All About Sam by Lois Lowry Page B

I call Meredith up and say, 'I despise Steve Harvey'—well, Meredith could look at her code notebook and see that would really mean that I
love
Steve Harvey. But no one else would know, because they wouldn't know the code."
    Sam stared at his sister.
    "See?" Anastasia asked.
    "I guess so," said Sam, even though he didn't, really.
    "Don't forget that you can't tell anyone. You solemnly swore, remember?"
    "Yeah." Already Sam was sorry that he had solemnly sworn. It hadn't been worth it. He dropped to his belly and slithered out of Anastasia's room and down the stairs. He was a new kind of lizard: a kind that didn't eat bugs, only peanut butter.

    "What were you doing upstairs?" asked Mrs. Krupnik, as Sam ate his sandwich. He had slithered into the kitchen, explained about the peanut-butter-eating lizard, and his mother had realized that it was probably feeding time in the lizard world.
    "I learned about code," Sam told her.
    "Code?" his mother asked, wrinkling her forehead.
    "Yeah, that's when you say one thing but you really mean something else."
    "Like what?"
    Sam sighed. He couldn't tell about Anastasia's code because he had solemnly sworn. But suddenly he thought of something else.
    "Like Mr. Flabbo," he said. "If I said Mr. Flabbo, you know who I would mean, don't you?"
    His mother laughed. "Sure. You'd mean Daddy."
    "Right. Because Mr. Flabbo is code for Daddy. And if I said, 'I hate Mr. Flabbo,' it would
really
mean 'I love Daddy.'"
    "Oh." His mother looked confused.
    Sam looked around the kitchen. On the floor in front of the washing machine there was a huge stack of dirty clothes. He recognized the shirt he had worn yesterday, and he recognized the chocolate milk he had spilled on that shirt at dinner last night. He saw Anastasia's socks and his dad's pajamas. He knew how his mother felt about laundry.
    "If you said, 'I love doing the laundry,'" Sam explained, "that would be code, and it would
really
mean—" He waited for his mother to catch on.
    She laughed and sipped her coffee. "I guess I see. But I hope you won't say you hate anything, even in code, Sam. Okay? Because
hate
is such a yucky word. Even for laundry."
    Sam nibbled out the rest of the good part of his sandwich and arranged the crust in anon his plate. "Yeah, okay," he said. Actually, he didn't think
hate
was a yucky word.
Broccoli
was much yuckier.

    Sam went outside and wandered across the yard to visit the Krupniks' next-door neighbor. Her real name was Gertrude Stein. But Sam never called her that. He liked to call her Gertrustein.
    Gertrustein was very old. Sam wasn't sure how old, maybe two hundred.
    She had a grouchy face, and when Sam had seen her for the first time, he had been frightened by her face. But later, when he got to know Gertrustein, when they became good friends, he realized that she was actually a smiling sort of person. But her skin had drooped, so it hung down in a grouchy look, and sometimes it was hard to see the smile underneath.
    Gertrustein was on her back porch, hanging a dishtowel on the clothesline there. She always moved very slowly. Her arms and legs ached all the time, she had explained to Sam, and that was why she moved so slowly.
    "Hi, Sam!" Gertrustein said when Sam came up the steps. "What a nice surprise!"
    She lived all alone. She had no husband, no children, no grandchildren, and no dog or cat. So she was always glad to see Sam.
    "If I didn't have you to talk to," she had once told Sam, "I would probably forget how to talk."
    Sam thought it was the saddest thing in the whole world, to have drooping skin that gave you a grouchy face, to have aching arms and legs so that you had to move slowly, and to live all alone so that you might forget how to talk.

    But Gertrustein didn't seem to mind. Almost every day she made cookies.
    "I expect you might be willing to do me a favor and eat a cookie or two," she said to Sam.
    "I might," Sam agreed.
    "What have you been doing today?" she asked him after they had sat