Penelope Crumb (3 page)

Grandpa looks like the kind of person who would call the dog catcher, but I’m not sure if that’s because of our nose or something else. “When Grandpa Felix was alive…”

Mom clears her throat. “Penelope Rae.” (Colon.)

“What?”

“Grandpa Felix is not dead. Why would you think he’s dead? Why do you
always
think that everybody is dead?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “A lot of the time they just are.”

Mom says she hasn’t talked to Grandpa Felix in a long time, not since I was a baby, not since Dad got sick. But then I want to know, “Well, if you haven’t talked to him, how do you know Grandpa Felix isn’t Graveyard Dead?”

Mom gives me a look that says, If You Don’t Stop Talking about Dead Things, I’m Going to Pull My Hair Out by the Roots.

So I do, for now. Because Mom looks a lot better not bald.

N
ighttime is the best time to think about dead people, because in the dark and hush quiet, it’s easy to imagine my Graveyard Dead dad patting my foot under the covers and saying, “Oh, little darling. Oh, my heart.”

But this night, when I’m supposed to be asleep, I get to thinking a lot about Grandpa Felix not being Graveyard Dead. Why don’t we talk to him if he’s not dead? And if he’s not dead, why doesn’t he talk to us?

Me and Terrible asked about him before, I know
so, but Mom always said he was just gone. Just gone like Gram Trudy, my dad’s mother, who I never met. Just gone like Dad.

That’s what I thought, anyhow. But maybe there are reasons other than being dead for somebody to be gone.

Terrible’s bedroom is across the hall from mine. His door is covered in stickers that say things like
NO TRESPASSING
! and
DANGER! KEEP OUT
! and
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
! with lots of exclamation points on account of the fact that aliens really don’t like visitors. The door is open a crack, so I poke my head inside. All of the lights are out except for one by his bed, and I can see half of his face lit up in the dark. He’s got one eye open, but that doesn’t mean anything when it comes to aliens (Number 7). “Are you asleep?” I whisper.

He gets up, and two steps later he’s at the door in front of me. “Did you think Grandpa Felix was dead?” I ask him through the crack.

He looks at me for a second and says, “Yes,
dork.” Then he closes the door on me, and my nose nearly gets pinched off.

“Me too,” I say quietly, after the door closes. I run my finger over the
ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK
! sticker. Of all the dead people I know, Grandpa Felix is the only one who’s turned out to be alive. The only one. And I think it’s too bad that I don’t know him.

Down the hall, Mom’s room is all dark. She’s snoring, and it sounds like slurping chocolate milk through a straw when you get to the bottom of the cup—
cwuuurgh!
—which I’m not allowed to do on account of the fact that it’s not polite. But
cwuuurgh!
when you’re sleeping must be different from
cwuuurgh!
when you’ve got a straw, because Mom is allowed to do it all the time.

I climb in bed beside Mom and hug one of her extra pillows to my chest. It smells like cinnamon spice. Then real gentle, I touch the side of Mom’s face with my finger, right next to her ear. This is something I do to see how many touches
I can get in before she wakes up. Twenty-four is my world record. (Note: Do not try this game with aliens.)

I get to eighteen when she sits up in bed and says, “Margarine!” like she’s been dreaming about groceries.

So I say, “Butter!” like we’re playing that game where one person gives a clue about something and the other person has to guess what it is.

But Mom must not be in the mood to play that game right now, because she looks at me, rubs the sleep out of her eyeballs, and says, “What in the world are you doing?”

“Nothing,” I say, sitting on my finger.

She props herself up on a pillow and yawns. “You weren’t doing that touching thing again, were you?”

“Nope.”

“Penelope Rae.” (Gallbladder.)

“Why did you always say that Grandpa Felix was gone when he was not gone?” I ask.

“What?” says Mom. I repeat the question, and she says, “Do we have to talk about this now?”

“You said he was gone,” I say. “You said so. But he’s not dead and I have his nose and still I don’t know him.”

“I never said Grandpa Felix was dead,” she says.

“You never said he was
not
dead.”

“Penelope Crumb.”

“Mom Crumb,” I say. “So, where is he if he’s not dead?”

She yawns and then rolls over on her side so that I’m talking to the back of her head. “Where’s who?”

“Grandpa Felix. The not-dead grandpa that we’ve been talking about.” I poke my finger at the back of her head to wake up her brains.

“Stop doing that,” she says once they get awake. She looks at me over her shoulder. “I don’t know where he is. I lost track of him over the years, but the last time we spoke he was living in Simmons.”

“Simmons? That’s where Nanny and Pop-Pop used to live.”

When she doesn’t say anything, I give her brains another poke. She turns over then and grabs my cinnamon-spice-smelling pillow right out from under me. “Go to sleep,” she says, pointing to the door. “Now.” And then she pulls the pillow over her head.

W
hen I get to school, Miss Stunkel’s got our drawings hanging above the chalkboard. This would normally be a good thing because famous artists like Leonardo da Vinci have their drawings stuck up on walls for lots of people to see. But this is not a good thing on account of the fact that Patsy’s bad drawing of me is up there.

I tell my eyeballs not to look at it, and try to get them to look at Miss Stunkel’s Friday lizard pin or the “Math is stupid” that somebody wrote on the corner of my desk in permanent marker.
(Which was not me even though I also think that math is stupid.) But my eyeballs don’t listen, and they keep looking at Patsy’s bad drawing of me.

The next thing I know, Miss Stunkel is saying my name. Twice.

I put a look on my face that says, I Really, Really Have Been Paying Attention to Every Word You Have Been Saying. (Even though I really, really have not.)

But it doesn’t work because Miss Stunkel says, “We are on page twenty-two…where are you?”

Everybody laughs, except for me and Patsy Cline. “Umm,” I say, looking at Patsy for help. But Patsy is staring up at Friday Lizard like her tongue is starting to swell.

Miss Stunkel says, “Eyes on your book.” And that’s when I know I have to fix that drawing if I’m going to make it through the rest of the day without Miss Stunkel sending a note home.

So, during recess, when everybody is outside playing and Miss Stunkel is eating her pickled ham
sandwich (because that’s what teachers eat) in the teachers’ lounge, I sneak back into the classroom. I am an excellent sneaker. Stepping onto a chair, I pull a No. 2 Hard drawing pencil and eraser from my back pocket and get to work on my nose. And when I’m done, I can practically hear Mister Leonardo say: “Yes indeed, a mighty fine work. Much improved.”

And he would be right.

After recess, my eyeballs have no trouble paying attention to Miss Stunkel when she scribbles on the chalkboard. Especially when she pulls out a plaid hat with earflaps from her pocket and slides it on. Like Miss Stunkel’s all of a sudden worried that the chalk dust might make the faces in the drawings start sneezing on her head.

I give Patsy Cline a look that says, Miss Stunkel Has Gone and Lost Her Marbles. Patsy’s eyes get wide, and the next thing I know, Miss Stunkel’s got a magnifying glass up to her face. “Who am I?” she says.

“You’re Miss Stunkel,” says Angus Meeker.

I roll my eyes and try my hardest to hold back a
duh
. Then I raise my hand.

“Well, of course,” says Miss Stunkel. She puts the magnifying glass real close to her face now, which makes her eyeball look so big and bulgy that I can see the red squiggly lines in the white parts. “But who am I
now
?”

I raise my hand higher still.

“I am a detective,” she says, without giving me a chance. “And you all are going to be detectives, too. I want you to do some digging and find out about your family history.” She hands Angus a box of small magnifying glasses and tells him to pass them around. “Maybe your family came here from another country, or maybe your family has special celebrations or traditions.”

Angus Meeker tries to hand me a magnifying glass that’s got a crack in it, but I push his hand away and take a good one from the box. I hold it up to my eye, and through the looking glass everything
is great big: my toolbox, the Hairy Stink Eye that Angus is giving me, the hole in Miss Stunkel’s panty hose.

Then Miss Stunkel pounds on the chalkboard at what she’s written:

“You will take what you’ve learned about your family,” she says, “and make a coat of arms.”

“An arm coat?” I say. “You mean with elbows and everything?” Angus Meeker laughs, but I know he doesn’t know any more about it than I do.

“Penelope Crumb,” says Miss Stunkel, “you know my rule. Pupils in my classroom must raise their hands if they want to say something.”

I raise my hand like a good pupil and say, “Whose arms are they? And how do you put them on a coat?” Because that seems like kind of a creepy thing to do.

Miss Stunkel takes a deep breath and closes her eyes. She looks just like Mom does when we’re halfway to the store and she realizes she left her grocery list on the counter. Then Miss Stunkel opens her eyes again. She explains that a coat of arms is not a coat made of arms or elbows at all. It’s a picture, or a bunch of pictures, usually drawn on the shape of a shield, that show things about a family. A family’s history, for example, she says.

Well. Somehow that doesn’t seem as good.

“And put some time and thought into this art project,” says Miss Stunkel, “because one of your coats of arms will be selected for display at the Portwaller-in-Bloom Spring Festival. So make it pop.”

Good gravy. If I won, lots of people would come to see what I made. Just like Leonardo.

Right away I start thinking. I tap my finger on
my head to wake up my brains. My family is the kind that doesn’t have any traditions. “Does eating ham-and-egg sandwiches all the time count?” I ask.

Miss Stunkel looks around the room and says, “Someone is speaking, but I don’t see a hand raised.”

I am that someone. So I put both of my hands in the air and keep them there in case I forget again. “What if you don’t have any traditions or costumes?”

“Customs, not costumes,” says Miss Stunkel. And then she says that the purpose of the arm coat is to find out things you don’t know about your family. “That’s why you are going to be detectives.”

Then my brains really start to work. Because I think about how I didn’t know I had a big nose that belongs to my not-dead grandpa Felix. And if I didn’t know that, there might be other things I don’t know about.

Like, maybe Dad isn’t Graveyard Dead at all. Maybe he’s a secret agent who is undercover in some faraway place, like, as a taxi driver in one of those countries where cars have to stop for sheep that can cross the street by themselves, and we have to think he’s dead. At least for now. Until he can come home.

Or maybe, just maybe, I have a secret aunt that nobody knows about who is really a queen from a faraway island with coconut trees and kangaroos. And maybe that island is full of people with big noses. She probably has been looking for me and my nose for a long time. So she can make me a warrior princess.

In her kingdom, a big nose means royalty. Real warrior-princess material. And she will invite me to spend the whole entire summer with her. “Would you like a fancy lemonade drink with a tiny umbrella?” a butler would ask me while I wiggle my toes in the ocean. “Yes, as a matter of fact, I would like that very much,” I would reply, “just as
soon as I take a swim alongside these purple polka-dotted fish with orange lips.”