extra-gigantic letters, so that someone peeking from behind could see the words loud and clear.

  REMIND ME TO TELL YOU ABOUT THE KID WHO SITS BEHIND ME IN ENGLISH CLASS. HE’S A FIRST-RATE WORLD-CLASS PSYCHO!!!! WE’RE TALKING SERIOUS BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS.

  Ms. Glitch lay the hat on Lillian Lang’s desk. Lillian acted like picking first was a privilege bestowed upon her, rather than a simple consequence of having chosen the first desk in the first row of the classroom. She made a big to-do of rolling up the sleeve of her oxford and showing off a wrist of bangles and woven friendship bracelets. She probably made those for herself, thought Cass. Lillian dipped two fingers, claw-like, into the hat, and rummaged around until Ms. Glitch reprimanded her: “Ms. Lang, we don’t have all day.”

  “Mine says #1!” Lillian announced — as if that, too, signified greater meaning.

  Cass picked briskly, but also got #1. Please don’t mean what I think this means, she thought.

  “This is your chance to get intimate with the material.…” The word “intimate” sent a current of snickers across the room. “Okay, okay,” Ms. Glitch sighed, “bad choice of words. But that just goes to show you how important choosing your words can be. You’ll keep that in mind when putting together your presentations.”

  “Presentations?”

  “What’s a presentation?”

  It was a well-established fact at Elston Prep that discipline and rigor were the tickets to an Ivy League college, and so unstructured assignments were a source of great panic.

  “Are we going to be graded?”

  “You know, eighth grade marks count for college!”

  Ms. Glitch took the hysteria in stride. “Each discussion group will make a presentation to the class,” she explained calmly. “This presentation can take any form — a group skit, a song, you can act out a scene from a book in mim
e, as far as I’m concerned. Just as long as you’re creative, just as long as you work together. We’ll be starting with Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, and I see no reason why the first group to present shouldn’t be #1. Who’s in #1?”

  Two hands in front of Cass went up — one belonged to Lillian, of course; the other — Cass noticed with a gulp — to Annabella Blumberg. But where was the fourth? She turned her head to the right, the left.…

  “Okay,” said Ms. Glitch, making notations in her roll book. “#1 is Lang, Blumberg, Levin not Levine.” She glanced at Cass and threw her a wink. “And, who’s that in the back? Ah, yes, the inimitable Mr. Punkin.”

  It turned out being #1 was nothing short of doomed!

  ALISON POLLET grew up on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and attended a school similar to Elston Prep. Like Penelope, she often spaced out. Now Alison lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  Copyright © 2004 by Alison Pollet. All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, APPLE PAPERBACKS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc. ORCHARD BOOKS and design are registered trademarks of Watts Publishing Group, Ltd., used under license.

  Excerpt from Charlotte’s Web on page 214 copyright © 1952 by E. B. White, renewed © 1980 by E. B. White. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. “Everyday I Write the Book” by Elvis Costello © 1983 BMG Music Publishing Ltd. (PRS). All rights for the U.S. obo BMG Music Publishing Ltd. (PRS) administered by BMG Songs, Inc. (ASCAP). “The Greatest Thing” by Elvis Costello © 1983 BMG Music Publishing Ltd. (PRS). All rights for the U.S. obo BMG Music Publishing Ltd. (PRS) administered by BMG Songs, Inc. (ASCAP).

  Original hardcover edition designed by Marijka Kostiw, published by Orchard Books, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., July 2004