Far Far Away Read Free Page B

news. “You sold them all?”
    “Yes, yes,” the baker said merrily, and waited a full second before adding, “Almost all.”
    Ah! So this was a little game they played!
    “But you kept a few slices back for your most special customers?”
    “Yes, yes, my dear girl. For my most special customers”—here he dramatically peered past Jeremy and the girls toward the street—“and they may be in yet.”
    “You’re a funny man,” Ginger said.
    A pan rattled in the kitchen to the rear of the bakery. Someone else was at work.
    “There is just one little thing,” Ginger said to the baker.
    “I see, I see. There is just one little thing.”
    I could see that this, too, was part of their game.
    “We’re a little low on cash reserves.”
    “Oh, well now …” The baker shook his head solemnly and made several small tsk-tsking sounds. “This is really too bad. Too bad indeed.”
    “Of course, we could write you four IOUs,” Ginger said, and then one of the girlfriends chimed in with, “Or one big
We
-Owe-You.”
    Behind the white beard, the baker’s round face brightened. “I like that! One big We-Owe-You!” He winked and gestured the group toward a sunny window-side table with a vase filled with cobalt-blue irises. “Sit, please sit. My last four slices of
Prinsesstårta
will be yours. With coffee?”
    The girls all nodded, and Jeremy nodded, too.
    After the baker disappeared to the back of the shop, one of the girlfriends leaned back in her chair, lazily stretched her arms, and looked across the table to Jeremy. This was Marjory Falls, a pretty girl with milk-white skin and ink-black eyes. “Just so you know,” she said, “I spent half my study hall trying to work out that stupid riddle and didn’t even come close. ‘Find hidden in the poem the person who inspired it.’ ” She opened her dovelike hands. “God. What’s
that
all about? Hidden where, exactly?”
    As we have said, Jeremy’s was a generous nature—he gladly gave to others, and he was on the brink of it now. But as he opened his mouth to speak, Ginger interceded. “Hey, now,” she said. “We made a deal about asking for his homework.”
    Marjory’s hands fluttered up. “This isn’t homework. This is extra-credit.”
    A fragile argument, and one that Ginger began to refute, but this time it was Jeremy who interrupted. “Something told me it was an
acrostic
,” he said.
    The two girlfriends leaned forward like hungry diners to a meal, but Ginger sat back in her chair, once again studying Jeremy.
    Maddy Saxon ran a finger along her thin pink scar. “What’s an acrostic?”
    “It’s where a particular letter in every line goes together to spell something,” Jeremy said, and when the two girlfriends still seemed confused, he went on. “You’re supposed to find the inspiration for the poem hidden inside the poem, right? So if you read particular letters up and down instead of left to right—”
    But Ginger did not let him finish. “What did you mean when you said
something
told you it was an acrostic?”
    “Well, it was like the idea suddenly came to me that it was an acrostic.” Jeremy was not comfortable with this sort of half-truth—his forehead glazed with sweat.
    The girlfriends had pulled out the poem and were poring over it, but Ginger’s eyes were still fixed on Jeremy. “And you knew what an acrostic was?”
    “Yes.” He said this firmly, for that much was completely true, and Ginger fell silent when Jeremy wrinkled his nose, stifled a sneeze, and then eyed the irises on the table. From their open mouths yellow pollen lay loosely on their brushy tongues. Jeremy rubbed his nose and pushed the vase a bit farther away.
    “Got it!” Marjory sang out. “It’s the name of Alice Pleasance Liddell. She must have been the girl who inspired the poet to write the poem!”
    Ginger was still staring at Jeremy. “So did it come to you as a vague idea or the actual word?” she asked, but at this very moment the kitchen