The Phoenix Girls, Book 2

Chapter 2-1

Chapter 2

Birthday Girl

Penny Sinclair awoke the morning of her fourteenth birthday with tears on her cheeks and the feeling that she’d fallen back in time, all the way to when she’d last seen her mom out the door of their apartment in San Francisco to her taxi ride out of Penny’s life. It was to have been a one-and-a-half-hour flight to Los Angeles. Diana Sinclair never returned. Her company’s jet had lost its engines and fallen out of the sky, crashing into the ocean just in sight of LA. With no other living relatives, Penny had ended up in a children’s home in San Francisco before her mother’s old friend and her godmother, Susan Taylor, brought her to the small town of Dogwood, Washington.

Penny had dreamed about that day a lot in the past few weeks.

The one-year anniversary of her mother’s death had passed a month ago without mention, though Susan had treated her as if she were especially fragile and had not commented when Penny went to bed that night hours before her usual, and usually enforced, bedtime. Zoe Parker and Katie West, her best friends, hadn’t known there was anything special about the day, other than it was a Friday, and had been irritated when she’d told them she didn’t feel like doing anything after school.

At the time, it had seemed right to ignore the day until it just went away, seemed like the only way to handle it, but now, the day she was supposed to celebrate her birthday with her friends and Susan, her new mom by default, it felt wrong. Not as if she’d simply tried to forget that day but actually had forgotten it.

Penny remembered she wasn’t alone in her attic bedroom and wiped the moisture from her eyes and cheeks before Zoe could see it. Zoe was new in town too, living with her grandmother, Margery White, while her parents, Dana and Reggie Parker, drove around the country in a big truck. Margery, who was one of the crankiest people Penny had ever met, kept company with a pack of similarly cranky old women Susan called The Town Elders.

Zoe’s time in Dogwood was supposed to have been temporary, so her parents could save money to set up a new home. More than a year had passed since they left Zoe in Dogwood, however, and the arrangement was beginning to look more and more permanent.

Zoe’s grandmother was not happy about it. She hated Reggie, whom she referred to as That Indian, and seemed less than fond of Zoe, who favored her Native American father more than her Caucasian mother.

When Penny’s eyes were dry and it felt safe to face another human being, she sat up and found Zoe in her usual haphazard sprawl, half beneath the sheets of her attic bedroom’s second bed. Zoe was an active sleeper, and any morning she woke up still on the bed was a lucky one.

As Penny watched her, Zoe snorted loudly and flopped onto her stomach, kicking tangled sheets to the floor. She seemed only one flop away from joining them.

I should probably wake her up before she breaks something, Penny thought, but lay back and closed her eyes instead, wanting another fifteen minutes of dreamless sleep before she had to begin the day, but not daring to hope for it.

Penny dozed but could not shut her mind down. She thought about the past few weeks of drama and complications as her eyes slipped shut, and the memories followed her into sleep.