All About Sam (11 page)

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 and—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'—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 butter.

"What were you doing upstairs?" asked Mrs. Krupnik, as Sam ate his sandwich. He had slithered into the kitchen, explained about the peanut-butter-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 washing machine there was a huge stack of dirty clothes. He recognized the shirt he had worn yesterday, and he recognized the chocolate milk he had spilled on that shirt 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
mean—" 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 glass 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."

Gertrustein passed the cookies to Sam, and he took another.

"I know a code," she said.

"Do you really?" Sam asked. "Or are you talking in code? Because if you're talking in code and you say, 'I know a code,' then it would really mean 'I
don't
know a code.'"

Gertrustein chuckled. "No, actually, I do know a real code. Not a made-up one like Anastasia's. I know the Morse code. I learned it during the war. I wonder if I can remember it."

She closed her eyes, thinking. Sam sneaked his hand over to the cookie plate while her eyes were closed.

"Dit dah," Gertrustein said aloud.

Sam stared at her.

"Dah dit dit dit," she said with her eyes still closed. "Dah dit dah dit."

Quietly Sam pulled his sneaking hand back, away from the cookie plate. He slid off his chair. He decided that he would escape through the back door, run home faster than a speeding bullet, and tell his mother that something was seriously wrong with Gertrustein. His mother could call an ambulance.

But as he was tiptoeing across the kitchen toward the door, Gertrustein opened her eyes.

"I remember it! Every bit of the Morse code! Let me find a flashlight, and I'll show you!"

That night, after Sam was bathed and in his pajamas and had brushed his teeth and had had his bedtime story and had kissed everyone good night and been tucked in and his light was turned out, he decided that he didn't even need his night-light, for the very first time.

"Are you sure?" his mother asked. "You've
always
had your Mickey Mouse night-light."

"Tonight I don't want it," Sam said firmly. His mother leaned down to where Mickey lived in the electrical outlet on Sam's bedroom wall. She clicked Mickey off.

"Do you want me to leave your door open so you'll have a little light from the hall?" his mom asked.

"Nope," Sam said. So she said good night and closed his door.

His room was very, very dark. After a moment, when Sam's eyes adjusted to the dark, he could see the two big windows and the dark sky outside and a few stars.

He reached under the covers and found his daddy's flashlight where he had hidden it.

Then he tiptoed, carrying the flashlight to his window.

He balanced the flashlight on the windowsill, aimed it across the dark yard, and with his thumb, Sam found the button that would turn it on.

Dit dah dit dah,
Sam flashed. That meant: Desire to establish contact.

He and Gertrustein had studied Morse code all afternoon. Gertrustein had said that Sam had a mind like a steel trap. Sam pictured the inside of his own head, shiny steel with springs and teeth like a bear trap, grabbing at the Morse code and holding it tight so it would never escape.

Dit dah dit dah,
he flashed again, remembering the signal he had learned with his bear-trap mind. He waited. He knew how slowly she walked, and how long it took her to do things with her aching arms and legs.

After a minute, across the yard, from the upstairs window of the next house, he saw her answer.
Dah dah dah dah dah,
she flashed. Contact established.

Sam grinned in the dark.
Dit dit dit dit; dit dit,
he flashed. Hi. It was very easy to do hi in Morse code. Probably even someone who
didn't
have a bear-trap mind could do it.

Hi, Gertrustein flashed back.

Sam and Gertrustein had decided that they would flash "Hi" to each other every night for the rest of their lives.

She had taught him other messages, too.
Dit dit dit; dah dah dah; dit dit dit
was the one they would use only in case of emergency. If Sam happened to see scary monsters, for example, he could flash
dit dit dit; dah dah dah; dit dit dit
to Gertrustein, and she would save him. She would save him the very next
instant,
she promised.

If Gertrustein fell and broke her aching leg in fourteen pieces, she needed only to flash
dit dit dit; dah dah dah; dit dit dit
to Sam. He would rescue her in no more than thirty-two seconds, he had promised.

Sam watched through the dark, but there were no more flashes. Only the "Hi." No emergencies, no accidents, no monsters. Gertrustein was safe. So was Sam.

Content, he crept back through the dark room and climbed into his bed again. Carefully he aimed the flashlight at his ceiling and tapped out one more message with his thumb. A private message only for himself.
Dit dit dit; dit dah; dah dah
, he said to the ceiling. That meant
Sam.

Dit dit dit; dit dah; dah dah,
he flashed to the closet where occasionally there might be monsters. Sam. Any monsters would understand what that meant, and that they should go away.

Dit dit dit; dit dah; dah dah,
he flashed to the Mickey Mouse night-light. Sam. Mickey would understand what that meant: that he wouldn't be needed anymore.

Dit dit dit; dit dah; dah dah,
he flashed to his trucks in their cardboard garage. To the little box of dirt where King of Worms had once lived. To his books. To his jeans in a heap on the chair. To his sneakers with their Velcro fasteners on the floor. And to a half-eaten egg salad sandwich that he had hidden behind the curtains just last week.

Sam, he flashed.

Sam.

Sam.

Sam.

That's
me,
he thought with satisfaction, and he fell asleep.