Penelope Crumb (2 page)

The top of the dryer/desk is cluttered with glass jars stuffed full of felt-tip pens, No. 2 Hard drawing pencils that I sometimes borrow, and paintbrushes that Mom says are made from real horse’s hair. “What do you think?” she says, pulling her feet out of the dryer door and holding up her sketch pad. “And tell the truth.”

It’s a drawing of a heart. And I don’t mean a Valentine’s Day heart. Not the kind that looks like this: ♥. I mean the kind of heart that’s inside of you, with blood and veins and all kinds of creepy stuff like that. I stare at the heart but all I can see is the nose in Patsy’s drawing. “Very nice,” I say to Mom, just like Miss Stunkel said it, making a big deal out of the
very
.

Mom eyeballs the drawing and then reaches for her eraser. “I think the left ventricle looks too big.” Mom is going to school to be an insides artist. She draws people’s insides for books that doctors read. I don’t know why doctors would want to see those kinds of pictures in books because I’m pretty sure they see a lot of that creepy stuff in real life.

She blows the eraser bits from her drawing pad and asks, “Anything interesting happen at school today?” without looking up. This is one of her Regulars for when I get home. I usually answer with a Regular of my own: “Nope.” And then we will go on about our business. But today is no day for Regulars.

“I died.”

That gets her attention. Mom drops the eraser and it goes bouncing off behind the dryer/desk. She spins on her stool to face me and I know by the red blotches on her face that she is not happy about what I said. “Penelope Rae,” she says, in a way that makes my name sound like a gross body part. Large Intestine, for example.

Mom doesn’t much like it when I talk about dead things. I think it’s on account of the fact that I have a dead father. Graveyard Dead. But for someone who draws people’s insides, you’d think dead things wouldn’t be such a big deal.

I quick move off the subject of me dying and spill out the awful story about what happened today
from beginning to end. I make sure I use the right words to describe the nose in Patsy’s drawing:
gigantic, enormous, huge, extremely large…COLOSSAL!

The blotches start to fade and her eyes get big when I say COLOSSAL like she’s impressed that I know such a word. But I haven’t even gotten to the worst part. That’s when I tell her how Angus Meeker laughed and how Miss Stunkel said that Patsy’s drawing was a remarkable resemblance of me.

Mom twists her long hair on top of her head and sticks in a pencil to hold the knot. Then she puts her hand on my shoulder and gives me a face that says, You Probably Aren’t Going to Like What I’m about to Tell You.

“What?”

“What’s going on?” says Terrible, from behind me, making me jump.

Oh brother. “Nothing.” I squeeze my eyes shut and make a wish that he would get on his spaceship
already. Around the time he turned fourteen, my brother, Terrence, was snatched by aliens. When they brought him back, he was different.
Alien
different. Terrible.

“Doesn’t sound like nothing, dorkus,” Terrible says.

See what I mean? Ever since the snatching I’ve been keeping a list of all of his alien traits so that one day I can report him to NASA. Name-calling is Number 3.

“Penelope,” Mom says, “I’m afraid you have a Crumb nose.”

“What is that?” I say. “And why does that make you afraid?”

“She means from Dad’s side of the family, jeez,” says Terrible, taking off his bomber jacket. His stinky cologne smells like fishing worms mixed with orange sherbet and furniture polish (Number 5). “Don’t you know anything?”

I give him a look that says, I Hope the Aliens Come Back for You Soon. Then I say to Mom, “I
have Dad’s nose?” Which wouldn’t really be a bad thing, on account of the fact that Dad died when I was just a baby, and I don’t have anything of his except for a shoehorn and that beat-up old toolbox with rusty corners that I take with me everywhere.

“Well, not exactly,” she says, staring at my nose from different angles like it was a creepy inside she was about to draw. “I mean, a little bit, you do. But you have a more pronounced onion.”

“Onion!” I say. Onions are the cruelest of all vegetables because they 1) smell awful, 2) make you cry for no reason, and 3) look like worms when you fry them up in a skillet. Onions are bad enough on your supper plate, but in your nose!

Mom says rhinion—not onion!—and then points to the middle of her own nose. “The area right here. You have a little bump.”

I run my finger along the top of my nose. “I don’t feel anything. What’s the bump there for?”

Mom shrugs. “That’s just the way some noses are.”

“Yours isn’t,” I say to her. Then I point at the alien. “Neither is his.”

“Your grandpa Felix has one.” The blotches on her face are back.

“How can you not know you have a big nose?” says Terrible, shaking his alien head. “It’s in the middle of your face.”

I try to look at my nose, but my eyes go crossed. “A nose isn’t like elbows or knees that you can just look at anytime you want to and there they are, you know.” I show him both elbows and pull up my pant leg so he can see my knee.

“There are these rectangular things around here, Penelope,” he says. “They’re called mirrors. You should look in one every once in a while.”

Aliens think they are so smart. There aren’t any mirrors in the laundry room, so I run down the hall and into our living room to see myself. Terrible’s footsteps are right behind me.

In front of the mirror, I tilt and turn my head every which way to try to see my nose from all directions.
Straight on, it looks like it always has, not really that big or different. But it’s hard to get a good long look at the thing from the side.

How long has my nose been big? If it’s an artist’s job to notice things, like red eyeballs on Friday Lizard, dirt on a shoestring, or a caterpillary eyebrow, then how did I miss this?

Terrible says, “It’s pretty much always been big, in case you were wondering.” Alien mind reading (Number 6) really gets on my nerves. “Remember when we went swimming at that lake that time and you had to wear a snorkeling mask for grown-ups because the kid size was too tight?”

“I thought that was because of my big head,” I say.

“Or that you can’t eat an ice cream cone without it getting all over your nose?”

“Good gravy. That happens to everybody on account of the fact that your mouth lives here and your nose lives one floor up,” I say, pointing to them both. “Doesn’t it? Happen to everyone, I mean?”

He shakes his head at me in the mirror. “Nope,” he says with a smile that’s all puppy dogs and rainbows.

My word. “Well, since you know so much,” I sputter, “how come nobody’s ever said anything before?”

Terrible doesn’t even take any time to think about this one. “There are so many things about you that are weird, Penelope. If I had to point them all out, it would take me the rest of my life.”

I wonder if Mister Leonardo da Vinci ever had a brother who was an alien.

L
ittie Maple is knocking at my bedroom door. I keep my face pressed down on my drawing pad and tell her to get in here pronto because I am in need of some help. She does. Which is the good thing about Littie: She’s a doer.

Littie lives in the apartment across the hall, but she spends more time in ours because she’s a Lonely Only. Which is what she calls herself on account of the fact that she is an only child and is homeschooled and doesn’t have a TV. “What do you have your face on that paper for?”

“Trace it, would you?” I say, shoving a pencil at her.

She steps over the Heap on the floor and kneels beside me. She doesn’t ask why or what for or anything like that, she just grips the pencil and starts tracing. Her tongue wags in the corner of her mouth as she steers the pencil. When she gets to my forehead, she clamps down on her tongue with her teeth like she’s keeping it from running off to Texas.

“There,” she says when she’s through. She stands up and claps her hands. “That’s a keeper.” Littie is eleven, which is almost two years older than I am, but most people think she’s younger on account of the fact that she’s on the short side. (But don’t ever say anything about her being short because she will bend your fingers back until you say you’re sorry like you mean it.)

I look at the drawing. Mostly I look at my nose. It’s sticking out like it’s trying to get somebody’s attention. And here’s the thing: You have to admire a nose like that.

I imagine Mister Leonardo da Vinci would be happy to draw a nose such as mine. If he saw it, he would grab his pencils and say, “Drawing a nose of this size would use up all of my pencils, and my hand would surely get a cramp. But it would be worth it, yes indeed, lucky stars, it would.” Because that is how dead artists talk.

“Do me next,” Littie says.

I flip to a new page on my drawing pad and press Littie’s tiny head to it, then I trace. When I’m done, I hold them up side by side. Littie’s nose has no bumps and is round and short, sort of like the letter
C
if it had swallowed a coat hanger.

My nose, on the other hand, is a Big Rock Candy Mountain. I draw a tiny person on skis right at the top. The tip of my nose is more pointy than round. And that’s a good thing because that skier can go flying off the end instead of tumbling into my mouth. Blech.

“It’s a Crumb nose,” I inform Littie. “From my dad’s side of the family. Whose nose do you have?”

Littie shrugs. “Everybody says I’m the spitting
image of my momma, but when I get into trouble, Momma says I’ve got my pap’s disposition.”

While I think about whose disposition I have, I catch her staring. “What?”

“Nothing. I’m just having a look,” she says. “All this talk about your nose makes me notice it more now.”

“That’s all right,” I tell her, sticking it in the air. “I don’t mind.”

Littie looks it over real close. So close that I can tell she had bologna for lunch. “Don’t you mind having a boy’s nose?” she asks.

“What do you mean?”

“You said it’s from your dad’s side of the family,” she says. “You know, the
boy
side.” She sticks her tongue out of her bologna-smelling mouth like she’s going to upchuck.

Which makes me say this not-so-nice thing: “I’d rather have a boy’s nose than a pea-size head.”

“Who has a pea-size head?” she says with her hands on her hips.

“Nobody,” I say, shrugging. “Definitely not you,
Littie Maple.” If she doesn’t know she has a pea-size head, I’m sure not going to be the one to tell her.

Boy’s nose or not, I really wish I did have my dad’s, on account of the fact that besides the toolbox and the shoehorn and some pictures, there’s hardly any proof that Dad was ever here. I used to pretend that he was just away on a trip, like Littie’s dad is sometimes, and that he’d be right here waiting for me when I got home from school, asking for his toolbox back. But Mom says I’m getting too old for pretending.

Terrible sticks his head in my door. “Hey, wombat. Mom wants me to tell you to get your dirty clothes together. She’s doing laundry.”

“I don’t have any,” I say, drawing goggles on my skier.

He points to the Heap. “What about all that?”

“That’s not dirty.” I pick up a shirt from the pile and sniff it. “See?”

Littie takes a whiff, nods, and says, “Smells like hamburgers. I’m just saying.”

I sniff my shirt again, and somehow it
does
smell like hamburgers. Delicious ones that we sometimes get at the White Star Luncheonette. I hold the shirt out for Terrible to smell, but he shoves my hand away and tells me I’m both gross and disgusting.

Well then. Aliens don’t like the smell of hamburgers. That’s going on my list. I throw the shirt back on the Heap and get back to my drawing.

“Fine,” he says. “I’m telling Mom.”

“Fine,” I say, shrugging and sticking my nose in the air. But when he turns to leave, I follow. “Wait. What are you going to tell her?” I’m close behind him, down the hall. Littie is right behind me with the shirt in her hands.

Terrible comes to a stop beside Mom at the kitchen table. “She won’t pick up her clothes.”

Tattle-telling alien.

“Penelope.” Mom keeps her eyes on a family photo album that’s open in front of her.

“Tell her about the hamburgers,” Littie whispers
as she shoves the shirt at me. But I give her a look that says, Now Is Not the Time for Meat.

“What are you looking at?” I ask Mom.

Terrible answers, “Pictures, duh. What does it look like?”

Mom sighs and tells the alien he ought to be nice to his sister. I say, “Yes, he
ought
.” Even though I know he won’t ought. I slide into the chair next to Mom and lean in close as she turns the pages. My nose twitches. “Where’s Grandpa Felix?”

As my family goes by in pages, Littie squeezes in beside me and chews on her thumbnail. Mom points to a picture. “There,” she says.

I’ve seen pictures of Grandpa Felix before, but my dad is in most of them. So, I never really paid much attention to the grandpa part.

“And that’s your nose,” Terrible says, smirking.

“
My
grandpa’s got hair growing inside of his nose,” says Littie. “In his ears, too. Looks like spider legs.”

I give her a look that says, What Does That Have
to Do with the Color of Mud? She says, “You’ve got a grandpa nose. I’m just saying.”

I nudge her with my elbow. “Maybe so. But my nose doesn’t have spider legs.” Then I stick my finger up in there just to be sure.

“Not yet it doesn’t,” Littie says, nudging me back. “I’m just saying.”

I look at the picture up close, nose to nose. No spider legs, thank lucky stars. When you’re Graveyard Dead, I bet there are spider legs, real ones, in your nose. And other places, too. Then my eyes go to the smiling face right beside Grandpa. “I wonder why Dad’s nose isn’t the same.”

Littie rattles on about how she doesn’t have some mole the shape of a lima bean on her neck even though her momma and grandmother do, but I’m barely listening because I’m tracing my dad’s nose with my finger. His nose is thin and regular looking, and makes him look like the kind of person who would let a stray dog have a lick of a lollipop, just because.