Part 9 (2/2)
Anastasia laughed. ”Well, you make a pretty good lizard, Sam. Why don't you slither downstairs and eat some insects? That's what lizards do. Go out in the yard and find a nice juicy caterpillar for lunch, okay?”
Sam thought about that. He thought about a huge, fuzzy, juicy caterpillar, placed right in the center of a piece of whole-wheat bread, maybe with a little mustard dabbed on him.
Suddenly Sam didn't want to be a lizard anymore, not even for one minute longer.
”Will you play with me?” he asked Anastasia. ”I'm not a lizard anymore. I'm a boy again.”
Anastasia looked up from her notebook. ”I will a little later, Sam. We can go outside and I'll give you a ride on the back of my bike, okay? But not right now. Right now I'm making up a secret code, and I need to do it all by myself, without any interruption.”
Sam's eyes widened. ”What's a secret code?” he asked.
”Oh, it's complicated, Sam. It's when you say one thing but mean something else. Or write one thing but mean something else. Understand?”
Sam shook his head no.
”Well, for example...” Anastasia hesitated. ”Sam,” she asked, ”if I explain this code to you, promise me you won't tell anyone?”
Sam nodded.
”Do you solemnly swear?”
Sam gulped. He knew that swears were bad. There was a kid at nursery school who was always saying swears, and Mrs. Bennett did not find it amusing at all, not even for one single minute. (It was Sam's best friend, Adam.) ”I solemnly swear,” Sam whispered, glancing around to be certain no one could hear.
”Well,” Anastasia explained, ”I've made a list of all the boys I know. Robert Giannini and Steve Harvey and Eddie Fox anda”well, all the boys I know. See?” She tilted the notebook so that Sam could see a list of names written in green ink.
”Now, here's the code part,” Anastasia went on. ”I've written words after each boy's name, but the words don't really mean what they say. So if I wrote love, that really means 'hate,' see? And despise means 'love'. And my friend Meredith has the code, too, so she can understand. And if I call Meredith up and say, 'I despise Steve Harvey'a”well, Meredith could look at her code notebook and see that would really mean that I love Steve Harvey. But no one else would know, because they wouldn't know the code.”
Sam stared at his sister.
”See?” Anastasia asked.
”I guess so,” said Sam, even though he didn't, really.
”Don't forget that you can't tell anyone. You solemnly swore, remember?”
”Yeah.” Already Sam was sorry that he had solemnly sworn. It hadn't been worth it. He dropped to his belly and slithered out of Anastasia's room and down the stairs. He was a new kind of lizard: a kind that didn't eat bugs, only peanut b.u.t.ter.
”What were you doing upstairs?” asked Mrs. Krupnik, as Sam ate his sandwich. He had slithered into the kitchen, explained about the peanut-b.u.t.ter-eating lizard, and his mother had realized that it was probably feeding time in the lizard world.
”I learned about code,” Sam told her.
”Code?” his mother asked, wrinkling her forehead.
”Yeah, that's when you say one thing but you really mean something else.”
”Like what?”
Sam sighed. He couldn't tell about Anastasia's code because he had solemnly sworn. But suddenly he thought of something else.
”Like Mr. Flabbo,” he said. ”If I said Mr. Flabbo, you know who I would mean, don't you?”
His mother laughed. ”Sure. You'd mean Daddy.”
”Right. Because Mr. Flabbo is code for Daddy. And if I said, 'I hate Mr. Flabbo,' it would really mean 'I love Daddy.'”
”Oh.” His mother looked confused.
Sam looked around the kitchen. On the floor in front of the was.h.i.+ng machine there was a huge stack of dirty clothes. He recognized the s.h.i.+rt he had worn yesterday, and he recognized the chocolate milk he had spilled on that s.h.i.+rt at dinner last night. He saw Anastasia's socks and his dad's pajamas. He knew how his mother felt about laundry.
”If you said, 'I love doing the laundry,'” Sam explained, ”that would be code, and it would really meana”” He waited for his mother to catch on.
She laughed and sipped her coffee. ”I guess I see. But I hope you won't say you hate anything, even in code, Sam. Okay? Because hate is such a yucky word. Even for laundry.”
Sam nibbled out the rest of the good part of his sandwich and arranged the crust in an on his plate. ”Yeah, okay,” he said. Actually, he didn't think hate was a yucky word. Broccoli was much yuckier.
Sam went outside and wandered across the yard to visit the Krupniks' next-door neighbor. Her real name was Gertrude Stein. But Sam never called her that. He liked to call her Gertrustein.
Gertrustein was very old. Sam wasn't sure how old, maybe two hundred.
She had a grouchy face, and when Sam had seen her for the first time, he had been frightened by her face. But later, when he got to know Gertrustein, when they became good friends, he realized that she was actually a smiling sort of person. But her skin had drooped, so it hung down in a grouchy look, and sometimes it was hard to see the smile underneath.
Gertrustein was on her back porch, hanging a dishtowel on the clothesline there. She always moved very slowly. Her arms and legs ached all the time, she had explained to Sam, and that was why she moved so slowly.
”Hi, Sam!” Gertrustein said when Sam came up the steps. ”What a nice surprise!”
She lived all alone. She had no husband, no children, no grandchildren, and no dog or cat. So she was always glad to see Sam.
”If I didn't have you to talk to,” she had once told Sam, ”I would probably forget how to talk.”
Sam thought it was the saddest thing in the whole world, to have drooping skin that gave you a grouchy face, to have aching arms and legs so that you had to move slowly, and to live all alone so that you might forget how to talk.
But Gertrustein didn't seem to mind. Almost every day she made cookies.
”I expect you might be willing to do me a favor and eat a cookie or two,” she said to Sam.
”I might,” Sam agreed.
”What have you been doing today?” she asked him after they had sat down together at her kitchen table with a plate of cookies and a gla.s.s of milk each.
Sam sighed. ”Anastasia won't play with me because she's busy writing a code,” he said. ”And my mom is doing the laundry so she can't play with me right now, and she didn't understand about codes, anyway.
”Do you know about codes?” he asked, looking up at Gertrustein. ”If I said, 'I don't want another cookie,' it would really mean, 'I do want another cookie' because it would be a code.”
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