"She seemed to have forgotten her standards when she fell low for a boy who's dignity was falling almost as much as she was for him."
Penelope sells flowers at Stubby Stems to help her ill mother get better and meets a previous seen face buying flo...
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the sunlight seemed to scorch through penelope's already thin sweatshirt, making her arms burn even from inside her beat-up car. countless stands of matted hair from her messy side braid were plastered to the nape of her neck and forhead as she sat staring at the endless fields of traffic lights around her.
despite the unideal situation, she was contentedly humming along to the static car radio. a soft, barely-there smile rested on her lips.
for no apparent reason at all, penelope felt at peace.
maybe she was starting to go crazy from the absurd amounts of caffeine she consumed. even if she was, today had been a good day.
the kids at school had been less wild than usual, she had no homework to do and top it all off, she'd found a stash of jolly ranchers under the passenger seat.
if anyone was wondering, she did plan on eating them.
the sun continued to beam brightly overhead, making everything take on a yellow tint. everything seemed perfect. even her usual irritation towards the traffic-light-infested intersection was no where to be found.
in her mind penelope knew she had to be less than five years old because when the light flashed green she still sped off like she was chasing after the sun. for some reason she never beat it and it hid a way from her.
penelope rarely thought about how she ended up with her license but as her mind cruised to it, it was definitely a good question that she herself, couldn't answer.
she admitted that her and the streets didn't make the perfect combination, but it wasn't her fault that her drivers ed teacher was on meth the same day she took her final drivers exam.
having her drivers ed teacher in the car was probably worse than everyday penelope who texted while she drove, today wasn't the exception.
texting while driving was no joke, her fingers missed to tap on the right letters and they barely created one right word, which did seem like a funny joke to her.
it didn't matter much because her best friend, asha could understand anyway and that spoke a lot about their level of closeness.
when she got out of her car and checked the lot around her, penelope found the well-used vehicle parked almost perfectly. she gave herself a half-hearted fist pump before jogging up to the store entrance, jabbing her key into the lock, and opening the lock.
as usual, she was hit with the intoxicating scent of fresh dirt. although her mother often argued that the smell of flowers was one of the most beautiful things you could find, she despised it. even after all these years, the scent still managed to crawl up her nose and churn her brain into a mess of faint nausea.
