Sam didn't like leftover, cold spinach very much. But he went to the refrigerator anyway, took out the dish that held the spinach, and ate some.

Yuck. It tasted awful.

He checked his muscles. No change.

Another big bite. YUCK.

And he checked again. Still no muscles.

Sam sighed and reached for the bowl of spinach one more time, just as the back door opened. His father was home.

"What are you eating, Sam?" Daddy asked. He set his briefcase down, came over to the table where Sam was sitting, and peered into the bowl. "It looks like cold spinach."

"It is cold spinach," Sam said with his mouth full.

"Do you mind if I ask why you are eating something so disgusting? Especially when there's good stuff in the refrigerator, likea"let's seea"apples?"

"I need big muscles," Sam said.

"You do?" his daddy asked. "Why?"

Sam thought about that. "If I had big muscles," he said at last, "Nicky would never ever bite me at school. And no monster would ever dare to come live in my closet. I could chase bad guys. And everybody would call me He-Man."

"Well," his dad said, "I guess that's true. But why are you eating cold spinach?"

"This is how Popeye gets his big muscles."

Sam's daddy sat down. "I'd forgotten that, Sam, but you're right. That is how Popeye gets his muscles. And when I was a kid, I tried to get them the same way. But you know what?"

"What?" Sam asked gloomily, reaching for another bite of yucko cold spinach.

"It doesn't work for regular people, only for Popeye."

"It doesn't?" Slowly Sam put the spinach back into the bowl.

"Nope. I thought I'd better tell you before you gave yourself a spinach stomachache."

"But how did you get your big muscles?"

"Me? I don't have big muscles. I'm Mister Flabbo," said Sam's father. "Feel." He guided Sam's hand to the top of his arm, and Sam poked. Through his father's jacket, the arm felt pudgy and soft.

"Anyway," his father said, "you don't want to be like Popeye. He wears terrible clothes."

Sam thought about Popeye's clothes. "They're not so bad," he told his father. "He wears a sailor suit."

"I happen to know, Sam, that your mother bought you a sailor suit. And you absolutely refused to wear it. Remember that day when you were supposed to go to a birthday party, and Mom tried to get you to wear the sai-"

"Yeah," Sam muttered. It was a day he had tried to forget. He had behaved very badly. So, in Sam's opinion, had his mother.

"And another thing about Popeyea"" Sam's father went on. "I know you'll hate this!"

"What?"

"He smokes a pipe."

"That's right!" Sam said. "Just like you! Even though Mom and Anastasia and I always always tell you to quit, and Anastasia brought home all those booklets from the American Long Sausage Nation."

"American Lung a.s.sociation," his father corrected him, with a guilty look. "And I am going to quit, I really am. Very, very soon. Probably next week. Or if not next week, the week after that, for sure."

Sam's daddy looked so unhappy that Sam reached over and stroked his arm to let him know that he loved him, even if he did smoke a pipe.

"Good old Mr. Flabbo," Sam said. "I love you."

"Thanks, Sam," his daddy said. "I love you, too. Let's you and I start doing some exercises together, so we can work on the old muscles."

Sam grinned. He put the bowl of spinach back in the refrigerator. "Come on," he said to his daddy. "Let's go pump iron."

13.

Sam slithered on his belly up the stairs and into his sister's bedroom. Her door was partly closed, so he slithered in very carefully through the open part, making no noise.

Slither, slither, slither.

Anastasia didn't see him. She was on her bed, writing in her notebook.

Anastasia was always writing in her notebook.

"It's my private notebook," she had told Sam. "And don't you ever dare peek into it. Because I have ways of knowing if you do."

"What ways?" Sam asked. "I could do it while you're at school, and you would never, ever know." (Anastasia never took the private notebook to school.) "Yes, I would. Sometimes I put an invisible hair across the cover, and if the hair is dislodged I know a spy has been into my notebook."

"Lemme see. I want to see the invisible hair," Sam had said.

But Anastasia had said no. "Just keep your mitts off of it," she told him. "People my agea"thirteena"have private stuff, and they don't want their little brothers messing around with it."

"People my age have private stuff, too," Sam had told her.

He didn't, really. Didn't have any private stuff. But he liked to try to make himself invisible, which was a way of being very private, and that was why he was slithering invisibly into Anastasia's room.

"BOO!" Sam shouted, leaping up suddenly, beside his sister's bed.

Anastasia jumped, startled. She dropped her marking pen.

"Sam!" she said in an irritated voice. "Cut it out. You scared me. What are you doing, creeping around like that?"

"I'm being a lizard," Sam explained.

Anastasia laughed. "Well, you make a pretty good lizard, Sam. Why don't you slither downstairs and eat some insects? That's what lizards do. Go out in the yard and find a nice juicy caterpillar for lunch, okay?"

Sam thought about that. He thought about a huge, fuzzy, juicy caterpillar, placed right in the center of a piece of whole-wheat bread, maybe with a little mustard dabbed on him.

Suddenly Sam didn't want to be a lizard anymore, not even for one minute longer.

"Will you play with me?" he asked Anastasia. "I'm not a lizard anymore. I'm a boy again."

Anastasia looked up from her notebook. "I will a little later, Sam. We can go outside and I'll give you a ride on the back of my bike, okay? But not right now. Right now I'm making up a secret code, and I need to do it all by myself, without any interruption."

Sam's eyes widened. "What's a secret code?" he asked.

"Oh, it's complicated, Sam. It's when you say one thing but mean something else. Or write one thing but mean something else. Understand?"

Sam shook his head no.

"Well, for example..." Anastasia hesitated. "Sam," she asked, "if I explain this code to you, promise me you won't tell anyone?"

Sam nodded.

"Do you solemnly swear?"

Sam gulped. He knew that swears were bad. There was a kid at nursery school who was always saying swears, and Mrs. Bennett did not find it amusing at all, not even for one single minute. (It was Sam's best friend, Adam.) "I solemnly swear," Sam whispered, glancing around to be certain no one could hear.

"Well," Anastasia explained, "I've made a list of all the boys I know. Robert Giannini and Steve Harvey and Eddie Fox anda"well, all the boys I know. See?" She tilted the notebook so that Sam could see a list of names written in green ink.

"Now, here's the code part," Anastasia went on. "I've written words after each boy's name, but the words don't really mean what they say. So if I wrote love, that really means 'hate,' see? And despise means 'love'. And my friend Meredith has the code, too, so she can understand. And if I call Meredith up and say, 'I despise Steve Harvey'a"well, Meredith could look at her code notebook and see that would really mean that I love Steve Harvey. But no one else would know, because they wouldn't know the code."

Sam stared at his sister.

"See?" Anastasia asked.

"I guess so," said Sam, even though he didn't, really.

"Don't forget that you can't tell anyone. You solemnly swore, remember?"

"Yeah." Already Sam was sorry that he had solemnly sworn. It hadn't been worth it. He dropped to his belly and slithered out of Anastasia's room and down the stairs. He was a new kind of lizard: a kind that didn't eat bugs, only peanut b.u.t.ter.

"What were you doing upstairs?" asked Mrs. Krupnik, as Sam ate his sandwich. He had slithered into the kitchen, explained about the peanut-b.u.t.ter-eating lizard, and his mother had realized that it was probably feeding time in the lizard world.

"I learned about code," Sam told her.

"Code?" his mother asked, wrinkling her forehead.

"Yeah, that's when you say one thing but you really mean something else."

"Like what?"

Sam sighed. He couldn't tell about Anastasia's code because he had solemnly sworn. But suddenly he thought of something else.

"Like Mr. Flabbo," he said. "If I said Mr. Flabbo, you know who I would mean, don't you?"

His mother laughed. "Sure. You'd mean Daddy."

"Right. Because Mr. Flabbo is code for Daddy. And if I said, 'I hate Mr. Flabbo,' it would really mean 'I love Daddy.'"

"Oh." His mother looked confused.

Sam looked around the kitchen. On the floor in front of the washing machine there was a huge stack of dirty clothes. He recognized the shirt he had worn yesterday, and he recognized the chocolate milk he had spilled on that shirt at dinner last night. He saw Anastasia's socks and his dad's pajamas. He knew how his mother felt about laundry.

"If you said, 'I love doing the laundry,'" Sam explained, "that would be code, and it would really meana"" He waited for his mother to catch on.

She laughed and sipped her coffee. "I guess I see. But I hope you won't say you hate anything, even in code, Sam. Okay? Because hate is such a yucky word. Even for laundry."

Sam nibbled out the rest of the good part of his sandwich and arranged the crust in an on his plate. "Yeah, okay," he said. Actually, he didn't think hate was a yucky word. Broccoli was much yuckier.

Sam went outside and wandered across the yard to visit the Krupniks' next-door neighbor. Her real name was Gertrude Stein. But Sam never called her that. He liked to call her Gertrustein.

Gertrustein was very old. Sam wasn't sure how old, maybe two hundred.

She had a grouchy face, and when Sam had seen her for the first time, he had been frightened by her face. But later, when he got to know Gertrustein, when they became good friends, he realized that she was actually a smiling sort of person. But her skin had drooped, so it hung down in a grouchy look, and sometimes it was hard to see the smile underneath.

Gertrustein was on her back porch, hanging a dishtowel on the clothesline there. She always moved very slowly. Her arms and legs ached all the time, she had explained to Sam, and that was why she moved so slowly.

"Hi, Sam!" Gertrustein said when Sam came up the steps. "What a nice surprise!"

She lived all alone. She had no husband, no children, no grandchildren, and no dog or cat. So she was always glad to see Sam.

"If I didn't have you to talk to," she had once told Sam, "I would probably forget how to talk."

Sam thought it was the saddest thing in the whole world, to have drooping skin that gave you a grouchy face, to have aching arms and legs so that you had to move slowly, and to live all alone so that you might forget how to talk.

But Gertrustein didn't seem to mind. Almost every day she made cookies.

"I expect you might be willing to do me a favor and eat a cookie or two," she said to Sam.

"I might," Sam agreed.

"What have you been doing today?" she asked him after they had sat down together at her kitchen table with a plate of cookies and a gla.s.s of milk each.

Sam sighed. "Anastasia won't play with me because she's busy writing a code," he said. "And my mom is doing the laundry so she can't play with me right now, and she didn't understand about codes, anyway.

"Do you know about codes?" he asked, looking up at Gertrustein. "If I said, 'I don't want another cookie,' it would really mean, 'I do want another cookie' because it would be a code."