Free Taking Care of Terrific by Lois Lowry Page A

Crowley."
    "I don't care about being famous. It was neat, seeing bag ladies grab some power."
    "My dad probably wouldn't have used it, anyway," Seth said. "It would have seemed communistic to him. He gets very uptight when people wrest power."
    "Right. Today the Popsicle cart, tomorrow the Congress."
    Seth laughed. His laugh is surprisingly infectious when he isn't working hard at making it sound sinister.
    "You want to go over to the Florian again?" he asked.
    I groaned. "I'm drinking Diet Pepsi," I said. "And I ate salad for dinner. If I drink another one of those million-calorie drinks at the Florian I'll have to go to Fat Camp."
    He laughed again, unsinisterly. "Well, do you feel like just going out for a walk or something? It's really the pits, sitting around this apartment."
    We agreed to meet down at the corner, and I went to tell Mrs. Kolodny I was going out for a little while. Now she was filling out a magazine
questionnaire titled "Is Your Home Decor Really You?" She was licking the pencil tip before marking each little box "Yes," "No," or "Maybe." I cringed. I wondered about lead poisoning. I wondered how many years Mrs. Kolodny had been licking pencil tips.
    "Enid," she asked when I came into the kitchen, "would you call me—" She followed the print with her finger and found the place. "Would you call me Somber and Serious, Merry and Mischievous, or Calm and Complacent?"
    Talk about tough decisions. "Calm and complacent," I said after giving it a little thought.
    She turned a page to peek at the answers. "I knew it!" she said triumphantly. "My decor should be apple green with touches of some vibrant blues!"
    It wasn't completely clear to me why that news delighted her so. Maybe it was because she was wearing vibrant blue sneakers.
    Back she went to the questionnaire, pencil tip in her mouth. I snitched a few grapes out of a bowl on the kitchen table (very few calories, grapes), told her I'd be home by nine-thirty, and headed out.
    Seth was sitting on the front steps of a brownstone house on the corner. I wondered what Seth
Sandroff's decor should be. There hadn't been a category for Depraved and Disgusting.
    He had a ball-point pen tattoo of a dragon smoking a cigar on one forearm. His shoes—Seth's, not the dragons—should clearly have been condemned by the Board of Health. Wedged into the back pocket of his cut-off jeans was a paperback of a Robert Ludlum spy novel.
    "I never knew you could read," I said. "You practically flunked English last year."
    "All I flunked was the test on
The Scarlet Letter
," Seth pointed out. "And that was because I missed the third episode on TV. Would you care to match my English grade against your final mark in Geometry?"
    Touché. We let the academic discussion go and headed down Marlborough Street toward the Public Garden.

    It was beginning to get dark. Funny; I've lived in Boston all my life, but I had never been in the Public Garden at night before. Muggers, rapists, murderers, thieves, and nocturnal rodents: these were the specters I had been warned about, the things that were said to prowl the Garden after dark.
    But now, at dusk, there were only a few romantic couples sitting on benches and a derelict or two curling up around a bottle of wine until a policeman told them to move along.
    And I felt pretty safe with Seth. No one would want to mug someone who looked as seedy as he did. At the same time, despite his seediness and skinniness, he had a certain confidence about him, a don't-mess-with-me look. We sprawled on a bench beside the pond. Out in the middle of the water, the Swan Boats were chained together for the night.
    "Marlene fell out of a Swan Boat once," Seth said, "when she was about three. Or maybe it was Arlene. I can't remember. We were with my grandmother, and the twins were goofing off, and one of them fell in. Everybody screamed."
    "Did someone have to leap in and save her?"
    "Nah. Some guy just reached over the side and fished her out. The