Her mother sighed and said she’d see when she was free.
The next day, Penelope got off the school bus, but didn’t enter her building. Instead, she waited on the sidewalk outside the apartment for her brother to arrive. A game she and Stacy played as kids, Mother May I, was going through her head. Only it came out in an unexpected way:
Mother’s Helper, may I take a giant step?
Penelope knew from experience that the first days with a new mother’s helper were pretty uncomfortable.
Mother’s Helper, may I take a medium step?
She wondered if Jenny knew this.
Mother’s Helper, may I take a baby step?
Probably not! Probably Jenny had never even been a mother’s helper!
Penelope didn’t realize she was actually taking the steps. Had there been anyone looking at her from across the street, she might have looked like she was performing a particularly clunky modern dance number. She was mid-giant step when the elementary school bus inched to the corner, and Nathaniel disembarked, a scruffy eight-year-old in a satin baseball jacket and jeans that wrinkled at the knees.
“Hey, Penelope!”
Penelope fished inside her front pocket for a quarter. “Heads we go to Baronet and play videos, tails we go upstairs!” she responded.
“But Mom said we had to go straight home,” the boy warned.
“So? It’s not like Jenny is gonna know we went to Baronet. We can just tell her we get out at four-thirty on Tuesdays.” Penelope grabbed Nathaniel’s skinny wrist and inspected his Mickey Mouse watch. It was 4:01. “See? We have twenty-nine minutes.”
Nathaniel shuffled from foot to foot. “I gotta go to the bathroom!”
“Baronet has a bathroom.”
“It’s yucky.”
Penelope was already in a rotten mood, and her whining little brother was making it worse. He had a knack for doing that.
“Maybe she’s looking down at us right now?” Nathaniel tilted his head up to their apartment on the sixteenth floor. “Like how Ivy used to do.…” His voice got softer when he said the name “Ivy.” She’d been their mother’s helper for two years until she moved to California to attend graduate school, and if Penelope and Nathaniel agreed on anything, it was that they’d loved her very much.
“Yeah, well, she’s not Ivy. She’s not gonna know to do that. And anyway, she doesn’t know what we look like.”
Nathaniel’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “Fine, flip a coin,” he said. They squatted on the sidewalk, their backpacks by their sides. Penelope placed the quarter on her thumb and flicked it in the air. It did a triple somersault and landed with a plink on the cement: tails.
“Two outta three!” she yelped, grabbing the quarter to flip it again.
But Nathaniel stood up and walked toward the apartment. “Hey!” Penelope called, running to grab a satin elbow. She put on her sweetest voice and patted his dirty-blond head. “C’mon, Natty, pretty please! I’ll buy you a game of Asteroids.”
“Tails we go upstairs. You said. And, Pen, I really gotta go!”
“I’ll get you a Charleston Chew!” Penelope cooed. “They have strawberry there, just like you like.”
Nathaniel kept walking.
“Fine.” Penelope marched ahead of him. “Have it your way.”
Inside the lobby, the building’s doorman Carlos was using a rag, the same dark shade of green as his cap, to shine the wooden panel between elevators. “Hola, young Penelope and young Nathaniel.”
“Hola,” said Penelope and Nathaniel in unison.
Carlos beamed. He saw it as his personal mission to teach the kids in the building introductory Spanish. “So, the new lady’s upstairs,” he whispered conspiratorially.
“Yeah,” said Penelope, “we know.”
“Boy, do I feel sorry for you two.…” Carlos’s deep voice oozed with pity.
“What do you mean?” whispered Nathaniel, his body stiffening with fright.
“Well …,” said Carlos, crinkling his nose like he smelled garbage. “Let’s just say you’ll see for yourself.”
Penelope’s own stomach began to churn fearfully, until she remembered: Not only was Carlos the resident language instructor, he was also the building’s most artful storyteller. “He’s lying, dummy,” she blurted out, punching her brother’s bony shoulder.
“You’re getting too smart for your own good, Penelope!” Carlos said, laughing. He turned to Nathaniel. “Don’t worry, kiddo. She looks super nice. Maybe even as nice as the last one, and you know how I felt about her.” Carlos stopped wiping the counter to thump his wide chest with his hand. He’d loved Ivy as much as they had, and thumping his chest meant she had his heart.
The elevator doors heaved open to reveal the amber walls of the sixteenth floor, and with a quick turn of the head Penelope got her first glimpse of Jenny leaning in the doorway of the apartment. She smashed her eyelids shut and imagined that when she opened her eyes, Jenny wouldn’t be there. A gym teacher’s voice in her head yelled, Go back, go back! She wanted Jenny to backpedal like an outfielder going for a fly ball deep in center field. Except she’d just keep going back and back and back … until she disappeared. Poof! Gone!
Penelope walked blindly down the familiar hallway. Mother’s Helper, may I take a baby step? Another baby step? You didn’t say, ‘Mother’s Helper, may I’!
She cracked open her lids.
Was she gone?
No. She was there. Live, in color, and she smelled like the inside of an orange peel. “Are you Jenny?” swooned Nathaniel.
Penelope and Nathaniel hung their jackets on pegs in the front hall closet. “You guys want a snack?” Jenny asked.
“I’m hungry!” boomed Nathaniel as if this weren’t a boring answer to a boring question, but a big bright idea that had come to him from nowhere. “I’ll take a snack!”
“I thought you had to go to the bathroom so badly,” Penelope muttered to her brother. “Liar,” she whispered so only he could hear it.
Nathaniel shoved past Penelope and scurried down the hallway, limbs flying. “Oooh, I forgot!” he howled.
Of all the mother’s helpers the Schwartzbaums had ever employed, Jenny was definitely the prettiest. She had thick blond hair, glowy pink cheeks, and fluttery white eyelashes that made her green eyes twinkle when she blinked. In her stretched white sweatshirt worn inside out over the most faded Levi’s jeans Penelope had ever seen, Jenny gave an overall appearance of softness.
She seems nice, better than I had expected. Maybe she’ll be like Ivy. Maybe Jenny will make Carlos thump his chest. Nathaniel will love her, I will love her … and then …
Penelope shook her head from side to side, as if doing so would erase the thoughts inside it. Staring at the nice, pretty face, she had the sudden urge to get as far away from it as possible. “I forgot I have to go pick up some school supplies at Baronet,” she gulped. She ran into the kitchen and called Stacy. Then, her jacket was back on and she was in the elevator going down.
As a kid growing up in New York City, Penelope knew lots of ways to make walking down the street interesting.
Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back.
Don’t step on a line or you’ll hurt your father’s spine.
But scanning the streets for Moe Was Heres was her favorite. Moe was the Upper West Side’s most notorious graffiti artist. He scratched his name into phone booths, spray-painted it on subway cars, etched it in the sidewalk. Penelope had counted twenty-two Moe Was Heres on West End Avenue and Broadway between Ninetieth and Seventy-seventh streets alone. Finding new Moe Was Heres was a competition for kids on the Upper West Side. Like an Easter egg hunt, only every day and slightly more sinister. After all, what Moe did was graffiti. Which was illegal! Very illegal! There were always stories on the news about it and signs on lampposts and phone booths with warnings about how graffiti was a crime.
So, as Penelope walked the ten blocks from her house to Baronet, she kept her hea
d hanging down and her eyes peeled. On the corner of Eighty-sixth Street, there were the fading chalky remains of a hopscotch game; in between Eighty-fourth and Eighty-fifth, there was a train of pink silly string; Eighty-second was covered in litter from a blown-over trash can; and then, there on the northeast corner of Eighty-first Street, just as Penelope was turning toward Broadway, on a freshly paved square of sidewalk, she discovered #23.
Penelope bet she was the first kid in the neighborhood to find it! She’d definitely beaten Nathaniel. Served him right! She swooped down to get a closer look. What did Moe write his name with? A stick? His finger? She dipped her second finger inside the first line of the “M.” Wow! It would take three of her thumbs to fill one line. If Moe used a finger, he was probably a giant.…
Just then, a heavy panting sound came from behind her. They were sloppy, slurry breathing sounds. And snapping to attention, Penelope became aware of what she must look like sitting in the middle of a city sidewalk. A skimpy girl. Vulnerable. All alone. You always heard stories about New York City kids getting mugged … or followed … or kidnapped. This kid in her class, Billy Stern, had been mugged five times! Penelope said a silent good-bye to the ten dollars in her pocket and whipped her head around.…
She was face-to-face with a frothy pink tongue, which, when you think about it, really meant that she was face-to-tongue.
The tongue hung from the open mouth of a shaggy brown dog attached to a long red leash. Penelope’s eyes traced the leash up gray sweatpants splattered with paint, up the sleeve of a patchy olive green army jacket covered in different colored buttons, up the long, pale neck of a girl. At least Penelope thought it was a girl. It was hard to tell because of the blue corduroy baseball hat that covered her forehead and hit the rims of gigantic heart-shaped sunglasses.
The sunglasses had been very popular over the summer. They would have been the most normal part of the outfit had they not been missing one lens, so that one eye hid behind black plastic and the other, a brown coffee bean of an eye, stared flatly ahead.
“S-sorry,” Penelope stumbled, untwisting herself and standing all the way up. The dog’s tongue lapped at her leg and she stepped back, bumping smack into a short, bald man wielding a metal shopping cart full of brown grocery bags. A green apple flew out of a bag as the wagon hit the curb and the dog lunged for it, expertly snaring it in her teeth.
“Sorry!” called Penelope as the bald man teetered away, cursing under his breath. Penelope watched as he rolled his cart unevenly across the street. The light turned from yellow to red before he could get across, and a van beeped impatiently.
The strange girl chomped on a wad of bubble gum, staring with her one visible eye at Penelope. “Why?” she asked.
Huh? thought Penelope. “Why what?”
“Why are you sorry?” The girl blew a bubble. It popped, and she peeled it off her nose.
“I was in your way. I made that guy lose an apple,” Penelope dully explained, not entirely sure why she was still standing there.
The gum sloshed in the girl’s mouth when she talked. “It’s a free country. You can stand where you want. And apples are cheap. Plus, look how much Sylvia Hempel likes it.” Hearing her name, the dog lifted her snout in the air, crunching gleefully.
What kind of name for a dog is Sylvia Hempel? thought Penelope.
“You shouldn’t feel you have to say sorry all the time. My philosophy is only say what you mean. So, I say sorry if I’m really sorry. And that’s not very often.”
“Well, I like to be polite,” Penelope replied, if not a little smugly. She was pleased to have a response.
But the strange girl wasn’t fazed. She just grinned and pointed to a cluster of buttons on her jacket. There was one with a peace sign on it, another that said: WHEN THE GOING GETS TOUGH, I GET TOUGHER. But the button the girl was pointing her stubby finger at read: POLITICS ARE NOT POLITE. Penelope had no idea what that meant.
Some people can make you feel a certain way just by looking at you. With her one uncovered eye, this girl made Penelope feel like there was a big joke that everyone except Penelope was in on. It wasn’t a feeling she particularly liked. “So, you’re into Moe? I think he’s a genius. People don’t get that he’s making a statement. I think that’s the most important thing: making a statement. I try to make one every day.” She pointed to another button on her jacket. In thick blue letters, it said: IT’S NOT UNKIND TO SPEAK YOUR MIND. “I think that’s important, don’t you?” Penelope didn’t say anything, which didn’t stop the girl from continuing. “So I heard a rumor Moe’s really Kip Harwood.”
When Penelope didn’t respond, the girl said: “Oh, do you not know who that is? He’s this really important artist who lives downtown. I think it might be him. What do you think?” Penelope shrugged. “Not much of a detective, are you? You’re no Miss Marple. Oh, you don’t know who that is, either? Wow! You mean you don’t read Agatha Christie? I’ve read every single one. Twice. I like Hercule Poirot better than Miss Marple. He’s the other detective.”
Penelope had no idea what this girl was talking about. And she had no idea why she was still standing on the sidewalk listening to her. So when Sylvia Hempel tossed the apple core at the girl’s dirty sneakers and the girl went to pick it up, Penelope stole away, tearing across the street just as the light was turning red.
“Hey! What’s your name?” called the girl.
Penelope kept running.
A crazy person! Penelope had just spent five minutes talking to a crazy person! She was a city kid, warned all her life not to talk to strangers, let alone crazy ones!
“Sylvia Hempel says thanks for the apple!” the girl cackled. “See? She’s very polite!”
As Penelope jogged toward Broadway, she thought she could hear Sylvia Hempel’s toenails clicking behind her, but maybe she was just being paranoid.
Baronet had video games upstairs, and Stacy and Penelope shopped for school supplies to the sound of asteroids smashing. They needed graph paper and protractors for Algebra, composition books for English, and three-by-five index cards for Fundamental Languages, a class in which they studied seven languages in one year (that way, come eighth grade, they’d be prepared to pick a language to study through high school).
Penelope stood before the pen display. She tried a pink felt-tip marker, drawing a little squiggle on the pad of paper they kept for sampling. Someone had written in thick blue scrawl . It reminded Penelope of Moe #23. “I heard Moe might really be this famous downtown artist,” she told Stacy.
“Really? Who told you that?”
“Hmmmm, uh, well, I don’t remember,” fumbled Penelope, feeling funny — for some reason — about mentioning her encounter with the strange girl.
Stacy skimmed her hand along a row of plastic binders. “Well, I heard ‘Moe Was Here’ really means ‘Worship the Devil.’ ”
Penelope drew a heart with a green ballpoint. “What does that mean?”
“That it’s not like one weirdo writing his name, it’s a bunch of people, like a cult. They write ‘Moe Was Here’ ’cause it’s code for ‘Worship the Devil.’ ”
“Who would do that?” Penelope put an arrow through the heart.
“I don’t know. Creepy people.”
“Creepy how?” Penelope switched to a peach highlighter.
“Just creepy,” Stacy said, annoyed.
“But how?”
“What does it make a difference? Creepy is creepy.”
“How do you know it’s not one guy?”
“Why do you have to be so dense? Even if it is one guy, he’s still a creep. Anyone who writes his name all over the city has serious problems. You know that movie about the insane asylum where they give that crazy guy a lobotomy? That’s what they should do to Moe.” Stacy paused to look at the price tag on a plastic zippered pencil case. “I mean, IF he exists.”
Penelope wondered if a day would go by when she didn’t ask somebody to define something. “What’s a lobotomy?” she asked
, returning the highlighter to its place and moving toward the composition books.
“An operation where they make you brain dead. Like a zombie.” Stacy picked up a packet of index cards. “You’d better work on your vocabulary. We’re gonna have SATs.”
“I thought not till eleventh grade,” said Penelope.
“Yeah, but you should start now,” Stacy declared in her most authoritative way.
It was nearly evening, and Penelope walked home with a brisk, determined step, clutching the bag from Baronet against her chest.
New school supplies. New teachers. New kids. New Moes. New mother’s helper. New, new, new. When she wasn’t having strange encounters with crazy girls and their dogs, there was no street more comforting than West End Avenue, and Penelope basked in the familiarity of the ten blocks between Baronet and home. The awnings from apartment buildings cast cool shadows on the sidewalk, and she made a game of speeding underneath them as quickly as possible so she could get back into the sun.
She didn’t know what she expected to find at home, but a totally calm dinner scene was not it. Shouldn’t Jenny be just a little bit worried? Instead, she just smiled serenely and said, “Hi, you get what you needed? Ready for dinner? We’re having breaded chicken. Nathaniel said it was your favorite.”
Nathaniel’s face burst into a maniacal grin. Breaded chicken was his favorite.
“Seventh grade. Big year. Lots of homework, I bet.” Jenny was talking to Penelope, but her brother answered.
“I have lots of homework!” he crooned. Nathaniel always acted like this when he was around new people; like a total show-off.
“Eight-year-olds do not have real homework.” Penelope stabbed at a niblet of corn.
“I do! I have to do my workbook!” Nathaniel took a jubilant chomp of a dinner roll. Crumbs spattered his front.
“One dumb workbook page is not homework. It’ll take you two minutes, and then you’ll get a gold star.”
Seventh Grade in the Life of Me, Penelope Page 3