Page 132 of One More Chapter

Me and the boy with the blonde hair were playing in the sand. Well—I was playing in the sand. He couldn’t seem to sit still.

“Anthony James!” Ms. Debbie yelled. “Stay by Penny. You don’t go down by the water without Mama.”

“Anthony James” came scuttling back to our pile of sand toys.

“I don’t like it when she calls me my middle name,” he said, collapsing onto his butt in the sand, spraying some onto my bare leg.

“Well, I don’t like that she calls me Penny,” I said, shoveling sand into my bucket.

“Isn’t that your name?”

“No. I’m Penelope.” I’d tilted my nose into the air. Penelope made me sound more grown up.

“Penny is my favorite song though! Penny Lane is my eyes and ears in the blue bird sky…”

“Those aren’t even the words.”

I shook my head, but little Anthony James kept singing The Beatles to the beat of his own drum.

We built sandcastles in our contented silence. I strained over the babble of my new baby Connor and Anthony’s toddling brother to hear what our mommies were saying about our daddies.

“My daddy calls me AJ sometimes. For Anthony James.” He stood up and pounced into some strange stance with his hands angled in front of him. “It’s my karate name. Hi-YA!”

I stared and shook my head as he started chopping the air, kicking sand up around me.

“What’s your middle name?”

“Jayne.”

With a “Y.” Because my motherhadto be different.

“What’s the letter?”

“J,” I said, flattening him with a stare I’d give people when they said something stupid. My mother was starting to call it my “resting mean face.”

“Oh! You could be PJ then! PJ and AJ! We could be superheroes. I like The Hulk. He smashes things.”

I rolled my eyes as he started pounding the ground with his fists.

“I will not be PJ. I am not a Funnybunny.”

Mom read that book to Connor all the time. It didn’t make sense to me that the bunny thought he could be a bear or a beaver.

“PJ Layne is a fireman and she likes finger pies…”

“Stop it,Anthony James,” I snarked, scrunching up my nose.

“Hey, only mymommygets to call me that.”

“Then stop singing songs about me having finger pies?—”

“PJ Layne is a fireman with finger pies?—”

“Mommy! MakeAntstop!”

“Hey! I amnota ant!”

“Ah. Our first fight.”

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