Penelope

by Rebecca Harrington

  Inside, the field was overrun with people, none of whom Penelope had seen before, even though they were ostensibly her classmates. There were several U-Hauls parked on the grass. It was hard to decide what the U-Hauls were doing or why they were there. Many of them had grills set up but were not serving food. Some of them had empty bottles of alcohol strewn near them, but no actual alcohol was being served. One or two were playing music and people were dancing in front of them, but Penelope had a morbid hatred of dancing when it was light out. If Penelope had a daytime wedding, for example, she would eliminate dancing from the order of the event. It had no place.

  “What time do you think people got here?” asked Penelope.

  “No idea,” said Ted.

  “This looks so fun!” said Catherine, dancing in place.

  “Do you think there is any food here?” said Penelope.

  “I don’t see any,” said Ted.

  “I want to dance!” said Catherine. She started grinding up against Ted aggressively. Ted started dancing too. Penelope understood why he had never really danced in front of her previously.

  “I think I might just go into the game,” said Penelope.

  “Are you sure?” asked Ted.

  “We’ll meet you in there!” said Catherine. She took Ted by the sweatshirt and led him to the dancing U-Haul.

  Penelope was suffused with relief. If Gustav called her now, she would be unencumbered.

  By the time Penelope took her seat, so far away from the field that she was alone in her own section, the crowd was already enjoying the halftime show. It was World War I themed, said the announcer into a loudspeaker. At the climax, a red papier-mâché plane representing Harvard flew into a blue papier-mâché Yale bulldog.

  The game resumed. Penelope did not know anything about football, so she people-watched. The crowd was generally old and clad in fur coats. There were current students at the game too, but they seemed to be a constantly fluctuating, less vocal maroon number, like a small, sad, consumptive sister to the robust alumni of yore. At one point, a male Harvard cheerleader launched himself into the crowd to attack a male Yale cheerleader. This was the point when Ted and Catherine found Penelope. Penelope saw them striding up the steps to her section and felt that she now knew the exact feeling associated with the expression “living on borrowed time.” Gustav still hadn’t texted.

  “There you are,” said Ted. “It took forever to find you! Why did you sit all the way up here?”

  “Did you see that guy just attack the Yale cheerleader?” said Catherine, wide-eyed.

  “Yeah,” asked Penelope. “I didn’t really understand that. Do you know who is winning?”

  “It was crazy,” said Catherine.

  Ted and Catherine sat down next to Penelope. It seemed that despite the police crackdown, they had been drinking since daytime dancing at the U-Haul. Catherine immediately fell asleep with her head on Ted’s lap. Ted’s bangs were down, and he had a dried patch of ketchup next to his lip that he seemed unaware of.

  “So this is fun,” said Ted. Catherine started to snore loudly.

  “I guess,” said Penelope. She checked her phone. No word from Gustav.

  “Why do you keep checking your phone? Are you waiting for that European guy to call you?”

  “No,” said Penelope. “He said he would text me.”

  “And he hasn’t yet?” said Ted.

  “No,” said Penelope.

  “If he really wanted to hang out with you,” said Ted in a malicious tone that Penelope did not appreciate, “he would text you to watch the game with him. With us! So we can all go on the double date. I think he is blowing you off.”

  “Maybe you are right,” said Penelope. Penelope had thought of many scenarios associated with Gustav, but the one she hadn’t anticipated was that he wouldn’t call or text her at all. Once confronted with the truth, she felt a mixture of relief and disappointment. The whole situation with Ted, however, seemed far more intolerable if this was to be an accepted fact.

  It seemed as if the game was in its final minutes forever. It was very close because each side kept fumbling the ball and throwing incomplete passes at each other.

  “The weird thing about bad football is the heightened suspense,” said Penelope during the third overtime. Ted and Catherine were both sleeping and didn’t respond.

  After the game was over, Penelope roused Ted and Catherine and all three of them walked back toward Pennypacker. It was starting to get dark.

  “Well, what do you want to do now?” asked Ted.

  “I think everybody is studying tonight,” said Catherine in a slurred voice.

  “You wouldn’t think that would be the case,” said Penelope, “considering this is supposedly the most celebratory school-sponsored event of the year.”

  “We could go to my room, I guess, and watch a movie,” said Ted.

  “That’s fine,” said Penelope. Just then, Penelope got a text. It was from Gustav. It read as follows:

  “Terribly sorry to have missed you today. Wasn’t able to stay for the festivities myself. Skiing in Japan for foreseeable future and Mum sent the jet early. Drinks when we get back? xx”

  Penelope laughed with happiness.

  “Why are you laughing?” asked Ted.

  “Oh, no reason,” said Penelope.

  “Did you get a text from that guy?” asked Ted.

  “No,” said Penelope. Ted grabbed the phone from her and read the text.

  “He’s probably at the S— right now and that’s a lie.”

  “I think he’s in Japan,” said Penelope.

  “You don’t have any reason for thinking that,” said Ted.

  “I don’t know,” said Penelope. “But I think you should just put Catherine to bed. She can’t watch a movie. She is drooling on your sweatshirt.”

  Two days after Harvard-Yale, Penelope took the bus home to celebrate Thanksgiving. She was happy to leave school. Recently, Raymond had started leaping into the shower while Penelope was washing her hair and watching her steadily until she was finished. Formerly, Penelope had thought cats were afraid of the water.

  Penelope returned to school on Sunday and dutifully waited for Gustav to call her. He didn’t. Two weeks after Thanksgiving break, Penelope had still not heard from him. Penelope never mentioned it to anyone, but this made her feel very bad. Every time her mother called her to talk, she was momentarily excited because she thought it was Gustav. Every time Ted and Catherine texted her to go to dinner, she always briefly thought Gustav was calling her to go clubbing. Ted asked her about Gustav all the time. He seemed to take great triumph in being right about him, like the narrator in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

  Penelope thought about asking Emma or Lan about Gustav, but it seemed like a bad idea. Lan probably didn’t know Gustav and would definitely hate him if she ever met him. Penelope didn’t think Emma would be very congenial to the idea that she and Gustav had a date and, instinctively, never mentioned he had texted her at all.

  The only comfort Penelope had was that Gustav might not be back yet from Thanksgiving, although the longer she was back at school, the more unlikely this seemed, considering they were about to go on vacation again for Christmas in a couple of weeks. She had two Counting People sections after break and Gustav did not show up to either of them; he was not the most assiduous student. It was unfortunate he did not attend the section, considering that they had a very important final project for the class coming up, the country report, and Jared gave a lot of notes about it that Penelope did not write down.

  The country report was the centerpiece of Counting People and the main portion of the course grade. Its mere mention made Jared voluble. It involved graphs and Excel spreadsheets as well as written content that analyzed the census data of the particular country on which one was doing one’s report. Penelope had the sense that people had been working on their reports for weeks. She had not started hers yet, but she had picked her country. She had selected Luxembourg, as th
e capital of Luxembourg is also Luxembourg.

  The problem with Luxembourg was that it had very little census data. Penelope figured this out about Luxembourg the day before the country report was due. She relayed this fact to everyone at dinner.

  “I looked in all the databases,” said Penelope, drinking some chocolate milk for emphasis. “I really think the census in Luxembourg is not very thorough. I should complain to their chamber of commerce.”

  “You should have never picked Luxembourg. You should have picked a country more important to the world than Luxembourg,” said Nikil.

  “I would have picked Brazil,” said Catherine. “That country is so interesting.”

  “Or do a country that needs more attention. Luxembourg is a pretty shallow, Western-centric thing to pick. Why don’t you pick a country with real problems and issues?” said Glasses.

  “I don’t think these country reports help countries. Isn’t it cool that Luxembourg’s capital is Luxembourg?” said Penelope.

  “Do you have Excel on your computer?” asked Ted.

  “No,” said Penelope.

  “You have to go to the computer lab then, to do the graphs there. Do you know where the computer lab is?”

  “No,” said Penelope.

  “It’s in the basement of the Science Center,” said Nikil, disgusted.

  “OK,” said Penelope. “I have a lot of trouble with imagining graphs visually in my mind. This may be kind of hard for me.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly!” said Ted. “Graphing things in Excel is one of the easiest things you will ever do. It’s way easier than writing an Images of Shakespeare paper, and you can write those in like two hours.”

  “Oh, shut,” said Penelope. “Do you think that Luxembourg has so little census data because it is hard to keep track of the population amidst all the forest that is there?”

  No one said anything in reply and Penelope drank the rest of her chocolate milk.

  After dinner, Penelope walked over to the computer lab. After an hour of reading Wikipedia entries about Luxembourg, Penelope opened up Excel to start her project in earnest. This isn’t so bad, she thought as she entered the data for the graph she was creating about Luxembourg’s changing birth rate. It is just putting a number into a box. She pressed the button to graph the data sheet and a pie chart appeared. That’s odd, thought Penelope. I wanted a line graph. When she went back to her spreadsheet all her data was erased. Guess I have to do that again, she said to herself and shrugged.

  Over the next four hours, Penelope became increasingly frantic. At three in the morning, she started crying after she accidentally erased her line graph about birth cohorts for the third time. She had completed one graph out of twelve successfully and the report was due at noon the next day. She went out to the soda dispenser and got another Diet Coke.

  She was alone in the computer lab save for one extremely thin boy in a massive red T-shirt, who was playing a computer game that involved chatting to other people through a headset. Periodically, this boy would look at her and shake his head. Then he would go back to his game. Penelope wanted to rip his hair out.

  Penelope settled herself in her seat again. I can do this! she thought. She cracked her knuckles. She readjusted herself in her seat. She put all of Luxembourg’s death rates in one row and all the years that the death rates were measured in in another row. She pressed the graph button. A black square appeared on the computer screen.

  “Oh no!” yelled Penelope, who then dissolved into actual tears. Red T-shirt glared at her.

  “Are you really crying?” he asked Penelope.

  “Yes!” said Penelope.

  “What are you doing?”

  “A graph of Luxembourg,” said Penelope.

  “I bet that’s really easy,” said Red T-shirt.

  “No,” said Penelope. “It’s really hard.” Red T-shirt was not listening to her anymore. He was trash-talking his Internet compatriots.

  “Penelope,” said a voice from the corridor. “Is that you?” It was Gustav.

  Penelope turned around. “Yes,” she said. She tried to wipe her face, but she had a feeling she had made herself look worse.

  “Well, what are you doing here at the witching hour?” He strode into the room. Gustav was very tan and was wearing what seemed to be snow pants with shackles made out of nylon wrapped around them. He sat down at the computer next to her and peered into her face. Penelope hoped it didn’t look too horrendous.

  “I should ask you the same question,” said Penelope. She hiccoughed.

  “Well, I am here because I just got back from Japan about two hours ago and have to do this demmed country report. Don’t have Excel on my computer. Jared’s been rather intractable as well. Wouldn’t give me an extension despite my pleading and a bishop’s letter.”

  “Well, that is what I am doing,” said Penelope, “and it is really hard.”

  “What country are you doing?”

  “Luxembourg.”

  Gustav guffawed.

  “The long-neglected topic,” he said. He had grown a slight beard during his trip to Japan.

  “Which one are you doing?”

  “Inner Mongolia. Or Outer Mongolia, whichever one is an actual country,” said Gustav.

  “Do you have all the census data?” asked Penelope.

  “Looked it up on the plane. Exceedingly boring country. No one has children anymore, yet archers abound.”

  “Well, good luck graphing it,” said Penelope.

  “Oh. Graphing? This shouldn’t be hard at all. It’s merely putting numbers in a box.”

  “That is what I thought,” said Penelope in a monotone. She turned back to her computer. Both she and Gustav graphed silently for ten minutes.

  “Why, that’s odd,” said Gustav. “Just erased my whole graph by accident. How did that happen? I guess I should start over.”

  Gustav kept graphing.

  “I say,” said Gustav, “what kind of program is this? I didn’t want a pie chart of any kind. Penelope, why did it give me a pie chart?”

  “Hold on,” said Penelope. “I may have actually figured something out.”

  “Finally!” said Red T-shirt.

  “The boy is rather a pill,” said Gustav.

  “You guys are pills!” yelled Red T-shirt.

  “OK,” said Penelope. She walked over to Gustav’s computer station. “I think this is what you do, so it doesn’t erase everything all the time.”

  “Oh, dear God, by Jove, you’ve got it! How did you figure that out?”

  “Trial and error,” said Penelope.

  “Also, you cried for like ever,” said Red T-shirt.

  “What game are you playing?” said Gustav.

  “Myth II: Soulblighter,” said the kid.

  “Well, then, you have no business ridiculing this fine lady.”

  “Whatever,” said Red T-shirt.

  “Thank you, Penelope,” said Gustav. “You have shown me the truth of graphing.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Penelope, who resumed her seat.

  At 6:30 in the morning, Penelope finished her final graph. She had had three Red Bulls over the course of the night and she was wearing the worst bra possible. Gustav preserved his good looks well into the morning hours. The computer lab was, perhaps, the site of the most continuous self-recriminations Penelope had ever endured. She decided to take a brief nap.

  “Darling, you can’t sleep with your head against the computer screen,” said Gustav. “I’m afraid you will permanently ruin your posture.”

  “How long have I been like that?” asked Penelope.

  “About an hour or so,” said Gustav. “Didn’t want to wake you initially, but your positioning seemed to become more and more uncomfortable as time marched on. Plus, according to my calculations, you only have about four hours to complete the written portion of the country report.”

  “Is it already eight?” asked Penelope, suddenly sitting upright.

  “Yes,” said
Gustav. “I myself just finished the graphing portion of the thing and am now going to get myself a cup of coffee. I will be back.” He strode out of the room without a jacket.

  Gustav came back about half an hour later with several coffees and a large white bag. He sat down in front of his computer and set the bag down on the table between him and Penelope.

  “Here, ma’am, is a coffee for you.”

  “Thank you so much!” said Penelope.

  “I got four coffees, because stupidly I did not ask how you liked yours. Also, considering we must write until noon today, we will probably drink all of them no matter how they are prepared.”

  “I love coffee of any kind, really,” said Penelope.

  “How far are you in your treatment of Luxembourg?”

  “Not very far. I might introduce a forestry section to take up space.”

  “Excellent idea.”

  “I definitely think it will be my most entertaining section,” said Penelope.

  “I am sure that Jared will appreciate it. And now to work,” said Gustav, who cracked his neck dramatically.

  Penelope sipped her coffee.

  Three hours passed. Penelope wrote as quickly as she ever had in her life. As time passed, she realized that each sentence she wrote had started to contain longer and longer words and make less and less sense in the logical context of the report.

  “Do you think ‘the amelioration and amalgamation of various disparate elements has made Luxembourg what it is today’ actually makes sense as a sentence?” asked Penelope.

  “I wouldn’t say that it exactly ‘makes sense,’ but I would say that the alliteration is very nice,” said Gustav.

  “I did think that was good,” said Penelope. “And I am also on my third coffee.”

  “Good girl,” said Gustav, typing madly.

  When it was ten minutes before noon, Penelope finally finished spell-checking her report. It wasn’t good, but it did have all the required parts, plus a unique comparison between the forests of Luxembourg and Belgium.

  “OK,” she said. “I am done. I am going to print it.”

  “I’m going to print too,” said Gustav. Penelope got up from her computer and stationed herself next to the printer. After two minutes of staring into space, willing herself to stay awake, she looked down at the screen.