Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket

Author:Lemony Snicket [SNICKET, LEMONY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Fiction / Family / General (See Also Headings Under Social Issues), Juvenile Fiction / Social Issues / Adolescence, Juvenile Fiction / Mysteries & Detective Stories
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2015-09-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER EIGHT

Ellington stood up, and we stood together unmasked, thinking about each other. The world continued to rotate. I’d learned long ago, as everybody learns, that the earth turns around something called an axis, which is a word for a line that goes down the middle of something. It’s not a real line. The axis is imaginary, a line that exists only in your mind. I had never understood it until that moment in the train compartment. Ellington Feint was a line in my mind running right down the middle of my life, separating the formal training of my childhood and the territory of the rest of my days. She was an axis, and at that moment, and for many moments afterward, my entire world revolved around her.

“Hello,” I said.

“Same to you,” she said. “How did you find me?”

“This is the only place on the train where you can find coffee,” I said, and showed her the tiny folded cup. She raised her curious eyebrows, shaped like question marks, and finally gave me the smile she always gave me, the smile that could have meant anything. “That looks like the work of Ornette Lost,” she said.

“I suspect she’s on board.”

If Ellington was surprised, she did not show it. She reached underneath the table and retrieved a dark green bag I recognized at once. It was tube-shaped and had a secret compartment that had held a book called Caviar: Salty Jewel of the Tasty Sea, and the book in turn held a secret. But the book was gone now, and Ellington glanced at me and then reached in and tugged at a smooth black panel in the bag, and from under the false bottom she retrieved something that looked like a glass pitcher, with some kind of metal pump on the top and a sieve that fitted perfectly in the middle of the thing.

“What is that?” I asked her.

“This,” she said, “is one of the greatest inventions mankind has ever known. It’s called a French press, and it’ll make much better coffee than that slop over there. I’ll show you.”

She showed me. She found an electric kettle and plugged it in, and then stood on tiptoe to take down a sack of coffee. She slid the pump out of the pitcher and poured in several handfuls of the ground coffee beans, almost as dark as her hair. The kettle steamed, and Ellington carefully poured hot water into the pitcher, onto the coffee, and balanced the pump on top of the pitcher but didn’t lower it in.

“And now?” I asked.

“Now we wait,” she said, and we sat at the small table. The water and the coffee mixed and clouded, like bad weather or troubled thoughts. She reached into a pocket of her rumpled clothing and brought out a small music box. She did not use the small crank to open the small panel that held a photograph I did not want to see, showing her missing father, a man with kind eyes and an open smile.

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