The Secret Language of Girls Read Online Free Page A

house and order a pizza.”
    Kate’s mom sighed. “Mel always liked sausage on his pizza. I guess those days are over.”
    The tears that had been hiding behind Kate’s eyeballs began to trickle down hercheeks. Her dad would probably never get to eat another sausage pizza in his life. For some reason, that seemed like the saddest thing Kate had ever heard.

    By the time Kate got to school on Monday, everyone in her class knew about her dad’s heart attack. She was late because her mom had taken her and Tracie to see their dad in the hospital first thing that morning. The pinging machine and its tangle of wires had been pushed into a corner. Kate’s dad was sitting up in his bed eating a low-fat corn muffin when his family came in. On the TV mounted on the wall across from his bed, an interviewer was talking to people who were over a hundred years old.
    “That will be me in sixty years,” Kate’s dad had said cheerfully, pointing to a hundred-and-one-year-old man on the screen who was chopping wood in his backyard.
    In sixty years Kate would be seventy-one. She scrunched up her face and looked in the mirror next to the TV, trying to imagine what she would look like then.
    “Are you getting sick?” her mom asked her.
    “Nope,” Kate said. “Just old.”
    When Kate walked into her classroom, everyone was busy working on their solar-system projects. As soon as they saw her, all the kids in her class stared at Kate as though she were a famous celebrity who had come to visit them. Ms. Cahill came over to Kate as she was taking Pluto and Saturn out of her cubbyhole and patted her on the shoulder.
    “You’re a very brave girl,” Ms. Cahill told Kate.
    Kate didn’t feel brave. Mostly she just felt like herself, except maybe a little more important. After all, it wasn’t every day a person’s dad had a heart attack and then made a spectacularrecovery. That’s what the doctor who had stopped by her dad’s room that morning had said. A spectacular recovery.
    At morning break, a cluster of kids gathered around Kate and asked her about her dad’s heart attack. She told them about seeing the ambulance in her driveway, and how, as the ambulance had passed her on the street, she had seen her dad’s hand wave weakly at her from the window. Her dad hadn’t really waved, but Kate thought it added a nice dramatic touch to her story. She leaned back against the jungle gym and threw out a bunch of big words like cardialgia and coronary thrombosis. Everyone looked impressed.
    “So I guess this means you’re not going trick-or-treating,” Flannery said.
    Leave it to Flannery to ruin a perfectly good discussion, Kate thought. The kids who had been standing around the jungle gym listening to her trickled off to watch the seventh gradersplay soccer. Now it was just Kate, Flannery, and Marylin.
    “That was really good pizza we had at your house Saturday,” Kate told Marylin, ignoring Flannery.
    Flannery rolled her eyes. “I know you spent Saturday night at Marylin’s house, okay? It’s only because your dad had a heart attack, so don’t try to make me jealous.”
    Kate shrugged. Who said anything about trying to make anyone jealous?
    “So, are you going trick-or-treating or not?” Flannery demanded.
    “Of course I am,” Kate said. “My dad’s coming home from the hospital tomorrow. Why wouldn’t I go trick-or-treating?”
    Flannery rolled her eyes again. She was the queen of eyeball rolling. “Well, Marylin’s having dinner at my house, so just meet us there at six.” Then she turned to Marylin. “Come on. I need to show you something.”
    Kate watched Flannery and Marylin walk toward the school building. She wondered if there was someone in the army she could call to get Flannery’s stepdad transferred. I hear they need soldiers in Istanbul, she could say. And there are a few openings in upper east Romania. At least that’s what I read in the paper.

    The idea came to Kate forty-five minutes before she was