Penelope Page 4

  “Ha!” he croaked bitterly. “I’m never good enough for them. Penelope, you have no idea what it’s like to be an only child.”

  I didn’t bother reminding him that I, too, was an only child. “Maybe you should think about moving out, getting your own place.”

  “I could …,” he said slowly. “If I found someone I could live with. Actually, I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. My parents said they’d buy me a house if I settled down with a nice girl from a good family. I suppose they want grandchildren.” He sighed. “Typical. They only think about themselves.”

  I swallowed and took a deep breath. “Do … do you know anyone like that, Edward? Someone you’d want to marry and settle down with?”

  “Actually, that’s something I wanted to talk to you about.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “And not just because you’re a Wilhern. Of course, the fact that your blood is as blue as ours would make my parents very happy. But it’s much more than that. Oh, Penelope … you’re my only friend, the only person who cares about me, the only one who listens to me. Penelope … I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  I could feel my mother and Wanda breathing down my neck.

  “You understand my feelings, you can see beyond my name, my money, my good looks. You know I’m more than a rich, handsome aristocrat. And I know you must be more than your curse. You have the sensitivity to see the real me, to let me show you how sensitive I am. Let me know you, Penelope—the real you. Let me see beyond your curse.”

  “Not yet,” Wanda hissed in my ear. But I wasn’t so sure about that. Edward’s voice had actually touched me—it was positively plaintive.

  “I have this feeling, Penelope, that you’re the one. No, no, that’s not right, it’s more, much more than simply a feeling. I know you’re the one, my one and only. You never nag me like my mother. You wouldn’t care if I took naps. You accept me just the way I am.”

  He moved closer to the window. “Penelope, is it at all possible that you could feel the same about me?”

  “It’s … possible,” I said carefully. I had a sudden urge to touch my snout to see if it was growing.

  “Penelope, please. I’m begging you. Come to me. Come out.”

  He looked so pathetic, standing there before me. He was such a nothing, an annoying nerd with no personality, a whiny little spoiled brat. A spoiled brat who had the ability to lift my curse.

  I moved swiftly, before my mother or Wanda could stop me, before I could stop myself with second thoughts. I was able to get through the door before they could even cry out or react.

  “Edward…”

  He turned to me. And there it was—that look.

  “Ohmigod.”

  “Edward?” I took a step toward him. “It’s me, Penelope.”

  He took a step backward. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Noooooooo!” he howled. He took another step backward. “Don’t come any closer! Keep back! Stay away from me!” He looked around frantically. “Somebody, help me! Help me!”

  “Edward, stop it. I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, but without thinking I took another step toward him while I spoke. Edward went over the edge. I could still hear the echo of his screams long after he’d fled the room.

  Chapter Six

  “How ya doing, Lemon?”

  “Not bad,” the reporter replied. While his one good eye adjusted to the harsh fluorescent lighting of the police station, he fiddled with the patch over the other eye. There’d been a time when he’d hoped that the unfortunate loss of his eye would lead to a cool pirate nickname—Captain Hook, Jack Sparrow, something like that. But it wasn’t to be. After twenty-five years, he had come to accept that he would always be known by his last name, the name endowed by his family—Lemon. Like a used car that turned out to be worthless. Lemon, synonymous with loser. Which made sense, since, after a quarter of a century, he was still a nobody reporter on the same old beat.

  “Anything happening, Al?” he asked the sergeant at the desk.

  “Not much. Four-car pileup on the highway. Break-in on Eighty-fourth Street. A brawl behind the Madison.”

  Lemon perked up. The Madison was a pretty upscale hotel. “Any celebrities involved?”

  “Nah.”

  The door to the station burst open, and a distraught man burst in. “Help! I need help!” He looked over his shoulder fearfully. “Is she behind me?”

  “Something wrong, sir?” the sergeant asked.

  “I’ve been attacked!”

  “Yes, sir. Who attacked you?”

  “Not who, what! A creature, a monster! You have to go after her, arrest her, lock her up!”

  A couple of cops snickered, and the sergeant behind the desk rolled his eyes. “Yes, sir, a monster attacked you, that’s just terrible. Hey, Joe, we got space in the tank for him to sleep it off?”

  “I am not drunk!” the man declared indignantly.

  “Just calm down, sir.”

  “Do you know who I am?”

  “No, sir, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  But Lemon did. He’d suddenly recognized the face from his newspaper’s society page. “You’re Vanderman’s son, aren’t you?”

  “I am Edward Vanderman Junior, yes. And I’m telling you that a monster has attacked me.”

  The sergeant groaned, but he took out a form and wrote down the victim’s name. “Can you be more specific, Mr. Vanderman? What kind of monster was it?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to me?” Edward cried. “Not it, she!”

  “Ah, a female monster. Four arms, eight legs?”

  Edward shook his head fiercely. “No, no …”

  “The head of a dragon?”

  “No, not a dragon. A pig.”

  Lemon drew in his breath sharply. “You saw a woman who looked like a pig?”

  “Oh, yeah, I think I know her,” one of the cops said. “Sounds like the beast my brother-in-law fixed me up with last week.” The guys cracked up, but Lemon didn’t join in. This wasn’t just the son of a tycoon having a nervous breakdown. He had a gut feeling there was a bigger story here.

  Edward threw himself across the sergeant’s desk. “Don’t let them laugh at me! I know what I saw! She had the face of a pig. With fangs!”

  “Okay, fellow, just calm down. Take a deep breath.” Out of the corner of his mouth, the sergeant muttered, “Get some cuffs.”

  Lemon stepped forward. “That won’t be necessary, Al. He’s with me.” He thrust an arm through Vanderman’s. “Come with me, Edward. I want to hear all about your pig-lady.”

  Chapter Seven

  Mass hysteria had taken over the Wilhern household. My mother was sobbing buckets of tears and wailing at the top of her lungs while my father tried to comfort her. Wanda was screaming at Jake.

  “What do you mean you couldn’t catch him?”

  Jake, in true butler fashion, remained calm. “I’m terribly sorry, madam, but I didn’t expect him to react so dramatically. And he moved with extraordinary speed. I ran as fast as I could, but by the time I’d reached the front gates, he had disappeared.”

  “I could call the police,” my father offered. “They could put out an all points bulletin.”

  “Franklin, he didn’t commit a crime!” my mother shrieked. “You can’t have a man arrested because he didn’t sign a gag order!” She paced the room. “We’re finished, finished! The word will be all over town by tomorrow. We’ll have to change our names, move away,far away.” She stopped to glare at me. “And you, Penelope, why, why, why did you reveal yourself like that? It was too soon!”

  “Mother, what else could I do? He was begging me to come out.”

  “You could have put him off.”

  “For how long? He was already saying he loved me. Eventually he’d have to see me. I don’t think putting it off would have made any difference.”

  “Well, we’ll never know now, will we?” my mother fumed. “I wonder if we should raise your
dowry. Maybe that would tempt Edward back.”

  “Jessica, the Vandermans are wealthy,” my father pointed out. “Just as all the people like us are. A larger dowry wouldn’t influence them.”

  I couldn’t take any more of this madness. “If you will all excuse me, I’m going to the solarium,” I announced, and no one tried to stop me.

  But I found no comfort in the solarium. Even my plants looked sad and hopeless. The sun was setting, so I turned on the fake-sun lights. Unfortunately, I was then able to catch a glimpse of my reflection in the shadows on the glass. If there was anything uglier than a pig-faced girl, it was a pig-faced girl crying.

  An awful memory came rushing back. I couldn’t have been more than six or seven, and I’d wandered into a guest bedroom for some reason. From the window, I had a view I’d never had before. It must have been some sort of school playground—I could see children playing, running around, tossing balls back and forth.

  It was the first time I’d ever seen real, live children my own age. For a while, I just watched in awe and amazement. Occasionally, the echo of a giggle or a squeal would reach my ears.

  I’d never had any other children around me, and I wanted to play with them. Hurrying out of the room, I went down the back stairs of the house. I wasn’t even trying to hide myself, but nobody saw me as I ran through a warren of rooms and out a door. Following the sound of the voices, I circled the house. The mansion was surrounded by gates and hedges, but I was able to pinpoint the place where, just yards away and blocked from view, the children were playing.

  I couldn’t reach them, of course, or even see them through the barriers. But then, miracle of miracles, a ball came flying over the gate. I heard the kids yelling, and I wondered if I should yell back. I didn’t need to. Apparently, a couple of them were good climbers. Two heads appeared at the top of the hedge.

  “Hey, girl, can you throw back our ball?” one of them called. I looked up.

  The screams of the two kids brought other kids climbing up the gate to see me. Half were screaming, half were laughing. Their cries drew out my mother and Jake. The next thing I knew, I was being scooped up by my mother while Jake chased off the children. I never knew if they got their ball back.

  I had cried that day. “Why did they laugh at me, Mommy?” I’d asked. “Why were they afraid of me? Was it my face?”

  “That’s not your face,” my mother said over and over. “It’s the curse. Someday you’ll have your real face, and no one will scream when they see you.”

  But eventually I reached my teens, I still didn’t have my real face, and that’s when I started crying on pretty much a full-time basis.

  Chapter Eight

  Books. I had lots of books. They were my best friends and my worst enemies.

  Until I was twelve or thirteen, reading was a pleasure. I moved from fairy tales to fantasies, stories with dragons and trolls, myths, science fiction, alien worlds. It was all pretend, which suited me just fine. It was better than having to rely on my own imagination all the time for entertainment.

  But then I discovered books that had to do with real life. Biographies, books about travel, memoirs, and journals. Fiction, too, novels that didn’t involve magic or intergalactic space battles but that took place in the real world, with characters my age who did things, who went to high school and played sports, who had friends, who fell in love. That’s when I realized what I was missing. And that’s when I got really mad. If a typical teenager could feel that life was unjust because her boobs were small, imagine how I felt.

  I wanted to hang out at malls, go to dances, try out for cheerleading. All I could do was read about life. I couldn’t live it.

  I tried hobbies. I took up painting, pottery, knitting. I had piano lessons (a major coup for my parents, who located a blind piano teacher). But I had to do all of these things alone, and I got bored with them. I played chess with my father, which I actually liked, but not enough to play six hours a day. I wasn’t a nerd, for crying out loud.

  My father was very anti-television, so I hadn’t been exposed to much of that, but by the time I was fifteen I was complaining so much about my deprived life that he broke down and put one in my bedroom. My general state of mind went from bad to worse.

  Teens on TV had it all—they were beautiful, they went to the beach, they had dramatic love affairs. Of course, I didn’t know then that there was more fantasy in that teen TV world than there’d been in my fairy tales. For me, the TV shows didn’t just provide entertainment, they confirmed the injustice of my world and gave me more excuses to cry.

  Ultimately, I discovered video games, Nintendo, and PlayStation, which kept me amused for some time. Then there were chat rooms and virtual reality Web sites, where I could reinvent myself and have something that remotely resembled communication with other people. I took to writing bad dark poetry in a feeble imitation of Sylvia Plath, and I became an expert at giving myself home manicures.

  And somehow I made it to the age of eighteen. That was when my mother had hired Wanda, from a professional matchmaking agency, to assist her in the task to which she could now devote herself: finding Prince Charming, who would fall in love with me so deeply that he could accept my face and marry me so the curse would be lifted.

  Life with me couldn’t have been easy for my parents. It wasn’t easy for any of us, living in a fairy tale with no happy ending in sight, when there was a real world out there somewhere that we couldn’t touch. And here I was now, at the age of twenty-five; people were still running away from me, and I was still crying.

  Stop it, I ordered myself. Edward Vanderman is not worth your tears. You didn’t even like him!

  But maybe that was why I was crying. Because there remained that one horrible fact: If a pathetic creature like Edward Vanderman, who was desperate to get married, ran away from me in horror—who wouldn’t? I wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be best to give up right now, and—and do what? Kill myself? No, it would break my poor father’s heart and he’d be overcome with guilt.

  Besides, I didn’t want to die. I wanted to live. Not like this, hidden away, all alone. I wanted to live like real people, normal people. The people I read about, the characters I saw on TV—okay, maybe not them, since I didn’t have any real interest in playing beach volleyball or developing an eating disorder. I just wanted to be out.

  “Penelope, my child.”

  I wiped my eyes quickly before my father could see the tears. “Hi, Dad.”

  “I’m so very, very sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault that Edward Vanderman ran away,” I said. “You’re not responsible.”

  “No, you know what I mean, my dear. In the long run, it’s all my fault. It was my family that gave you this—this problem.”

  I turned back to my reflection and put a hand over my “problem.” Funny how I almost looked human. Then I caught a glimpse of my father’s face behind me. He was in as much pain as I was, and I felt even sadder for him than I felt for myself.

  I went to him and kissed his cheek. “It’s going to be okay, Dad,” I said, and tried to sound like I really believed this. Then my mother and Wanda came running into the solarium with Jake bringing up the rear. The women were squealing about some brilliant new idea, and I pretended for my father’s sake to be interested.

  “I can’t believe we didn’t think of this sooner!” my mother exclaimed.

  “What’s your idea?” I asked.

  Wanda turned to my father. “This curse—there was no mention of nationality, was there?”

  He looked at her blankly. “Huh?”

  “Prince Charming, the man who can lift the curse. I know he has to be one of your own kind, but that just means a blue blood, right? He doesn’t have to be from around here, does he?”

  My father’s brow furrowed. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  My mother spoke up. “Because all this time we’ve been trying to find an aristocrat among our own local set! Why not a foreign one?”

&nb
sp; “A foreign aristocrat?” he asked. “How would he be any different from an American one?”

  “Other nationalities have different standards of beauty,” Wanda stated. “I’ve heard of a tribe in South America where the fatter a woman is, the more beautiful she’s considered to be.”

  “Penelope is not fat!” my mother declared indignantly.

  “That’s just an example,” Wanda said. “All I’m saying is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and some nationalities behold people differently from others.”

  “Is there a nationality that appreciates pig faces?” I asked doubtfully.

  “That’s not the point,” Wanda said briskly. “I’m simply saying that we need to extend our search criteria.”

  “There’s something else, too,” my mother declared eagerly. “Europe is full of decayed aristocracy. People with titles and castles but no money. A significant dowry could be very appealing to them.”

  “Oh, dear. Does this mean we have to move to Europe?” my father asked.

  “That won’t be necessary,” Wanda assured him. “Haven’t you ever heard of Eurotrash? The city is filled with ex-pat Europeans! They come here for temporary jobs but then they want to stay.”

  My mother picked up the narrative. “Which they can’t, because they need passports or visas or green cards or something.”

  Wanda finished it off. “And what’s the easiest way to get a permanent residency? Marriage!”

  My mother rubbed her hands together gleefully. “We have to get to work on our database. There’s a whole world of foreign Prince Charmings out there and we have to identify them. Come along, Franklin. We need all the help we can get and there’s no time to lose.”

  With one last apologetic look shot in my direction, he followed them out. Only Jake remained behind.

  “Would you like your tea in here, Miss Penelope?”

  “Yes, okay, thank you, Jake. Jake! Wait.”

  “Yes, miss?”

  I gazed at the butler thoughtfully. “What do you think of that idea?”