Chapter 2-3
838 Words
“Hey, Penny?”
Penny heard the voice and recognized it, even in the nearly perfect blankness of her half-sleep, but ignored it. It was a part of some emerging new dream, had to be since Katie wasn’t allowed to visit her house.
“Pssst … are you there?”
If it was an important dream, it would start making sense any time now. No need to worry.
“Hello … hello … helloooooo …”
Penny groaned and rolled onto her side so she could slap the snooze button on her alarm clock. Instead, her hand fell on the mirror next to it, a small oval in a pewter frame.
“I see you,” Katie said, her voice muffled, and began to giggle.
Not the alarm clock, and not a dream, which could mean only one thing. Penny was awake.
She groaned again and closed her fingers around the small mirror. She fought a brief urge to chuck it across her room and steal a few more minutes of sleep and sat up instead. No need to break irreplaceable magic mirrors just because they sometimes interrupted perfectly good sleep.
One of the useful things she and Zoe had been able to learn while waiting for Katie was how to use the mirrors Tovar had left behind. The big one, which Penny kept shoved under her bed reflective side down, could see through any of the smaller ones anytime the viewer wanted. If Penny spoke Zoe’s or Katie’s name into the small one she carried with her, they could hear and respond through theirs, which was great, because there was no cell phone signal at Penny’s house, much to Katie’s irritation, and electronics in general didn’t work in Aurora Hollow.
Penny forced her eyes open, blinking against the sun, risen higher since her last experiment with wakefulness and now stabbing its too-bright light all over.
“Penny, hurry up.”
“All right.”
She rubbed the last of the sleep from her eyes and flipped the mirror over. Staring at her from inside was not her groggy reflection but Katie’s bright and cheerful one.
“Kat, just because you’re a morning person doesn’t mean you have to try to turn me into one.” Penny was tolerant, not one to judge another’s imperfections, but even she had her limits.
“Morning person?” Katie sounded slightly offended. “It’s almost noon!”
She seemed to realize how loudly she was speaking and looked furtively over her shoulder.
Penny checked her bedside clock and noticed Zoe’s bed was empty.
“Ten thirty is not almost noon.”
But it was time to rise and shine … if she had to.
“I’m coming over today,” Katie said, then looked over her shoulder again to be sure no one was eavesdropping.
“Your dad changed his mind?” Penny somehow doubted it. A man who can nurse a fourteen-year-old grudge against a dead woman took his grudges seriously, and Katie’s continued glances over her shoulder confirmed her suspicions.
“Are you kidding?” Katie’s buoyant mood seemed to slip a notch, but she brightened again almost at once. “Michael’s covering for me.”
“Michael?” Penny knew Michael by face but had never spoken to him. He was Katie’s brother, five years older and something of a town hero. Star quarterback in a championship game against Oakville, a town to the west that Dogwood hadn’t been able to beat before he joined the team, or in the few years since he’d graduated. The Dogwood varsity football team had one thing in common with Katie’s dad: it knew how to hold a grudge. Oakwood was smaller, but seemed to contain the right genetic pool to produce good football players, and they consistently crushed Dogwood.
Instead of making his play for football stardom, however, Michael had joined the sheriff’s department as a deputy. Katie didn’t hold that against him, though. Just because the sheriff was next to useless didn’t mean that Michael was.
“Kat, if you don’t start making sense, I’m going back to sleep.”
“Dad thinks Michael’s going to Olympia today and that I’m going with him.”
Penny understood and smiled. “You’re going to be in so much trouble if you get caught.”
Katie gave Penny the look, a thing Penny had first experienced at Dogwood School last fall when Katie had shared her father’s long-held grudge. It was withering, and when directed at you, it made you feel about a foot tall. “Fine. If you don’t want me to come over I can find something else to do.”
“No, I want you to come. I just don’t want you to get grounded.”
“Oh come on, who’s going to tell him?”
Penny did a quick mental checklist of people she knew were coming to her birthday party, not that many really, and had to admit Katie had a point. Still …
Penny shrugged. “It’s a small town.”
Katie rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
Despite the risk, Penny was happy Katie was coming over. “I’ll see you later then.”
There was a muted knocking at Katie’s door, and she peered over her shoulder a final time. “Gotta go.”
And just like that, Penny was staring at her own reflection in the strange oval of glass. To her surprise, she was smiling.
It was beginning to feel like a birthday.
- Writer
