The Fingertips of Duncan Dorfman Read Online Free PDF Page B

she asked her father. “Please, Dad?”
    “Sure, why not,” said her father. “I want to get a couple of snapshots of your brother anyway. You stay here, and I’ll take some pictures.” He took out his camera.
    April’s brother, Gregory, stood in front of her and the boy, saying, “Watch this!”
    Still in his baseball uniform, Gregory turned a somersault off the side of the pool. The shutter snapped.
    April said to the boy, “I’ve got an anagram for you. ROAST MULES.”
    “That’s two words.”
    “I know. But if you unscramble the letters,” April said, “it’ll make one long word.”
    “Are you sure I know it?” he asked. “Maybe it’s a word I’ve never seen before.”
    “You definitely know it,” she said.
    He thought and thought, but couldn’t come up with the answer. Soon April’s father told her it was really time to go. April said good-bye to the boy, and he said, “See you.” Then she returned to the motel room, where her siblings wrestled on the beds and on the foldout sofa, and someone farted, making a putt-putt sound like a faraway car backfiring. Someone else laughed as if that fart were hilarious. Then someone turned on the TV, which was showing a game of futbol from Chile. Everyone in the family was happy to watch, except April.
    When she peered through the heavy aqua drapes of the motel window a little while later, the boy was gone.
     
     
    The next morning she’d looked for him in the breakfast room, where sleepy families sat drinking coffee and tea and hot chocolate, and eating cold rolls with butter and jam from tiny plastic packets. He wasn’t there. Later, in the motel office at checkout, he still wasn’t there. His family must have already left, April thought, disappointed. They must have already joined the line of cars heading out onto the Interstate.
    Most kids who met when they were on a trip with their parents never saw each other again. The puppeteers took away the puppets. But even if they did see each other, they might not know it. You could meet someone when you were a kid, and then meet him again when you were both grown up, but you probably wouldn’t even know it was the same person. April Blunt had met the boy in the blue T-shirt only once, and she knew nothing about him, but he still mattered to her after three years.
    In April’s bedroom now, sitting with Lucy, April said, “I never got to tell him the anagram of ROAST MULES.”
    “I’m sure it’s kept him up all these nights,” said Lucy.
    “He probably did wonder about it at first,” April said. But she worried, weirdly, that he had forgotten about ROAST MULES, and about meeting her.
    “Tell me, Flink, what were the words on his T-shirt?” Lucy asked.
    “I have no idea, Curnish.”
    “Think, Flink,” Lucy said. “Maybe the words could give us a clue to his location. Maybe they could help you find him. Not that I totally understand why you even want to.”
    “I don’t totally understand either,” said April. “But even if I knew his location, it’s not like I would recognize him. I barely remember what he looked like. And people’s faces change a lot. Well, anyway, enough about this. We should get back to Scrabble. We want to make it to the finals so my family can finally get it. We want them to see us on Thwap! TV and be blown away.”
    “And we also want to win the ten thousand dollars,” Lucy reminded her.
    “Yes, that would be a plus.”
    “Let’s go over the list of vowel dumps,” Lucy said.
    Vowel dumps were Scrabble words that used a lot of vowels. Even if you had what looked like a terrible rack, filled with A’s, E’s, I’s, O’s, and, worst of all, U’s, there were many words that allowed you to get rid of extra vowels that had turned your rack into “Old MacDonald’s Farm,” as people said, which was a joke about it looking like EIEIO.
    The vowel dump words were both ordinary and strange, and the four-letter ones