All About Sam by Lois Lowry Page A

over and stroked his arm to let him know that he loved him, even if he
did
smoke a pipe.
    "Good old Mr. Flabbo," Sam said. "I love you."
    "Thanks, Sam," his daddy said. "I love you, too. Let's you and I start doing some exercises together, so we can work on the old muscles."
    Sam grinned. He put the bowl of spinach back in the refrigerator. "Come on," he said to his daddy. "Let's go pump iron."

13

    Sam slithered on his belly up the stairs and into his sister's bedroom. Her door was partly closed, so he slithered in very carefully through the open part, making no noise.
    Slither, slither, slither.
    Anastasia didn't see him. She was on her bed, writing in her notebook.
    Anastasia was
always
writing in her notebook.
    "It's my private notebook," she had told Sam. "And don't you ever dare peek into it. Because I have ways of knowing if you do."
    "What ways?" Sam asked. "I could do it while you're at school, and you would never, ever know." (Anastasia never took the private notebook to school.)
    "Yes, I would. Sometimes I put an invisible hair across the cover, and if the hair is dislodged I know a spy has been into my notebook."
    "Lemme see. I want to see the invisible hair," Sam had said.
    But Anastasia had said no. "Just keep your mitts off of it," she told him. "People my age—thirteen—have private stuff, and they don't want their little brothers messing around with it."
    "People
my
age have private stuff, too," Sam had told her.
    He didn't, really. Didn't have any private stuff. But he liked to try to make himself invisible, which was a way of being very private, and that was why he was slithering invisibly into Anastasia's room.
    "BOO!" Sam shouted, leaping up suddenly, beside his sister's bed.
    Anastasia jumped, startled. She dropped her marking pen.
    "Sam!" she said in an irritated voice. "Cut it out. You scared me. What are you doing, creeping around like that?"
    "I'm being a lizard," Sam explained.
    Anastasia laughed. "Well, you make a pretty good lizard, Sam. Why don't you slither downstairs and eat some insects? That's what lizards do. Go out in the yard and find a nice juicy caterpillar for lunch, okay?"
    Sam thought about that. He thought about a huge, fuzzy, juicy caterpillar, placed right in the center of a piece of whole-wheat bread, maybe with a little mustard dabbed on him.
    Suddenly Sam didn't want to be a lizard anymore, not even for one minute longer.
    "Will you play with me?" he asked Anastasia. "I'm not a lizard anymore. I'm a boy again."
    Anastasia looked up from her notebook. "I will a little later, Sam. We can go outside and I'll give you a ride on the back of my bike, okay? But not right now. Right now I'm making up a secret code, and I need to do it all by myself, without any interruption."
    Sam's eyes widened. "What's a secret code?" he asked.
    "Oh, it's complicated, Sam. It's when you say one thing but mean something else. Or
write
one thing but mean something else. Understand?"
    Sam shook his head no.
    "Well, for example..." Anastasia hesitated. "Sam," she asked, "if I explain this code to you, promise me you won't tell anyone?"
    Sam nodded.
    "Do you solemnly swear?"
    Sam gulped. He knew that swears were bad. There was a kid at nursery school who was always saying swears, and Mrs. Bennett did not find it amusing
at all,
not even for one single minute. (It was Sam's best friend, Adam.)
    "I solemnly swear," Sam whispered, glancing around to be certain no one could hear.
    "Well," Anastasia explained, "I've made a list of all the boys I know. Robert Giannini and Steve Harvey and Eddie Fox and—well, all the boys I know. See?" She tilted the notebook so that Sam could see a list of names written in green ink.
    "Now, here's the code part," Anastasia went on. "I've written words after each boy's name, but the words don't really mean what they say. So if I wrote
love,
that really means 'hate,' see? And
despise
means 'love'. And my friend Meredith has the code, too, so she can understand. And if