Penny Dreadful

A
LSO BY
L
AUREL
S
NYDER

Any Which Wall
Up and Down the Scratchy Mountains
Inside the Slidy Diner
(picture book)

BOOK ONE
H
EAVY
B
ORED

E
VER TO
C
ONFESS
Y
OU’RE
B
ORED

P
enelope Grey knew she was lucky. She lived in a big stone mansion in the greatest city on earth, with a canopy over her bed, wonderful books to read, and lots of toys to play with. Her parents were delightful people. Her father was funny and her mother was sweet, and they both loved Penelope very much—of this she was certain. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to actually
see
her parents all that often, since her father tended to be busy with his important job at the top of a very tall building, and her mother had any number of social obligations and deserving charities that kept her tied up most days.

Still, Penelope knew she was lucky. She had a chef to prepare her meals and an extremely capable tutor named Joanna who taught her interesting things each day in the comfort of her very own home. She had occasional supervised outings to the zoo or the park, accompanied
by pleasant girls with names like Jane and Olivia. She had a housekeeper, so she never had to pick up her room, and she had no grubby little brothers or sisters. It was all very tidy.

Yes, Penelope knew she had nothing to complain about. She had everything a girl could want. Unfortunately, knowing that she
should
be happy only made it worse that Penelope was not happy at all.

The truth was that Penelope was bored. Bored in a terrible, empty, ongoing, forever kind of way that made her sigh much more deeply than any ten-year-old girl should ever sigh. She was bored with the delicious meals and the polite playmates. She was bored with her great, echoing house. She was even bored with her name—Penelope Geraldine Grey—which she thought sounded like the name of an old lady with too many diamond rings and not enough hair. She was bored with her hazel eyes and her medium-length brown hair, which was not quite straight and not quite curly, and could not have been more boring. And when she caught herself thinking about all of this, she was bored with herself, which was worst of all.

This sorry state of affairs was only made more awful by the fact that Penelope had read enough books (they were just about the only thing that Penelope did
not
find
boring) to know that bored little girls who live in mansions are usually spoiled. Penelope did
not
want to be spoiled. Spoiled girls in books were silly and selfish. Still, Penelope could not help it. Whatever she did, wherever she went, she was horribly, hungrily bored.

Penelope thought that perhaps things might improve in a few years, if only she could go away to boarding school. In books, boarding school was always very exciting, full of deep secrets and midnight escapades, and sometimes magic. But even if her parents agreed,
that
was still far off in the future, and in the meantime she could think of no other real solution to her problem.

One drizzly Saturday afternoon in May, Penelope was sitting on the window seat in the marble foyer at the front of the house. She had just finished reading the very last Anne of Green Gables book, and she was depressed at the thought of what to do
next
. She watched strangers pass by the front window in the spitting rain with their umbrellas, and she made a game of trying to guess which stranger might look up and smile or nod. So far, at least fifty people had passed, and not a single one had looked up at her from the wet pavement. Penelope was just about to stop playing the game when her father came down the stairs. He plunked himself beside Penelope on the wide window seat.

“You’re looking a little down in the mouth. What’s wrong, sport?” Dirk Grey asked his daughter in his usual jovial way.

“I’m
bored
, Daddy,” admitted Penelope with a slump and a sigh.

Dirk pondered this for a moment. “Hmm.” Then he cleared his throat, stuck an index finger theatrically into the air, and quoted at the ceiling, “Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources!”

Penelope looked at her father quizzically. “What’s that mean?” she asked.

“It means that when you’re bored, you need to think of something to
do,
” answered her father. “It means you can’t blame boredom on anyone but yourself. You can’t just wait for things to happen to you. You have to
do
things. Or anyway, I think that’s what it means. It’s often hard to tell with poetry!”