“But that’s not fair!” said Penny.
“Not fair? The law hasn’t got anything to do with what’s fair. Your boy is a danger to society. Truth be told, I’m uncomfortable standing this close to him even with all of you around to serve as a barrier between us. What if he’d torn out that poor boy’s throat? That little bandage Will has on wouldn’t do much good toward treating a gaping throat wound. Will, do you really think you’d be standing here right now if he’d torn out your throat?”
“I bet he wanted to!” said Will.
“Of course he did. I know a menace when I see one. That is to say, now that he’s committed an act of violence I see him for the menace that he is. Jail will straighten him out, or at least give him a good place to rot.”
“No!” shouted Mary. “He was defending my honor!”
“Clearly it was not honor he should have defended,” said Officer Danbury. “Ten days in jail for the boy. That’s my sentence.”
“But you’re not a judge!” Penny protested.
“Fourteen days! And if you’re not careful you’ll join him in his cell!”
“I want to join him!”
“Then fourteen days and he’ll have no visitors! Except, of course, for the guard who brings him bread and water, but that guard will not offer him any human comfort!”
Jail! Nathan couldn’t believe it. Only scoundrels went to jail!
“Jail is too good for him!” declared Will’s mother. “He should be banished!”
“Now, now, some jails may indeed be too good for him, but I assure you that ours is not.”
“He should be executed!” said Will.
“Oh, now, don’t be goofy, we’re not going to execute a seven-year-old boy for biting somebody. Because of your ridiculous comment I’m knocking a day off his sentence.” Officer Danbury pointed his index finger at Nathan and rotated it in a circle. “Turn around so I can handcuff you.”
“Too bad you don’t have fang-cuffs,” said Will.
“He’s down to twelve! Are you trying to suspend his sentence entirely?”
Nathan turned around and Officer Danbury snapped the handcuffs on him. As Will laughed and the sisters cried, Nathan was led to his cell.
The cell was cold and dark and smelled bad, but Nathan felt certain that he would still be alive at the end of his sentence. He’d survived all by himself in the forest, and he’d been a year younger then, so he expected to be fine.
It wasn’t his fault. If he’d been born with normal teeth, he could have bitten Will for saying those mean things and nobody would have cared.
But he shouldn’t have bitten him.
He shouldn’t have gone to the party at all.
Nathan lay on his pile of hay (“No cot for you!” Officer Danbury had said) and alternated poking his tongue between his freshly knocked-out tooth and the one he’d lost naturally. His new tooth hadn’t started to grow in yet. He wondered when he’d be able to feel the point.
Penny and Mary went home and cried in each other’s arms. “I would have bitten the little worm’s arm myself if I’d been so equipped!” said Penny. “I hope he fails to keep the wound adequately cleaned!”
Mary told Sharon that she couldn’t move away to live with her, not until Nathan got out of jail, because Penny needed the company. Sharon told Mary that she understood completely, but that she’d decided to move back to where she’d grown up, far from there.
“I can’t go with you!” said Mary. “Not that far! Won’t you please stay?”
Sharon shook her head sadly and said that she wanted to stay, but that she just couldn’t. She left the next morning.
Will poked at his bandage and thought about Nathan sitting in jail. Though it was a happy thought for him, it didn’t make him any less angry. He’d been bitten by somebody who’d been beaten up by a girl! “I hope he dies in there,” he’d say to anybody who would listen, and a lot of people were interested in what he had to say. “He deserves awful things to happen! Him and his disgusting, vulgar mother!”
Three times a day, Penny and Mary would ask how Nathan was doing, and Officer Danbury would assure them that Nathan had not perished. The guard only checked on Nathan once a day, but Officer Danbury was reasonably confident that he wasn’t lying to the sisters the other two times each day he answered their question.
Will was sent to the Corner of Ridicule every day, but he didn’t care. He loved to talk about how much he disliked Nathan. He did nothing else at recess, even when the teeter-totter was available. “Somebody should burn down their house!” he said, often.
Nathan’s classmate Peter liked the idea of setting fire to a house, though he only ever burned small things, and his father had taught him “If it’s alive, don’t burn it.” He could envision the flames dancing all over the roof, but would never, ever do something so cruel.
It was never officially proven who did do it. Peter’s father had heard his son talk about it, and thought it sounded like an excellent way to spend an evening, and spoke of it in a purely hypothetical sense to several of his co-workers at the factory.
They shared this idea with still more people, in a purely “We would never do this, but it would serve them right for having a vicious boy like that!” manner. It took less than one full day for the idea to reach nearly everybody in town, and almost all of them agreed that they would never do it.
On the eighth day of Nathan’s sentence, while Penny worked at the library and Mary managed her restaurant, somebody broke into their home with matches and gasoline. Or perhaps it was two people, working together—nobody ever knew for sure except for the guilty parties, who were never caught and never confessed.
Penny was helping a little girl find a book about dead clowns when her employer frantically beckoned for her to take a phone call.
“Hello?”
“Penny!” It was her next-door neighbor, Eunice. “It’s a shocking thing! I’m looking out the window at your house right now and it’s a raging inferno!”
“No!”
“I’ve never seen so much fire concentrated into one place in my life! I called the firemen as soon as the roof collapsed in flames. I shouted ‘Save the dog! Save the dog!’ and they ran in, but then I remembered that you didn’t have any pets, and when they finally came out they were very unhappy to have risked their lives to save a dog that didn’t even exist, and they said that for all they cared the house could just burn right down to the ground, so for that I apologize. I hope you didn’t have anything nice inside. Oh, the north wall just went down. It’s very sad.”
Penny was given permission to return home immediately after helping the little girl find the book she wanted (The Clown Who Frowned When He Drowned). By the time she reached her home, it could no longer, technically, be called a “home,” but rather a pile of burning rubble.
“At least there was no dog inside to perish,” a fireman told her.
Mary arrived home (a term that will continue to be used despite its lack of accuracy) and fell to her knees.
The sisters had always gotten along well, but one point of contention had existed between them: Penny’s distrust of banks. Mary felt that they should keep their lifetime of savings safely in a bank, while Penny thought that the money they had worked so hard for would be much safer in a steel safe in Penny’s room.
The safe was expensive, fireproof, and came with a guarantee that if the contents were in any way damaged, they would be replaced (or their sentimental value would be paid for such things as photographs, where it would be impractical to regress the subjects to their former ages in order to recreate the pictures). The Invulnerable Safe Company, owned by Lawrence Wicket, had even provided a fancy certificate stating this. Unfortunately, Mr. Wicket had retired and was at this very moment deep in the jungle, enjoying a treasure hunting expedition he’d financed by selling unreliable safes that quickly melted in fire.