Chapter Text
Penny’s parents always warned her not to wander too far in the woods behind their house, but her desire for adventure typically outweighed the guilt she held for putting a hole in her backyard’s fence.
To be honest her wandering was the reason the fence went up in the first place. A trip too far taken when she was three resulted in a broken arm, a heated argument between her parents, and a fence that she found herself staring up at far too often.
It was tall in the same way everything was tall when one was three, spanning the entire yard in tall wooden planks. She didn’t want the fence to go up, to lose the beautiful view that she found herself staring at from her back steps more often than usual for a girl of her age. But she was never really like many of the other girls her age anyway so that wasn’t really the best argument.
Her parents were a little concerned at her lack of social group. Her mom, a doctor in training, has assured her father (after talking to a few of her colleagues in pediatrics) that shyness was normal in girls of her age. They were still coming into their own, building their social circles, and sometimes children developed groups a little slower than the norm, and that was completely fine.
She’s fine, her mother would say, she’ll make friends soon enough.
But she never really quite got the hang of it the way the other children did. Even at her young age the girl could tell her father was upset about it, the fact that as the other kids played tag and soccer in the park his daughter would always read by herself on the swings, never even hinting that she wanted to join.
But her mother would always reassure her that there wasn’t anything wrong with that, that even though she wasn’t as social as the other kids that didn’t mean that they loved her any less. But Penny noticed when her father stopped coming with her mom to tuck her in at night, she knew even if her mom tried to hide it as hard as she could.
Penny honestly didn’t mind not having many friends, a feeling she could later depict as loneliness soothed with her books and her parents and the wide expanse of the woods beyond her house and a call of adventure so desperate that she felt it deep in her bones. She didn’t need anything else.
At least, she always thought so.
Until Jim was born.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a child so enraptured by a baby, Penny usually heard some of the nurses say as she’d pass them in the hallways of the hospital. She’d taken to visiting her mother every day since her baby brother had been born, constantly wanting to check on the kind woman and the brand new bundle of joy.
Ever since she laid eyes on Jim, wrapped in his baby blue blanket with his pinched red face, Penny wasn’t sure she had ever felt such immediate love for anything in her entire life.
She loved Jim more than anything; always begging her father to take her to the hospital to see them, always asking her mother if it was alright to hold him, and when he was in her arms she hardly breathed let alone moved in fear of somehow hurting him, all so she could sit there for as long as she could and just watch.
Jim had the same blue eyes as their mother, but although it was a bit too early to tell, his looks leaned more towards their fathers’, while Penny was more the opposite.
She looked more like her mother, her hair just a shade or two darker, looking more brown than auburn, and she had eyes like her fathers’, a shade of brown akin to pools of golden honey.
He always said they got their eyes from his mother, she always just had to take his word for it.
Penny loved to spend time with Jim, despite the fact that he didn’t really do much of anything. But he also didn’t look at her with eyes a little too pitying as they watched her sit by herself, reading in class while the other kids went to play together at recess. Going to the hospital to sit with her brother had slowly become her favorite part of the day. And when Jim was finally given the all clear to come home, Penny spent a lot of time in his nursery.
She liked sitting on the floor next to his crib (despite the fact that there was an armchair barely a foot away that she could use; she just liked being as close to him as possible), reading excerpts from books her mom said she had used to read to her when she was a kid. And when she ran out of those she’d read from the books that were assigned to her in class, from stories she’d taken out from the library, from the old and worn copies of fairy tales her mom had picked up for her from the bookstore on her off days; pretty much anything she could get her hands on, but adventures were always her favorite.
Maybe that was what kept her going into the woods, even though her parents explicitly told her not to. The woods made her feel a little less like every other kid living in her cul-de-sac and a bit more like all the adventurers she read about in her stories. Being in the woods soothed that desperation for something, anything more, even if just a little bit. Scratching her adventurers’ itch and soothing the longing feeling that sometimes felt too overwhelming for her tiny body. Maybe that was why she kept the gap she found in the fence, just big enough for her to squeeze her tiny body out of, a secret from her parents.
But what did she know, she was only three.
But now she was seven, and she just wanted a place to hide from her parents’ arguing, typically kept in hushed tones so as not to wake Jim or alarm Penny.
But Penny usually heard them anyway.
So, she pushed herself through the gap in the fence that was much easier for her three-year-old body to get through than her seven-year-old one, groaning a bit at the effort before she finally made her way through, the plank falling shut behind her with a quiet thunk before she trotted off into the safety of the trees
However, in her absent minded wandering, it took her a while before she finally noticed she had passed the same gnarled, knotted tree three times. It took her even longer to realize that she didn’t recognize her surroundings at all.
She started to panic when the sun began to set and she still wasn’t sure which way was home, the shadows growing longer and causing her wild imagination to run even wilder.
Penny was scared, she realized as tears finally sprung to her eyes, her hands fisting her shirt so she had something to hold on to to keep her grounded. She spun in rapid circles, as if the answer to her predicament would pop out of the trees and guide her home. But nothing happened, and as the sun set, sinking her into darkness. Penny sat down where she stood, placed her head in her arms and did what any other self respecting seven-year-old in her situation would do.
Penny cried her eyes out.
The girl’s ears perked up a bit as her sobs turned to sniffles, hearing a noise through the trees no louder than a whisper that caused Penny to strain to try and hear it better.
Someone was humming, she realized, as a sweet lullaby eased its way through the trees and slowly calmed her fears.
As the lullaby grew louder Penny’s cries slowed to a stop, so enthralled with the light, airy voice as it grew louder in her ears. Penny thought it sounded like a woman as exhaustion finally swept over her, her hours of wandering and brief sobbing spell having tuckered her little body out as her eyes began to droop before finally falling closed.
Her eyes fluttered open as she felt her body rocking, aware of the feeling of being carried and being reminded of the times her mother would carry her to bed after falling asleep at Jim’s cribside.
Sweet girl, she thought she heard the woman speak, don’t worry, everything will be just fine.
The lost girl felt safe and warm as her eyes fell closed again, her head leaning against the chest of whoever was carrying her, the restarted humming and the woman’s steady heartbeat lulling her to sleep as the two disappeared into the trees, with only the stars and moon as witnesses to the fate that had been set into motion.
Penelope Lake was found three days later in an alley behind Magellan’s Antique Mall, fully across town from the spot in which she disappeared.
The only real signs that she was missing at all were the smudges of dust and dirt and gunk that layered her once pristine clothing, her mild case of dehydration, and the minor lacerations she had on the bottoms of her feet; her shoes and socks missing with no clue as to how they disappeared in the first place.
When thinking back on it years later, Penny couldn’t quite remember what had happened during her stint in the woods; Her memory was spotty and unreliable. According to her mom she had woken up and told the police that she was kept safe by the pretty woman in a cave full of glittering rocks and creatures made of stone instead of flesh. It’s where I got the pretty rock, Penny’s mom told her she had said as the girl lifted the rock that she had been found with, a shiny orange crystal about the size of her palm, for everyone to see. The pretty lady gave it to me. She said it would help make me strong!
The doctors chalked it up to childish imagination, her mind trying to protect her from the trauma, and her parents accepted it. Soon enough she and everyone else began to move on. The only reminders were the newly patched fence, the bright new pair of sneakers she got when she got out of the hospital, and the crystal she refused to part with.
Eventually, Penny practically forgot about it all together; when the patched spot in the fence didn’t look so new anymore, when she finally grew out of that new pair of shoes she had gotten for being good for the doctors and nurses, when her dad had abandoned her and her mom and her brother, packing his bags and leaving them behind on the day Jim turned five.
Pretty soon all that remained was the pretty rock given to her by the pretty lady.
When her mom noticed that she would take it to school every day, allowing it to sit in the depths of her pocket next to the loose change she’d use at the candy store, she suggested something a bit more practical, turning it into a necklace that Penny eventually never took off.
And as she and her brother grew older the whole thing became less of a tragedy and more of a dream. Something that was so long ago and far away there was no way it could ever hurt them anymore.
Until two high school sophomores decide to take a shortcut through the canals to avoid being late for school.