Jenny Sparrow Knows the Future

by Melissa Pimentel

  Melissa Pimentel

  * * *

  JENNY SPARROW KNOWS THE FUTURE

  Contents

  1999

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Six Months Later

  Acknowledgements

  Read More

  Follow Penguin

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  JENNY SPARROW KNOWS THE FUTURE

  Melissa Pimentel grew up in a small town in Massachusetts in a house without cable TV and much of her childhood was spent watching 1970s British comedy on public television. At twenty-two, she made the move to London and has lived there happily for thirteen years, though she has sadly never come across the Ministry of Funny Walks. She spends much of her time reading in the various pubs of Stoke Newington with her husband (everyone thinks they’re weird but they don’t care) and being woken in the night by her two squabbling cats, Roger and BoJack. She works in publishing.

  1999

  The two girls lolled on the overstuffed sofa, eyes heavy, knees knocking together, as the final credits of the movie rolled up the screen. Their teeth were furred with Pixy Stix sugar and their tongues dip-dyed bright blue from the snow cone maker Jenny’s mom had bought her three years ago, for her tenth birthday. They had known they were too old to play with it now – kids’ stuff, really, to be relegated to the corner of the basement, along with the jumbo tub of Barbie dolls, and the matted plush dog Jenny used to sleep with – so they’d both hidden their delight when the slush had curled out of the machine and into their waiting paper cups. They’d also rolled their eyes at each other when Jenny’s mother had appeared in the doorway and asked if they wanted hot chocolate. Though Jenny had been embarrassed, she’d also been secretly relieved that she was for the moment behaving like any other normal mother, and now two chocolate-rimmed mugs sat on the floor in front of them, sunk into the deep pile of the basement’s shag carpet.

  ‘Do you want to do the Ouija board?’ Isla said. Her thick mass of spongy blonde curls was piled high on her head, and her eyelids were crusted with liquid liner from a makeover session earlier in the evening.

  Jenny shook her head. ‘Not right now.’ The Ouija board had freaked her out ever since an incident at a sleepover with her soccer team the year before, when the arrow had jumped frenetically across the board, calling out threats to each of the girls gathered around it. When Jenny had told her mother the story, her mother had heavily suggested that the culprit was not, in fact, the spirit of Becky Tassenhoff’s mean dead aunt, as suggested, but Becky Tassenhoff herself, whose parents had been going through a nasty divorce – much like Jenny’s own parents had the year before – and who’d been showing signs of the strain. Still, the Ouija had said that Jenny’s hair would all fall out, and she’d spent the next six months waking up in a panic, expecting to find handfuls of her long auburn hair lying limply on the pillow in great tangled tufts.

  Isla threw a couple of pillows onto the floor and plonked down on top of them. Their sleeping bags were rolled out already, but it was still too early to climb into them. ‘Julia Roberts is so pretty,’ she said, picking at a piece of fluff in the carpet.

  ‘You totally look like her,’ Jenny said, reaching up to touch the French braid Isla had threaded into her hair earlier in the evening. It was lopsided, Jenny could feel that without looking at it. She itched to take it out and do it herself, straight this time, but she didn’t want to hurt Isla’s feelings.

  ‘God, I wish.’ Isla kicked idly at one of the pillows and twisted herself into a new tangle of limbs. Isla had started growing at eleven and – now five foot eight – showed no signs of stopping. She was a string bean of a girl, all elbows and knees, with long, flat feet attached to her skinny legs like flippers. On the days she came home crying because one of the boys in her class had called her Lurch or ironing board or Gumby, her mother would brush her damp curls away from her eyes and tell her that one day she’d appreciate her long legs and slim frame. Trust me, she’d say, holding her by the shoulders with her plump hands, one day they’ll all be jealous of you. But Isla couldn’t see how that was possible, with her flat chest and knobbly knees, and her wide-set eyes too big for her face. She wanted to be like Tina Walker, tiny and petite except for her massive chest, which she displayed to full effect in scoop-necked Abercrombie shirts. ‘What do you think it would be like?’ Isla said.

  Jenny glanced at her. ‘What would what be like?’

  ‘Being Julia Roberts in that movie.’

  Jenny thought about it for a minute. ‘Pretty bad, I think. I mean, Richard Gere is old, even if he is rich and kind of good-looking.’

  ‘But imagine being so pretty that a guy would pay all that money just to sleep with you,’ Isla said.

  ‘I guess.’ The thought made Jenny deeply nervous. In fact, any mention of sex made her squeamish, and while Isla had leaned forward during the scene where Richard Gere had led Julia Roberts into the bedroom, Jenny had secretly closed her eyes. Her mother, following her father’s affair and subsequent desertion in favor of his twenty-three-year-old tennis instructor, told her that sex was a drug just as bad as heroin, and that she should protect herself against it at all costs.

  ‘Do you think our lives will be like that?’ Isla asked, flipping over onto her stomach and looking up at Jenny from underneath her curls.

  ‘I hope not,’ Jenny said. A cool sweat broke out on the back of her neck. ‘I don’t want to be a prostitute.’

  ‘Not that!’ Isla laughed. ‘I mean, do you think our lives will be glamorous like that? And exciting?’

  The thought settled between the two girls. At the moment, in Jenny’s mom’s basement in suburban New Jersey, it seemed unlikely.

  ‘Maybe,’ Jenny said uncertainly. And then, more firmly this time, ‘Sure.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  Isla picked at the last few chips of polish still clinging to her thumbnail. ‘Sometimes I feel like I’m going to be stuck here for ever. Like Danny.’ Isla’s older sister had fallen pregnant during her senior year of high school, and now lived in the condos off Route 13 with her two-year-old and the father of her child, a guy called Jimmy, who had a Kawasaki motorcycle and an unconvincing moustache.

  ‘You are not going to be like Danny. We just have to have a plan. My mom always says that you can’t do anything without a plan.’

  Isla eyed her doubtfully. ‘Do you have a plan?’

  ‘Sort of. In my head at least. Do you?’

  Isla shrugged. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Wait, I know what we should do.’ Jenny jumped off the couch and ran up the carpeted steps in her socked feet. She returned a few minutes later holding a purple velour-covered notebook and a sparkly silver pen. She’d got the notebook for Christmas last year, but it had been too pretty for her to use – surely anything she’d write in it wouldn’t match up to its beauty? But this, she decided, was important, and should be treated as such. She curled back up on the sofa and cracked open the spine. ‘Okay,’ she said, voice firm, ‘we’re going to write down all of the things we want to do with our lives.’

  ‘All of the things?’

  Jenny nodded. ‘That way we’ll have a plan that we can follow, and we’ll both know about each other’s plan, so we’ll kno
w if the other person isn’t following it. It’s called accountability.’ Jenny had heard the word on an episode of Oprah a few weeks ago, and was very pleased with her use of it here.

  ‘So, like a life list?’

  Jenny nodded triumphantly. ‘Exactly.’

  Isla thought about this for a minute. She didn’t like the idea of sharing her dream of being a doctor, even with her best friend. She’d once hinted to her father what she wanted to be when she grew up and he’d laughed and patted her on the head, and told her that maybe, if she studied hard, she could be a nurse. She looked up at Jenny’s face staring down at her, her green eyes wide, and knew that if there was one person she could trust, it was her. Plus, she knew Jenny well enough to know that once she got a plan in her head, there was no dissuading her, and if Isla wanted to go to sleep anytime that night she’d better get on board with the life list idea.

  ‘Okay,’ Jenny said, brandishing her sparkly pen like a weapon. There was a tuft of pink feathers affixed to the top of it, and it bobbed gently as her pen moved across the page. ‘You go first.’

  Isla groaned. ‘Fine. Where do we start?’

  ‘I think we should be super detailed about it. Like, not just where we want to be when we’re thirty, but where we want to be in six months, and two years, and so on. It’s called mapping.’ The details of the Oprah show had come flooding back now, and Jenny pinked with pleasure at being able to recall them.

  ‘I want to be hot,’ Isla said, ‘like, psycho hot.’ Jenny started scribbling in the notebook. ‘Wait, you’re not writing that down, are you?’

  ‘Of course I am! It’s called visualization.’ Maybe she could teach a course on this, Jenny wondered. She was obviously some sort of genius at it.

  ‘God, this is so embarrassing.’

  They heard heavy footsteps on the floor above, and then a light appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘Girls, it’s late,’ Jenny’s mom called. ‘Lights out soon, okay?’

  ‘Fine, Mom!’ Jenny called, rolling her eyes at Isla. ‘Okay, where were we. Psycho hot … What’s next?’

  The pages filled up with the girls’ aspirations and dreams, until finally, just as the early morning light began to sneak through the small, high windows, the full picture of their futures had taken shape.

  1

  I leaned into the mirror and swiped another slick of Fuchsia-licious onto my lips and blotted with a piece of toilet paper. It left a faint white fuzz behind, and I rubbed at it with my fingertip. Great, now I looked like a kid who’d eaten a bucket of raspberries. I sighed and wiped the whole lot off with a wet paper towel. I looked like a deranged clown in lipstick, anyway. I slid on a layer of lip balm and smiled to check my teeth for any errant pink smudges. All clear.

  ‘Lovely dress!’ I looked up to see Florence from accounts staring at me closely as she washed her hands. She looked genuinely suspicious to see my legs unsheathed from their usual smart black trousers. ‘Going somewhere nice?’

  ‘Burnt Sienna,’ I said, trying and failing to sound casual. Burnt Sienna was the hottest restaurant in London at the minute, complete with a brash young hot-shot chef, and an aquarium filled with mini sharks. Christopher must have made the reservation months ago. When he told me where we were going tonight, I knew what would happen. I just knew.

  ‘Ooh, look at you! Special occasion?’

  ‘My birthday.’ I shrugged.

  Florence clapped her hands together and did a little hop. ‘I didn’t know it was your birthday! We should have done cake and champers in the office to celebrate!’

  I tried not to flinch at the word ‘champers’. It was on my list of gross words, along with nibbles, cuddly, and the reigning champion of gross, moist. ‘I’m not big on birthdays,’ I said.

  ‘Spoilsport! Well, have a lovely time tonight! See if you can get a photo with that chef – he’s super hot.’ She gave me a little wave before rushing out.

  I stood back and assessed my reflection. I’d already redone the liquid eyeliner twice, and my left eye was still a little different from the right. Not that anyone would be able to tell unless I closed my eyes for some kind of inspection, but still, I would know. Tonight had to be perfect, including the eyeliner. I got the tube back out of my make-up bag and dabbed at the black swoosh that hugged my lash line. I squinted in the mirror. There. Perfect.

  It was true that I wasn’t big on birthdays. I’d never thrown myself a party, or taken myself away for a pampering spa day. (Pamper. Add that to the gross words list). Most years I was happy with a takeaway on the couch, and a quick splurge in H&M. This year, though, this year was different.

  What I couldn’t tell Florence was that this was the year I was going to marry my soulmate. I could picture the words on the list, written in the bubbly handwriting of my thirteen-year-old self. ‘Number 27: Marry soulmate when thirty-one.’ I was already behind (Number 25 was get engaged when thirty), but I’d always liked a challenge, and people planned a wedding in a year all the time. It was romantic! And now, on my thirty-first birthday, I was confident that everything would be back on track by the end of the night.

  That’s why it had to be perfect – not because it was my birthday, but because it was the night I was going to get engaged. I was sure of it.

  Well, not a hundred per cent sure, but pretty confident. Christopher was definitely my soulmate – we’d been with each other for six years, and we were perfect together – and we’d need at least ten months to plan a transatlantic wedding, so that didn’t leave a whole lot of time for him to propose. Sure, he didn’t exactly know about my list – no one did, except for Isla – but I’m sure he could sense that it was time for us to take the next step. So when he told me that we were going to Burnt Sienna tonight I just knew: tonight was the night.

  It was six o’clock on a Tuesday, so most of my co-workers were still locked into their desks, pecking away at keyboards and studying spreadsheets. I didn’t want to call attention to the fact that I was ducking out early, so I grabbed my bag and coat from my cubicle and headed for the door.

  The restaurant was on the South Bank, so I wound my way through Charing Cross and over Jubilee Bridge. It was early March, and the sky was dimming with dusk. The air still held the coal-edged smell of cold, and the wind cut straight through the leather bomber jacket I’d decided looked best with my little black dress that morning. Men in gray suits hustled past, and women clicked along the paving stones in their high heels. Everyone and everything seemed to have been painted in the same palette of gray.

  Despite the cold, tourists still thronged the bridge, blocking the path in their threes and fours, heads tilted outwards towards the river, mouths slightly ajar. I pushed past them. I’d been in London for three years now, and the sights that I’d once only seen on postcards were now just background noise, and the people who flocked to London to see them were basically human-shaped obstacles to be hurtled and dodged.

  I took a deep breath and felt my lungs fill with the cold air. Tonight, Christopher was going to ask me to marry him. My heart fluttered at the thought. Everything was working out exactly how I imagined it would. I just hoped I could work up a convincingly surprised expression when he popped the question.

  We’d agreed to meet in the bar of the BFI. I spotted him as soon as I walked in. He was sitting at a table in the corner, glass of red wine in front of him, staring down at the phone in his hand with a frown. His dark hair, usually combed neatly into submission, had started to curl at the ends after the long working day, and there was a faint shadow of stubble across his chin.

  Six years – six whole years! – and the sight of him still had the power to make me swoon like a heroine in a Mills and Boon novel. How could that happen? Weren’t there studies that proved this sort of thing was chemically impossible? Wasn’t I supposed to be inured to him by this point, as familiar as a favorite armchair or bathrobe?

  He looked up, caught my eye, and smiled, and my stomach flipped.

  I walked over to the table as he
stood up to kiss me. ‘Happy birthday, darling,’ he said, before taking my coat and settling it on the back of my chair. ‘I’ll get you a drink. What would you like?’

  ‘Gin and tonic, please.’

  ‘Right, I’ll just be a tick.’

  Maybe it was the accent. He’d been born in Wales, but his parents had moved up to London when he was eight and enroled him in a series of expensive (and from what I could gather, draconian) private schools, which had left him with an accent that drifted between soft lilting consonants and crisp aristocratic vowels. To my American ears, he sounded like Hugh Grant, though he hated it if I said that. Despite the harsh private school education, and the fact that his best friend was called Jonno, he soundly rejected any intimation that he was posh. ‘I’m from Penmaenpool!’ he’d scowl, his Welsh accent surging forward. ‘I’m not bloody posh!’ Anyway, I still think he sounds like Hugh Grant. Just don’t tell him I said so.

  ‘Here you are.’ He handed me my drink and sat down. ‘How was your day? Did anyone sing “Happy Birthday” to you? Was there cake?’

  I shook my head. ‘I kept it pretty quiet.’

  ‘Ah, that’s a shame. Well, I’ve got a bit of a surprise planned that will hopefully make up for it.’

  ‘You do? Tell me!’

  He laughed. ‘That would sort of negate the point of the surprise, wouldn’t it? You’ll just have to be patient.’ I raised my eyebrows. ‘I know, I know, that isn’t your strong suit!’

  We finished our drinks and headed back out into the cold. The restaurant was tucked down Gabriel’s Wharf, a place more traditionally known for its pizza joints, fish and chip shops, and galleries selling overpriced watercolors than for fine dining. The exterior of Burnt Sienna didn’t give any clues away, either. The outside of the building was clad in chipboard, and, rather than a proper sign, the name was scrawled in chalk on the window. We stood outside and looked at each other.

  ‘This is definitely the right place …’ Christopher said uncertainly.