The End of FUN (25 page)

Over the next hour or so we worked on anagrams without FUN
®
—and I gotta say, Katie was pretty good at it. A real natural anagram machine. As for me, I pretty much sucked a butt. I could barely make a word. Mostly I just watched Katie work. It really was a beautiful sight, the way she hunched up under the lamp, hard at her studies, the way her hair kept falling down.

“OK,” she said at last. “I've got a couple leads here. How about this?
A teenager is grief
. Or how about this?
Soft reggae is eerie
. That's kinda true, isn't it?”

“I don't really like reggae.”

“But is it eerie? When played softly?”

“I doubt he put in all this trouble just to tell me about
reggae
.”

“Fine. So what do
you
have?” She grabbed my paper and read. “
Aaron rules?
Come on!
Virgin ogre? Riven filth? Sloven thug?
What are these, death metal bands?”

“Maybe he got me tickets to a show.”

“Aaron.”
She was using her teacher voice.
“You have to take this seriously.”

“First you said to humor you, and now you want me to take it seriously. Which is it? Look, we could have this done in five minutes using FUN
®
.”

Katie didn't answer. She was examining my paper.

“That gives me an idea. Maybe we need to set aside the most likely words. Like your name, for instance. That makes it easier. Is it possible to make the word ‘treasure,' too? Or ‘money'? No—there's no
m
.” She looked up from the page. “Go ahead and use your FUN
®
if you think it's so great. I've got my brain. Nothing beats good old-fashioned human ingenuity!”

Just out of principle I knew I was going to have to beat her—if not for the sheer joy of winning, then just to demonstrate the superiority of FUN
®
. It was John Henry versus the steam hammer all over again, and I was the steam hammer.

I found this free upgrade, CodeCracker
™
by LiteTouch Industries
®
(YAY!), that said it could do anagrams. But when I went to download it, Homie
™
denied me.

“So give me permission.”

Homie
™
flickered.

“Aw, come on!”

“Trouble with FUN
®
?” Katie sang.

Homie
™
popped back up.

“Great. What do I have to do?”

“What?”

Which, no, it wasn't. What it was was a rip-off of the New Bronx Boogie, and a good nine months too late to be relevant. Homie
™
wouldn't let me do it sitting down, so I got up and danced around like an idiot, with Katie laughing her head off.

I completed the Bramburry Farms
®
New Cow Boogie
™
, including the
YAY
! at the end, downloaded the anagrammer upgrade, inputted the letters TEE­FTH­GIE­EVI­LON­AIS­SUR­RAE­NGID, and Homie
™
flickered for a second….

“Seriously?”

“So show me SOME of them. Five at a time. And make it have meaning.”

“No—I mean give me something that makes
sense
.”

“Wait—no. You don't understand. The word ‘sense' doesn't have to be in it. Take the sense back out. Make it
mean
something.”

I glanced over at Katie to see how she was doing.

“Hey. No peeking!”

So I told Homie
™
to subtract the letters A, A, R, O, N and give me some sentences starting with that.

I scanned the next four, and the next after that. I was getting nowhere fast, and then Katie shouted out that she'd gotten it, so I picked the best one I could find in the vast sea of crap data and said I had it, too. Maybe.

“Yeah?” she said. “So what is it?”

“Show me yours first.”

“Fine.” She handed me a paper, and there it was, written out in her neat, schoolteacher's handwriting:

Aaron, evil heirs get suiting feed.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Well, I don't know,” she said. “It's like, ‘Be a good boy or you might get screwed.'”

“You think
that's
what he spent all this time trying to say?”

“Well, what did
you
come up with?”

So I wrote it out for her:

Aaron, I give hugs, i.e. ‘el friend test.'

She started laughing. “Oh. Right. That makes a
lot
more sense. ‘El friend test'—what's
that
supposed to mean?”

Both solutions were admittedly lacking. That much was evident. We searched a little longer, but without the same fire as before, and then Katie said it was time for her to go.

I thought about her all night long. I
dreamed
about her. She was sitting on my grandpa's recliner teasing me about how she knew the code. And when I woke the next morning to the sound of knocking at the front door, I was sure it was Katie with the answer. It wasn't. It was the little cowboy woman from the funeral, Anne Chicarelli, the one who sang “Amazing Grace,” dressed in a long gray coat and a beat-up old cowboy hat to match.

“Adam,” she said in her gravelly voice.

“Aaron.”

“There are two kinds of people in this world: those who believe it will end in fire, and those who believe it will end in ice. Which kind are you?”

What a weird question. “I don't know. Isn't the sun expanding into a red giant or whatever? So maybe fire?”

Anne raised the brim a little to gaze at me with dark eyes. “There is a third option, you know.”

“Asteroid?”

“There is a great land, Adam, beyond the horizon. Few people in this world ever get there anymore. And yet some do.
Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat
. Do you know what I'm talking about? I'm talking about heaven, Adam. And do you know what the key to heaven is? Jesus Christ.”

“I see.”

“Have you found him yet?”

“Um, I wasn't really looking.”

She smiled. “Your grandpa, he was the same way. Stubborn to the end. Oh, he let me talk—I could talk and talk and talk—but he always had that same smirk on his face. Very similar to the one you're wearing now, I might add. I will tell you the same thing I told him. You want to know where Jesus is?” She patted her chest. “He's in your heart. But that's not what I came to talk to you about today. Did you know I have a twin sister? Not identical—fraternal. She lives in Phoenix, and if anyone got the better genes, it was Georgia. She's a foot taller than me and never smoked a day in her life, yet her insides are riddled with cancer. Now, you tell me this, Adam: If Harriet is dying, what chance do I have?”

She hawked up something and spit it out.

“I came here to ask you a favor, Adam. I have to go to Arizona soon to visit her. I was wondering if you could watch Cain and Abel for me.”

“Who?”

“My horses. Do you like to ride horses? Your grandfather sure did. He'd go out into the hills with Abel and be gone half the day. You're welcome to ride Abel. He's gentle as a breeze. Cain, on the other hand…I wouldn't recommend Cain unless you really know what you're doing—and even then he's likely to surprise you.”

“I don't really ride horses, but I could watch them for you, sure.”

As soon as I said that I kind of regretted it, though it seemed the quickest way out of the conversation. But Anne Chicarelli wasn't done yet.

“Wonderful. Shall we pray?”

She took my hands in hers and we prayed again. I mean she prayed and I pretended to listen very reverently because, again, why rock the boat? She talked about Jesus and God the Father and all the things they would do for us, how they would move mountains for us—or maybe
we
were supposed to move mountains for
them
? I was a little distracted.

I'd just gotten one new message(s):

After the amens, Anne said she would let me know in the next week or so when she was leaving for Arizona. I said that was fine.

Then I called Katie.

“Guess what?” she said. “I think I cracked it!”

“Cracked what?”

“The code! It's so easy a child could figure it out! Which, to tell you the truth, is exactly what happened. I wasn't the one who solved it at all. One of my students showed me. I can't
believe
I missed it the first time. Look, I've only got a couple minutes, so I just wanted to tell you that the message is—”

“Wait! Now, just hold on.”

Funny, but suddenly I kind of wanted to figure the answer out on my own. Because if Katie just handed it over, what was the fun in that? Especially if it was easy. Shouldn't I at least take another stab at it? After all, it was from
my
grandpa.

“Maybe you could give me a hint.”

“A hint?”

“Yeah, so I can figure it out myself.”

“A hint,” she said. “Fine. OK. Look in a mirror.”

“What?”

“That's your hint.
Look in a mirror!
”

It was a terrible hint. I mean, here's how a hint should work: a hint should lead a person gradually across the long bridge from question to answer; it shouldn't just lift you up with a Manitex
®
Series S Tandem Axle crane (YAY!) and plunk you down on the opposite shore. It shouldn't be like that. The transition needs to be gentle.

You probably figured it out already, but anyway, here it is—here's what I saw when I held the letters up to a mirror. The letters were all backward now, but I could still read the message. And here's what it was: