Girls Just Want To Have Fun | Robin Buckley

evil russians

July 1, 1985

Jill entered the mall through the same entrance she had left through and paused when she saw Steve hiding in plain sight behind a bush with another boy with short curly hair. She sighed as she watched Steve looking through a pair of binoculars at various people around the mall.

"Are you going to move or what?" A woman asked from behind Jill.

"Sorry," she mumbled and began to walk towards Steve.

"...she's not even in the ballpark of my type," Steve told the other boy.

"Who isn't?" Jill asked as she crouched down beside Steve. Both boys turned to look at her with a surprised expression. "I thought Robin was kidding when she said you were spying on people."

"When were you talking to Robin?" Steve asked.

"A few minutes ago. Some girl came in wanting samples and Robin refused so she wanted her to go get you and Robin told her you were spying on people," Jill explained. "You aren't that great at spying either."

"Sorry, but who are you?" the curly haired boy asked.

"I'm Jill," she told him. He nodded.

"Uh, Dustin."

Jill nodded. "Who are you spying on?"

"Russians," Dustin said.

"Evil Russians," Steve added.

"What makes them evil?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe the fact that they speak Russian?"

Jill smiled, "отстой для меня, я думаю" (Sucks for me, I guess)

Both boys looked at her with shocked looks.

"Holy shit!"

"You speak Russian?"

"It was my moms first language," she told them, still pleased at their reactions. The two turned to each other and whispered a couple things. Then they both stood up quickly.

"Come on," Steve told her.

Jill followed the two boys through the mall and back to Scoops Ahoy.

"Hi again," she told Robin as she followed the boys behind the counter and into the backroom of the store. There were no customers so Robin followed them too.

"She speaks Russian," Steve indicated to Jill.

"I know, dingus," Robin told him.

"Make her listen to the code and make sure it's right. Maybe it'll make more sense that way. Me and Dustin are gonna go try to find the evil Russians."

Robin nodded and the boys rushed back out of the room. A silence filled the room for several seconds after they left.

"Learning Russian, huh?" Jill asked.

"Yeah, I mean I couldn't just tell you what I'm doing because they think it is some super secret code and that it will be life changing to solve it or something."

Jill nodded.

"Should we go up front then?"

"Yeah," Jill agreed, following Robin to the front of the store where it was still relatively empty.

Jill put on the headphones that Robin had been wearing earlier and Robin hopped onto the counter and shut the sliding window behind her.

"I guess just listen to it and tell me what it says?" Robin told her. Jill nodded and Robin clicked a button for the audio to start playing. Jill listened to it carefully. When the audio stopped playing Robin looked at her.

"Play it again. I missed the last part," Jill told her. Robin pressed a button and the audio replayed.

"The week is long," Jill began and Robin quickly grabbed the pad of paper she had laid down and looked at it, nodding as she spoke. "The silver cat feeds when blue meets yellow in the west. A trip to China sounds nice if you tread lightly."

Robin nodded, "I have all of that too."

"None of it makes any sense. Blue and yellow in the west? Tread lightly?" Jill told Robin. "It's a damn good code, that's for sure."

"Yeah," Robin said. "What do you think it means?"

They sat in silence thinking for a few seconds before a customer came in. Robin hopped off the counter to deal with them and Jill hopped onto the counter. Once the customer was gone Robin turned back around and got back in her original spot.

"Maybe blue and yellow in the west stands for the sunrise or sunset? Those colors can sometimes be blue and yellow. And tread lightly might mean the pool?"

Robin shrugged and muttered the code again, "The week is long. The silver cat feeds when blue meets yellow in the west. A trip to China sounds nice if you tread lightly."

Robin took a sip from her drink. "Tread lightly? Maybe that's its own code," she said to Jill as she flipped through her phrase book again.

Someone knocked at the back door and Robin slid open the window and climbed over the counter to the back door. Jill looked back down at the code sprawled in Robin's handwriting. She could hear Robin talking to a delivery man as Jill mumbled the words over and over again, hoping to find something in the code that she missed.

"Yo, Robin. You're not gonna believe who Dustin thought was a Russian," Steve called into the shop as he and Dustin walked in. Jill looked up at them.

"You did too."

"No, I did not."

Robin rushed through the doors to the back of the store and grabbed the pad of paper that was in front of Jill. She shoved past Steve and Dustin and Jill followed behind her as she hurried to the center of the food court. Robin hopped onto a bench and began to look quickly around the mall.

"A trip to China sounds nice. A trip to China sounds nice. A trip to China sounds nice. A trip to China sounds nice. A trip to China sounds nice," Robin muttered continuously under her breath. She suddenly stopped spinning in circles and stared at the Imperial Panda store across the mall.

"A trip to China sounds nice," she said with more confidence. Jill realized what she was doing and hopped onto the bench beside her, peering over her shoulder for the next part of the code. "If you tread lightly."

Both girls began to look rapidly around the shops in the mall for something that fit the code. Jill spotted a shoe store and pointed. Robin looked where she was pointing and nodded.

"If you tread lightly," she nodded. She looked at the pad yet again. "When..when blue and yellow meet in the west."

This part of the code didn't take Robin any time at all to solve as she looked at the clock above the Starcourt Mall entrance, where the blue and yellow hands were pointed at 2:23 in the afternoon.

"Robin," Steve called, as he and Dustin approached. Jill hopped down from the bench. "What are you doing?"

"She cracked it," Jill said. Steve gave them a confused look.

"Cracked what?"

Robin hopped down from the bench. "I cracked the code."