13 Little Blue Envelopes(59)

P.S. Do not go around taking up the offers of

strange men who ask you to come live with them.

That is not the moral of this story. Besides, your

mom would never forgive me.





The Red Scooter

While Carrie was eagerly poring over the twelfth letter, Ginny held the thirteenth blue envelope up to the Greek sun. (Was it Greek? Was it Italian? Did anyone own it?) She couldn’t see much through it. It wasn’t much larger than any of the others.

Felt like two pages. And this one’s drawing was hardly even a drawing—it was the number 13, made to look like oversized typewritten numbers.

“Well?” Carrie asked, folding up the letter she was reading.

“So you’re going to open it now, right? It says you can.”

Ginny sat back down and leaned back, immediately knocking her head into an oar on the side of the lifeboat behind her.

“And you obviously want to open it now, right?” Carrie went on. “Right?”

Ginny fished into the grocery bag. The only thing she could find in there that seemed good was one of the little cheeses.

She had to nibble her way through the red wax, and by the time 271

she got to the cheesy goodness, her mouth tasted like warm candle and she wasn’t hungry anymore. She set it aside. One of the guys would eat it.

“Are fried onion blossoms a real Australian food?” she asked.

Carrie hopped up and sat down on Ginny’s knees, pushing

the grocery bag aside in the process.

“Oh, come on! Open it!”

“I don’t get it,” Ginny said. “In the beginning, it kind of made sense. Then it all got kind of random. The one guy I was supposed to meet in Amsterdam wasn’t even there. Then she sent me all the way to Denmark for no reason at all.”

“There had to be a reason,” Carrie said.

“I don’t know. My aunt was kind of crazy sometimes. She

liked to see what she could get people to do.”

“Well, you can solve a lot of questions by opening the last one and reading it.”

“I know.”

There was going to be something in this last letter.

Something she didn’t want to know. She could feel it through the paper. This letter held a lot.

“I’ll open it when we get there,” she said, pushing Carrie gently off her knees. “I promise.”

Ginny’s body had adjusted to movement, so when she realized the boat had stopped moving several hours later, she found it a little hard to walk. She swayed a little and bumped into Bennett. They joined the long line of groggy, equally confused fellow passengers, and soon they found themselves on land just before dawn.

272

The port was a dismal bunch of concrete buildings. Again, having no real idea where they were, they took a cab waiting by the port office. Emmett spoke to the driver for a moment and then waved everyone in.

“Where’re we going?” Carrie asked.

“Not a clue,” he said. “I said we wanted to go somewhere

around here with a good beach, and we can’t pay more than three euros each.”

At first, the land around the road looked scrubby and hard, full of rocks and tough little plants that thrived in intense heat and gravel beds. Then the car turned, and they were on a high road above a vast beach. In front of them was a small town, just waking. Chairs were being put out in front of cafés. Ginny could see fishing boats moving in the distance.

The driver let them off along the road, pointing to a a set of steps that had been carved out of the side of the cliff that faced the water. The sand below was white, and the beach was empty. They made their way down these broad steps, clutching the rocky wall. As soon as they reached the beach, the guys immediately dropped down on the sand and stretched out to sleep. Carrie cocked an eyebrow at Ginny.

“I’ll open it in a few minutes,” Ginny said. “I want to walk around first.”

They left their bags there and climbed over a large rock

and found themselves in a small grotto. Carrie whipped off her shirt.

“I’m swimming,” she said, her hands already working on her bra hooks.

“Naked?”

273

“Come on!” Carrie said. “You’re in Greece. There’s pretty much no one around. They’re asleep.”

Without waiting for Ginny to make up her mind, Carrie

removed the rest of her clothes without a flicker of hesitation and headed for the water. Ginny thought it over for a moment. She needed to shave, seriously. But she did feel kind of gross, and the water looked unbelievable. Besides, her underwear looked pretty bathing suit–like. She would just keep that on. She yanked off her clothes and ran into the water.

It was warm as a bath. She dipped underwater and watched

her braids float above her head, like antennae. Then she put her head above water and sat down on the ground, letting the

waves come up over her. Carrie had obviously been cooped up way too long and was in and out of the surf. There was something almost toddler-like about her thrill to be naked.

When she’d been swept over by enough waves, Ginny pulled

herself out of the small trench she was sinking into and made her way back to the rock. Carrie slogged her way out soon after and dropped straight down into the sand.