And Then Everything Unraveled by Jennifer Sturman Page B
Authors: Jennifer Sturman
Tags: Fiction
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schedule for West Palo Alto High. Then she’d done the same thing with the schedules for my soccer games and school holidays.
There were only a couple of folders that looked like they might be interesting. The first was labeled CORDELIA—POSSIBILITIES FOR BAYEE, which sounded nice and cryptic. Inside I found a bunch of notes in my mother’s writing, scrawled on random scraps of paper and held together with a binder clip.
Deciphering anything T.K.’s written usually takes a while. Part of the reason she loves her label maker so much is that her actual handwriting looks like it belongs to an adolescent boy, so if she wants things to look neat she needs mechanical help. But these notes turned out to be ideas for projects I could do for the Bay Area Young Einstein Expo.
The other folder I thought might be interesting didn’t have my name on it, and I thought maybe it had ended up in the Cordelia drawer by accident. It was labeled simply ROSS . I didn’t know any Ross except for Ross’s Cove, and I’d never heard T.K. mention anyone by that name, so this was even more cryptic, but I’d just learned the hard way not to expect too much from cryptic labels. Inside I found three pieces of paper: a letter, a Post-it, and a drawing.
The letter was on formal stationery, with a logo at the top. It spelled out EAROFO in big capital letters, and below the logo was an address on K Street in Washington, D.C. The letter itself was short but not exactly sweet.
Dear Ms. Truesdale,
Thank you for your inquiry. Due to the high level of demand for our services, we are unable to accommodate your request.
Sincerely,
Melvin P. Stern
Executive Director
Melvin P. Stern hadn’t bothered to personally sign the letter, which seemed sort of rude. Nor was there any indication as to what kind of services he and EAROFO offered that were in such demand.
I Googled EAROFO, but all I learned was that it was aGreek word for “putrid, rotten, and bad.” I doubted that had been what Melvin P. Stern was going for when he named his organization or business or whatever it was—it was more likely to be an acronym for something else. But that something else didn’t show up in the search results, and when I looked for an EAROFO Web site, trying all of the standard suffixes—.com, .net, .org, .edu—the browser only returned error messages.
And just in case the letter wasn’t insufficiently enlightening on its own, stuck to its bottom was the Post-it. And on the Post-it T.K. had scrawled five words:
Typical! Don’t go through Thad.
Which was totally bizarre. As a general rule, Thad knew more about T.K. than T.K. did—I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she wouldn’t want him to know or why she wouldn’t want him to know it. After all, he probably already did know, whether she wanted him to or not.
I flipped to the drawing, but if I was hoping it would explain anything, I was out of luck. It looked like a bad copy of a bad copy of a picture of a bunch of wavy lines in a box. There was no regular pattern to the lines or the stripes they created, though they reminded me of one of those executive toys my dentist had in his waiting room, a Lucite rectangle with layers of different colored sand trapped inside. When you tilted the rectangle, the sand would pour from one end to the other, rearranging itself in new layers. It was better than back issues of Highlights and FamilyCircle, and also pamphlets on the glories of flossing, but that was about it.
Anyhow, this drawing looked like a black-and-white version of that toy. And there wasn’t a title or a signature or anything to indicate what it was supposed to be—just some typed numbers and letters in the top right-hand corner of the page:
81°S/175°V
The numbers and the degree symbols were clear enough, but the letters didn’t work on any scale I knew. I mean, for temperatures F was Fahrenheit and C was Celsius and K was Kelvin, but none of those letters were the ones on the page. The S
There were only a couple of folders that looked like they might be interesting. The first was labeled CORDELIA—POSSIBILITIES FOR BAYEE, which sounded nice and cryptic. Inside I found a bunch of notes in my mother’s writing, scrawled on random scraps of paper and held together with a binder clip.
Deciphering anything T.K.’s written usually takes a while. Part of the reason she loves her label maker so much is that her actual handwriting looks like it belongs to an adolescent boy, so if she wants things to look neat she needs mechanical help. But these notes turned out to be ideas for projects I could do for the Bay Area Young Einstein Expo.
The other folder I thought might be interesting didn’t have my name on it, and I thought maybe it had ended up in the Cordelia drawer by accident. It was labeled simply ROSS . I didn’t know any Ross except for Ross’s Cove, and I’d never heard T.K. mention anyone by that name, so this was even more cryptic, but I’d just learned the hard way not to expect too much from cryptic labels. Inside I found three pieces of paper: a letter, a Post-it, and a drawing.
The letter was on formal stationery, with a logo at the top. It spelled out EAROFO in big capital letters, and below the logo was an address on K Street in Washington, D.C. The letter itself was short but not exactly sweet.
Dear Ms. Truesdale,
Thank you for your inquiry. Due to the high level of demand for our services, we are unable to accommodate your request.
Sincerely,
Melvin P. Stern
Executive Director
Melvin P. Stern hadn’t bothered to personally sign the letter, which seemed sort of rude. Nor was there any indication as to what kind of services he and EAROFO offered that were in such demand.
I Googled EAROFO, but all I learned was that it was aGreek word for “putrid, rotten, and bad.” I doubted that had been what Melvin P. Stern was going for when he named his organization or business or whatever it was—it was more likely to be an acronym for something else. But that something else didn’t show up in the search results, and when I looked for an EAROFO Web site, trying all of the standard suffixes—.com, .net, .org, .edu—the browser only returned error messages.
And just in case the letter wasn’t insufficiently enlightening on its own, stuck to its bottom was the Post-it. And on the Post-it T.K. had scrawled five words:
Typical! Don’t go through Thad.
Which was totally bizarre. As a general rule, Thad knew more about T.K. than T.K. did—I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she wouldn’t want him to know or why she wouldn’t want him to know it. After all, he probably already did know, whether she wanted him to or not.
I flipped to the drawing, but if I was hoping it would explain anything, I was out of luck. It looked like a bad copy of a bad copy of a picture of a bunch of wavy lines in a box. There was no regular pattern to the lines or the stripes they created, though they reminded me of one of those executive toys my dentist had in his waiting room, a Lucite rectangle with layers of different colored sand trapped inside. When you tilted the rectangle, the sand would pour from one end to the other, rearranging itself in new layers. It was better than back issues of Highlights and FamilyCircle, and also pamphlets on the glories of flossing, but that was about it.
Anyhow, this drawing looked like a black-and-white version of that toy. And there wasn’t a title or a signature or anything to indicate what it was supposed to be—just some typed numbers and letters in the top right-hand corner of the page:
81°S/175°V
The numbers and the degree symbols were clear enough, but the letters didn’t work on any scale I knew. I mean, for temperatures F was Fahrenheit and C was Celsius and K was Kelvin, but none of those letters were the ones on the page. The S
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