Never Say Genius (21 page)

“What’s wrong with the bathroom in the RV?” his mother asked.

“It’s gross, Mom.”

Coke pulled open the door to the men’s bathroom and looked around, just to be on the safe side. Nobody was in there. The three stalls were empty, and Coke went into the middle one.

While he was in there doing his business, he heard the door open and footsteps enter the men’s restroom. Somebody was whistling “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” Coke leaned forward and peeked under the stall door to see that the guy who came in was wearing black cowboy boots. Peeking through the narrow crack near the stall door, Coke could see the guy was wearing a large cowboy hat. But he couldn’t see the guy’s face. There was the sound of water in a sink, and then the electric hand dryer.

The guy was standing just a foot or two away from the stall. It made Coke feel uncomfortable, and he didn’t stand up even though he was finished. He didn’t make a sound. He pretended he wasn’t there.

Then, suddenly, an envelope slid into the stall and came to a stop at Coke’s foot.

He should have jumped up immediately and opened the stall door. He could have seen the face of the guy who slid him the note. He would have found out who was sending him all those ciphers.

Shoulda, coulda, woulda. Coke didn’t open the door. Instead, he opened the envelope. It wasn’t sealed. There was a sheet of white paper inside.

It was blank.

Now Coke was mad.

“Who
is
that?” he shouted, as he stuffed the paper back in the envelope and the envelope in his pocket. He got up from the toilet and reached for the little lock on the stall door.

It wouldn’t open. Somehow, the stall had been locked from the outside—by the guy with the cowboy boots. And now those boots were walking across the tile floor and out of the restroom.

That’s when Coke realized that he smelled something, and it wasn’t a bathroom smell. He had been in a lot of smelly bathrooms in his life, but this was worse. Much worse. It smelled like chemicals. The kind of chemicals that you’re not supposed to inhale.

“I gotta get outta here,” Coke mumbled to himself.

He couldn’t slide under the stall door. He couldn’t climb over it. He couldn’t open it. He was trapped.

Gas was filling the bathroom now. There was a hissing sound, as if the gas was escaping from an aerosol container. Coke was choking, his eyes filled with tears. He couldn’t call for help.

He took off his T-shirt, ripped it in half, and wrapped it around his face, hoping to filter out at least some of the poison gas. It was burning his eyes and his lungs.

He leaned on the stall door as hard as he could, but it wouldn’t budge. He took a running leap at it, but the stall was too small to get enough momentum. He was starting to panic.

Finally, he just reared back and kicked the door open, like the police do on TV. The stench of poison gas filled the bathroom. Coke closed his eyes and made a mad dash for the exit door, hoping that door had not been locked too.

He stumbled out to the open air and collapsed on the grass, choking and gagging. Pep was sitting there at the picnic table, waiting for him.

“What is your problem?” she said.

“Did you get a look at the guy who just came out of the bathroom?” Coke asked her.

“Yeah,
you
just came out of the bathroom.”

“I mean before me. The guy was wearing cowboy boots and a cowboy hat.”

“I just got here,” Pep said. “Man, what were you doing in there? I can smell it from here. What did you eat for breakfast?”

“I didn’t eat anything!” Coke shouted. “Some guy tried to poison me in there! And he slipped this envelope into the stall.”

“Oh, great,” Pep said. “I haven’t even solved the
last
cipher yet.”

“I don’t know if it’s a cipher.”

Coke took the envelope out of his pocket and showed the piece of paper to Pep.

“It’s blank,” she said.

“I know.”

“Come on, let’s get out of here before somebody sees you and thinks you caused that smell,” Pep told her brother. “We can work on this in the RV.”

They rushed back to the parking lot, where their parents were waiting anxiously to get back on the road.

“What happened to your shirt?” Mrs. McDonald asked Coke.

“It ripped,” Coke admitted.

“We can see that,” Dr. McDonald said. “How do you rip your shirt going to the bathroom?”

“Some guy in the bathroom tried to kill me with poison gas,” Coke said, “so I ripped my shirt and made it into a gas mask so I could breathe.”

“Ha, ha! Very funny! You kids crack me up,” Dr. McDonald said. “Let’s go.”

“I wish you would take better care of your clothing,” said Mrs. McDonald.

Dr. McDonald hit the gas and got on the highway again. In the backseat, the twins looked at the white piece of paper carefully, turning it over, holding it up to the light. It was hard enough to figure all these ciphers out when they were written clearly. Now Pep had to work from a white sheet of paper. It was frustrating.

“Maybe the clue is simply ‘invisible’ or ‘emptiness’ or something like that,” Coke whispered to his sister. “Or maybe the white sheet of paper is the clue itself. Maybe it means the White House! Maybe there’s going to be a terrorist attack on the White House!”

“Or maybe the message was written in invisible ink,” Pep guessed.

“Oh, great.”

Pep put aside the white piece of paper and went back to working on the previous cipher they had received—SSGBETPLARAAENXRNDNX.

Fifteen miles down the highway, I-76 forks up toward Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and I-70 forks down toward Baltimore. Dr. McDonald merged onto I-70 South.

“I got it!” Pep suddenly exclaimed.

“What have you got, honey?” asked her mother from the front seat.

“Uh … poison ivy,” Pep said, scratching her leg. “I think maybe I got it back at the rest station.”

“We’ll get some calamine lotion next time we stop.”

Silently, Pep motioned for her brother to slide over next to her and look at her notebook. She had written out the cipher.

SSGBETPLARAAENXRNDNX

Then, below that, she wrote it again, but this time she divided it up into four lines.

SSGBE
TPLAR
AAENX
RNDNX

“So?” Coke asked, shrugging. “I don’t get it.”

“It’s so simple!” Pep whispered in his ear. “I can’t believe it took me so long to figure it out. Don’t read it horizontally. Read it vertically.”

Coke looked at the letters again.

STAR SPANGLED BANNER

“You got it!” Coke exclaimed.

“Maybe we should take her to a doctor,” said Mrs. McDonald.

“I’m fine, Mom!”

Pep went back to the page in her notebook with the other ciphers on it and added the new one.

• July 3, two
P.M.

• Greensboro lunch counter

• John Bull

• Star-Spangled Banner

What could it mean? What could a train, the national anthem, and a symbol of the civil rights movement have to do with one another? Every time they got a new cipher, it made things more confusing. And now they had one that said nothing at all. Coke shook his head wearily.

Half an hour after the highway split, a sign appeared at the side of the road.

“Woo-hoo!” Coke hollered. “Did you know that the state sport of Maryland is jousting?”

“Nobody cares,” Pep told him.

“Jousters care,” Coke said.

They had traveled almost two hundred miles across southwestern Pennsylvania. From the front seat, their mother informed them that they were exactly one hundred miles from Washington, D.C., now. The twins fell silent in the back of the RV. Coke didn’t bother to announce any more fun facts about Maryland.

Something was going to happen in Washington. Something big.

The end was near.

S
oon after crossing the Maryland state line, Dr. McDonald pulled off the highway and drove a few miles to Yogi Bear’s Jellystone Park Camp-Resort in Williamsport, Maryland. Mrs. McDonald checked in at the office while the kids checked out the pool. It was an uneventful night.

In the morning, Dr. McDonald said he was in the mood for poached eggs, and they didn’t have any eggs in the RV. So they hit the road looking for a place that served a decent breakfast.

It wasn’t long before they came upon the Blue Bell, one of those diners that was designed to look like it was from the 1950s. There was a line of stools at the counter, silver chrome and mirrors all over the place. A big jukebox was playing “Great Balls of Fire” in the corner, alongside a glass case filled with cakes and pies that spun around slowly.

Mrs. McDonald picked up a few travel brochures from a rack on the wall. A sign said
SEAT YOURSELF,
so the McDonalds slid into a booth near the window. Coke was immediately absorbed in reading the menu, which was filled with Maryland trivia.

Soon the waitress, a bleached blonde wearing a pink skirt, a little pink hat, and a lot of eye makeup, came roller-skating over to the table.

“Howdy, folks,” she said in a deep Southern accent. “Y’all new to these parts?”

“We’re on a cross-country trip,” Mrs. McDonald told her. “My sister is getting married in Washington the day after tomorrow.”

“Well ain’t that sweet?” said the waitress. “So what would you folks like this morning? We got eggs, bacon, sausage, muffins…”

“I’ll have two poached eggs on toast,” said Dr. McDonald.

“Adam and Eve on a raft!” the waitress hollered to a guy in the kitchen.

“And coffee, please,” added Dr. McDonald.

“Cuppa joe!” hollered the waitress.

Pep kicked Coke under the table, and he shot her a nasty glare before looking back at the menu.

“I’ll have a western omelet with french fries,” said Mrs. McDonald.

“One cowboy with spurs!” hollered the waitress.

“And no onions, please.”

“Don’t cry over it!” hollered the waitress.

“On second thought,” said Mrs. McDonald, “can I get an English muffin instead of the french fries?”

“Eighty-six the spurs!” hollered the waitress. “Burn the British!”

Pep kicked Coke under the table again.

“Hey, stop it!” Coke barked at his sister.

“Stop what?” asked Mrs. McDonald.

“She’s kicking me.”

“Stop kicking your brother.”

“I’m not kicking him.”

“And how about you, little lady?” asked the waitress. “What’ll ya have?”

“I’ll have waffles,” Pep said.