Chasing Poppies

A story about the relationship between two sisters, Penelope and Genevieve. Themes of grief, depression, and body image present.

An unknown woman stood in the Rain family living room. Wearing a pinstripe suit, she clicked and clacked her heels across the tiles once littered with American Girl doll boxes. Her fingertips scurried over the smooth wooden frame as she studied the photograph housed inside. Through the window, the sunlight illuminated the frame as it danced across the mantle, detailing the family’s youngest daughter, Genevieve. Embellished in her Communion dress with her blonde curls flowing in the Vermont summer wind, her wide-eyed gaze was so curious and innocent, yet haunting. Penelope, the eldest of the two, winced as she observed the woman holding the frame, knowing she could never quite forget that dress. That frilly dress was the fanciest piece of clothing her sister had ever owned during her five short years, and she always fantasized she was a princess as she twirled around in it. Penelope was in the picture, too, much younger and still unscathed from menstrual mood swings and cystic acne.

“This one will be perfect for the memorial,” the woman picked up the photograph between pen clicks and turned to the pastor who nodded in agreement. The picture detailed the two sisters standing, perched amongst the poppy fields in their childhood backyard only days before Genevieve’s death. Amongst the rolling hills of their hometown of Bass Peak, Vermont, the pair spent hours outside “chasing poppies” and running as fast as their tiny, stubby legs could carry them until the sun fell into the earth. Plucking poppies from their plump stems, they always filled their matching baskets with the beautiful summertime flowers, and that day, brought them home to their dolls for afternoon tea. Setting the table with Penelope’s most prized birthday present, a Mattel plastic tea set, and each of their dolls perched up, the freshly picked poppies always provided the perfect centerpiece. As they poured cups of imaginary hot liquid and giggled while clutching plastic scones, that was the last time Penelope ever saw her mother smile.

After what had seemingly been the most perfect day, Penelope’s eyes bolted open, her body doused in moisture and sweat, sticking to her mattress. She catapulted the blanket off of her, landing on the floor of the sisters’ shared bedroom.

“Genny?” Penelope whispered, turning to her side and rubbing her eyes. Recently, she had been suffering from very vivid nightmares, and Genevieve, two years younger, would always hold and comfort her, tapping her fingers amongst the bedpost. 

“3… 2… 1,” Genevieve would say whenever her older sister had a night terror, matching her finger taps to the numbers. “See? You are okay and safe now.” Penelope would often follow her sister, matching her number of finger tips to bring herself back to reality.

Penelope rubbed her eyes and opened them, and instead of Genevieve laying by her side, the sight of her unmade trundle bed created an eeriness in the room. The clock glared into her youthful eyes, reading 6:12 am, and her eyes struggled to find sleep. Hours later, Penelope was startled by sobbing from the kitchen, feeling her heart beat faster with each descending step as she picked up momentum. Turning the corner into the kitchen, her parents produced words that to this day, she still struggled to understand.

            “We are so sorry,” were the only words that could leave their lips.

            Genevieve was declared dead at 10:54 am, a tragic case of an accidental drowning engraved into the coroner’s book, leading to barbed wire fences being put up around Green’s Pond. Green’s, as the locals called it, boasted panoramic views of Stratton Mountain and once doubled as a nature preserve and a local swim club. Now inundated with geese, sticker bushes, and fallen branches three years after its closing, the girls’ mother had always warned them to not venture past the property line, balancing little Genevieve on her lap while Penelope sat on the floor.  To the residents of Bass Peak, Genevieve was a small-town tragedy taken from us far too soon and a victim of her parents’ absentmindedness and her own curiosity. Penelope never quite understood what drove her sister to venture down to Green’s that morning, but she never asked questions. Questions made it all feel too real.

            Genevieve’s funeral drew in large crowds from all over Bass Peak and beyond. Even at just a mere five years old, Genevieve had sang regularly at the church and always took first place at the annual town fishing derby. Her parents opted for an open-casket, much to Penelope’s melancholy, as her eyes welled up with tears. Although the altar was covered in her sister’s favorite flowers, even their beauty could not conceal the sheer ugliness of her swollen corpse. That picture of her in the white dress, this time with Penelope cropped out, towered over the church pews. Penelope sensed Genevieve’s presence in every piece of stained glass and poppy flower. Squirming in the stiff, wooden seats that dug into her itchy black dress, she listened while family members and so-called friends went on and on and on about her angel sister. 

Behind all of the flowery speeches, Penelope scoffed, knowing that none of them knew her sister as well as she had. Needless to say, after the funeral, Penelope jumped out of her seat, grasping every single poppy flower that she could in her chubby hands. A few hours later, the ravenous reporters began cluttering the Rains’ front porch crafting newspaper headlines about Genevieve’s mysterious death. Hence, giving Mr. Rain a reason to drink Smirnoff every night and wake up with a pounding migraine the next morning.

“Daddy, will you please drive me to school today?” Penelope asked eagerly one morning, with pigtails grazing against her Hello Kitty backpack. “It is too cold to walk to the bus stop, it’s nearly snowing today.”

Her father groaned, puffing his cigarette and clutching his pounding temple. “Go walk yourself. God gave you legs for a reason,” he replied gruffly, a result of his late-night drinking and minimal sleep.

Penelope sighed. Perhaps the extra steps were good for her and her newfound love for dessert, anyways. So, she began to eat and her father continued to drink and her mother locked herself away. She never asked questions.

After Genevieve died, it did not take Penelope long to realize that she was not like other kids in Bass Peak and that her parents were not the superheroes her wandering imagination had made them out to be. Throughout her years in grade school, Penelope was the one who the teachers felt inclined to send notes home under the guise of just checking in and cluttering her parents’ phone with messages. They never responded.

Following her fourth-grade winter break, the kids in Penelope’s class began donning their countless holiday gifts.

“I got a new doll!”

“I got a computer with three new games!”

One of the boys in her class, Kyle, looked over at Penelope, “What did you get this year?” and she fell silent, yearning for the family dinners and cookie baking on Christmas Eve which had not occurred since her sister’s passing. To nine-year-old Penelope, filling each other’s stockings with goodies was her favorite memory, smiling for a moment as she was whisked back to that last Christmas together. She and Genevieve had made cookies for the holidays, rolling the dough into perfect, bite-size spheres and sticking the leftover batter on each other’s noses. Penelope glared at the torn carpet of her classroom, her heart sinking at the response that she spent the holidays alone in the family parlor.

“Mommy, can we make chicken parmesan one night? That was Genevieve’s favorite,” Penelope asked her mother as she left her room for the first time in what seemed like days. Her pencil brushed against her multiplication homework and she furrowed her brow. She was in fifth grade now, and her class had been practicing the times tables- the eights always stumping Penelope.

Her mother scowled and faced the pots and pans that had been piling up in the sink. “Can you just clean up the table? Your eraser shavings are everywhere. Don’t you want to eat dinner at some point? Clean, now.”

And so, she shut herself up and the Rains ate TV dinners in silence. While her father clutched a beer in hand, Penelope twisted a spaghetti noodle around her fork and felt the acidity of the marinara burn in her stomach. The next week, she won the Bass Peak annual Spelling Bee, and her parents did not even show up. In fact, they never even talked about it. They tended to not talk very much in that household.

In the next few months, Penelope’s parents remarked that her baby fat was no longer cute and enrolled her at weekly Tuesday swim lessons at the YMCA. She had refused to go anywhere near water after Genevieve’s death. After four years, she was believed to be fine as she sat strapped in the back seat of her mother’s Honda Civic. Squeezing into a swimsuit was already humiliating enough for her, its mustard ends restraining her belly fat, but being the only 12-year-old at the pool was somehow even worse. All around her, tiny children splashed around and glared at the weird-out-of-place-older-girl. Their parents cooed and snapped their Walgreens disposable cameras as their little munchkins perfected their strokes and Penelope slouched over in the back of their photos.

Her lifeguard’s name was Rose, to which Penelope rolled her eyes. Roses were tacky flowers; basic, and pricked kind children with their villainous thorns. Roses were cliche and grew out of control until they sprawled out and engulfed their bushes. Roses were not like elegant, scarlet poppies that she would forever associate Genevieve with. In the realm of flowers, Penelope felt like an ugly, out-of-place dandelion. Rose tirelessly demonstrated the side, back, and breaststrokes as Penelope made friends with the flickering light at the top of the ceiling rather than her swim group.  She kicked and splashed water around, eventually storming off of the slippery pool deck after about ten minutes- the chlorine sticking to her split ends like chewed up Bazooka gum. Soaking and shivering, she perched herself on the hard metal bunch of the locker room and wept softly into her pruny hands. When her mother pulled into the parking lot, she would sob the whole way home. Mrs. Rain would just go silent as she clutched the steering wheel and popped an Excedrin. Her dad drank some more and her mother slept her sorrows away and she hoarded a box of Cheez-Its in her bedroom. The collection of processed snacks under her bed expanded and so did her waistline. Still, she never asked questions.

Penelope’s nightmares came back twice as badly once she had started swim lessons, with visions of her head being grasped and held violently underwater. Sometimes Genevieve was there and sometimes she was not, warning her sister not go in the water like she mistakenly had. Those were the most haunting, leading her to grasp her pillow and bury her face in its softness and scream.

            For the next few years, Penelope was coined as the freak with the dead sister and the absentee parents. At school, she was an angsty teenager who ate her feelings and parents did not want their sweet little angels associating with her. To say the least, middle school was brutal, between the constant snickers from the ruthless, acne-ridden trolls deemed middle schoolers. The locker room was wholeheartedly the worst, with the aroma of onion-sweat lingering amongst the broken lockers. Her classmates’ taunts stabbed through her like knives. Marcia Lovejoy, the school’s most prominent bully and daughter of the CEO of Tootsie Roll Industries, paid the seventh grade in free candy in exchange to make her life a living hell. 

“We’ll give you back your clothes when you admit that you killed her, lard a*s.”

“With a sister like you, she probably jumped into that pond willingly, freak.”

At first, Penelope winced, but as the school year went on, she sucker-punched Marcia Lovejoy right in her overly blushed, caked up face one fateful afternoon. She was suspended for a week. While the majority of the school still disdained Penelope, she did receive a few fist pumps from Marcia’s other victims.

Following the locker room incidents and her general disinterest in interacting with others, she was required to attend weekly sessions with a school social worker, Nicole. At every session, Penelope said nothing and twirled her pencil around, tapping it lightly on the desk as she stared ahead at the Mickey Mouse bobblehead on her desk. Genevieve had loved Mickey Mouse. During sessions, Nicole would throw around words like depression and trauma and grief, but those were all just background noise to her.

“Your anger stems from not properly processing Genevieve’s death,” Nicole said to her one day, lowering her glasses. But Penelope shrugged- none of these words were going to tell her how her sister died or why she had wandered down to the pond in the twilight. No matter how many times Penelope attended sessions and tapped her fingers, she never felt safe.

As Penelope grew older, Green’s Pond became a sight for teenage sex, littered beer bottles, and chain smoking. In high school, she blended in with the antiseptic walls, so she started selling nicotine to make a buck. At first, she abhorred the idea of people partying at the place where Genevieve took her last breath. The more she frequented the pond, though, she began to realize that she was just like them. They were all lonely people with lost eyes and tattered souls who hopped that barbed fence and ruined their bodies just to feel alive.

            She often cut classes to smoke, other times to have sex in exchange for cigarettes. As her sneakers hit the pavement, she headed down to the Krauszer’s. In the once-thriving downtown of Bass Peak, Krauszer’s was one of the only stores which remained open. Most stores had declared bankruptcy, moving out of Bass Peak and going somewhere cool like Burlington or Portsmouth. As she shuffled through the door and heard that familiar store bell ring, ding! she pulled her hoodie over her face and handed the cashier a five dollar bill. Inhaling ebony smoke, she leaned against the cold brick wall that faced the back parking lot. As her finger grated against the lighter, she wished that deep down that her mother could just pull up in her Honda Civic, take her home, and reassure her that it would all be okay. Her car never came. Instead, Penelope’s phone buzzed- a call from the hospital sharing that her father was in for liver failure. He had drunken himself to near death and his daughter was too angry to even care.

            As the monitor beeped and she entered the hospital room, she stood there awkwardly, unsure of the last time she and her father had talked. Watching her dad’s nearly lifeless body deteriorate and shrivel under the grim hospital light, she began to think back to when Genevieve laid in that open casket. First her angel sister, now her dad, and although her mother was still alive, she might as well have been dead with the dreary fog in her eyes. She knew that needed to get the hell out of Bass Peak.  A week later, she grasped a one-way $6 Greyhound bus ticket in her hands as she slammed the door.

            Penelope’s bloodshot eyes prayed for sleep, which felt impossible as the bus jerked, swinging her head in a full throttle as it trudged along the Mass Turnpike. Her cracked lips yearned for water as she looked around the bus. It smelled like piss and cigarettes. Much to Penelope’s surprise, the bus was filled with people around her age, the outcasts of their families. It reminded her of Green’s Pond and the damaged youth.  She heard whispers all around her, mostly arising from the girl with jet black hair across the aisle. Eyes smothered with thick eyeliner she blabbed loudly on the phone as she chomped bubblegum. She looked maybe fourteen, yet was traveling completely alone. For some reason, Penelope immediately felt drawn to the young girl. She was just like me, she thought.

“I hear California poppies are stunning this time of year.”

As soon as the word “poppies” exited the girl’s lips, Penelope’s ears perked up immediately. What were the odds? She immediately thought of Genevieve.

 In line at a Starbucks, Penelope swiped a wallet from the obnoxious platinum blonde woman who ordered a tall skinny latte with no foam no whip in her nasally irritating voice. It was the kind of voice that made her insides churn into solidified butter. She was too wrapped up fixing her hair and cleaning her glasses to even notice. Penelope grinned, the gaudy Gucci wallet she grasped in her hand was her one-way ticket out of there. 

After what felt like forever, Penelope traversed through airport security and hopped a plane. The rest of that day was a blur to her. When she finally arrived, surrounded by bright hues of orange, she stood amongst the poppies. The vibrance of the afternoon sun engulfed the field as her soles brushed against the soft ground and soothed her tired feet. Penelope twirled and danced and ran throughout the preserve until the sun fell into the earth. Smoothing out a patch of grass with her hands, Penelope laid on her back and gazed at the stars, tapping her fingers against her temple as Genevieve had once taught her. Penelope’s eyes fluttered, drifting off into the aroma of the poppies which enclosed around her like a warm hug. And for the first time in forever, her eyes found sleep.