THE NOSE AND HIS PERFUME

Chapter Three

 This chapter is dedicated to @bri_holley for the encouraging comments. Thanks!

Chapter Three: Penny and The Gingerbread Village

The twins’ younger cousin, Penny, was staying with them over the holidays because her mother had to work. Penny arrived a couple of days after the Nose, on the first day of the twins’ winter vacation from school. Bunny, who had been woken up way too early by the sound of her arrival, padded across her cold bedroom floor, slid open the door to Beau’s room, and said, “She’s here.”

She and Beau had adjoining bedrooms with a sliding pocket door between them. Beau’s room was messy, covered in computer parts, books, and dirty laundry, and smelled strongly of his pet rats, Rat and Rat Jr. Bunny’s room was cleaner, because she cared less about stuff and more about space and had no interest in collecting anything, preferring instead to have a wide open area to practice karate in.

Bunny could hear their cousin happily blathering away to the Varshavskys all the way on the other side of the apartment. Penny was probably the happiest person in the world, though Bunny had no idea why. She was a hyper-eager, pudgy, little weirdo. Bunny suspected that she didn’t have many friends. Though they were in different grades, they went to the same school, and Bunny knew the other kids called her One Cent because her name was Penny and she was poor. Penny’s mom was a single mom who worked for a non-profit organization. Penny was staying with them because her mom had gone away to the South Pacific to save endangered dugongs, a creature so strange, Bunny had googled them to see if they were real.

Bunny had been dreading Penny’s arrival. Not because she didn’t like her—she liked Penny—but because Penny was only eight. The twins would never have played with her unless someone made them, and since the Varshavskys had to work, they were going to have to look after her all the time. Beau was right that it was essentially unpaid babysitting, which was unfair.

“I wanted to go down to the basement again before she got here,” Bunny said.

They hadn’t had the chance to explore the basement again or check out whatever it was the Nose was doing down there. The Nose had set up shop in the basement and was apparently making perfume down there.

“We better go say hi,” Beau said.

Mrs. V unnecessarily headed the twins off in the hall to inform them that Penny had arrived. She tried to entice the twins, promising them that as long as they let Penny tag along, they could do anything they liked.

“Can we get a cheetah?” Beau asked.

“No,” Mrs. V said.

In the living room, Penny was excitedly bopping around their Christmas tree, though there was really nothing impressive about it. The tree was sparsely decorated with mismatched strands of lights, the few ornaments that had belonged to the twins’ parents, and a large quantity of marshmallows. Both inept sewers, Bunny and Beau had been banned from making popcorn and cranberry chains due to the pinpricks and foul tempers they caused. Instead, every year, Mr. V would bring home an industrial-sized bag of marshmallows and the twins would make marshmallow garlands to hang on the tree and around the house. When Mrs. V thought they all were eating too many, she would sprinkle them with hot pepper. As far as Bunny was concerned, the real decorations were downstairs in the store, but Penny was babbling on about their decorations, overenthusiastically awestruck by their marshmallow garlands.

“Hi,” Penny said to the twins, as they came into the living room. “Guess what? They’re building something downstairs.”

“What do you mean?” Bunny said.