EVER TO CONFESS YOU’RE BORED
Penelope Grey knew she was lucky. She lived in a big stone mansion in the greatest city on earth, with a canopy over her bed, wonderful books to read, and lots of toys to play with. Her parents were delightful people. Her father was funny and her mother was sweet, and they both loved Penelope very much—of this she was certain. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to actually see her parents all that often, since her father tended to be busy with his important job at the top of a very tall building, and her mother had any number of social obligations and deserving charities that kept her tied up most days.
Still, Penelope knew she was lucky. She had a chef to prepare her meals and an extremely capable tutor named Joanna who taught her interesting things each day in the comfort of her very own home. She had occasional supervised outings to the zoo or the park, accompanied by pleasant girls with names like Jane and Olivia. She had a housekeeper, so she never had to pick up her room, and she had no grubby little brothers or sisters. It was all very tidy.
Yes, Penelope knew she had nothing to complain about. She had everything a girl could want. Unfortunately, knowing that she should be happy only made it worse that Penelope was not happy at all.
The truth was that Penelope was bored. Bored in a terrible, empty, ongoing, forever kind of way that made her sigh much more deeply than any ten-year-old girl should ever sigh. She was bored with the delicious meals and the polite playmates. She was bored with her great, echoing house. She was even bored with her name—Penelope Geraldine Grey—which she thought sounded like the name of an old lady with too many diamond rings and not enough hair. She was bored with her hazel eyes and her medium-length brown hair, which was not quite straight and not quite curly, and could not have been more boring. And when she caught herself thinking about all of this, she was bored with herself, which was worst of all.
This sorry state of affairs was only made more awful by the fact that Penelope had read enough books (they were just about the only thing that Penelope did not find boring) to know that bored little girls who live in mansions are usually spoiled. Penelope did not want to be spoiled. Spoiled girls in books were silly and selfish. Still, Penelope could not help it. Whatever she did, wherever she went, she was horribly, hungrily bored.
Penelope thought that perhaps things might improve in a few years, if only she could go away to boarding school. In books, boarding school was always very exciting, full of deep secrets and midnight escapades, and sometimes magic. But even if her parents agreed, that was still far off in the future, and in the meantime she could think of no other real solution to her problem.
One drizzly Saturday afternoon in May, Penelope was sitting on the window seat in the marble foyer at the front of the house. She had just finished reading the very last Anne of Green Gables book, and she was depressed at the thought of what to do next. She watched strangers pass by the front window in the spitting rain with their umbrellas, and she made a game of trying to guess which stranger might look up and smile or nod. So far, at least fifty people had passed, and not a single one had looked up at her from the wet pavement. Penelope was just about to stop playing the game when her father came down the stairs. He plunked himself beside Penelope on the wide window seat.
“You’re looking a little down in the mouth. What’s wrong, sport?” Dirk Grey asked his daughter in his usual jovial way.
“I’m bored, Daddy,” admitted Penelope with a slump and a sigh.
Dirk pondered this for a moment. “Hmm.” Then he cleared his throat, stuck an index finger theatrically into the air, and quoted at the ceiling, “Ever to confess you’re bored means you have no Inner Resources!”
Penelope looked at her father quizzically. “What’s that mean?” she asked.
“It means that when you’re bored, you need to think of something to do,” answered her father. “It means you can’t blame boredom on anyone but yourself. You can’t just wait for things to happen to you. You have to do things. Or anyway, I think that’s what it means. It’s often hard to tell with poetry!”
Then he stood back up and headed off in the direction of the kitchen, leaving Penelope to think sulkily that it hadn’t sounded much like poetry to her.
Even so, she was glad to have some advice to follow, and she took her father’s words to heart. From that day on, she tried to do things every single day. Since she had little experience with doing, and didn’t know where to begin, she turned to her books for help. Each morning she stood in front of her bookshelf with her eyes squeezed tightly shut and ran a finger down the spines of the bindings, stopping whenever the mood struck her. Then she’d pull out that particular book, flip to a random page, and do whatever the people in that book happened to be doing.
In this way, Penelope succeeded in exploring her (dusty) attic, planting some (cucumber) seeds, inventing her own secret language, starting a diary, roller-skating up and down the halls of the Grey mansion, putting on a puppet show (though there was nobody but Josie, the housekeeper, to watch it), and a handful of other fun-sounding things.
One day, inspired by a book called A Little Princess, Penelope asked her mother to invite Jane (or Olivia, if Jane was busy; it didn’t much matter) over to spend the night. She requested that Chef fill the fridge with his special triple-deluxe chocolate cheesecake squares, in expectation of a candlelit midnight feast. But when, around midnight, Penelope tried to rouse Jane with a flashlight to tiptoe downstairs “like poor orphans,” Jane stared silently up at Penelope from her sleeping bag in a way that made Penelope feel instantly bad.
“What’s wrong?” asked Penelope. “What did I say?”
“I was an orphan, Penelope,” said Jane. “In Russia. Before I came to America to live with my parents.” Then, without saying anything else, Jane buried her face in her pillow and went to sleep.
This left Penelope feeling terrible for Jane, and guilty about her blunder, but also bewildered that she’d known Jane for several years and never had any idea she was adopted. How had that happened?
Even with all her doing, Penelope remained bored. It was nice that on the nights when her mother was home to tuck her in, and she asked, “What did you do today, dear?” Penelope could answer her with something interesting, like “I made a piñata.” But it didn’t feel like enough.
The more she mulled the situation over, the more frustrated Penelope felt. In books kids did fun stuff, sure. But also big things happened. People died and were born. Fortunes were lost and found. Magic talismans turned up and houses disappeared in tornadoes, and Penelope could imagine no way to make any of that happen.
Yes, Penelope decided. It is going to take something enormous for me to become unbored. It is going to take an everything change. For that she figured she’d just have to wait.
Then one day after her finger stopped on a book called Magic or Not? Penelope wandered out into the perfectly manicured lawn of her backyard, holding a folded scrap of paper. There was a decorative wishing well of sorts in the middle of the Greys’ lawn, beneath a little red maple tree. The well had been designed by a famous architect, and a picture of it was in a book her mother kept on the coffee table.
Penelope didn’t think the well looked very wishable or magical. It was too fancy and nicely kept. Besides, she wasn’t sure she believed in wishes anyway, but her finger (and the book) had determined what she must do, and so she would do it.
With an unfamiliar flutter in her chest, Penelope unfolded the scrap of paper and read what she’d written one last time.
Penelope refolded her wish carefully and tossed it into the well. Then she leaned over and peered down after it.
The well was only about six feet deep. The cement floor had a small mesh grate set into it, and Penelope fully expected to see her wish sitting on that grate, but funnily enough, Penelope couldn’t see her wish at all anymore. The well appeared to be completely empty.
That’s odd, thought Penelope, leaning over to examine all the shadowed corners of the well’s bottom. But the wish really did seem to have vanished, and after a few minutes Penelope straightened up and went inside, where nothing seemed any different at all.
So Penelope forgot about her wish. Mostly.