Chubs snorted, but I could see him warm to the compliment.
The minutes dragged by, and the conversation waned. I found myself reaching for Zu’s notebook and flipping it open to the beginning. The first few pages were mostly sketches and doodles, but those gave way to page after page of math problems. Liam’s handwriting was neat and precise, and, surprisingly, so was Zu’s.
—Betty traveled 118 miles in three hours. How fast was Lee driving?
—You have five Snickers bars to share with three friends. You cut them in half. How many will each friend get? How can you make sure the leftovers get shared equally so Chubs doesn’t complain?
And then I got to a page with completely different handwriting. Messy and smeared. The letters were darker, as if the writer had been pressing down on the paper too hard.
I’m not sure what else can be said about this book that hasn’t already been said. I’m
out of clever things to say, I’m afraid. Jonathan Swift has always been a favorite, but I
can’t get over how clever his wordplay is throughout the novel. I really can’t
get over how similar it is to Robinson Crusoe at times, especially when he’s on the ship
to Lilliput. Though his interaction with the Lilliputians wasn’t the strongest section,
you would be hard pressed to find equally clever interplay of parody and originality. I
can see why the book has been studied so carefully by scholars over the years. We
meet Gulliver as a dreamy young man in search of adventure, trying to get
anywhere that would involve sea travel, and see him evolve masterfully. If I had to
name the best section of the book, it would probably be the Laputians section, a
place I would greatly like to visit, because my own head is often stuck in the clouds,
and to be able to study philosophy and mathematics all day—a dream. There was a
time or two over the course of the novel that I felt Swift had gone overboard and
missed some opportunities to drive home his idea of what the ideal society should be.
You, as the reader, are left to figure it out for yourself. This book is perfect if you
love thought-provoking literature from an objective, rational viewpoint, or if
you dream about one day traveling the world yourself.
“Umm…” I held the page up for him to see. “This yours?”
“Give me that,” he said. His face was wild with panic. Not just panic—by the way his nostrils flared and his hand shook, it was almost like I had scared him half to death. Guilt shot through me. I passed it back to him and watched him tear that sheet of paper out.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I said, worried about the tinge of green coloring his face. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just wondering why you’d practice writing essays when you said you didn’t think we’d ever get to go back to school.”
He continued to stare at me for several seconds, until something in his stony expression finally gave. Chubs blew out the breath he’d been holding.
“I’m not practicing for school.” Instead of tucking the sheet of paper inside the briefcase, he laid it out between us. “Before…before camp, my parents thought the PSFs were investigating them, which, you know, they were. They sent me up to my grandparents’ cabin to hide, and—you remember what I said about the Internet being policed? We had to find a way around it, especially when they started putting pressure on Mom at work.”
I glanced down at the sheet of paper again. “So you used to send book reviews?”
“I had a laptop and a few wireless Internet cards,” he said. “We would post book reviews online. It was the only way we could think of to talk without them catching on.”
He leaned over, covering the paper so only the first column of words was visible. I’m out can’t get to you can meet anywhere name place and time missed you love you.
“Oh.”
“I wanted to write it out now,” Chubs said. “In case I can get online, but only have a few minutes.”
“You’re pretty genius,” I said slowly. “Your whole family.”
I got a snort in response. Duh.
The question I really wanted to ask him was inching its way up my throat when he pulled a deck of cards out of his briefcase.
“Want to play a few games?” he asked. “We’re going to be here a while.”
“Sure…but I only know Old Maid and Go Fish.”
“Well.” He cleared his throat. “We don’t have the right deck for Old Maid and, unfortunately for you, I excel at Go Fish. I won the Go Fish tournament in fifth grade.”
I grinned, waiting for him to deal my cards. “You are a star, Chubs, a—” His nose wrinkled at the name. “I can’t call you by anything else if I don’t know your real name.”
“Charles,” he replied. “Charles Carrington Meriwether IV, actually.”
I tried to keep my face as straight as possible. Of course he would be named something like that. “Okay, Charles. Charlie? Chuck? Chip?”
“Chip?”
“I don’t know, I thought it was kind of cute.”
“Ugh. Just call me Chubs. Everyone else does.”
I figured it out.
It must have been half past five in the morning, well after several delirious games of cards and charades that had been brought on by too much candy and too little sleep. Both of us had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, to be proven right about the other boys. We kept the baseball bat beside us and never once turned our backs to the tents. When exhaustion finally set in, we took turns curled up on the ground, trying to steal a few minutes of sleep here and there.
I picked up Zu’s notebook again in an attempt to avoid being lulled to sleep by Chubs’s rhythmic snores, and added a few clouds and stars to the first page of doodles. The pages fanned out under my fingers as I flipped through the notebook again, not catching until I found what I was looking for.
540.
It was an area code for this part of the state, I was sure of it. Grams had lived down near Charlottesville for a time, and I had a very vague memory of standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, staring at her number printed on a notepad beside the phone. But the area it covered—that was no small bit of land, and there was no real guarantee that it was supposed to represent an area code in the first place.
It was easier to think of it now without three eager sets of eyes on me, but slightly complicated by the fact that I was running on fumes, sleepwise. With more than enough time to kill, I started in again—rearranging them, trying to create anagrams, substituting different letters for others.
The feeling snuck up on me slowly, crawling back up through the crowded, tired portions of my brain. The other number—540—where had I seen that? Why did it feel like—?
When it came to me, I almost laughed. Almost.
I had seen the number on the radio in Greg’s memory only a few hours earlier, burning brightly through even the murkiest clouds of his thoughts.
It was 540 AM—a radio station.
Shaking Chubs back awake wasn’t enough for me, not when I thought I would actually burst at the seams with excitement. I all but pounced onto Chubs’s back, both scaring him senseless and kneeing him in the kidney in the process. I’m not sure what sound he made when I landed, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t human.
“Wake up, wake up, wake up!” I hissed, hauling him huffing and puffing and cursing to his feet. “When they gave you EDO, did they say anything else?”
“Green, if I can still walk tomorrow, so help me God—”
“Listen to me!” I hissed. “Did they say anything about tuning in, or picking it up?”
He fixed me with a baleful look. “All they said was to check out Edo.”
“Check out?” I repeated. “Those exact words?”
“Yes!” he said, exasperated. “Why?”
“I was wrong before,” I said. “I don’t think the number has anything to do with a phone number. We were right before. The last letter isn’t a letter at all—it was supposed to be a zero. Five forty. It’s some kind of radio station.”