Alice blinked and straightened, strangely discom-bobulated, as unsteady as someone stumbling into the sunshine after spending hours in a dim room. Her kitchen came into focus: the sparkling stainless steel sink, the picture-plastered fridge, the oven, and the pan on the counter. A solitary beetle circled the pendant light, its flight clumsy and desperate. The window above the sink was dark. Dark already?
“Should I put you down for one Winsome Peak then?” Penny tucked the brochure under her arm and smoothed her sash.
“That’d be great.” Alice took in the bright badges stitched to Penny’s Girl Scout sash. There had to be a hundred of them, some official-looking and advertising her achievements in things like tracking and fishing; others—like the pizza one and the tic-tac-toe one—looking suspiciously handmade, as if Penny had come up with her own challenges, met them and then made the badges to reward herself. That was just like Penny.
Alice gathered the plates and carried them to the sink. Funny how she and Penny, both only children, had the basics in common: a mother, a father, the same rural school, the same road, even houses that looked alike. But they didn’t add up in the same way. Something had slipped into or fallen out of Penny’s equation. Kids used to whisper she was adopted. Penny, herself, had encouraged the rumor. But she looked just like her mom.
While Alice rinsed the plates, Penny went to the pan and cut another cookie bar. Alice found herself staring at the reddish brown curls on her neighbor’s bent head, wondering what trick in her ancestry accounted for her strangeness, what wild gene had been stirred in her making.