Out on a Limb (9 page)

“So how was school today?”

“Good.”

“Yeah? Good? So tell me about your classmates, what are they like?”

“They’re like kids in Grade Seven.”

“And you’re getting to know some of them?”

“I see them every day, yeah.”

“So tell me about some of them. Who are the friendly ones?”

“Everybody is of equal friendliness. Do we have to keep having this conversation? Haven’t we already had it, like, eleven times?”

“Don’t get snippy, Rosie, your mother’s just interested,” Dad said.

“Okay,” I sighed.

I had succeeded in ending the conversation. Mom closed up the bag of marshmallows and stoked the fire. I sat on my stump in silence, watching the sparks as they rose and twisted and mingled with the stars.

NOTEBOOK: 11

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: Valuable Lesson

It was in the third week
of September that I had my first real encounter with Bridget Hanrahan. She sat across the aisle from me. We’d spoken exactly three times.

Time #1:

Bridget: I HATE mechanical pencils! These stupid feeble leads! Do you have a pencil I could borrow?

Me: I think so. Yup. Here.

Time #2:

Bridget: (indicating back of T-shirt).Your tag is sticking out. Me: (tucking tag back in). Oh, okay, thanks.

Time #3:

Bridget: What’s our math homework? Do you know?

Me: Chapter Seven, page 79, section B, questions 13 to 29. Bridget: Brutal. Thanks.

This made her slightly friendlier than the other kids in my class, but even so my opinion of Bridget was low. She was good friends with Kendra. This did not reflect well on Bridget.

Our encounter happened in communication skills, the last class of the day. I was dying of boredom. Miss Rankle was lecturing on transitive versus intransitive verbs. I knew there would be a test on this stuff, but I knew it would be a multiple-choice-pick-the-correct-sentence test. Not to brag or anything, but I speak excellent English, and I trusted myself to pick the correct sentence without listening to one single word that Miss Rankle said. I got my wallet out of my cargo pants. I took out Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter and lay it on my desk. I tried to think of new ways to write a code alphabet, and started writing one where I switched every second letter.

BADCFEHG, I wrote. I glanced up to see Bridget Hanrahan looking across the aisle at my desk top. She nodded at the coded letter and my partial alphabet. With a quizzical smile she traced a question mark in the air. It had actually been awhile since anyone outside my family had smiled at me. It had been awhile since anyone outside my family had shown any interest in me. That is why I did what I did. I smiled back, and I passed Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter to Bridget.

“An
intransitive
verb is an action verb that does not require an object to
complete its action
,” Miss Rankle said, from the front of the class. “A
transitive
verb is one that expresses an action
directed
toward a
person
, or a
thing
.” Miss Rankle spoke without any pause or change of tone, so Bridget and I didn’t notice her heading down the aisle until it was too late. Bridget glanced up at Miss Rankle’s looming pantsuit and closed the coded letter in her hand. Miss Rankle grabbed Bridget’s wrist. “For example, the
teacher demanded
the note,” Miss Rankle said, actually prying Bridget’s fingers open. Miss Rankle seized Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter.

“Passing
notes
,” Miss Rankle said. “That’s something I haven’t seen in a while. I thought it had gone out of style since text messaging. But apparently not,” Miss Rankle said. She smoothed Great-great-aunt Lydia’s letter. “And in code, too. Intriguing. I’m sure the class will be fascinated to hear what it says. Do tell, Rosamund, since it appears from the stationery that you’re the author.”

“I’m not, actually,” I said. “I don’t know what it says.”

Miss Rankle looked at me. I could hear the air leaving her nostrils. “Not the author, even though your surname is right at the top of the stationery? I find that hard to believe. Very hard. I find it easier to believe that you are choosing to be difficult. But you should know, Rosamund, that I can also choose to be difficult.”

I knew that already. I had heard lots of kids in the class say so. When she chose to be difficult, she gave out test scores that were actually in the negative, wiping out earlier good grades. When she chose to be difficult, she gave long detentions for offences like pencil-dropping. When she chose to be difficult, she made kids sing solos in Music class. I stared at the floor to avoid her threatening stare. If Miss Rankle chose to be difficult, my Grade Seven year would be terrible. So should I pretend that I had lied at first, and pretend that I
did
know what the note said? What would I say about what the note said? I tried to think of possible note topics, but my imagination failed. My mind contained nothing at all, except what was right before my eyes. I was about to say that the note was about squares of grey linoleum with a random pattern of pink and black spots when Bridget spoke up.

“Rosie’s mother Lydia wrote the note,” Bridget said. “Both our mothers had to write in code for Pathfinders. Rosie and I are trying to earn our Pathfinders’ cryptography badge. We have to decode encrypted messages using the same steganography principles developed by Trimethius. You know, like the Nazis used for the World War a Enigma machine? And like the US Navy used to develop the Cryptanalytic Bombe to break the Nazi’s code? It’s really, really hard though. That’s why our leader said that the code has to be written by somebody we know well. To give us a clue. Otherwise it would be impossible. And we’re really, really sorry we passed the note in class, but we’ve been working really, really hard to decode it, and we’re just so intellectually stimulated by the challenge.”

I stared at Bridget, totally impressed. Miss Rankle stared at Bridget too, assessing her credibility. “Well, Bridget and Rosamund, I’m sorry that all your hard work is going to end up going to
waste
. No doubt that will help you learn the valuable lesson that there is a time and a place for everything.” With that Miss Rankle walked away and shut Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter into her top desk drawer. She turned the key to lock it. I stared at the tasseled key, feeling gutted. Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter, gone!

“
Now
. Back to more
important
matters. Transitive verbs fall into
two categories
,” Miss Rankle’s voice vibrated. “We call these
active
and
passive
voice.”

Bridget raised her hand.

“Yes Bridget?”

“May I please go to the water fountain?”

“To the water fountain? Oh, very well,” Miss Rankle said, sounding all annoyed, which goes to show just how little it takes with her. Bridget rose from her seat and headed past Miss Rankle toward the door. “Then there are verb
moods
, which are not to be confused with verb
voices
.” Miss Rankle said. “Verb
moods
are of three kinds:
indicative, imperative
and
subjunctive
.” As Miss Rankle looked critically from student to student, Bridget hesitated in the threshold of the open classroom door. When Miss Rankle went on about verb moods, Bridget came back inside the classroom to Miss Rankle’s desk. Bridget turned the tasseled key. Slowly, she slid the top drawer open. Miss Rankle made eye contact with me and I nodded as if begging to know more about the subjunctive mood. Bridget removed Great-great-aunt Lydia’s coded letter and slowly shut the drawer. Letter in hand, she left the classroom. But in seconds she was back with the letter. She had lost her nerve, I thought, and I couldn’t blame her. Stealing the coded letter was suicide: Miss Rankle would have known for sure that Bridget was the thief. Of course she had to put it back. The opening drawer caught Miss Rankle’s ear.

“Bad grammar!” I yelled. I did this to create a distraction. I didn’t have a lot of time to think, but I knew that bad grammar
was
Miss Rankle’s obsession. And Miss Rankle was distracted. She was totally examining me. Behind her back Bridget shut the coded letter away in the drawer and turned the tasseled key. I was struck again by its loss and that was all I could think of for a moment. But Miss Rankle was waiting for me to finish my sentence. “Bad grammar ...” I repeated. “Bad grammar ...it’s ...it’s said by some to signal the end of civilization. Do you think that’s true?”

I sounded like the biggest nerd ever, but I had a moral obligation to protect Bridget. She’d attempted a serious offence on my behalf.

“That is a rather profound thought, Rosamund,” Miss Rankle said, and she actually looked a tiny bit pleased. “And yes, I do think it’s true.”

Bridget returned to her seat and started writing. When Miss Rankle was chalking verb tenses on the board, Bridget leaned over and stuck a scrap of paper inside my desk. I unfolded it.

ITOOK PIX OF YOUR NOTEWITH MY PHONE.

I breathed. Great-great-aunt Lydia’s actual letter was gone for good, but the code had been saved. I flipped the scrap over and wrote THANKS,YOU SAVED MY LIFE. This was a bit of an exaggeration, but I have always considered it good manners to exaggerate when thanking somebody. To stress my gratitude, I added five exclamation marks. I crumpled the scrap, leaned over and tossed it into Bridget’s desk.

Bridget uncrumpled it and smiled at me. I’d never really looked at her face before. It was a nice face. There was a space between her front teeth. Her eyes were the same colour as the pebble-bottom of our stream. She had freckles: not a big mass of them, but just a few really clear ones, like dot-to-dots. Even though she was friends with Kendra, I thought Bridget had the face of someone I’d like to know.

NOTEBOOK: #12

NAME: Rosamund McGrady

SUBJECT: The Lunch Exchange

The following morning
when the recess bell rang, Bridget reached into her desk.

“Here,” she said, as we stood in our aisles. “These are the pictures I took of your note. I took six, but only two turned out.”

“Thank you so much,” I said. “So, so, so much. I wanted to say thanks yesterday, but you disappeared as soon as the bell rang.”

“Bridget! Are you coming?” Kendra called from the classroom door.

“In a minute,” Bridget called back. Kendra did not look pleased.

“That was completely amazing,” I said to Bridget, “the way you stole it right out of Miss Rankle’s desk. Weren’t you scared?”“

Yeah, but what choice did I have? Since she didn’t believe me about our cryptography badge.”

“Oh, I think she believed you. She just felt like being mean. It was brilliant, your story about our cryptography badge. I was, like—how is she coming up with all this stuff? AboutTrimethius and the Enigma Machine and the ... stegasaurography? No. Stega-whatever.”

“Steganography.” Bridget shrugged. “Believe it or not, that’s what my dad talks about at the dinner table. He’s really into military history. Anyway, glad you were impressed.”

“I was in awe. That was so nice of you, too, to go to all that trouble to defend my note.”

“Bridget,” Kendra called. “You’re wasting our whole recess. Let’s go.”

“You go,” Bridget called back. “I’ll catch up with you.”

She turned from Kendra to me. “It would have really bugged me to lose your note. I thought it might be important. What’s the story anyway? Do you really not know what it says?”

“No, I really don’t.”

“So who wrote it? That Lydia Florence Augustine person?”

“Yup.”

“Is she a relative?”

“Yeah, she’s my Great-great-aunt, except that I’ve never met her, cause there was some huge fight in my family decades before I was even born.”

“So how did you get the note?”

I was not quite ready, in my very first conversation with Bridget, to say that I’d found it in the treehouse where I lived. “I found it at my place,” I said, “when we moved in this summer.”

“So the letter must be old, then,” Bridget said, “Because this Lydia person wouldn’t have been at your place after the big family breakup, would she?”

This was not necessarily true, seeing that my place was an unlocked treehouse on Great-great-aunt Lydia’s own property. I shrugged.

“Plus it seems like kind of an olden-days thing, to write in code, don’t you think?” Bridget continued. “’Cause they didn’t have cell phones or BlackBerries or whatever back then. Not even private land lines. So they had to be more creative to communicate secretly.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“What was the big family fight all about?”

“No clue. Everybody involved in the fight is dead now, except for Great-great-aunt Lydia.”

“Maybe her note explains it.”

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

“Bridget!” Kendra was still waiting. “Come! On!”

“Cool. Well, good luck with it,” Bridget said, as she headed to the front of the classroom to join Kendra. Kendra pivoted in the doorway, swirling her hair like a satin cape.

After recess came math. Whenever I looked up from my text, Kendra was staring at me from her eye-corners like one of those paintings whose eyes follow you all around the room. When the lunch bell rang, Bridget came up to me. “Want to have lunch?”

“Yeah, okay,” I said getting my lunch bag. “Sure.”

“Rosie’s going to have lunch with us,” Bridget reported to Kendra. Kendra sighed through her nostrils. “
What
ever,” she said.

She walked down the hallway with Sienna, Twyla and Nova. Bridget and I followed a couple of steps behind. We headed outside to a picnic table in the courtyard. I knew from eavesdropping that this area was called the Lunch Exchange. Nova and Twyla sat on one side of the table, then slid over to make room for Bridget. She sat beside them. Kendra and Sienna sat on the other side of the table. They did not slide over to make room for me. I stood holding my lunch bag.