Seventh Grade in the Life of Me, Penelope Read online

  Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  By the time she got to her Earth Science textbook, she was bored. She started experimenting. She did bubble letters:

  She slanted her letters to the right.

  Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  She did all lowercase.

  penelope b. schwartzbaum

  All caps.

  PENELOPE B. SCHWARTZBAUM

  She did script.

  Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  All the millions of ways one could tilt one’s pen, all the trillions of ways one could puff one’s Ps, loop one’s Ls: It filled Penelope up — as if the world were bigger than she could ever imagine. Bigger than Stacy and Dr. Alvin, bigger than the Upper East Side and Upper West Side combined. Her pen did its orderly dance across the page, and the world felt calm like the Hudson River on a dark, warm night.

  A Quiz for Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Prepared by Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Name: Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Age: 12

  Grade: 7th

  Color of Hair: Brown

  Color of Eyes: Green

  Height: 5′ 2″

  Weight: Don’t have a scale!

  Favorite Food: Pizza

  Least Favorite Food: Marzipan (Don’t try it. It’s gross.)

  Favorite Outfit: Anything Polo, and everything should match.

  Best Friend: Stacy Commack (Of course!)

  Are Your Parents Married, Divorced, or Separated? (Underline one.)

  Favorite Television Show: General Hospital (Of course, again!)

  To be continued …

  Pia Smith sent a clipboard skidding like an air hockey puck across the table. She was a pie-faced girl with a wide space between her eyes, frizzy hair pulled back with shiny purple combs, and a bad habit of saying every sentence like a question. “Sign this?” she ordered, plopping across from Stacy and Penelope.

  Penelope dunked a chicken finger into a glob of ketchup. “What is it?” Stacy asked.

  “It’s The Pledge. Just sign it, will you?”

  Penelope and Stacy read from the ruled paper snapped to the clipboard:

  THE PLEDGE

  I WENT TO ELSTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL.

  I PLEDGE NOT TO BECOME FRIENDS WITH ANY NEW KIDS.

  THAT MEANS I WILL NOT GO OVER TO THE HOUSE OF or ATTEND PARTIES OF or TALK (MORE THAN ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY) TO KIDS WHO JUST STARTED ELSTON.

  “What’s the problem with the new kids?” Stacy sounded purposeful, like an interviewer on 60 Minutes, a tactic she’d picked up from her mother.

  “They’re all abnormal,” answered Pia, reaching across the table to snatch a chicken finger off Penelope’s plate. She had half of it in her mouth when she thought to ask, “Mind if I have one?” Pia was always dieting but could often be found eating off other people’s plates. “We’re getting T-shirts that say NO NEWKS. You know, spelled: N-E-W-K-S? Like ‘NO NUKES’? As in ‘NO NUCLEAR WAR’? If you sign now, you’ll definitely get one. They’re going to be cute and for a good cause. I’m telling you, new kids suck.”

  Pia spat the last angry sentence, then looked around proudly as if she hoped a new kid had heard her. But they were too far away. While the Elston Elementary alumni ate lunch in the center of the cafeteria, the new kids dined at the tables on the outskirts — like tiny islands surrounding a dark, impenetrable sea.

  “Trust me,” insisted Pia. “I’ve talked to a bunch of them. They’re rude, and anyway, it’s the principle of the thing. Ever heard of loyalty? We should stick together.”

  Stacy inspected the clipboard with deliberation. “Who wrote this?” she asked, even though she knew it had been Annabella Blumberg. Annabella had been the brains behind last year’s very successful Roll Up Your Left Pant Leg If You Hate Hallie Alterman Day and the equally effective Put a Sticker on Your Notebook If You Think Richie Chernovsky Smells Day, and this was just the kind of thing she would organize — or have someone else organize.

  That someone else was always Pia.

  Pia was Annabella’s best friend, her assistant in command, her head negotiator in chief, and her fiercest protector. She was scariest when she was around Annabella. Alone, she was easier to say no to. Or at least maybe.

  “We need to think about it,” Stacy said plainly.

  “What?” Pia sounded dumbfounded.

  “Penelope and I, we need to think about it.” As the words left Stacy’s mouth again, time seemed to slow down so that Penelope could actually see Pia’s face go from pink to magenta to scarlet.

  “Penelope and I, we need to think about it.” Penelope heard the words again in her head.

  A disgusted Pia nabbed the clipboard from Stacy, turned on her heels as if to leave, then turned back to grab Penelope’s last chicken finger. “I bet if Annabella had asked, then you would have signed,” she grumbled before thumping off in a huff.

  “Wow,” whistled Stacy, taking a sip of her Pepsi Light.

  On any other day, Penelope might have relished the moments after a scene like that — rarely did life flare up so dramatically, and in her presence. But today, all she could think was: “We need to think about it.” Not I need to think about it. We! Are we a “we”? Do I want to sign something? Do I want to make a pledge?

  “What’s wrong with you?” asked Stacy. “You look weird. Like you have something to say.”

  Penelope opened her mouth to talk, but her thoughts were going too fast for her mouth. She thought: We’re not a we. We don’t match. She hadn’t planned on saying the words out loud, but they tumbled from her lips like static-y socks flying out of an open dryer.

  “We’renotawe.Wedon’tmatch.”

  Had the words left her mouth? They had! She hadn’t meant for them to! Penelope’s hand flew in front of her mouth, as if she could physically stop any more stupid words from coming out. Two tables over, a pyramid of soda cans crashed with a giant clang.

  “Huh?” said Stacy. “What’d you say?”

  Penelope scrambled to recover. She steered her thoughts to Port Charles, home of her favorite television show, General Hospital. “I said I was thinking about Rick and Monica,” she lied. Rick and Monica — or Dr. Weber and Dr. Quartermaine, as they were also known — were characters who were having a dangerous and passionate affair.

  “Oh,” said Stacy, as if that made perfect sense.

  Vicki Feld and Tillie Warner arrived at the table. “Is Pia Smith pathetic or what?” groused Vicki, sliding into Pia’s abandoned chair. “Pathetic” and “pitiful” were the seventh grade’s most popular words. They were “in,” like ballet slippers, Lacoste sweaters, and friendship pins.

  “Yeah, she’s so scared Annabella’s not gonna be most popular this year, it’s pitiful,” said Tillie.

  Vicki was the kind of girl other girls called “cute” and not only because she was exceptionally short. She looked permanently animated — and not animated as in lively. Vicki looked like a cartoon character. With hair more yellow than blond, as if it had been colored with a crayon, a mouth of white Chiclet teeth, and chubby, pinchable cheeks, she was a cross between Betty from Archie Comics and Smurfette — if Smurfette weren’t blue.

  Vicki’s best friend, Tillie, didn’t look like anyone you’d see on TV — unless it was a commercial for cortisone cream or hair conditioner. A rashy girl who picked at her split ends and rarely looked at you when she talked, Tillie wore a sleeveless pink polo that exposed pale white arms dotted with red bumps — an allergic reaction, she claimed, to the lab coats they wore for Earth Science.

  “So then you’re not going to sign The Pledge?” Stacy asked them.

  Vicki liked to act like everything that came out of her mouth was top secret. And while she often whispered, she had a habit of whispering loudly. “Oh, we will,” she rasped.

  Knowing what she’d said required explanation, Vicki did a careful scan of the cafeteria to make sure the coast was clear.
When she was sure no one else was listening, she slowly mouthed the words “Annabella’s bat mitzvah …” She gave a deep and knowing nod of the head, as if that said it all. “It’s sorta blackmail,” she added, “but I heard she’s getting a glassblower and a deejay.”

  Tillie focused on the table when she talked. “I think it’s funny that Annabella and Pia think you can control who you like,” she told the crumbly remains of Stacy’s oatmeal cookie. “Like, if I want to be friends with a new kid, I’m not going to let myself?”

  “You’re so philosophical,” scoffed Vicki. “You know you wanna go to Annabella’s bat mitzvah. You already talked about the dress you’d buy.”

  Stacy jumped in. “I agree you wouldn’t want someone to tell you who to be friends with, but what if, well …” Stacy seemed to be thinking out loud. “What if you just happened to never get to know them?” Her eyes darted toward the new kids’ tables off to the side. “Then it wouldn’t be a problem.”

  Tillie squinted at the packets of salt and pepper.

  “It’s up to you!” Stacy added triumphantly — as if she’d just succeeded in decoding her own muddled thoughts. “You don’t have to like anyone you don’t want to!” Stacy’s final sentence sounded to Penelope like a warped version of a public service announcement about peer pressure they showed on Channel 11 in between sitcom reruns.

  “I predict that Annabella’s bat mitzvah will be the party of the year,” announced Vicki conspiratorially. “There will be all these cute boys there. She has all these camp friends, you know.” Vicki looked directly at Tillie. “You can’t pretend you don’t care about that. I mean, we’re in seventh grade. We all want boyfriends.”

  We do? thought Penelope, who looked from Vicki grinning commandingly to Stacy nodding agreeably to Tillie painstakingly dividing a strand of hair into two silky threads. She had the sudden flash that perhaps there were thoughts inside Tillie’s head that no one, even Vicki, knew.

  Algebra was Penelope’s worst subject. The teacher, Mr. Bobkin, was a balding man with a beard, and a belly so large, it seemed to Penelope it had a personality all its own. Like it was pacing the room and Mr. Bobkin was chasing it. Some teachers wore jeans and a sweater. Not Mr. Bobkin. He wore a suit and tie — the same tie, actually — every day. It was silk and red and dotted with gold “Es” in honor of the institution that reared him. “That’s right, kids,” he’d told the horrified class, their eyes bulging like the giant green olives Penelope’s mother served at cocktail parties. “Once upon a time I was you.”

  The only time the stern man cracked a smile was when he recalled his days as a seventh grader at Elston. Back then, the school was all boys, they had to wear uniforms, and they treated their elders with respect. He didn’t say “as opposed to now,” but Penelope knew that’s what he meant. She also suspected he liked Elston better back then because girls hadn’t been allowed.

  Still, Penelope would rather hear Bobkin’s recollections of Elston past than his lectures on Algebra. The teacher talked so fast and didn’t take questions until the end of the period, at which point Penelope was totally lost. It would happen suddenly, the getting lost, so suddenly that — when looking back at it — she couldn’t recall the exact moment it happened.

  Like today. She was sitting at her desk, hunched over her notebook, taking notes, when — boom! — the letters and numbers were crashing and jamming in her head, and she stopped taking notes and started practicing her signature in the margins of the pages. Over and over and over again:

  Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  Penelope B. Schwartzbaum

  She studied the carvings on the wood desk. She didn’t know who any of the initials belonged to. Probably they were the older kids she saw in the halls. L.K. = #1 SHOOTING GUARD. H.S. AND A.H. = PRETTIEST JUNIORS. M.M. AND L.A. FRIENDS 4 LIFE! It was like General Hospital. Maybe some of them were even having affairs! Like Rick and Monica!

  A.G. ’S K.B. N.L. AND D.K. 2GETHER4EVER! K.A. L–U–VS R.D.!

  She went back to practicing her signature.

  A curly-haired boy next to her slammed his textbook shut, and Penelope snapped out of her daze to discover that class was over. “That sucks, huh?” muttered the boy, who also happened to be a new kid. He wore a retainer that clicked when he talked.

  “Yeah,” agreed Penelope, though she didn’t know exactly what sucked.

  “A quiz tomorrow with no notice! I have to read Act I of Julius Caesar. When am I gonna study for this? I’m Ben,” he said in a rush of clicks and words.

  “Penelope,” she said.

  “Me Ben, you Pen,” grinned the boy.

  They packed up their backpacks and exited the classroom.

  Gym was the only class the entire seventh grade had together. Bobkin let them out late, and the Algebra class swarmed like bees toward the gymnasium. “He does this on purpose,” gulped Ben as they jogged across campus. “He’s such a jerk. I’m glad I didn’t go to Elston when he was there. Bunch of nerds in suits.”

  “Yeah, well, I wouldn’t have been allowed,” puffed Penelope.

  “Huh?” said Ben.

  “No girls,” she reminded him.

  “Well, then, I’m double glad I didn’t go to Elston back then,” clicked Ben, giving Penelope a sideways glance. “I like going to school with girls.”

  Penelope heard Vicki Feld’s voice — we all want boyfriends — in her head and ran just a little bit faster.

  It always happened this way. Right before the school year started, Penelope’s mother set lofty goals for herself: This year, no matter how much stress she was under, she was going to come home every night at 6 P.M. This year, she was going to make home-cooked meals for her children. This year, she wasn’t doing any overtime. No dinner meetings. No business travel. She was going to set limits. Then, a week or so later — after five nights in a row of ordering takeout and paying the housekeeper overtime because she was running late — Mrs. Schwartzbaum gave up and hired someone to help out.

  This came up that night at the dinner table after Penelope’s father excused himself to pack for a business trip and Penelope’s brother, Nathaniel, scampered off to watch television. Penelope and her mother were still picking at their dinner: take-out spaghetti and meatballs — again.

  “Hey, Mom, where’d you go to college?” asked Penelope. Along with Annabella’s bat mitzvah and how much homework they had, college was the most popular subject in the seventh grade.

  “I went to City College. Same with your dad. We had to live at home because our parents didn’t have any money. You’re lucky. You’ll be able to go wherever you want.”

  “That’s what Dr. Alvin says.” Penelope twirled spaghetti onto her fork. “If we do well.”

  “You’ll do well,” replied her mother matter-offactly. As vice president of client relations for one of New York City’s most prominent financial conglomerates, Denise Schwartzbaum took it for granted that her daughter was bound for great things. “So, this is showing some gumption. You’re thinking about college already?”

  “Stacy thinks we need to pick.”

  “That Stacy,” marveled Mrs. Schwartzbaum. “Always on top of things.” Her mother paused to spool spaghetti onto her fork. “I know a real expert on college you can talk to,” she told Penelope in a tone that was almost teasing.

  Penelope stared at her mother. “Who?” she asked.

  “Jenny. She’s the new mother’s helper I hired.”

  Penelope felt like she’d swallowed the meatball whole. She stared at her plate. There was no spaghetti left, only clumps of meat in oily orange puddles.

  As her fork scraped white stripes into the orange splats on her plate, she thought about the Lacoste shirt she’d wear tomorrow — white with red stripes — and whether she should wear it with jeans or corduroys.

  “Jenny would be an excellent person to talk to about college. She goes to Columbia. That’s an Ivy League school, you know.”

  Should I we
ar a belt, and if so, which one? The ribbon one with the alligators, or the rainbow one? And should I wear red Polo socks or tube socks or …

  “She starts work here tomorrow. I gotta say, it’s a huge relief for me.”

  Sneakers or loafers? If sneakers, then tube socks. If loafers, then red Polo socks.

  “I’ve got three reports to write in two months, and your father, you know how busy he is. This month alone he’s got trips to Paris, Copenhagen, and Singapore. So, it’s a good thing, eh?”

  You know what would look really cool with the red and white shirt? Those little red earrings they had at Bloomingdale’s.

  “Honey, are you listening to anything I’m saying?”

  If only my ears hadn’t closed up …

  “I know you’re twelve and you think that’s too old for a babysitter.”

  What a funny expression! Ears closing up!

  “I think it would help if you thought of her as Nathaniel’s babysitter. And call her a mother’s helper, why don’t you? I think that will make it easier for you. Okay?”

  Penelope pinched her earlobes, squeezing the hard little lumps that used to be holes.

  “Okay?”

  She squeezed tighter until the lumps felt hot between her fingers.

  “Listen, you know your dad and I would like to be home more. We’d like that more than anything, but we just can’t be.… I tried. I really did. Jenny will be a great help to you if you just let her. Be a trooper, okay? For me?”

  Ouch!

  “Okay? Please, Penelope, say something. I’m counting on you to be mature here.”

  Penelope knew she was supposed to say something reassuring, like: “Of course I’ll be a trooper. Don’t worry, Mom, I’ll be nice to Jenny.” But, the words that came out were: “Can we go shopping for school clothes?”