The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman Read Online Free PDF

“you and your opponent take turns forming words on the board, just like in a crossword puzzle. Each letter of the alphabet has a point value, and a few letters are called ‘power tiles,’ because they’re worth much more than the others.” She explained the following:
    The J was worth 8.
    The Q was worth 10.
    The X was worth 8.
    And the Z was worth 10.
    There were also two blanks in the game, she told him, and these were very important. “Blanks are a big deal,” April said. “They help you make a lot of different words. You move the tiles to form words—unscrambled words are called anagrams. I sometimes see anagrams in my head at night,” she added. “The letters jump around.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Well, I know this sounds majorly strange,” April said. “But take the word INSTEAD. See, you can move the letters around so they spell SAINTED, or STAINED , or even DETAINS.”
    “Got it,” he said.
    “Plus,” said April, “those same letters make a couple of other words that you’ve never heard of, like NIDATES and DESTAIN.”
    “Those are real?”
    “I swear.”
    “This is pretty impressive,” said the boy in the blue T-shirt.
    “IMPRESSIVE,” April said, “is an anagram of PERMISSIVE. And you know MARASCHINO?”
    “Those cherries in drinks that no one really likes?”
    April nodded. “MARASCHINO is an anagram of HARMONICAS.”
    The boy’s mouth moved a little, as if he was arranging the letters silently. “You’re right,” he said.
    She told him how if you used all the letters on your rack, it was called a bingo. And if you used all the letters of your rack twice in a row, it was called a bingo-bango. And if you used them three times in a row—
    “Does that ever happen?” the boy interrupted. “Wouldn’t it be, like, winning the lottery three times in a row?”
    “It’s never happened to me personally,” April said, “but it definitely happens.”
    “Let me guess what it’s called,” said the boy. “Bingo-bango- bungo ?”
    “Close. Bingo-bango-bongo. And if you find a bingo but have nowhere to put it, it’s called a homeless bingo.”
    “Poor homeless bingo,” he said. “Just sort of wandering around with nowhere to live.” The boy seemed to like hearing all these Scrabble facts, and as they began to play he picked up the rhythm of the game. She beat him in the end, but not by an insane amount.
    Eventually the Blunt family came back to the motel. The blue van, with its bumper stickers that read: I’M A SPORTS LUNATIC, and HONK IF YOU LIKE HOCKEY, pulled into the lot, and the doors slid open and her family popped out, chugalugging water from plastic bottles. Her brother, Gregory, sucked the water out so fast that the plastic bottle became indented, making a loud popping sound. Her father saw April sitting by the pool, and he waved and came over.
    “Hey, April,” he said. “We’re all going to take showers in the room, then grab a bite. Come with us.”
    She wished she could stay there with the boy. They were in the middle of a second game of Scrabble now, and he had been telling her about himself. He’d told her about going to a weeklong camp called Aller-ja-wee-a. “It was the corniest place,” he said. “It was for kids who have food allergies—get it, Aller-ja-wee-a? —and I hated it. Any time we tried to do something on our own, a counselor was on our case.”
    “Sounds lame,” April agreed.
    “We had to play a game called Where Are the Nuts?” he said. “The counselors took us out into a field and hid little plastic objects in the grass that were supposed to represent nuts. We had to find them and throw them away like they were hand grenades about to go off.”
    April had told him how different she was from her jockish family. Now he could see that for himself. Her siblings and parents were all around the pool area, telling April to hurry up and pack up her board and racks and score sheets.
    “Can I have five more minutes to finish this game?”