Penelope Crumb Read online

  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.”

  Then a high-pitch shriek from Patsy Cline interrupts my island thoughts.

  Miss Stunkel clutches her chest, and says, “Mercy. What is the matter?”

  Patsy Cline, being the good pupil that she is, has her hand raised. Then she points at the wall and yells, “Somebody graffitied my drawing. Look!”

  Everybody looks where she’s pointing. Angus Meeker’s mouth falls open and he says, “Whoa, man oh day!” But I don’t see what all the fuss is about.

  Miss Stunkel turns purple in the face. She clears her throat and says, “Who is responsible for this? I demand to know immediately.”

  I raise my hand, but Miss Stunkel doesn’t call on me. Instead, she looks at me like she’s sorry. Sorry for what, I don’t know. I drop my hand.

  Miss Stunkel wraps her fingers tight around Friday Lizard. “I’m waiting,” she says. “Who did this to Patsy Cline’s drawing? Who is the graffiti artist that made Penelope’s nose look so…umm, so…like that?”

  Graffiti artist? I look from Miss Stunkel to the nose in Patsy’s drawing, the one I fixed to look like it really does on my real face: bigger and with Grandpa Felix’s bump. I even drew on the skier with her goggles and everything.

  “Who?” says Miss Stunkel again, turning purple-er.

  “Me. I’m the graffiti artist,” I say. “What’s a graffiti artist?”

  Miss Stunkel’s eyes get so big that I’m afraid her eyelids will disappear inside her head where her brains live. And then I realize that I forgot to raise my hand this time. So I do. Both of them.

  But it must be too late, because Miss Stunkel’s fingers are still clamped around Friday Lizard. And I worry that her eyeballs are going to turn red like his. “You did this?” she says.

  “Yep.” I wave my hands at her so she’s sure to see that this time I remembered.

  “Penelope Crumb,” she says. “I’d like a Word with you after school.”

  By the look on her face, I know she’s not going to let me pick the Word.

  6.

  Miss Stunkel’s Word turns out to be a Sentence. One with two parts to it. “Penelope Crumb, I’m very disappointed in you, and I don’t very much like to be disappointed in my pupils because it gives me wrinkles.” Which it really does.

  “I know,” I say, pointing to her forehead. “Sorry about all of those.”

  She gives me a look like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. But if she doesn’t know her forehead is chockful of wrinkles, then I am not going to be the one to tell her. “Never mind” is what I say and then nothing else.

  Miss Stunkel sends a note home. But before she hands it over, she tells me that the note isn’t meant for my eyeballs and so I’m not to read it, on account of the fact that it’s addressed to my mom and not me. But seeing how I’m supposed to start acting like a detective and all, and part of being a detective is snooping, here’s what the note says:

  Dear Mrs. Crumb,

  Today was not the best day for Penelope. Once again, she was not paying attention in math. And, in the middle of my lesson on coats of arms, it came to my attention that Penelope had defaced Patsy Cline’s drawing. This caused quite a disturbance as you can imagine. I can’t for the life of me figure out why she would want to do that to a drawing of her own face. When I asked Penelope, she replied simply that her nose needed to be fixed. Maybe you can get to the bottom of this?

  Sincerely, Ms. Stunkel

  There’s a word in the note I don’t know: defaced. It must have something to do with making a face look better. I stuff the note back in the envelope and stick it in my toolbox. Then I deliver it to Mom.

  “Oh dear,” Mom says, before she even reads it. She puts down her paintbrush. She’s got a new batch of insides that she’s working on.

  I look them over real close and point to one of a purplish red blob. “What’s that?”

  “A spleen.”

  “Spleen?” I say. “That sounds made-up.”

  When Mom opens the letter, her face gets all pinched. “Penelope Rae.” (Spleen.) “What is this about?”

  “I defaced my face,” I say.

  “Do you know what defaced means?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “It means to ruin something,” Mom says.

  “Ruin? That can’t be right,” I say. “Are you sure it doesn’t mean to make a face look better?”

  Mom shakes her head. “Sometimes you act like you were raised by wolves. What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking that Patsy Cline drew my nose, which is also Grandpa Felix’s nose, all wrong.”

  “What does Felix have to do with this?” Mom says.

  “It’s his nose,” I tell her.

  Mom gives me a look that says, We Are Not Going to Talk about This Anymore. And then she says, “We are not going to talk about this anymore.”

  “If Grandpa Felix’s nose isn’t on my face, then it’s like Grandpa Felix doesn’t even exist.” I start to feel all tingly in my fingers. “Like he’s never been here.” And if he’s never been here, then Dad’s never been here. But I keep that last part to myself.

  She dips her paintbrush into a blob of deep red and then sweeps the brush across her paper. “Sometimes people aren’t here for you when you need them to be.”

  “Dad isn’t here for me when I need him to be.”

  Mom flinches when I say this like I stuck her with a pin. Sometimes I try to say things with sharp edges to get her talking. But it never works. “To your room,” she says. “Oh, and you’re going to tell Patsy Cline that you’re sorry about what you did to her picture.”

  “But I’m not sorry,” I say.

  She gives me a look that says, Oh Yes, You Are, Young Lady.

  “Okay, fine,” I say. But I’m not going to mean it.
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  I stomp all the way to my room, where I find Littie digging headfirst in my closet. “Don’t you have any hats?” she says.

  “What for?”

  Littie shakes a bag of marshmallows at me and sticks her head out from under my Captain Hook Halloween costume. “I’m making a marshmallow helmet.” She pulls out my Hook hat. “Can I have this?”

  “I guess.” I was Captain Hook in first grade, and the hat is getting too small for my head. I climb onto my bed and pull my toolbox onto my lap. I turn the magnifying glass over in my hand and then hold it up to my eye.

  “Do you have any of the big marshmallows?” Littie asks. “All we have are the miniatures.”

  I shake my head. “A helmet for what?”

  “I’m going to learn how to ride a skateboard,” she says. “And I need head protection in case I crash.”

  “Oh.” Through the magnifying glass, I look at the bag she’s holding. “They look like the big ones in here.”

  “What do you have that for?” she asks.

  “We are supposed to be detectives for Miss Stunkel’s class. Snoop around and dig up things about our family. Stuff like that.”

  “What kind of things?” Littie says.

  I shrug. “Something good for my arm coat.”

  “What’s an arm coat?” she says.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “But if I make a good enough one, I’ll be like Leonardo da Vinci.”

  Littie raises her eyebrows at me and then glues a marshmallow on my Hook hat. “Are you sure you don’t have any of the big marshmallows?”

  “Littie,” I say, “I can’t think about marshmallows now. I’ve got to be a detective and save all of my brains for my arm coat and family dirt-digging-up.”

  “Do you mean a coat of arms?” she asks.

  “Maybe.”

  “Can I help?”

  But I’m already down the hall when I answer. “I’m calling my nanny and pop-pop.”

  “I thought your grandparents were dead,” says Littie, catching up.

  “No,” I say. “Not these ones.”

  7.

  I pick up the phone and dial. “Hi, Aunt Renn, this is Penelope.”

  “Hi, Melon. What a nice surprise,” she says. Aunt Renn is my mom’s sister. She lives in Texas and has always called me Melon since I can remember. It has something to do with cantaloupes and my name being Penelope, but it never made any sense to me. That’s my aunt Renn for you.

  “Are Nanny and Pop-Pop home?”

  “You just missed them,” she says. “They piled into their RV and headed west to some flea market. You can call them on their cell phone. Do you have the number?”

  I tell her that I do, and then I say, “I’m doing a school project about our family history. Do you know anything?”

  “Not much,” she says. “What kind of stuff do you want to know?”

  “Something good enough that I could put on an arm coat,” I say. “Like, was anybody in our family famous?”

  “I came in second place in a spelling bee in fifth grade,” she says. “Embarrassment. That was the word I missed. E-M-B-A-R-A-S-S-M-E-N-T. I think that’s it. I can never remember if it has two r’s or two s’s.”

  “Huh,” I say and then nothing else.

  “But your uncle Cleigh would know more about that than I do,” she says. “About our family, I mean. He never was a very good speller.”

  “Uncle Cleigh?” I say, after punching in his number. “It’s Penelope. Can you tell me something about our family that’s not boring or about spelling?”

  Uncle Cleigh says he’s been studying about our family’s genie-ology. Which sounds really good until he tells me that genie-ology doesn’t have anything to do with magic genies. So, I hang up.

  “Hi, Nanny.”

  “Penelope, sweetness. How are you?” she says. “Pop and I are at a flea market outside of Austin. We’re about to buy a lamp.”

  “Do you know anything real good about our family?”

  Nanny says, “I beg your pardon? What isn’t good about our family? Answer me that.” Then she says something else about a lamp shade and a new plug.

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, Penelope. We’re talking lamps here. Can I ring you later?”

  “Wait, before you go,” I say. “Do you know if Grandpa Felix still lives in Simmons?”

  “Felix?” says Nanny. “Lost track of that one years ago. Why do you ask?”

  I tell her “no good reason” and then hang up.

  Littie’s got half of my Hook hat covered in marshmallows. “Your family is very dull,” she says.

  Maybe they are, but having a dull sort of family is the kind of thing you can’t do anything about and don’t really want to hear from somebody else. “What’s so great about your family?” I say.

  Littie shrugs and then, like she gets asked this very question all the time, she says, “My mom and dad are both scientists and worked in Africa on finding cures for diseases. My dad still does that, except not in Africa anymore, but my mom stopped working after I was born so she could concentrate on me. My grandpa on my mom’s side was an astronaut and got to go into outer space. My grandma is a reporter and got to meet the president, but I don’t remember which one. My other grandpa, the one with the spider legs, flies airplanes.”

  Well then. Nobody likes a big shot.

  “I’m just saying,” she says. “But don’t feel bad. I’d trade you.” She squints her eyes, shakes her finger, and says, “Because there are no adventures allowed,” in a creaky, high-pitched voice that sounds a good bit like her momma’s. Even looks like her, too.

  “Sure,” I say, even though I wouldn’t trade families with Littie no matter what. Not even if they got a TV and her momma started letting her do stuff and quit putting ice cubes in milk.

  “What about your dad’s family?” says Littie. “I mean, they might be not as dull.”

  “My dad didn’t have any brothers or sisters,” I tell her.

  “A Lonely Only like me?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about his mom?” she asks.

  “Dead,” I say. “So, there’s just his dad, Grandpa Felix. Now that he’s not dead anymore.”

  Littie chews on a marshmallow. “The one with the nose?”

  I nod.

  “Do you think he’d be any better than the rest of your family?” She pauses. “And by the way, I wasn’t looking at your nose just now. And even if I was looking at your nose, which I was not, it’s not because it’s big. I thought there was something on it.”

  “Fine.” I pull the picture of Grandpa Felix from my pocket.

  “Where did you get that?” Littie asks.

  “From the photo album.” I touch my finger to Grandpa Felix’s nose in the picture and can just about see him wink at me.

  “Did you have a hook with this costume?” asks Littie.

  “What?”

  “Captain Hook has a hook for a hand, you know,” she says. “That’s why they call him Captain Hook.”

  “In there somewhere.” I point to the bottom of my closet without taking my eyeballs off Grandpa.

  “Like a treasure hunt.” She starts throwing things out of my closet. Shirts fly by my head—pink ones, the kind I don’t like and never wear because pink makes me feel like a raw hot dog and at the same time a baby pig with a temperature. One shirt hits me in the face.

  “Watch it,” I say, pulling the shirt off my head.

  “Found it!” Littie holds up the hook made out of aluminum foil wrapped around a coat hanger. “If only we could find some real buried treasure.”

  Now, I’m telling no lies when I say that I see Grandpa Felix just about give me another wink right then and there. So I say to Littie, “Maybe we can.”

  Littie’s eyes get so big, her cheeks might fall in, and she says, “I smell an adventure.” I grab my magnifying glass and we head for the computer.

  “What are you doing, dorkus?” says Terrible. We run into him as he co
mes out of the kitchen.

  I shrug at him and try to slip past, but he blocks me.

  “Hey, we learned about noses in biology class today,” he says.

  He leans in close and my nose twitches at his bad smell. I switch to breathing through my mouth and look for other alien signs like scales and pointy teeth, but I don’t see any.

  “Noses never stop growing,” he says, waiting for my reaction.

  But I don’t say anything and try to keep my face blank.

  “Ears, too. Haven’t you ever noticed how old people have giant noses and ears?”

  Littie’s eyes get big and she says, “I have noticed that! I’m just saying.”

  “See?” he says. “Even when the rest of them stop growing, their noses just keeping on getting bigger and bigger and bigger and…”

  I hold the magnifying glass up to my eye and peer at him until his nose is the size of a baked potato. He rolls his eyes, mutters weirdo under his breath, and then lets me by. Aliens are not to be trusted (Number 2).

  At our computer, I do a search for Felix Crumb. Apparently, there are a lot of Felix Crumbs out there. Too many. But none that actually live near me. Still, it makes me wonder how many Penelope Crumbs there are. But when I ask Littie, she clucks her tongue like a pigeon and says, “Do you want to find your grandpa or not?” I tell her fine and that when she clucks her tongue I want to throw bread crumbs at her.

  Littie looks at the screen over my shoulder and says, “Maybe you should hire a private detective. They find people all the time.”

  “I am a detective,” I tell her. “And I’ve only just started finding people.” I search for F. Crumb, instead of Felix, in Maryland.

  Littie points at the computer. “It says there is one F. Crumb in Simmons and two F. Crumbs in Montville. They’re not that far from here.”