Runaway Girls by Skylar Finn

Author:Skylar Finn
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2020-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

14

Penny and the Unicorns

He had never had much interest in girls. Or more to the point, they interested him, but not in the same way they seemed to interest his peers.

He watched them from a distance, starting in middle school: their long hair blow-dried and flat-ironed into submission, their sparkling cherry lip gloss, low-slung hip huggers, dark blue jeans, the top of a thong peeking over a waistband. It was as if they had all collectively agreed to undergo some mysterious change between the sixth grade and the seventh: to become someone other than themselves, to wear a costume and a mask so others would look at them and perceive them in a certain way.

On the other hand, there were girls like Penny: girls who either didn’t get the memo or were absent whatever gene was required to spontaneously alter their appearance, behavior, and personality over the course of a single summer. Penny was quiet and sat in the back of every classroom, where she refrained from drawing attention to herself. She looked out the window or drew in her notebook. She wore glasses and sweaters no matter what the weather and ate lunch alone while she read a book.

He was fascinated by Penny and wondered what books she was reading and what she thought about them. He wanted to know what she drew in her notebooks. He left the locker room before gym class and waited in the hallway in an alcove out of sight outside of the girls’ locker room until they finished changing. When the last high-pitched giggle had faded inside, he slipped in and diligently searched each locker until he found Penny’s: her sweater neatly folded inside, her loafers on the bottom shelf.

None of the lockers had locks (something to do with bringing guns to school), and it was the easiest endeavor in the world to sift through her things—to unhook her red JanSport backpack from its metal peg and unzip it to see what was inside. Her copy of Watership Down for English, her math and science books, and her notebook—a blue Mead Five Star five-subject, its tan dividers filed neatly with freshly dittoed handouts from all her class.

He flipped through the sections and saw she had reserved the one furthest back for her drawings. He expected unicorns but was startled by what he found instead. Penny was a strange girl with a strange mind and had drawn all their classmates—and several teachers—dead, in a variety of creative ways. Brooke Baldwin choked on her milk at lunch. Billy Fay died on the soccer field after being struck by lightning. Mrs. Farmer, the Home Ec teacher, appeared to eat a poisoned chicken pot pie and keel over in the middle of class.

If Penny had interested him from afar prior to that, now she absolutely fascinated him. He, too, liked to imagine his classmates dying in a number of creative ways, especially the girls—the ones like Brooke Baldwin, anyway. All she did was giggle and flash her

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.