Penrod

In a sun-baked Midwestern town where the sidewalks smell of hot tar and parental scolding echoes from every porch, Penrod Schofield—president-for-life of the self-styled American Boys’ Protective Association—presides over a court of pre-pubescent anarchy. His gavel is a slingshot; his robe, a pair of patched knickerbockers stained with grass, iodine, and the faint ghost of forbidden licorice. Each Saturday the gang convenes in a loft perfumed by pigeon droppings to lodge grievances against tyrannical grown-ups: the neighbor who waters the lawn while they’re mid-ballgame, the cop who confiscates their firecrackers, the dancing master who insists on posture. Summer swells like a bruise; the heat warps barns into cathedrals of mischief. Penrod, a pint-size Dionysus, sabotages a ladies’ aid theatrical—swapping Juliet’s potion for ipecac, painting Ophelia’s face with stove-blacking—then, dressed in a moth-eaten tailcoat, staggers through a waltz like a drunken marionette, scandalizing lace-gloved debutantes. Into this Eden slithers Rupe Collins, a boy whose knuckles already bear the scabs of adult hardness; he terrorizes the alleyways until Herman and Verman—twin forces of nature armed with scythes that gleam like crescent moons—mow him back into the shadows. The town’s pillars roar for juvenile reformatories, but fate flips the script: Penrod’s posse nabs two fugitive bandits hiding in the very carriage house the ladies condemned as a cesspool of delinquency. Overnight the pariah becomes the paragon, and Marjorie Jones, whose yellow hair is the color of courthouse dust motes at sunset, bestows upon him a smile that feels like the first line of a new mythology.