The Red Blazer Girls (10 page)

“Just for that, you are
not
getting out of this Dickens thing.”

“G'night, Soph.”

On Friday night, while everyone who is someone (at least at St. V's) is headed for the West Side and a night of dancing and who knows what else (will I
ever
know?), Margaret and I take the subway down to Canal Street and do a little shopping before heading over to Rebecca's apartment. You can find just about anything you need, and a lot of things no one in their right mind would ever want, on Canal Street. In its own way, it is a fabulous budget-shopping experience. Designer knockoff handbags? Check. Cute little Chinese ballet shoes? Got 'em, any color you want for a buck! Jangly dangly earrings? Right here, miss—two for five dollars. We resist the urge to buy illegal movies that are still playing in the theaters, but I do pick up a beat-up-looking disc with a bunch of cartoons for Rebecca's little sibs and, well, a really cute belt and a pair of big sunglasses that I just
can't
resist.

Margaret had agreed to go with me to Rebecca's, provided that I left her alone after school from four to seven so she could catch up on her studying. Her grandmother and parents went to Queens to visit some relatives, so she had three hours of serious “quiet time.” I was forbidden to contact her or bother her in any way. In addition to my temporary exile from Margaretland, Rafael is miffed at me for bailing on the dance. But the first thing he did after I told him that we weren't going was ask whether my friend Leigh Ann would be there. AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH! Is this the cost of “doing the right thing?” I may not be cut out for it.

My dad, on the other hand, came through with a box full of miniature chocolate tortes, Napoleons, éclairs,
and
truffles. I may have lost the boy (temporarily), but I have the primo goodies.

At Becca's we order pizza, and after it comes, as Rebecca predicted, her little sibs clamor to watch
Balto
yet again.

“No! I can't listen to that damn thing one more time,” she says.

“You said a swear. I'm telling,” says her little brother, Jonathan.

“You're damn right I did, mini-man. No more
Balto
. Look, here are some cartoons that my nice friend brought just for you. There's Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner. These are
classics
. I guarantee you're gonna love them.”

Jonathan and his twin sister, Jennifer, whine, but
after thirty seconds of the Road Runner's “beep-beeps,” they are enraptured. (I just finished the “Word Power” in an old
Reader's Digest
in my orthodontist's office. I am
enraptured
by the word “enraptured.”) The disc also turns out to be a serendipitous choice (more “Word Power”). How could I have known that the Road Runner and his arch-nemesis Wile E. Coyote would help us with clue number two?

“Okay here it is,” Margaret says, printing the letters on a sheet of newsprint torn from Rebecca's sketchpad.

We all stare at it for a long, long time, nobody saying anything.

“Is this the classical languages clue?” I ask. “Because I have to tell you: I've got nothin'.”

Margaret and Rebecca both look hypnotized—that's how hard they are concentrating.

“Is it a code?” Rebecca asks.

“Maybe. But for now, let's look for easier solutions,” Margaret suggests. “What if it's a list of words, and he's only showing us two letters from each one?”

“But there could be
thousands
of possible words for some of those,” Rebecca says.

“Yeah, you're right. Is it, say, a famous quote? Or another Bible verse? That would narrow it down.”

Rebecca seems skeptical. “I don't know. That seems
too
hard. Maybe if there were blanks to fill in the missing letters. That way, at least you'd know how many letters were missing. Do me a favor and write the letters out the usual way, across the page.”

“I think that made it worse,” I say.

“Are there
any
recognizable words in there?” asks Margaret. “Anything longer than two letters? What about every other letter? S, E, R, S, V, E—no, that doesn't work. Damn. Reverse? O, K, N, E, T Nope.”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Rebecca says. “Let me see the letter. What was the first clue? The exact wording?”

“‘Look behind L2324.’ Why?”

Rebecca's brow furrows and she scratches her
head, thinking hard, eyes darting back and forth across the paper, and then, finally, a satisfied smile appears on her face.
“Look behind
—all right! I'm definitely onto something. Look at this. Take the last two pairs of letters.”

OK

LO

“OK and LO, right? Now, move the LO up one row, in front of the OK. What do you have? LOOK, right? Now, do the same thing with the next letters.” She writes:

UN DE

LO OK

“Now, just keep sliding the ones from the bottom of the list up and in front of the next ones up.” She continues on the paper:

UN DE RT HE

UNDER THE

And finally,

LOOK UNDER THE

“Damn, Rebecca,” I say, in awe.

“I'm with Sophie,” said Margaret.

Now that we (as if I had anything to do with it!) have the pattern, the rest is a snap. We end up with this:

LOOK UNDER THE MARBLE OVISARIES

But OVISARIES means nothing to us.

“Sounds kinda like ‘ovaries,’” I note.

Margaret chuckles. “I don't think Caroline's grandfather would tell her to look under
those
. Which leaves us two possibilities. One, OVISARIES is an anagram—”

“Another one?” says Rebecca.

“Or this one definitely is the classical languages clue and OVISARIES is Greek or Latin. You don't happen to have a Latin dictionary around, do you?”

“Yeah, I've got one in the kitchen,” Rebecca says. “I think it's in the freezer.”

“Margaret thinks everyone has a full reference library in their house,” I assure her.

“In her
house,” Margaret corrects. “‘Everyone’ is a singular pronoun.”

“Let's just kill her now,” I say. “No one will know, but even if they did, they'd never blame us.”

“Well, how about a regular English dictionary, then.”

“That
I have.” Rebecca goes into her room to fetch a perfectly ordinary, respectable paperback dictionary. Margaret's personal dictionary is six inches thick and outweighs her by a good twenty pounds.

While the gears in Margaret's brain whir and click like something out of a cartoon, I head into the other room to watch the real thing with the kids. Rebecca's brother and sister don't even look up when I enter the
room; they are
deeply
involved. I sit on the floor next to them.

Suddenly Margaret starts shouting out all this stuff about how while she was searching for “ovisaries” in the dictionary, she found the word “ovine,” which means “of, or having the nature of, a sheep,” from the Latin
ovis
, for “sheep.”

After sort of half listening for a while, I say, in an offhand kind of way, “Oh, it's probably like
Road-runnerus digestus
or
Carnivorous vulgaris
.”

“Sophie, what
are
you babbling about? Get back in here,” Margaret orders.

“I was
babbling
that it's probably the scientific name for an animal, like
Road-runnerus digestus
or
Carnivorous vulgaris
. You know, how in the Road Runner cartoons, about once an episode, they do this thing where the stupid coyote is chasing the dumb bird, and they'll freeze the frame, so it looks like something out of a biology textbook. And at the bottom of the page, they come up with these crazy fake Latin names—well, I assume they're fake, anyway—like, for the coyote,
Road-runnerus digestus
.”

“The genus and the species,” says Margaret. “Of course!
Ovis aries
is the Latin name of some kind of sheep!”

“So I'm right? Again?”

Margaret beams at me and immediately runs to Rebecca's computer, and within, well, minutes—using
Rebecca's dial-up Internet, no less—we know that
Ovis aries
is, in fact, the Latin name for the common domestic sheep. Somewhere in the church, we hope, is a marble sheep we can look under. But not at its ovaries.

Just one more thought about the Road Runner: if that stupid coyote can afford all that stuff from the Acme Corporation, why doesn't he just buy something to eat? Am I right? You know I am.

If we didn't
know
that the church was locked, we probably would be packing up the kids and taking the subway uptown to Sixty-eighth Street to find whatever it is that awaits us under the sheep. But since we can't do that, and since I just
have
to tell someone, I have a, um, perfectly valid reason to call Raf. Because, you know, he's my friend. What is going on with me?

Life in elementary school had been pretty simple; St. V's was like my all-girls galaxy, with St. Andrew's—the boys' galaxy—right next door. Both are smallish galaxies with enough contact between them that I knew just about everyone in my grade in both schools. The St. Andrew's boys may not have been anything spectacular, but they were
our
boys. Now that we are in the upper school, suddenly they are
everybody's
boys. People like Leigh Ann, who can't possibly appreciate Raf the way I can, have a chance. More than a chance, actually, because to Raf she
is new and different and exciting—not just his good ol' punch-each-other-on-the-arm pal.

So I call him. And Leigh Ann is right there, with him—well,
near
him at least. Raf even puts her on the phone to talk to me.
Sheesh!
Utterly clueless.

On the way home from Rebecca's, Margaret asks me about the phone call. “What happened? One second you're happy, you're talking to Raf, and the next second, poof, you're moping around like your dog ran away. Did you tell him how we figured out the second clue?”

“I tried, but it was hard to hear with the music and everything.”

“So what else is the problem?”

“Guess.”

“What? I have no idea. What is going on?”

“Oh, it's nothing,” I lie. “It's just—he was there with Leigh Ann. And I think I'm losing my mind.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly.”

“Sophie, do you
like
Raf?”

To paraphrase my grandmother, I hem and haw. “I don't. I mean, I don't know. This is so embarrassing. I
can't
like him. Oh, God, why am I like this?”

“What exactly
are
you ‘like’?”

“Like an idiot girl who is freaking out because he put
her
on the phone.”

“He did? That's weird.”

“Tell me about it. She's like, ‘Why aren't you guys
here? I miss you. It's not the same without you, blah, blah, blah.’ And that's the thing that drives me the craziest. Part of me wants to hate her, but I really don't think she was rubbing my face in it or anything. She actually sounded like she wished we were there.”