On Friday afternoon, Penelope Shelley sat in the school cloakroom waiting for the other children to go home. It was one of her 'Plans to Make Life Easier'. If she was out by the school gates at the end of the day, the other children saw her. It was easier to sit in the cloakroom until they were gone. She would hide under her coat as it hung on its hook and listen as the other children laughed and yelled and pulled their coats on. Then, when all the noise had stopped, she would peep out and then sit down on the radiator pipe that ran along the wall above the skirting board. In the winter, that pipe was good for warming your hands on. She would sit there until she was sure that the other children would have left the playground. Sometimes she did her homework while she was sitting there. Sometimes she just sat and thought. Today was a sitting and thinking day.
             What she was thinking about was topiary. Topiary was something she had read about. Topiary is when people think it is not good enough for a bush to just look like a bush. They take a pair of topiary shears and chop away at the bush. They try to make them look like hot-air-balloons or spaniels or televisions. This was how Penelope felt about herself. It seemed to her that somebody had chopped away at the potential branches of her life with an enormous pair of topiary shears. Slowly but certainly, her possibilities were being lopped off and she was being shaped into something completely different to the shape she wanted to be.
             Penelope's favorite possibility branch was the possibility that she was not her parents' daughter. For as long as she could remember, Penelope had had a suspicion that she was adopted. She had spent hours at the sitting room window, waiting for her real parents to come and take her away. While she sat in the school cloakroom waiting for all the other children to leave, Penelope allowed herself to think about this possibility one last time. She knew...