Free The Ten Best Days of My Life by Adena Halpern Page B

You want to tell me what happened?”
    â€œI’m new,” she said confidently. “Do you really think that’s the way I’d like to start off at a new school? Telling on the other kids? I don’t think so. I plead the Fifth and that’s my right as an American.”
    Yes, she was smart. Pen’s father was a lawyer and taking the Fifth was a big thing in her house. I had to ask her later what “the Fifth” was.
    Now, normally, if any other kid had said this, they would have been given a severe talking-to with threats of expulsion or worse: in-school mornings and afternoon detention for three months. Pen, though, made a point with no room for discussion. How could anyone start off their first day at school by admitting that she beat the crap out of the entire fourth-grade class? Pen had balls . . . er, ovaries of steel, still does.
    So Mrs. Macknicki excused her and went on to the next kid.
    That afternoon, after a long hot shower, even though my parents kept asking why I smelled like compost, I never told.
    â€œSomething’s going on at that school that I’m not liking,” my father said sternly from the phone when my mom told him I stunk. “Let’s get her out of that school, Maxine.”
    â€œAre the kids being mean to you?” my mom asked. “Would you like to go to a new school?”
    I didn’t even have to think about it.
    â€œNope,” I told them. “It’s not so bad. I’ll stay there.”
    The next day at school I had someone to eat lunch with, and that afternoon I had my first playdate.
    My parents thought Penelope was the weirdest-looking girl they’d ever seen.
    â€œThat girl needs a good brush to her hair and a good diet,” my dad laughed after he met her.
    They didn’t know her though. Pretty soon they came to see what I saw. She was the coolest girl anyone could ever know.
    Penelope Goldstein is everything I never was. Even from that young age, Pen was never afraid to fight for anything if she felt it was worth fighting for. She wasn’t the prettiest girl, she never had the prettiest face, but you would never have known it by the way she carried herself. Pen has the ability to make people believe that her ample thighs are the ones to envy. That’s why I love her so much. That’s why everyone loves Pen. A couple of years ago I asked her why she fought off the other kids for me. She said, “The kids really hated you. I figured they must have been jealous of you. If they were jealous, there must have been something really cool about you.” That’s Pen. She’s always had this insane gift for seeing the world in a way that no one else ever thinks to look at it.
    I don’t know if it was because of Pen, or that I had learned my lesson that telling was not the way to go through life, but eventually Dana Stanbury and Kerry Collins and Olivia Wilson also became lifelong friends. Every so often, as the years went by, either Olivia or Kerry or Dana would say to me, “I always felt really bad about that day and I want to apologize.” I told them it wasn’t necessary to apologize after all these years, but I let them anyway. I wondered, though, had Penelope not beaten the crap out of them, how would my life have been different?
    So I go back to those questions I asked in the beginning: How much money makes you rich? How many friends do you really need in this world (or that world)?
    Come to think of it, I think I’ve made the answers pretty clear.

Heaven Help Me
    I need a break.
    This is all getting to be too much.
    Is this what they want to know? If they know my best friend was the big fat kid, will they really let me stay in seventh heaven?
    What do they want from me?
    I’m so stressed.
    Ugh.
    Maybe Peaches will go for a walk with me. Peaches has been totally ignoring me lately, now that she’s got her new gang of dog friends and an endless number of dog toys. I feel