Free A Little Bit of Spectacular by Gin Phillips Page B

than it sounded. First I had to find her/him/them/it. And I had no idea where to look.
    Amelia shook her head, tossing black thread into the air. “You’ve got me. It’s easier with frogs. You just need a net.”
    â€œNot helpful,” I said. “You’re the scientist. Be logical. Think of a plan.”
    â€œI dunno,” said Amelia. “Maybe you should write her back.”
    â€œWrite her what?”
    â€œYour phone number? Tell them to give you a call. Them, her, whatever.”
    We’d spent two days trying to figure out what to call whomever was leaving the messages. I mean, the messages said “We are Plantagenet.” Plural. But the handwriting was girlie, and it was all done by one person. It didn’t make sense.
    â€œLet’s just stick with ‘her’ for now,” I said. “And I am not leaving my number on a bathroom wall!”
    Amelia tossed the black thread back on the sewing table and flopped onto my bed, her elbows landing next to my knees.
    â€œOkay, now we’re getting somewhere,” she said. “This is better. We’ve narrowed it down. So you don’t want to leave your phone number on the bathroom wall. What do you want to leave?”
    That was one thing I liked about Amelia. She occasionally got distracted by spools of thread or Eastern spadefoots, but she had a way of simplifying things. She could take the hundreds of thoughts flitting through my head and pluck out the one I needed to focus on. And once she’d plucked out a thought, we could deal with it. Problems were easier to solve when you broke them down into smaller pieces.
    So what did I want to tell the Plantagenets? If I left a message, what would it say?
    â€œShe needs to know I’m interested,” I said. “That I want to meet her.”
    â€œGood,” said Amelia. “That’s part one. You accept her invitation.”
    I leaned back against my headboard.
    â€œAnd she needs to know how to find me,” I said. “She has to be able to reach me so that we can meet.”
    â€œShe already knows,” Amelia said. “If you answer her, she’ll know she can reach you on the wall at Trattoria.”
    I nodded. “True.”
    So what did that leave? I thought of all the swoops and swirls of writing on the bathroom walls. I thought of all the messages—the bizarre ones, the funny ones, the sweet ones, the poetic ones.
    â€œI need to impress her,” I said. “I can’t just say, ‘Let’s meet.’ She needs to know that I’m worth meeting. If I’m boring, she might change her mind.”
    â€œWell, you’re not boring.”
    â€œThank you. But how do I prove it?”
    We spent the next couple of afternoons coming up with messages that would prove I was not boring. The right message needed to be fairly short—I did have to fit it on a wall. And it needed to be attention grabbing. We took a stack of paper and a couple of markers and let our imaginations run loose. We’d jot down a message, discuss it, and either throw it in the trash or keep it in the
maybe
pile. We tried being funny, being clever, being intelligent, being flattering. Some of our first attempts were pretty good. Some were not. . . .
    Knock Knock.
    Who’s there?
    Plantagenet.
    Seriously? I love Plantagenets !
    To You Know Who—
    I’d like to meet you.
    I’d be an idiot not to want to.
    I’ll go anywhere.
    As long as you’re there.
    Do you have blue eyes and silver hair?
    Roses are red.
    Plantagenets are chosen.
    I would like to meet one.
    At room temperature not frozen
.
    Thank you for the invitation.
    It would be a nice situation
    To join you at a restaurant or even a gas
    station.
    If we met, I think I would like you.
    I like how you write and
    Paint pictures with words and
    How you keep secrets
    I can keep secrets, too.
    Then, like I was a lamp and someone had plugged in my cord,