Penelope in Retrograde: A Novel(15)

I stumble my way down the rope ladder, using the pounding in my head as a guide. When I make it onto solid ground, it’s as if the sun has suddenly decided to turn on its brights and point straight at me. I’m starting to think my girl Vermouth is actually out to get me.

“What are you wearing?” My mother tugs at the sleeve of my hoodie. “Where’s the dress from Saks that I laid out for you?”

“I’m seventeen, Mom. I think I’m a little too old to be wearing the dresses my mommy lays out for me.”

“You picked the dress out, Penelope!” She pulls something that resembles a tiny bird’s nest from the topknot of curls piled on my head. “You look like you just crawled out of a gutter.”

“Silvia!” my father shouts from the patio. My god we do a lot of shouting in this family. “Silvia, where is she?”

My mother and I lock eyes. The lines around her blue eyes soften, along with her painted-on brows, and for a moment, I almost think she feels bad for me. She knows as well as I do that I’m not cut out for Princeton. She’s the one who signed me up for creative writing classes when I was in middle school instead of forcing me to do math tutoring. She’s the one who always let me stop at the bookstore on the way home from school so I could check out the new release section. She knows how much I want to go to Berkeley, and yet here she is trying to force me into a stupid mock interview for a school I don’t want to go to on a freaking holiday. Something inside me hardens, and I shoot her my best drunken death glare.

“I’m right here, Dad.” I belch and don’t even bother trying to hide it. “Is your friend ready to meet me?”

I brush past my mother, doing my best to put one foot in front of the other in a straight line, until I reach my father.

“What on earth?” My father eyes me warily, like I’m a feral cat. “Are you drunk, Penelope?”

“I’m not not drunk.”

“Do you think this is funny?” He shakes his head the way he always does when I’ve disappointed him. Two shakes, followed by running one hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. “Do you know how many strings I had to pull to get Reginald Yates to join us for Thanksgiving? I flew him out from New Jersey. The man is incredibly influential at Princeton. He likely has hundreds of parents begging for him to practice their kids’ college interviews with him, and yet here you are three sheets to the wind!”

“What exactly does that phrase mean?” I hiccup. “Does it mean bedsheets? Who has three bedsheets hanging out in the wind?”

“Silvia.” My father motions for my mother, completely ignoring me. “Silvia, I need you to go inside and tell Reginald that Penelope is sick. We’ll go ahead and have dinner. He’ll be disappointed to miss out on the mock interview, but at least his dinner won’t be spoiled.”

“Hey, what if we pull a Freaky Friday and have Phoebe pretend to be me?” I ask. “Then your old pal Reginald won’t be disappointed.”

“He’s already met your sister,” my mother snips. “She had the decency to wear the dress she picked out and not get drunk with her boyfriend.”

“Smith’s here? I’ll kill him,” my father growls. “The only thing worse than that boy is his damn hippie-dippie parents.”

“He’s puked all over the tree house,” my mother says. “We’ll have to have the place condemned before we bulldoze it to the ground.” She grabs my hood and pulls me toward the back door. “When we get inside, I want you to go directly to your bedroom. Do you understand? The last thing we need is for Reginald to see you like this and ruin any chance you have to make it into Princeton.”

The ground starts to spin beneath my legs. I can’t tell if I’m walking or floating. My girl Vermouth is taking turns between beating on my head like a bongo and whacking my belly like a pi?ata. “But I don’t want to go to Princeton, Mom.”

“You don’t know what you want, Penelope.”

She opens the door. A rush of Thanksgiving scents torpedoes my sense of smell, and a wave of nausea hits me like a brick to the face. My mouth turns on the waterworks, which means it’s only a matter of seconds before my girl Vermouth makes her comeback.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” I grumble. “Mom.”

“Oh, Reginald.” My mother jerks my hood like a puppeteer trying to stand a dummy to attention. “Reginald, I’m so sorry for the delay.”

“Ah, this must be the famous Penelope.” The man my mother called Reginald has one of those big, booming voices that would make a sports announcer jealous. “It’s great to meet you. How are you?”

“Drunk.” I turn my head just in time to miss covering Reginald Yates’s shoes with vomit. My mother’s caftan is less fortunate.

The last thing I remember before falling asleep is Phoebe gently keeping my hair out of my face while I dry heaved over the toilet. God, it would be so easy to hate Phoebe if she wasn’t such a damn good sister. It’s not her fault that she’s naturally perfect. It’s even less her fault that she got saddled with a twin who somehow ended up with all the worst traits in the family gene pool.

We don’t have that twin thing where we can read each other’s thoughts or anything, but Phoebe does know how to comfort me when nobody else in our family can.