"Shouldn't You Be in School?" (All the Wrong Questions, #3)

by Lemony Snicket

Caviar is the eggs of a fish, usually a sturgeon, black and shiny and served on small pieces of toast at parties to which you are not invited. As

Her eyes were green and her hair so black it made caviar look beige,

The girl, and the promise I’d made, hovered in my head no matter what I was reading, and her name hovered in my ears like the song she played on an old-fashioned phonograph,

Ellington Feint. Ellington Feint. Ellington Feint.

Not I, Snicket. I don’t drink coffee. You’re thinking of that girl who caused all the trouble with that statue.”

“I guess I am thinking of her,” I admitted. Ellington liked to sit at the counter of an establishment called Black Cat Coffee, on the corner of Caravan and Parfait. She often had her coffee very late at night and stayed there to watch the sun rise.

“Tomato-watermelon gazpacho. It’s what they serve in Spain when it gets too hot. And the stuff on the bread is a habanero pepper jam I made myself.”

“Anyone can see that,” Moxie said, and poised her fingers over the typewriter keys. “Why don’t you tell us about the whole thing?”

“The skinny” is a phrase which just means “the secret information,”

“I have a question too,” Jake said. “What can we do to help?”

There was still a player piano in the corner, tinkling music that was sad but not weepy.

There were still three buttons—one marked A that opened the hatch in the ceiling and lowered the staircase so you could reach the attic, one marked B that fired up the machine that made fresh bread, and one marked C that controlled the shiny equipment that brewed coffee, dark and strong, that I never drank. But there was no button to make Ellington Feint appear.

It was a rare day that I didn’t go to Black Cat Coffee, just on the off chance she might be sitting at the counter. The plac...

saw someone at Ellington’s favorite spot, with a cup of coffee steaming next to them, my heart raced to think it was her even as my e...

“You know no such thing,” Qwerty said, and turned his empty cup over so it domed over the saucer.

Qwerty smiled, but it was sad around the edges.

Qwerty stood up and met my eyes. His were nervous and moving quickly. I don’t know what mine were.

“It’s not for me to say,” he said, with another look at the Mitchums. “They say in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind. You must find that book, Snicket, and read it.”