a few thousand of them in town.”
“Really!”
“Yeah!”
“And where will this travel take you?” she asked.
“I don’t know! That’s half the fun! You see we go online and they have a treasure map.” I felt a little guilty leading her on about the treasure or time capsule idea. The treasure was worthless and the time capsule was only half true. But she could understand the idea of looking on a treasure map for a time capsule. “The map gives us the coordinates to find the capsule.”
“The coordinates?”
“Yeah! The longitude and latitude. We load the coordinates into Twiggy’s GPS and it leads us to the capsules.”
“Wow, you are learning a thing or two at college.”
“Yeah, did you know the coordinates are broken down into degrees, minutes and seconds? We’re given the coordinates down to three decimal places which is about three feet, so there is no way to get lost!” I crossed my fingers hoping she would believe me. I wasn’t quite sure if it was that close but it could be.
“And this Twiggy, is she usually a responsible student?”
“Oh! Yeah! Better grades than me!” Without studying, I added mentally. “We study together a lot and I’m sure my grades have improved.”
“When will you be home?”
“The eleventh!” I said. As long as I had answers and sounded excited maybe I could sway her.
“That’s a long time. Where will you be staying?”
“We’ll get reservations. I still have enough money for a night or two. Maybe Twiggy’s parents will let us have a slumber party at their house.”
My parents were so, so, so traditional. I had to think traditionally when I talked to my mom about things like this.
“Is there any partying involved? Any drinking?”
“Coffee, tea and soda.”
“Drugs?”
“Only Tylenol if we drink too much coffee.”
“Sex?”
“With Twiggy?” I asked.
“With anybody!” she almost gasped.
“Mom! What kind of a girl do you think I am?”
“I’ll think…”
“Thanks Mom! Oh I just knew you’d see it my way! I’ll be home in time to help Meredith get ready for her sweet sixteen! I can’t wait to tell Twiggy!”
And I hung up. They sure didn’t know what a schemer of a kid they raised.
Chapter 3
Bam, bam, bam! I pounded on Twiggy’s dorm room door.
There was the sound of a chair sliding and stocking feet kicking things out of the way as someone came to the door. The door opened and there stood Skippy. Skippy was Twiggy’s roommate. He was a cross between an Old English Sheepdog and a giraffe. He was tall and thin but his hair was light blonde, fine and long. With all those qualities it tended to fly out from his head so he looked like a young, tall Albert Einstein. Or maybe he was a cross between Einstein and Stretch Armstrong.
“Is Twiggy here?” I asked.
“He’s in the shower,” he said.
“Oh,” I said looking down the hall. I wasn’t allowed in the men’s shower room. “Can you tell him I was looking for him? And tell him I’ll wait for a little while at Holey Moley?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“He’ll know where to go,” I said.
“Okay. You sure seem excited about something.”
“Don’t tell him that. I’ll just wait until I reach a stopping point in my book.”
“Okay.”
Holey Moley was the name of the geocache in the knot hole of the tree and the tree made a good reading spot. The only problem with reading there was that if a geocacher came looking for the cache they would think they couldn’t. Geocachers are not supposed to search for a geocache in the presence of non geocachers. If they do, they are not supposed to be obvious about it. They call people who don’t geocache muggles and if muggles were to see a geocacher geocaching they might think we were doing something suspicious and call the police. The police don’t like to find what they called “suspicious packages” because they have to evacuate buildings, call the bomb squad and blow up perfectly harmless containers that only held a small notepad and a few toys. It was kind of a waste of time and resources. So when I read at Holey Moley I watched for geocachers and if anybody eyed the tree disappointedly I would wave them over and tell them I was a geocacher and then they could look. And even though I had only found ten caches I still felt like I was a real geocacher, because I had an account and a geocaching name and knew how many finds I had. That made it official.
My geocaching name is Grabby Gabby, which my roommate somehow made into something crude and sexual but really it just meant that I “made the grab” when Twiggy and I went geocaching. I don’t know why I always found them before he did. He had much more experience at finding geocaches, but I still managed to find them first. I was beginning to think he really found them first but he wanted me to feel like I was doing well so he let me find them first. Holey Moley was the only one he found first and it was because he was taller. I could reach in the hole if I really stretched and stood on my tiptoes, but he didn’t even have to stand on his toes.
I settled down with my book and fingered the pages. Hmm, I only had about a hundred pages to go to the end of the book. Maybe I would wait a little longer than I told Skippy. Then I spent several minutes wondering why Skippy needed a nick name, too. I decided if he was anyone else’s roommate we would just call him Jake, but he was Twiggy’s roommate and Twiggy was the one constantly assigning nicknames to people. I wondered how Skippy got his name. It wasn’t a derivative from his real name. Then I remembered that Skippy’s family lived along a river and his dad had a motorboat and a sailboat. They used the motorboat for quick trips to the store and they sailed the sailboat out to the ocean and visited ports up and down the east coast. Maybe Twiggy considered Skippy a junior skipper? For a smart guy Twiggy sure could be immature.
I was maybe fifty pages into my book when Twiggy walked down the sidewalk in my direction. He walked like Ichabod Crane and he had large feet so it was easy to recognize him amongst the other students. They all looked very relieved that classes were almost at an end. Some of them carried boxes of belongings. I needed to think about packing up, too.
“Guess what!” I said.
“You didn’t really flunk your final and the coffee really did explode in your brain and you’ve lost ten million brain cells and you’re in need of a second brain. Well, here I am!”
“I
