Smoke, Chapter 7

Penelope was awoken in the morning by a sound she very rarely heard inside her mother's house. It was the sound of her father's voice.

Scarcely daring to believe it, she leapt out of bed and ran into the living room, where she saw him sitting on the sofa talking with her mother in serious tones; but he stopped when she came in, and his face immediately crinkled into a kind, loving smile -- that look she knew so well, but never got from her mother. She ran and leapt into his arms. "Dad, dad, I missed you so much!"

"Hey, pumpkin princess," he laughed, still calling her nicknames from when she was a little girl. Distantly she registered her mother's sour gaze. He started bouncing Penelope on his knee. "Boy, kiddo. I sure was worried about you."

"I'm OK!"

"Want to tell your mom and I about it?"

No, Penelope thought. "OK," she grudgingly said, and sat on the sofa beside him. Her mother went to sit on a chair facing them. "The truth is..." She gulped. Could she really lie to her father? But she would have to. Neither would believe the truth, anyway, and so it would only worry and upset them. "I ran away from home. I couldn't take it anymore." She started to sense a new opportunity. "It doesn't feel like home. Can't Tim and I come live with you?"

Her mother sighed. "Penelope, we've talked about this."

But her father was undeterred. "So what were you doing all this time?"

"Living on the street," Penelope said. "I...I had to steal things, for food."

"From where?" His voice was stern. Uh-oh, she thought. He's going to want to return the money.

"I don't know where. I lost track. Convenience stores and stuff."

"Uh-huh. Penelope, this was dangerous, wrong--"

"I know!" she interrupted. "But what am I supposed to do? I hate my school and I don't have any friends and there's nothing to do here and I want to live with you!"

"Sweetie, I know. But you can't. I travel around too much. You have to stay here with your mom." Her mother snuffed air out of her nostrils in a faint expression of exasperation. "Anyway, you're not a baby anymore. You have to be strong, OK? When you do something like that, you worry everyone. And you know better than to steal. Something horrible could have happened to you. I want you to promise me that you won't run away from home again. Next time you feel like doing that, you pick up the phone and call me, OK? Any time, day or night."

"OK..." Even though she wasn't guilty of most of it, she still felt ashamed. "...did you have to leave that job early?"

"I'm just taking a couple of days off," he reassured her. "To come see you and Tim."

"Speaking of which, I'm supposed to pick him up in an hour. You want to do it?" her mother asked.

"Sure."

One of the best times in Penelope's life, strangely enough, was eating at Wendy's. Her father didn't have much money, and since they saw him rarely, he usually took them to "fun" places to eat, like fast food restaurants. She loved everything about it: the way her father made every cashier smile, the smooth modern tables, the options of the soft drink station, the crackling of the paper bag, the feel of the soft foil wrapper around the spicy chicken sandwich, shaking pepper onto her ketchup for the fries...even the mess Tim often made. All of these things meant that it was her time with her father, and nothing was more precious.

Tim hadn't made a big fuss about seeing her again. He was too excited to see their father. He just walked up to her, punched her in the gut, and hugged her around the waist until she shook him off. But Penelope understood that this was his way of saying much the same things: "Don't do that again. I love you."

The next day it rained, so they stayed in their father's apartment playing video games, shooting one another with Nerf guns, playing with Legos, drawing, and anything else that came to mind. One of the coolest things about Penelope's father was that he had fun playing video games with them. He only had one of the oldest systems there was -- a Super Nintendo -- but beating her father as Fulgore or Orchid was just as much fun as playing alone on her PS3 at home. And after pizza for dinner, he made them "church windows": a pan of chocolate with colored mini marshmallows baked throughout it, then cut into squares. He must have been really worried, Penelope thought.

At this, a faint flicker in her mind reminded her of all the things she didn't want to know: at the end of this night, she would have to go home. She was getting older, and something about her relationship with her father seemed on the verge of changing. The memory of the time-beast lurked in her mind. She had escaped a traumatic experience, then lied to both of her parents about it. And something very big was happening that both frightened and excited her.

She knew that after this summer, her life would be different. And there was no way to go back in time.

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