Their second attempt at the cake, which happened after the food fight was quite done and they both had embarrassedly cleaned up the worst of the mess, went off much more smoothly. They pulled it out of the- now properly heated- oven and congratulated themselves on the only-slightly-lopsided design of pineapples; a double-sided arrow from one side to the other.
Ella had hardly finished munching through her slice when she leaned forward across the table and said, “So.”
Penn looked at her. “So,” he echoed confusedly.
“So now what?”
He shrugged and took another bite of cake. “I don’t know.”
“Aw,” Ella whined, “but I chose the cake! Didn’t you think the idea was clever? Pineapple right-side-left cake?”
“Very clever.” He said it truthfully- Ella was quite possibly the most clever person he knew as of the moment- but she didn’t look impressed.
“I’ve done my thinking for the day,” she said. “Now it’s your turn. Think of something clever.”
Penn considered it. Ella’s idea had been to take a common feature of human life and invert it. Might he not take the same path?
“Calculate the speed of dark,” he said finally, and by the way Ella’s face lit up he knew he had done something right.
“Brilliant! I love math!”
When the first of those four words left her mouth, Penn had just stabbed another piece of his cake. Ella was sitting across from him. By the final word his cake had moved only two inches upward, and Ella was at the doorway of the second room over, rummaging through an immense pile of seemingly new notebooks that tipped precariously to lean on the hallway wall. Penn finished his bite and trotted calmly to peek over her shoulder.
“What are you looking for?”
“A notebook.”
“There are lots of notebooks.”
“Yes, there are.”
Rustle, rustle.
“Are you looking for a specific one? Maybe I can help.”
“Yes, but no. I’m looking for one, but only I will be able to tell which one it is.”
“Okay.”
Rustle rustle.
“A-ha!” Ella rose triumphantly with a black notebook in hand. “Perfect! Had to find the right color.”
“There are a lot of black notebooks.”
“But none of them felt right! I can’t work if the notebook isn’t right. Drives my teachers nuts. One day the blue one is my physics notebook. Next day, it’s the green one. My notes are all over the place. They shouldn’t care, they’re not their notes, but. Can’t do much about that.”
“Can’t do much,” Penn agreed.
“Anyway!” Ella tried to clap her hands, but the notebook muffled the sound. “Shall we get going? We’ve got some calculating to do.”
Penn smiled.
“I’d like to finish my cake first.”
YOU ARE READING
The Speed of Dark
Humor'When Penn first met Ella, her presence caused him to within seconds divest of all traces of dignity he possessed. He held out his hand like they were potential business partners instead of strangers in the freezer aisle of Aldi and told her that hi...
