Twin Souls: The Story Behind The Broken Roses

Chapter Twenty: October 15, 2014

Penny Elmwood

Overall, Penny had been a kid that had always enjoyed the routine of school and stability that it brought along into her life.  She liked knowing what she was going to be doing every second of every day, knowing what to expect from her peers around her, and knowing she was doing something that she was already excelling in.

She still liked that, she still liked the technical side of school - but the social side had become a nightmare over the last few months, and she wasn't sure how she was supposed to properly navigate it.  She'd become painfully aware of her body, of the fact that she'd hit puberty before most of her peers, that was something she'd realized when her height rocketed up when she was eleven and everyone else's had stayed the same... It didn't get any better the further she got, the more she looked like a woman.

Ukeketaji ni laana kubwa zaidi ya familia yetu.  That was something that her grandmother had said to her when she'd visited her in over Spring break the year before.  She'd looked so sad when she'd said it too, like the light of Penny's childhood was dying before her very eyes.  In the moment, she hadn't really realized just how right her grandmother was, she'd thought it was something dramatic, something leading back to her grandmother's own childhood that she didn't want to talk about, but no.

No, she should've known it meant something more from the way that her mother looked at her now when she left the house - there was a tinge of fear in her eyes, a constant reminder to text her the second she got on the bus, the second she got to school, the second she got out of volleyball practice, the second she was on the late bus home... She had to send pictures of the locked doors; her mother made her father walk her from the store to their front door 'just to be safe'... It was making her start to think that maybe she really was cursed.  She envied some of her peers who looked more their age.  When she'd been at camp, she'd become very familiar with the phrase 'you're so mature for your age' from some of the older camp members and counselors, something she hadn't really seen as that big of a red flag until she'd noticed how Esme and Emma reacted to it.

Emma nearly got violent on several occasions, and Esme just looked haunted, she'd looked at her like she wanted to tell Penny she was sorry that she'd ever been born and it was something that stuck with her... It wasn't until Emma told the story of why she'd burnt down her old dorm building at boarding school that she really understood it.

For whatever reason, she'd thought that coming back to school would maybe mean that it would all stop, that people would be normal... But no.  The boys in her class, the same ones that she used to run around with at recess in elementary school or sit next to and talk to in class were now weird around her, looking at her like she was an alien creature, a different species that they couldn't talk to and had to study in order to understand... It was starting to make her hate herself.

She was beginning to resent the features that were so clearly from her mother... It didn't help that the high school and middle school were next to each other, that some of the teenage boys would lean out and make comments about her body or her appearance, like she was trying to get their attention when really it was the opposite... The girls were no better sometimes too.

It was in this very parking lot that she'd been called a slut for the first time, and it'd been by a high schooler that she'd never even met before... and it was followed by a quick apology when she saw her face, a I didn't know you were a baby, you should be more careful, sweetie.  As if it was her fault that she'd made that assumption.