Picture Me Gone Read Online Free PDF

us thanks to a map Cat discovered in the catacombs under the British Museum in an ancient box sealed with a curse.
    Untouched for two hundred years, Cat said. Feast your eyes, matey.
    I feasted my eyes on an ancient-looking folder, scarred and burned round the edges, and even though I knew she’d used an old iron to burn the edges and make a bit of ordinary card look antique, I was impressed. It did look old.
    Wow, I said, reaching for it. But she pushed my hand away and made me put on bright blue washing-up gloves, which had a satisfying forensic appearance when used out of context. With my gloves on, I was allowed to hold the file while Cat dusted it with baby powder for fingerprints.
    Just as I thought, she said with a mad gleam in her eye. Last handled by foreign operatives.
    Really? How can you tell? I was genuinely curious.
    Look closely, she whispered. See how the fingerprint whirligigs go backward? That’s foreign.
    I must have looked skeptical because Cat bristled. Fine, don’t believe me. You think I care?
    I believe you, I said.
    As you should, young Mila. As you should.
    And the date? I asked. I didn’t want to piss her off again.
    She held one of the pieces of burned paper from the file up to the bare lightbulb in the clubhouse. As I thought, she said. It’s ninety percent linen, distinct greenish hue (that was from the walls in the clubhouse, which were painted green and gave us a greenish hue too), made in Czechoslovania between . . . hmm . . . 1918 and 1920.
    You had to give the girl credit.
    And then she carefully looked at all the information in our file, while I drew an approximation of a stencil in red pencil at the top of every page:

    If we’d managed to hang on to the rats, we could have tied coded notes to their legs, but instead we worked on innocuous-sounding phrases for our code books that would allow us to exchange vital information in public. When I say we worked on phrases, what I mean is that Cat made them up and I said they were good. Here are some examples:
    Take an umbrella = TRUST NO ONE
    I’m thirsty = I HAVE NEWS
    What’s for dinner? = WE’VE BEEN BETRAYED
    Nice curtains = WE’RE DOOMED
    If I ever suggested a phrase, Cat would think of a reason why it wasn’t quite right, so after a while I stopped bothering. I didn’t mind though, just continued on with my TOP SECRET lettering, which got more and more professional-looking until you might have thought we had a real stamp.
    Are you getting a picture of our relationship? The thing is, I could have chosen a more straightforward friend, but I didn’t. It never really occurred to me that the friends you choose reveal you. Take Matthew and Gil. Gil required a leader and Matthew a follower. With Cat and me, I was the anchor. I would never, for instance, stuff rats into socks.
    It was all good fun, except that I never got to be the one who made the twenty-eight-digit prime-number code to save the world, despite understanding prime numbers far better than Cat did. She thought you could just have a mystical feeling about a number, no matter how many times I told her that
prime
meant not being divisible by anything. To Catlin, thirty-nine was a prime number because it looked sinister. Despite it totally not being one.
    As for her elaborate save-the-world fantasy—well, maybe it wasn’t a random choice. I would rather have played something else occasionally, like orphans or explorers or hospitals. But if my family had been like hers, I might have been equally desperate to come up with the right combination of prime numbers to make the world safe again.

eleven
    G abriel and his babysitter are back from playgroup. Her name is Caryn, C-a-r-y-n in case we were thinking of going with the usual spelling, and she looks uneasy when we tell her that Suzanne isn’t home yet but it’s all right, she can go. She says, No, it’s OK, I’ll just fix his boddle in case Mommy’s delayed.
    But Mommy isn’t delayed, she’s back, still looking