Romeo Blue by Phoebe Stone Page A

and pecked at the top of his fountain pen, I still didn’t laugh. My beautiful Winnie and Danny were in prison in France. After all this waiting and hoping and wondering, now I knew. I knew and it hurt. It hurt more than any of the other hurts I had been feeling. It had come like a bomb and blown Brie and the dance away. It had swept away all the other worries that had seemed to be tumbling down on me in a constant stream. But at least they were not dead. No, not yet anyway.

    During breakfast, I couldn’t eat a bite. Derek got all my toast and blueberry jam. I think he had been waiting for just such an opportunity. He gobbled up my scrambled eggs as well. Uncle Gideon was looking at me with soft brown eyes that for some reason reminded me of Wink again. Then he glanced up at The Gram quickly and shook his head. I did not know if I could bear the thought that he too would soon be in danger.
    Little Bill was talking about when he was a fighter pilot during World War I. “Did you attack any enemy planes?” said Derek.
    “Well, actually, I shot down the Red Baron’s brother. Didn’t kill him but he didn’t fly again for the rest of the war.”
    “Hey, that’s pretty hotsy totsy,” said Derek, finishing off my portion of blueberry jam. It was very impressive the way he said that, but I didn’t feel like smiling.
    I went to school then, but I couldn’t listen to anything anyone said to me. Winnie and Danny, my beautiful Winnie and Danny, were in prison. At the end of the day I couldn’t remember anything that had happened in class.
    Stu Barker walked home from school with Derek and me in the afternoon. Stu was a devoted Boy Scout. He could start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. He could pitch a tent anywhere, even in the middle of a storm. He could make a water purifier out of an old coffee tin. StuBarker was quite a small fellow, the size of a fifth grader. Derek towered over him. But Stu was very bossy.
    “You got to listen to me, kiddo,” he said as we walked along the road out of town. “I’m an Eagle Scout now. I’ve got everything figured out.” He looked way up at Derek and nodded his head at him. “I’m going to be a page next year and work at the state house part-time. You go to government studies program in the spring and when you’re done with it, you are an official page. Then you’re on your way to being a senator or even the president of the United States.” Then he nudged me with his little elbow. “Isn’t it the truth, Flissy? Come on, say it’s so.”
    “I daresay I know nothing at all about government studies,” I said. They went rattling along, talking away, as if everything were hunky-dory (another Derek word). But everything wasn’t hunky-dory at all. Not at all. My beloved Winnie and Danny had been caught. They had been put in prison. Were they hungry or cold? Were they together? Were they in danger of being shot?
    On top of my worries for Winnie and Danny, I had become more suspicious of Derek’s father, which caused a bit of a rift between Derek and me. He refused to hear my worries about this. When I had mentioned the Gray Moth, he had exploded and stormed out of the room. Whenever I brought it up, he would simply walk away.
    “Derek,” I had cried when we were alone for a moment after school. “Why wouldn’t he take off his hat?”

    “What!” he had almost yelled back at me. “He told us why. He likes his hat to keep its shape. You are meddling, Flissy.”
    Derek had invited his father to the house again this week and I had begged him not to. And I felt we needed to tell someone about the invisible-ink letter. And the eyeglasses and everything else. No, nothing was hunky-dory. Not at all.
    “And by the way, who are you going to the dance with, kiddo?” said Stu, putting his hands in his pockets and looking up at Derek.
    “I’m going with Brie. You knew that, Stu,” Derek said.
    “Oh, Brie,” said Stu, punching Derek’s good arm. “Brie’s the bee’s