Mutiny of the Little Sweeties

On Wednesday after school, Kate, Vicky, and Alena decided to invent their own secret language, which no one else would understand. It seemed to them very convenient to have such a language: you talk about what you want and no one will find out.

Vicky took a thick notebook and carefully made columns in it, as in a school dictionary: word – transcription – translation.

“What will ‘cat’ be?” asked Vicky.

“Pshygl!” said Kate.

“Why ‘pshygl’?”

“Why not?”

Everything – animate and inanimate that dwelt or just happened to be in the Gavrilov house – was named roughly this way. The difficulty was that these new words were certainly immediately forgotten and it was necessary to constantly look in the notebook in order to talk and then pass it on to the person with whom you were just having a conversation. The person took the notebook and you started to point with your finger to the words you had just said.

Now the main concern was to hide the notebook from the other four children, who were interested in stealing it. At first, Kate, Vicky, and Alena hid the notebook by turns, but later it was only Vicky, who had the gift of hiding an object in the most obvious place so that it was unlikely to be discovered. For example, between two pans, one nested within the other, or right in her drawer, wrapping it in the cover of the school diary, which was immediately discarded, of course, because everyone saw that it was a diary.

Peter was the most zealous of all in the search. He literally rummaged the whole house, suspecting that the poster appearing on his door – “ENNEI – URLINKLE!” – meant “Peter – idiot.”

Finally, Kate was tired of this. “No,” said Kate. “‘Urlinkle’ is something else. You won’t snatch it out of my hands? Honestly? No, I don’t believe your word of honour! You’ll say you gave your word not to snatch it from my hands but you’ll snatch it out of one hand! Or from the fingers! You really wanted to say that, right?”

Peter puffed, because Kate, it goes without saying, had guessed right. “What will happen now?” he asked.

“We’ll tie you up!”

Peter willingly agreed, and the three girls thoroughly tied him up with ropes to a chair. Peter grinned in secret, because he tensed up his right arm so that it would be easy to pull it out.

“Ready! Then look!” Kate carefully covered the page with her fingers, leaving one line. “Here! Idiot is ‘shmurk’!”

“And ‘urlinkle’ is donkey? Show me ‘urlinkle’!” Peter said and grabbed the notebook with his freed hand.

“Ah! You promised not to! Get it from him!”

The three girls grabbed one part of the notebook and Peter’s hand the other. The girls, huffing, pulled it to themselves, and Alena even tried to scare Peter with the clicking of teeth near his hand, but Peter would still have won, and then Mama’s phone played a military march.

Mama did not react because she did not realize that it was her phone. Peter was forever changing her ring tone, considering it witty. Sometimes Mama’s phone began to rumble like a tractor, then scream, then fire a single shot with the sound of a recoil.

“The phone! Didn’t you hear it?” Peter shouted and, having let go of the notebook, jumped together with the chair to hand Mama the phone.