The following middlegrade short story is one of the first children stories I’ve written. Maybe my days in private school helped inspire it? Hmm… well anyhow, enjoy the creative writing!

“Time’s up, pencils down!” Mrs. Steer announced.

The sound of pencils slamming against desks and the cracking of sore hands filled the classroom. A few students looked over their papers with satisfied expressions. Rupert was one of them. Penelope fiddled with lint stuck in her hair.

Mrs. Steer marched up one of the aisles. “Now I want each of you to pair up and exchange the stories you’ve just written with one another,” she said. “C’mon now, we haven’t much time left.”                     

Someone tapped Rupert’s shoulder from behind. He turned and saw Penelope staring at him with a brazen smile. “Partner?” she asked brightly.

He quickly scanned the room. Fred. Maxine. Oliver. Terrance. Theresa. All of them were taken.

Rupert sighed and held out his paper. “I guess I am…”  

Mrs. Steer cleared her throat. “You are to read each other’s papers, discuss and share feedback, then use the feedback to revise your story. I expect the final revision to be ready by Friday so you have three days to work on it.”

A soft chiming noise hummed over the intercom. Class was officially over.

“Have a splendid lunch,” Mrs. Steer wished them.

Rupert took Penelope’s paper and quickly looked it over. She had drawn strange-looking animals all over it: dogs with six legs; rabbits with clown shoes; squirrels with glasses and telescopes. But the strangest part wasn’t the illustrations, it was the three words messily written in the center.

Pleep.

Ploop.

Plop.

“What’s this?” Rupert mumbled. He looked up at Penelope but she had already left the classroom.

He walked out into the hallway and joined the crowd of students rushing outside toward the dining atrium. He saw Penelope’s brightly streaked hair bobbing above the others up ahead. She turned left, which didn’t make sense because the dining atrium was the other way.

He finally caught up to her near the elementary school playground beside their middle-school. She sat on a wooden bench atop the small hill.

“I believe you gave me the wrong item in class.” He held out the misshapen sheet of paper. “There’s only three words on it. Pee, poo, and pop!”

Penelope lifted her head back and laughed hysterically. “I wrote ‘Pleep. Ploop. Plop.’ Those words kept popping in and out of my head during class. Along with my friends I drew on it.”

Rupert found it strange that she called those drawings her friends, but he didn’t say anything. “Mrs. Steer will kill you if you turn that in,” he said.

Penelope looked away briefly, then shrugged her shoulders. “Well anyway, I read your story on my way here.”

“Oh. Well. What did you think of it?”

Rupert had written about his parents both being full-time criminal lawyers. They’ve prosecuted and convicted the most number of felons in Oregon.

Penelope turned toward him on the bench and rested her arm against the back. “How did it make you feel?”

Rupert severely disliked when people answered questions with questions. Especially now, when he was genuinely interested in her opinion of his work. “What’re you talking about?” he snapped.

Penelope laughed again. “I’m talking about what I just asked,” she said teasingly. “How’d it make you feel?”

“I don’t see how that matters.”

Penelope tilted her head and looked at him quizzically. Then her eyes widened and breathing hastened. She rifled through her messenger bag and unrolled her pockets. “I’ve lost my train ticket home! Can you help me find it?” she said.

There were no trains anywhere in town, and why she even needed a train to go home made less sense; however, she seemed so serious about it that he played along. “Maybe you dropped it in class. We can go check.”

Penelope jumped to her feet and pointed forward. “I have a feeling it’s hidden in that village nearby.”

Rupert looked at where she pointed. “You mean the elementary playground?”

“No silly, the village of the Tree Clan! Let’s go!” She ran down the hill toward the playground.

Rupert thought Penelope had completely lost it. After checking if anyone he knew was around, he hesitantly followed after her.

There were kids playing about on the jungle-gym, slide, and monkey-bars when they arrived. Penelope stood at the edge of the playground with both hands on her hip.

“Penelope we’re going to miss lunch if we stay out here too long. Let’s go back,” Rupert said.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty of food to share,” she said, tapping her messenger bag. “My mom says the school food is poisonous.”

“Of course she did…” Rupert muttered to himself.

Penelope didn’t hear him. She had already sprang into action. She swung across the monkey-bars, hopped across the springy lilypads, climbed up the dangly footrope, and dove into one of the colorful tunnels that shot upward.

Rupert trailed behind. His arms were too weak to make it across the monkey-bars, he slipped off the last lilypad, and got tangled in the footrope.

They arrived at the third-level platform after climbing through the tunnel. A group of four kids–about second or third grade–were huddled together in the middle. When the kids saw the much-taller intruders, they shrieked and scrambled down the slide to safety.

“Do you see this?” Penelope asked. She bent down where the kids were huddled.

Rupert walked beside her to get a look.

A small bundle of sticks and leaves were piled together. The kids from before must have been gathering them for who knows what reason.

Penelope looked up at him with those bright blue eyes of hers. She awaited a response.

But Rupert couldn’t take it anymore. “Penelope we’re too old for all of this make-believe imagination stuff. That’s what little kids do.”

Penelope stood up and walked to the edge of the platform. She looked at Rupert again, but her eyes no longer shimmered like before.

“How’d it make you feel? Running through the playground and thinking about the kids here as villagers,” she asked.

“I don’t know. Kind of weird. Kind of happy,” Rupert said. “But we aren’t supposed to be playing like elementary kids. We’d be the laughingstock of middle-school if they saw us here.”

“Then let them laugh,” Penelope said.

“Easy for you to say,” Rupert said, much louder than he intended. “Sorry I didn’t mean–”

“You don’t think I know what everyone calls me? Crazy. Weird. Funny-looking.”

Rupert looked down.

She turned away from him. “My dad says he regrets not doing the things that people would’ve found strange, and he doesn’t want me to make the same mistake. So if using my imagination and playing on a playground makes me a little kid, then I’ll be the biggest kid the world has ever seen.”

Penelope pushed past him and bent down toward the slide. She was leaving.

Rupert suddenly felt ashamed. He didn’t know what to say, but he certainly didn’t want her to leave.

“Wait,” he said, “it’s a clue!” Rupert walked over to the bundle of sticks and grabbed a handful. “These sticks have, er, carvings on them! That means only one thing.”

The wild look of adventure slowly returned to Penelope.

Rupert said, “The villagers. They must have sold your train ticket to the forest dwellers of the north. We better travel there before it’s gone for good.”

Penelope smiled through her glassy eyes and shouted, “Lead the way!”

Rupert could hardly believe what he was doing. His lunchtimes were usually spent poring over books and double-checking homework assignments. So of all the people to make him run toward the forest while laughing like a child, it had to be someone like Penelope. He watched her messy pigtails bop up and down with every stride. She looked at him as well and, for a moment, they both shared a deep feeling that didn’t need words.

When they entered the forest a squirrel scurried across their path.

“Look! A scout!” Penelope said, motioning toward the squirrel. “He says he can help us find my ticket.”

Rupert and Penelope followed the squirrel down the path. He leaped over rocks, crawled under logs, and then climbed up the trunk of a tree in dazzling speed. Rupert and Penelope watched from below as the squirrel ran across to the edge of a branch and peered at something in the distance.

“He says it’s north of here—just past the boulders,” Penelope said.

As they set off toward the boulders up ahead, a chilly wind blew past them that rustled the trees and swirled several leaves into the air. It sounded like ghosts whistling. Then a strike of thunder clapped in the sky.

“Looks like a storm is coming,” Rupert said. “We should head back before it starts raining.”

“The forest-dwellers are just trying to scare us off. That means we’re close!” Penelope said. She continued forward and started climbing over the first boulder.

Rupert looked at the sky. It was a nasty shade of gray that would no doubt lead to a rainstorm, but he couldn’t just leave without her. He sighed and followed after Penelope, who had already disappeared.

Rupert heaved his leg across the boulder and hurled himself over. He landed with a thud on his back.

“Penelope where’d you go?” he called out with a cough.

“Up ahead in the cave! You’ve gotta see this!”

“The cave?” He got to his feet and saw a small alcove in the hill up ahead. It was hard to see at first, but there was an opening just big enough for someone to squeeze through.

It really was a cave. Slightly dome shaped and high enough for them to stand inside. Across the ceiling were several small holes that let in thin rays of light.

“Isn’t this place wonderful?” Penelope said.

“Yeah. It really is,” Rupert said while looking around. He placed his hand along the walls of the cave and let it glide over the smooth ridges and curves. His hand caught onto something that shifted.

It was a small rock littered with many holes. It had a peculiar color–a deep red laced with streaks of yellow and orange. When he held it into the light, it cast several small glints of red, yellow, and orange across the walls of the cave.

Penelope gasped. “What is that?” she asked, staring at the sparkling colors across the cave walls.

“It’s your train ticket home,” Rupert said. He handed it to Penelope, who took a turn holding it up in the light.

“It’s beautiful,” she said.

A clap of thunder struck the air again–this time much louder than before. Then came the rain. It crashed into everything at once. Remarkably, despite the holes in its ceiling, the cave remained dry.

Penelope peeked through the cave opening. “Looks like the forest-dwellers have us trapped.”

“What’re we going to do now?” Rupert said.

“Let’s eat! I’m starved, aren’t you?”

Rupert couldn’t disagree. He still hadn’t eaten anything for lunch. The two of them sat down in a corner of the cave and feasted on the assortment of food prepared by Penelope’s mom. A corned beef and pastrami sandwich, two tangerines, juicy purple grapes, a homemade strawberry smoothie, topped off with gooey chocolate-chip cookies.

Rupert and Penelope didn’t waste any time devouring their meal. They ate with such excitement that they’d laugh at the other as they stuffed their cheeks wide with food.

“Lunch is about to be over. We’re going to have to leave soon and get drenched,” Rupert said after finishing his cookie.

“Don’t you know this is a truth-seeker cave? It’ll only let us leave once the both of us have shared a deep dark secret with each other,” she said. “The good news is that once we break the cave’s spell, the storm will stop.”

“You think the storm will stop if we share a secret?” Rupert asked skeptically.

“Only one way to find out. You go first,” Penelope said.

“Fine.” Rupert laid back and thought about what to share. “I wish that I had a brother or sister. Because then I’d have someone besides my forty-year-old nanny to talk to.”

“What about your parents?”

“It’s like you read in my paper. They’re both criminal lawyers. When I do see them they’re either leaving for work or arguing with someone on the phone,” Rupert said.

“That sounds awful. Don’t you get lonely?”

Rupert shrugged. “I’ve gotten used to that. It helps keep me focused on homework, I guess.”

“So that’s how you feel about your parents being lawyers,” Penelope said. “You said you didn’t know before, but it sounds to me like you do.”

Rupert never talked about his parents like that. He felt relieved to shove such feelings out into the open, but also saddened. He could no longer pretend that everything was fine at home. Now, every time he saw his parents or was alone with his nanny, he’d think of everything he said a moment ago. Then he wondered if he’d ever tell his parents how he felt; or if he even could.

“Well what about you Dr. Penelope? What’s your secret?” he said.

“Today’s my last day of school.”

Rupert frowned. “No it’s not. We still have four months to go.”

“My parents just finalized their divorce. I’ll be moving to live with my dad in San Francisco tomorrow.”

The words cut Rupert. To his surprise, the thought of Penelope saddened him. “How can you be so nonchalant about that?”

“I used to be like you,” she said. “Little Miss Serious. But when I saw how being like that made my parents unhappy, I decided to make sure that never happened to me,” she said. “Everything can’t be fun and silly, but things sure would be a lot better if people were just less… I don’t know…”

“Serious,” Rupert finished.

“Exactly,” Penelope said with a smile.

For a moment they sat together in silence. Neither of them wanted to think about things outside the cave. It had become their own secret space where nothing else outside could touch them. But the moment didn’t last for long.

A faint chiming noise sounded from outside and echoed inside. It was the middle-school’s end-of-lunch chime. They squeezed outside the cave and looked around. The rain-storm had passed and was replaced by a clear, blue sky with no cloud in sight. The ground was completely dry as well.

“Looks like we broke the forest-dwellers’ spell,” Penelope said.

Rupert laughed. He’d almost started to believe the cave really was magical.

The two of them climbed over the embankment of boulders and raced through the forest, across the grassy knoll, and through the playground back to school.

Before parting ways to their separate classes, neither of them said goodbye to each other. Instead, Rupert gave Penelope the special rock he found in the cave, and she gave him her messenger bag, so that he could, in her words, “Have more adventures in the magical cave of the forest-dwellers.”

Later that day when Rupert returned home, he threw away the paper he wrote in class. and began writing a new story. This one would be about his new imaginary friend that lived in the forest and visited him at home when his parents were at work. However, the friend, named P, could only appear at the utterance of three magical words:

Pleep.

Ploop.

Plop.

THE END

Middlegrade Short Story: Penelope’s Secret Cave