Chapter Five

Chapter Five: Any Old Thing Will Do

The events of the past few days were completely forgotten on the morning that Jenny woke up from bed and, seeing her school uniform laid neatly out on top of her dresser, remembered that summer was over.

“Are you awake?” her father called up the stairs as Jenny crawled out from under the covers. With a yawn, she padded over to the door and pulled it open, smiling when the smell of Mr. Strumpet’s famous “first day of school” breakfast hit her nose. He was standing at the bottom of the stairs, wearing a splattered apron. “The bus comes in an hour,” he added.

Feeling a small tremor deep inside her chest, Jenny called down that she was awake and turned around, closing the door back behind her. As excited as she was, because Jenny really did like school, she was nervous too. She had known everybody at her old school and, even though she had lived in Buckley’s Hollow since the beginning of summer, she still didn’t know any kids her age that lived in town.  

Darting to the bathroom, she brushed her teeth and combed her hair. Then she ran to her room and quickly pulled on the uniform, wrinkling her nose at the boring blue and white-ness of it. Her backpack was lying at the foot of the bed and, after considering for a moment, she went to her drawers and pulled out the bag of sand that she had hidden there the night after they visited Grumman and Fletchley’s Department Store.

“Good morning, sunshine,” said Mr. Strumpet when she finally walked into the kitchen.

“I don’t think it’s good at all,” said Jenny stubbornly as she sat down at the table, glancing down at the jumbled mess of pancakes and eggs her dad sat down in front of her. “Can’t I be homeschooled?” she said. “Then you can teach me really useful things. Like picking locks.”

Mr. Strumpet poked his head out of the kitchen. “Picking locks?” he asked.

“Don’t you think it would be useful?”

Coming back with a glass of orange juice, he sat it down in front of her and then took his own seat. He’d taken off the apron and was dressed in his best suit and tie. She’d almost forgotten that he was going to a job interview that afternoon. She had heard him discussing it with her mother a few evenings before.

He had been on a lot of interviews since he had lost his old job �" more than Jenny could even remember. Back in the city Mr. Strumpet had worked in a tall building where every day he stared at numbers on a computer screen for several hours, sometimes changing the numbers and sometimes sending them along to somebody else, who often told him that he had done everything wrong and made him do it all over again.

That was back when Mrs. Strumpet, and not Mr. Strumpet, had stayed at home all day. Then just a few weeks before Christmas Jenny had come home from school to find her parents sitting at the kitchen table, and they had told her that they needed to talk.

Soon after, Mrs. Strumpet had been offered an important job telling other people why they should buy the things she told them to, and the entire family had packed up their things and moved into the small house in Buckley’s Hollow.

So Jenny watched her dad as he considered her question. Finally he said, “Lock picking might be useful, but there isn’t much you could do with it. And most of the things you could do with it are illegal.”

The pair finished their breakfasts quickly and, tousling her hair, Mr. Strumpet saw Jenny out the door and to the curb just in time for the big, rumbling bus to come down the street and stop outside her house. She turned around and waved at him one last time before pulling herself up the steps and inside. The driver, an elderly lady with a dried up face, cackled. Startled, Jenny caught herself from shrieking as she darted into the aisle and picked an empty seat behind two girls with long, blonde hair.

Holding her backpack in her lap, Jenny suddenly felt a lot smaller than she had a few moments ago when she’d been having breakfast with her dad. She glanced outside, listening as the noise rose and fell inside the bus as the other kids �" who had all known each other for years �" had a little fun before the first day of school officially started.

Jenny’s neighborhood sat on the edges of town, which had just as many big, expensive houses as it did tiny, run down houses. The Strumpets themselves lived right in the middle of these, in an ordinary house with bright blue shutters and neat little hedges. As they moved further away from Jenny’s house they came into one of the poorer neighborhoods.

Watching out the window, she saw that everything here became a lot more brown and a lot more thin and stretched out. Up and down the gravely street boys and girls huddled together at makeshift bus stops and, as they got onto the bus, the noise from the other kids died off a little as they turned to stare at the newcomers.

This neighborhood was called the Gray Hollow, and it wasn’t too difficult to see why. All the boys and girls from this part of town, from the youngest kindergartners to tall, bored looking teenagers, had the same colorless and pinched look. Their uniforms, while they were technically the same as all the others, had an obviously secondhand look to them.

As they got on the bus they stayed in their groups, taking up what was left of the empty seats on the bus. By the time the driver came around to the end of the street almost all the seats were full. The bus came to a shudder in front of the final house on the street, which was even older and more run down than all the others, for a single boy who stood there at the end of the driveway.

“Runt!” one other kid called as the boy stepped onto the bus. He quickly stared down at the floor. Sitting up, Jenny tried to get a good look at him. He had pale yellow hair that stuck up every which way on top of his head. Like the others from Gray Hollow, he was extremely thin and his skin was more than a little pale. But apart from that, she noticed that he seemed different somehow from the others.

He walked all the way to the end of the bus, looking for seats, and then when he reached the back the boy was forced to turn around and march back the other way.

“Erm…you can sit here,” offered Jenny, scooting over closer to the window.

The boy looked up, surprise registering in his tired looking eyes. “Uhm…thanks,” he said, pulling himself up onto the seat beside her.

Having picked up all the students, it was time for the bus to return to the school, and nothing more eventful happened between the boy sitting down beside Jenny and the bus pulling up in front of the school and all of the students getting off, one by one.

She wanted to ask the boy his name, but Jenny didn’t dare. He hadn’t seemed too happy to be getting on the bus in the first place, and he probably wouldn’t have wanted some mousey girl asking him questions. However, by glancing over his shoulder when all the students crowded around the glass door to find out where they had been assigned, she saw that his name was Eric Webley, and although they were in the same grade they had different teachers.

Because she had been so busy thinking about Eric, Jenny hadn’t even noticed that the name of her own teacher was Miss Fletchley. So she was in for a surprise, the pleasant kind, when she was marched down the long hallway to her classroom and opened it to find the pretty young woman from the department store standing in front of the desk, handing out “My Name Is…” stickers for each of the students to fill out and place on their chests.

“Gretchen!” she said in surprise. The young woman looked up and her face turned a pretty pink.

“So nice to see you again, Jenny,” she said. “But here, you’re going to have to call me Miss Fletchley.”

“Oh.” Jenny took the sticker from Gretchen, glancing up at the young woman. “I thought you worked at the store.”

Gretchen smiled, pushing a strand of bright red hair out of her eyes. “Only during the summer. As a…well, a sort of favor to my uncle,” she said. “Now, will you go ahead and take your seat?” As she spoke, Jenny thought that she saw a worried look in Gretchen’s eyes.

She went around to the seat that Gretchen had pointed out to her and pulled out her notebook and her pencil box. Taking out her favorite pen, she wrote her name on the sticker as neatly as she could before fixing it to her uniform sweater.

All around her, the other kids were doing the same between talking, and laughing, and playing games whenever they could do it out of sight of the teacher. Finally, as the last of the students entered the room, Gretchen whistled and they all fell silent.

“Good morning, class. I’m Miss Fletchley,” she said. With that Jenny could almost swear she saw Gretchen glance in her direction and wink.

“Good morning, Miss Fletchley,” said the class, all together.

“Today, we’re going to start things off by going around the room. Each of you is going to tell me your name, what your favorite thing to do is, and what you’d like to be when you grow up. Doesn’t that sound like fun?” she said. But despite her perky words, Gretchen looked almost as nervous talking to the questions as Jenny was about having to answer her questions. She remembered how Gretchen had blushed when she talked to Jenny’s father at the store, and remembered thinking that she was shy even then.

Sitting up a little straighter, Jenny thought to herself that she was going to try and answer the questions for Gretchen. She started with the first of the students, and making her way around the room finally pointed at Jenny, who realized as her heart began to flutter in her chest that she hadn’t even thought of what she was going to say.

“Uhm…I’m Jenny Strumpet,” she said. “I mostly like to…to read,” she stammered. “And to draw. And…when I grow up, I’d like to be a…an adventurer!” she finally managed.

A bunch of the kids in class suddenly turned to look at her. “A what?” a handful of them said, as they started to whisper to each other.

Feeling herself turning red now, even redder than Gretchen had before, Jenny slumped down into her seat until her nose was practically at the same level as her desk. At the front of the room, Gretchen stared around at everyone before forcing the last few students to continue and then handing out their first assignment of the school year.

Completing hers in silence, Jenny wondered if the other kids were going to think she was a freak now.  That question seemed to be answered when Gretchen picked a boy named Nathan to go around the room collecting the assignments from the other students. As he came by Jenny’s desk he made a face at her; then, picking up her neatly finished paper, he crumpled it up and stuck it right at the bottom of the other pages.

By the time that lunch came around, she knew that she was going to be the least popular girl in her class. Looking at her desk to avoid the snickers from the other students, she waited until they had cleared the room before she picked up her backpack and made her way toward the door.

“Jenny?” said Gretchen, stopping her at her desk. Jenny turned around to see her smiling at her. “It takes a brave girl to go looking for adventure,” she said. “And an even braver girl to be herself, no matter what other people think.”

Jenny didn’t feel that brave, but she didn’t tell Gretchen that. Instead, she mumbled something like ‘thank you’ and left the room, following the last of the stragglers toward the lunchroom. She stopped at the doorway, spotting most of her classmates sitting around a table toward the front of the room. Taking one hesitant step towards them, she saw the boy named Nathan sitting at the middle of the table and making a face while the other kids laughed.

There were a few other tables. She ruled out the older kids, who looked like they were probably too cool for her, and the younger kids �" sitting with them would earn her an entire years’ worth of teasing, probably. Finally she spotted a mostly empty table in the corner of the room. The only person sitting there was the boy from the bus �" Eric Webley.

Making her way over, she sat down on the side opposite Eric and plunked her backpack down on the table. She pulled out the lunch her dad had made her, and was halfway finished with unwrapping her peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwich when he realized that Eric was leaning forward on his elbows without a single bit of food in sight.

Tearing off half of the sandwich, she held it out to him. He jumped slightly. Then, with a slightly suspicious glance in her direction, he took it from her and began to devour it with huge, gulping bites. Before even starting to eat her own half of the sandwich, Jenny pulled out a bag of carrot sticks and a package of cookies. She neatly separated each into two sections, pushing them over to Eric.

He polished off everything, and only when he was finished did he thank Jenny, doing so in a quiet voice that was almost a whisper. Jenny nodded, nibbling at a corner of her sandwich thoughtfully.

“Do they hate you, too?” he asked after the two of them had been sitting there in silence for several minutes, listening to the roar of the lunchroom. “You wouldn’t be sitting with me if they didn’t hate you.”

Jenny thought about it, and taking a bite of carrot nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I think they hate me.”

“Good,” said Eric. For the first time since she had seen him that morning something that almost looked like a smile passed over his face before fading away again.

Jenny learned that Eric had lived in the Gray Hollow his entire life. He had always been smaller than the other boys, and smarter too �" something that made him different than them. It was all made even worse by the fact that his older brother had been the high school football star, and just as popular with the Grays (as the kids from the Hollow called themselves) as he was with kids from the other parts of town.

Jenny told him all about the incident in class earlier that day, and he agreed that the other kids probably thought that she was weird. But he also said that he liked the idea of becoming an adventurer, and by the time the bell rang to dismiss them back to their classrooms they had already planned their first trips to the jungles of South America and into the pyramids of Egypt.

“Promise you’ll sit with me again?” asked Eric, as Jenny scooped up her backpack to make her way out of the quickly emptying cafeteria.

“Of course,” said Jenny. He stood up and followed her out into the hallway. She stopped dead when she saw Nathan standing there again, talking with a group of her classmates. Eric looked up and, seeing the source of her problems, grabbed onto her sleeve and pulled her in the opposite direction.

“Let’s go this way,” he said, leading her into a hallway that was almost empty. “Nobody uses this part of the school anymore,” Eric said. “I use it a lot, when I don’t want to see anybody.”

Jenny craned her neck around, getting a look inside the windows of the empty, darkened classrooms. All of a sudden she shivered, getting the same strange feeling that she had on and off since opening the strange box on her birthday.

All of a sudden she heard a growl. Not an imaginary growl, or a spooky sound that sounded like something that could have been a growl but really wasn’t. It was a real growl, and it came from right behind one of the closed doors.

“Did you hear that?” she asked, without needing to, because Eric too had stopped moving and was staring at the door with his already wide eyes pulled open even wider. They exchanged looks, and then slowly she walked to the door and turned the handle, giving it a slight push. It squeaked loudly as it opened.

She stepped inside, dropping her backpack at the doorway and looking around the room to see what could have made the noise. Whatever it was didn’t belong there. Even the grouchiest teachers never growled.

“Hello?” she called out. There was another long, low growl, followed by a snorting and snuffling kind of sound. Eric was standing at the door behind her. Walking slowly, Jenny moved through the rows of empty desks, reaching out to touch them so she didn’t trip as she moved through the room.

“Eric!” she whispered. “Whatever you do, don’t turn on the light!”

The problem with telling a person not to do something is this �" it makes the thing you are telling them not to do seem much more interesting. So Eric, who hadn’t even thought about turning on the light, could barely wait after Jenny told him not to turn on the light before he reached out and hit the switch.

The shadows suddenly disappeared as the room was cast in a bright, white glow. All of the shadows except for one. Jenny shrieked as the dark black shape darted across the floor and jumped up towards her. She ducked and it flew over her head, close enough that she could smell it �" a strange dusty, musty smell, like something that had been locked up for a thousand years.

There was a loud crash and several desks went flying, skidding to a stop against the wall. The shadow now spread against the wall, like a giant shapeless oil slick. Creeping down the floor, it began to reform into something new. It shifted a little, eyes forming at its center.

Slowly the shape began to change, spreading in some places and pinching together in others. It divided, forming a head, and stretching on either side until it had two wings. As Jenny watched, too stunned to move, it became a giant bird. Not just any bird, but an enormous crow. Spindly bird legs with sharp nails suddenly jutted out from the bottom of its body and it hopped up onto one of the desks that had fallen over.

Jenny knew, without knowing how she knew, that the shape must be connected to the box she had gotten for her birthday.

“Eric, can you throw me my backpack?” she called. He didn’t answer, and turning around she saw that she was now all alone with whatever the thing was. She felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck as, instead of the growling that had drawn her into the room she heard a raspy chatter coming from the monster.

Backing up slowly, keeping her eyes on the thing as it ruffled its brand new feathers, Jenny continued to move toward the door until she felt her backpack hit the back of her ankle. She ducked down, turning the whole thing upside down and dumping everything out on the floor as she quickly dug for the bag of sand.

Metal screeched as the giant crow stepped from desk to desk, circling around the room to where Jenny stood at the door. Yanking open the bag, she poured a fistful of dust into her hand. More desks toppled over as it moved toward her, and Jenny wondered how it was possible that nobody else could hear the awful noise that the thing was making.

Clenching the sand tight in her hand, feeling the grains pressing into her skin, she waited for the crow to come even closer. Finally, puffing up its feathers, it started to dive in Jenny’s direction. Holding her breath and hoping she wasn’t wrong about the sand, she threw the entire fistful into the monster’s eyes.

Squawking loudly, it lost its direction and went crashing down into the floor. It rolled once, and then once again, before coming to a stop on top of what was now a pile of battered wood and metal. Its huge, beady eyes blinked before coming to a close.

Then it started getting smaller. Slowly it shrank, down and down, until it was no bigger than an ordinary crow. It got to its feet, fluttered its feathers, and then with a quiet chirp flew up towards an open window and out of the school.

Jenny was breathless as she stood there trying to convince herself that she had dreamed the whole thing. She had never seen anything more strange in her entire life. But there were the upturned desks, and the glitter of gold sand across the floor, and even what looked like claw marks against one of the walls.

She hadn’t even thought about getting her things back together when she heard two pairs of footsteps coming down the stairs toward the room. The first was Eric, who turned bright red when he saw Jenny and turned his face away from her.

The second set of footsteps belonged to an older gentleman, who crossed his arms across his chest and glared down at Jenny disapprovingly.

“Young lady,” he said. “Can you tell me exactly what happened here?”