Horse Camp (7 page)

I hear you're trying to get a trial by jury. Maybe you could get some of those people who were outside the courtroom when the verdict was read to be on the jury. Most of them seemed to be on your side. You could also try to get a lot of poor, sick people. They'd probably vote for you, especially if you told them you had three children to care for. Especially if they were women. They'd probably understand. They wouldn't send a woman with children back to prison. They would probably try to get her home to her kids as soon as possible. But I guess it's all relative.

What do you mean the divorce is final?
I never believed my parents would actually get divorced. Why didn't you just say you're sorry so we wouldn't have to go through all of this? Why didn't someone tell me that you were really, truly divorced? Daddy can't be in Hawaii with anyone else, because he didn't want to divorce you. He said he'd take you back. He just wanted you to realize the consequences of the choices you'd made. He wanted you to apologize and come back home and live the way we were living before, with Daddy as the pastor and you as the wife and us as the kids. You must be wrong. He's probably in Hawaii for church business, not a vacation. If he were going on vacation, he would have brought us kids along. And who is Peggy? I've never even heard of her!

This is too much stress, Mom. First you get charged with a serious crime, then Dad files for divorce, then I have to move to a farm where there is no Internet or phone service, then I have to get used to a new family, then you get sent to prison, then I have to get enrolled in a new regular school in a new town that hardly has any buildings in it. Tomorrow, Sheryl is taking all of us to town for school shopping. Um, I thought we'd be out of here before school. And also,
I hope
she doesn't expect me to dress like her or like June Bug. Their look is just a little too hoochie for me. Don't say I'm being mean, because I'm not. In fact, I've sort of gotten used to having them around. If nothing else, Stretch's mood is a hundred times better when they are here.

Before you go to prison for good, will you send the rest of my Zombie Cowboy series? At the end of book two, Patience Lonelyheart discovers that Handle Boomton is descended from a long line of vampires and that's the reason he's only seen prowling at night. I am embarrassed to admit that I missed so many clues that are now so obvious. He made his money by gambling in the saloons at night. He had pointy teeth. He wore black from head to toe. Anyway, now Patience Lonelyheart and Eamon Cloversniffer have to figure out a way to prevent the marriage, which is taking them a long, long time and many, many pages to figure out. It's a very complicated plot.

Signed,

Penelope

Dear Daddy,

Thank you very much for the postcard from Hawaii. Boy, this is such a surprise! Peggy's swimsuit is very colorful. Yes, I agree that God works in mysterious ways, but I am not sure that Peggy applying for the church accountant position means that God was putting her before your eyes to take as your wife. That's really mysterious, probably a little too mysterious for it to be God's work. But you are the minister and would know more about those signs than me, I guess. Yes, I am taking good care of the boys. Yes, I can see that it will certainly be handy to have a wife who is also in charge of the accounting at the new church. It's hard to believe that Peggy is an accountant, though! Is she a real accountant? Has she gone to college? At first, I thought that was a picture of you with a waitress or something!

Pauly really wants you to call. I checked my phone the last time I was in town, and there weren't any messages from you. Maybe you've called or texted but my phone just isn't receiving the messages? I also checked my email at the library (which is run by a Catholic nun), but I couldn't find any emails from you, either. I checked the junk folder and spam folder, too. But, my email's been acting funny, so maybe I just accidentally deleted your messages. Anyway, Pauly really, really wants you to call, text, email, or come and see us so we can talk about all of this. Especially since Mom can take classes in prison, and I'm sure they offer accounting classes there, too, and she'd probably be more than happy to get an accounting certificate and be your new church's accountant, if that's what you wanted. She's much more agreeable than she used to be. You should call or visit her or send a letter and find out for yourself!

Sincerely,

Penelope

I
T'S NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE to get some privacy around here. Since I stay in the granary, away from everybody else, I have a little bit—like a tiny, teensy-weensy bit, a bit about as big as one half of one piece of sand—but I still have to use the bathroom in the house just like everybody else, and that bathroom is
not
private. Maybe it used to be, but since the lock on the door's jiggly handle is broken, there's basically no privacy at all. Of course, I found this out the hard way when Penny came barging in as I was drying off after my shower earlier this morning. I was brushing my teeth, and I didn't have my towel around me since I like to let things air out so they don't get too itchy or sweaty before I put on my clothes. Unfortunately, that gave Penny the chance to see pretty much everything, which I swore I wasn't going to show to anyone ever until I got married on my wedding night. To make it worse, Penny started laughing like a jerk before I slammed the door on her stupid face, and then I heard her telling whoever was out in the kitchen about what she just saw.

I've been so ticked off about it that I've been hatching plans of revenge all morning while I paint this little building Uncle Stretch calls the pump house. It's boring work, made even boring-er by the color I have to paint it: white. Come on. If you're going to paint something, at least use some color. The whiteness makes me twitchy, which makes me really want to think of a magnificent revenge for Penny. During a water break, I even ask Elle if she has any ideas, but of course Elle doesn't talk back—she just stands there in her rubber swimsuit, refusing to drop the arm that's covering her breast and chewing her fingernail.

Back at the pump house, I decide I need to set a trap for Penny … something that will embarrass and scare her. She really deserves it. As I brush the white paint back and forth, back and forth across the pump house siding, I compose a mental list of things that annoy me about Penny.

All this thinking about Penny's voice actually makes me cover my ears, and when I do that, the paintbrush drips a bunch of white paint onto my cheek. I drop the brush and use my shirtsleeve to wipe the paint off my face. I decide I need to start drawing out these plans instead of thinking. Thinking stresses me out. Drawing relaxes me. I slap some paint on the last side of the pump house, duck my head under a stream of cool water from the nearby pump, and then run to the granary. I grab up my sketchbook and begin to draw out some ideas.

The first plan I draw is for a water balloon launcher that will launch about thirty water balloons at one time from my window in the granary right in through her window in the house. It's about half a football field away, so the balloons would have to go a good fifty yards. They would drench Penny, and if she was wearing her nightshirt, the water would soak her enough that you could see right through the material, and anyone who was watching would pretty much see her naked. But I don't have any wood and a metal spring like I need to build the right kind of launcher. Plus, it would take too long to build. Next, I draw a plan for her to step in a rope and get swooped upside down so she would be hanging from a tree branch. If she was upside down long enough and swinging by her foot from the rope and wearing loose enough clothes, her shirt and shorts might get pulled off by gravity, so that people watching could see her naked, or at least her underwear or stupid bra, which she doesn't even need, by the way, but is always trying to talk about. If she got swooped up when was wearing tight clothes, which she does a lot, it wouldn't work that well. I move on to drawing a blueprint of the bathroom, where I could plant secret cameras in strategic places and then just press record on the cameras and let them run for twenty-four hours. But then I suppose it would record Pauly and Uncle Stretch and Sheryl, too, and I definitely would not want to see any of their bare nakedness. I really don't want to see Penny's at all, either. I just wish she wouldn't have seen mine! I start on a new idea dealing with stealing all her clothes and cutting holes in them, when Pauly walks into my room with a football in his hands.

“How many times have I told you to use the secret knock before entering this room?” I say.

“Hey, P.P.,” he says. “I hohd Penny saw you doing a funny naked dance and singing like cwazy into yoh toothbwush like it was a micwophone when you woh in fwont of the mih-woh in the bathwoom.”

“What are you talking about?” I say. “That's not true!”

“She told all of us at the bwekfast table she saw yoh ding-a-ling, dude.”

“She didn't see a dang thing!” I yell. “Now get out of my room!”

“It's not weally yoh woom, P.P. It's the gwain-o-wee.”

“Leave!” I say.

He walks toward the door, then turns around. “You shoh you don't want to play some catch?” he says, tossing the football from hand to hand.

“Where did you even get that football!”

“Stwetch gave it to me. It's one of his old ones.”

“Get out!” I scream. I jump off my bed and move toward him like I'm going to cream him, and he runs out of there.

Boy, one thing is for sure. Penny is going down. Forget embarrassing her. I'm going to make her miserable. I'm going to make her wish I was the only one born on our birthday.

I spend nearly all afternoon trying to catch one of the rabbits in this rabbit family I've seen behind the granary the past few weeks. I've got a cardboard box propped up by a stick that has a long piece of string tied to it, which I've been holding, ready and waiting, for when one of the rabbits looks under the box at the stack of carrots I've piled up to lure it. I didn't even go into the house for lunch because I need to get my vengeance as soon as possible.

Catching a rabbit is part two of my plan. There are three parts. Part one was finding just the right Bible verse to use to slam Penny for her sins against me. It didn't even take long since my personal Bible has this appendix in the back that shows you where to find verses based on any word. You can even choose a word like
lamb
or
sexuality
or
homosexuality
, or
murder
, and it will give you the perfect choice of verses. When I chose
vengeance
, I just looked at the first verse they suggested, and bingo, there was a real good one. I have committed it to memory.

Part three involves a big wad of bubble gum.

Out in the yard, one of the rabbits has gotten close to the box a few times, but right before it goes in for the carrots, it looks right at me and—even though I am completely silent and frozen stiff—it's like it can smell me or something because its nose starts twitching. It knows something is up, and it hops away.

After a while, Pauly comes up and asks what I'm doing.

“Quiet, you idiot!” I whisper fiercely. “Obviously, I'm trying to catch a rabbit.”

“Sowwy,” says Pauly. He hunches down beside me. “Why awe you twying to catch a wabbit?” he whispers, or I should say
sort of
whispers since he's too uncoordinated to really whisper correctly.

“None of your business.”

He sits there with me a while, since I decide not to kick him out of there because I'm thinking of using him to trap the rabbit. It takes a little extra thinking, since trying to catch wild animals means you usually have to be smarter than them. I tell this to Pauly and he whispers, “These wabbits awe pwobably smaw-toh than you, P.P.”

“Well,” I say, “a worm is smarter than you. Even the dumbest worm around.”

“That doesn't both-oh me,” he says. “I don't weally cay-oh because I like wohms. They'oh pwetty fun to play with, actually.”

That gives me an idea. “Okay, here's the plan, Worm Boy,” I say. “You need to sneak back to the house and get some of those gross granola bars Uncle Stretch keeps in that one cupboard. You know what I'm talking about?”

Pauly nods his head yes. “I think those gwanola baws are pwetty tasty.”

“Whatever,” I say. “Just grab a couple and hustle back here. And be quiet! Now go!”

He crawls off on all fours. I don't know why he thinks he has to crawl—what can I say, he's not a smart guy—so it takes him extra long to make it across the yard to the house, but in a few minutes, he's back with the granola bars. I open them and tell him to go sit next to the box and crumble the granola bars into his lap and quietly wait for the rabbits and then try to lure them under the box.

It doesn't take five minutes before three squirrels are creeping up on Pauly. The dummy doesn't even see them at first because he's looking off into the clouds, spacing out about something moronic, I'm sure. Before I know it, all three squirrels are scurrying around Pauly, eating the granola he's spread out. He looks at me and smiles. I give him a thumbs-up and then make a gesture for him to trap one of them under the box, but the confused look on his face shows that he doesn't get what I mean. Two rabbits even pop up out of nowhere and start hopping close to Pauly, but the squirrels see them and one of them starts squeaking a bunch of gibberish. It's pretty funny, because the squirrel's chattering gets louder and louder, and I bet if I could speak squirrel, I would hear some filthy squirrel language with tons of swear words. Whatever the squirrel says makes the rabbits turn right around and hop away. Pauly is chuckling and petting one of the other squirrels as it greedily chomps away at the granola.

I decide that a squirrel will work just as well as a rabbit, and I make my move. With the stealth of a Greek warrior, I sneak up next to Pauly and the squirrels, pick up the cardboard box that's hovering over the pile of carrots, and slam it upside down over one of the squirrels. The other two squirrels jump and scatter, one of them climbing right up Pauly's shirt and then jumping like a madman off Pauly's big, old, stupid head. But the one under the box is trapped. I've got my wild animal!

“Hey!” yells Pauly. “What awe you doing? I was going to twain them to be my pets!”

“Pauly,” I say, “you fulfilled your duty, and for that I thank you.”

“But that one in the box is pwobably weally scay-ohd.”

Pauly is probably right, since the box I'm holding over the trapped squirrel is being thumped and scratched against. I have to make Pauly help me transfer the squirrel into a more secure cage without letting it get away.

“Pauly,” I say, “I'll let you keep Nutty to train as a pet if you help me do one little thing first.”

I don't even have to explain what the thing is before Pauly says, “Okay.”

Penny's life is pretty dull. I should know, because after I put the squirrel in the cage, I started spying on her. All she's done is read a book outside, by a tree for about an hour, go into the house to get an apple, go back outside to the same tree she was sitting by before, read the same book some more, eat the apple, stare up into the clouds for a while, and then go into her room to write in her notebook. Lucky for me she also has the radio on because Nutty the squirrel, who I now have trapped in a smaller shoe box—an operation that took Pauly and me quite a while to pull off after I was done spying—is clawing at the cardboard, making a tiny racket. I wait a couple of more minutes before I decide that now is the time for action. I push the door open, hiding the shoe box behind my back.