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That playhouse. Penelope knew what her mother was trying to do: like the man in the book, the Pied Piper, she wanted children to march into the backyard and up the wooden steps into the miniature house with shelves and benches and tables. Those kids might appear but not a single one of them would stick around.
It wasn't her earlobes, which were flatter than any lobe she had ever seen—not even her parents had them and how she got them, she couldn't be sure. She didn't comprehend biology or genetics or inheritance quite yet but was told she had her mother's fine hair and her father's nose, so everything about her came from them but her lobes were a puzzle to everyone.
But that wasn't what made her different.
There was the accident in the cul-de-sac. A girl fell off her bike, having just learned to ride, still clumsy and off balance, teetering left and right. Penelope watched her glide across the concrete and come to rest against the curb. She imagined the girl's skin scraping against the asphalt and there was a lot of blood though Penelope's father later explained to her that head wounds always tended to bleed profusely. It wasn't the fact that Penelope had remained calm when the blood collected in the sidewalk dip—the very hollow in which a puddle formed and she jumped after a rain shower—it was the fact that all the kids who saw the blood gasped and turned pale. Even the boys backed up and one began to cry.
But not Penelope. She stood and stared at the blood pooling in the indent in the asphalt and the girl's mother came running and pushed Penelope to the side, pressing a handkerchief against her daughter's head.
The children were led away from the scene and huddled by a nearby tree. During the frenzy of cries and cars coming to a screeching halt offering help, Penelope wandered back and decided to observe the scene up close.
She stared at the pool of blood. It wasn't as scandalous to her as it was to the onlookers—she thought of the moment later, how it was twisted into something it was not—and she was merely attempting to see something up close she was fascinated by, not any different than looking at cells under a microscope, something doctors do, like her father.
Penelope kneeled down but couldn't get a good look at the blood and so she lowered her bottom, her legs turned out and away from her body, her thighs spread apart, her eyes hovering inches above the ground. Ever since then, the children thought her to be odd and all the playhouses in the world weren't going to change that.
The day the playhouse was put together and the window shattered—Penelope didn't have power over the wind, didn't slam the door shut, didn't make the window break, and therefore the entire affair was not completely her doing—Penelope took a shard and sliced her hand open. The cutting part scared her at first but once the skin opened up, she was mesmerized and felt no pain. Who is to say why she did what she did? To distract her mother? To spare herself the humiliation of playing alone? The anticipation of having her father spend an entire hour getting the sutures just right?
Penelope sat in a squeaky chair for the better part of an hour waiting in the ER. “Any doctor can suture that cut,” the nurse said, but Penelope's mother wasn't having any of it. Only Dr. Pryor's expertise would do. Her mother trusted no one else to close the wound just right, and she didn't want even a hint of a scar , Penelope overheard her say to the nurse.
“My husband is an excellent plastic surgeon. I will not have my daughter's hand look like an experiment.”
Her father came to stitch up the wound. In Penelope's mind, he had special vision: he saw how things ought to be righted that had gone wrong. How else was she to understand that he cut healthy people with a scalpel and then just stitched them up without having cured anything at all?
Penelope had expected the trip to the hospital—the first of her life, not counting her birth—to be a bigger ordeal. It was anticlimactic for the most part; there were no machines taking pictures of her bones, no cups she had to pee in, and no needles prodding her, they didn't even tell her to take off her clothes so they could put a gown on her. The highlight of the day was her mother inspecting the sutures and whispering over them as if she could will the skin to close and heal without a mark.
Later, at home, her mother sat down next to Penelope.
“What happened?” she asked and watched for words or gestures meant to expose Penelope somehow. Her mother was smart that way, capable of seeing signs that gave her away: the rapid blinking of the lids she had no control over, the trailing of her eyes to the left and downward, a sure sign of a lie to come.
“You didn't do this deliberately, did you?” her mother asked. There was a long pause as Penelope watched her mother brace herself for the answer.
Penny replied with a wobble of the head, which could have been a yes or a no.
“Did you?”
“I don't know what that word means,” Penelope said instead.
“Were you trying to hurt yourself?” Donna rephrased but Penelope knew the meaning of deliberate .
“Hurt myself?” Penny said as if that was a question incomprehensible to her, like a concept that only adults understood and that didn't make sense to her at all.
Penelope felt desperation run through her mother, could tell by her breathing and the red rash on her neck. Penelope liked this spark she felt inside of her; it made her feel powerful. She closed her eyes, kept her breathing steady, afraid her mother might demand an explanation.
“Okay.” Donna smoothed the pink duvet along the edges of the four-poster bed. “Okay. You go to sleep.”
Penelope traced the cut with the tip of her thumb for years to come. There was an occasional tingling of severed nerves and the red welt faded into a barely visible white scar passing as a second life line, as if Penelope could pick one fate over the other.