Page 41 of Treasured By Them
I grin. You don’t miss us, even a little?
Nope. I hate you as much as ever.
A text comes in from Edmund. Hate u 2, princess.
My smile grows as I imagine her scowling at the abbreviations, so I add, Can’t wait 2 c u again. Will spank u til u can’t sit.
She sends back a gif of an Academy of Ghosts character overturning a desk and stomping away.
I think I love this girl.
15
Danica
I wish Troy and Edmund were here. I would pester them and pick fights until we ended up fucking. It would be great. I wouldn’t have to think about my frustrating memory blockage, or the way that Vorsong guy bruised my shoulder.
I thought I needed to escape Edmund, but really, I just needed to get away from the violence and the fear. Edmund is fine. Troy is fine. They do things I don’t love—threatening Caleb wasn’t cool.
But when we’re away from that kind of situation? If we could remove ourselves from all the criminal shit? I think we’d have a chance.
In the meantime, I’ll try to enjoy this peaceful cabin. Maybe not alone like I’d hoped, but Malcolm and Zora aren’t bad company.
Since I have this time, I may as well do something positive. If I could figure out what I know about Britney Gardner’s death, it would be a win for justice. No, it wouldn’t bring her back to life. The tragedy will still be a tragedy. She’s still gone. But I could right a very old wrong.
I glare down at my math journal. Why couldn’t I spell anything out for myself? Why is it all numbers?
Unless…I sit down hard. Unless I did spell it out. But with numbers.
Maybe it’s a code.
Devising a secret code is exactly the kind of thing my eight-year-old self would have done. Especially because I had an inkling that my mom would snoop in my diary. I love her to pieces, but she’s never been able to mind her own business. If I didn’t want her to figure out what I was writing, I would have created a secret language or code. And what better way to do that than with numbers?
I stare at the repeating lines of numbers again. This could be where I was trying to tell myself something.
61 11 41 13 19 41 61
61 11 41 13 19 41 61
61 11 41 13 19 41 61
But what? Each of the numbers can be found in the first few lines of Pascal’s triangle. I flip back to the previous page, with Pascal’s triangle and the first place I added superscript numbers.
Is this the key?
Come on, I was eight. I was slightly precocious, but I wasn’t a genius by any means. So it shouldn’t be too complicated for me, a grown-ass adult, to figure out.
Let’s say the top number of my superscript triangle, 11, is A. The numbers in the next line, 12 and 13, are B and C.
11= A
12=B 13=C
14=D 21=E 15=F
16=G 31=H 32=I 17=J
…and so on.
