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“What do you call someone who writes books?” asked Mrs. Surlaw.
“You don’t call them,” said Deedee. “You must never interrupt a great author during her moment of inspiration.”
“I think you said the correct answer in there somewhere,” the librarian decided.
On the twelfth floor, the man with the mustache was waiting again. Deedee wondered how he had gotten ahead of her.
“Name the largest river in the United States.”
Deedee couldn’t remember its name, but she knew how to spell it. “M-i-s-s-i-s-s-i-p-p-i!”
Miss Mush asked the question on the fifteenth floor. “How many points on a fork?”
Deedee formed a picture of a fork in her mind, but when she tried to count the points, they blurred.
“Three?” she tried.
“I’m so sorry, Deedee,” said Miss Mush.
She didn’t have to go all the way back down to the bottom, just to the tenth.
Ron was coming up the other way. “Hi, Deedee,” he greeted her.
“Hi, Ron,” said Deedee. “Hope you studied your forks and spoons?”
She reached the tenth, answered another question there, then again on the eleventh and twelfth.
Ron was coming down.
“Hi, Ron.”
“Hi, Deedee.”
She reached Miss Mush a second time.
“What was Christopher Columbus’s favorite vegetable?” asked the lunch lady.
Deedee knew that one. “Cabbage!”
She had spent two whole nights studying the history of cabbage.
When she reached the eighteenth floor, the man with the mustache was there again.
“Are zebras black with white stripes, or white with black stripes?”
Deedee thought it was the same thing, but knew that had to be wrong. “The first one,” she guessed.
“Was that white with black stripes, or black with white stripes?”
“I don’t remember,” said Deedee.
“Me neither,” the man admitted, and let her pass.
A tall, thin woman asked the next question. She looked like a teacher, but Deedee had never seen her before. Strangely, the woman had one very long fingernail on her pinky.
“Please recite the alphabet backward.”
Deedee had to close her eyes to concentrate. “Z, Y, X . . .”
