The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

She colored for a moment longer. “You know all of this is probably nothing. These notes.”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “We’re too old for mystery games, Ruth.”

  “I know,” I said. She hadn’t looked up at me once since we stopped laughing. “I should probably get your dad the rubber cement.”

  “Ms. Pepper already did.”

  “Right. Well, I should probably get back outside, anyway. My mom will be here soon.”

  “Bye,” she said.

  “Bye.”

  I hesitated, but there was nothing more to say. Nothing at all.

  Five

  Neologism

  “Bandersnatch.”

  It was Coco. “Excuse me?” It was Monday morning, and I was clutching a stack of Cobblestone magazines that Ms. Lawson asked me to organize for her. Her room was full of bookcases overloaded with books, the history and social studies books jammed together with the fiction.

  “Bandersnatch. Ask me the definition.”

  “What’s the definition?”

  “It’s from Lewis Carroll, and it’s a grotesque and strange creature.”

  “Okay,” I said. He was grinning, so I felt pretty sure he wasn’t teasing me. But he had also called me grotesque and strange. Maybe.

  “It was on the Scripps spelling list last year. More precisely, it was the word that my sister got wrong in the state spelling bee.”

  The girl who’d gone from our middle school the year before had been tall and willowy with bright blond hair. I hadn’t realized she and Coco were related.

  “I see,” I said. Although I didn’t.

  “I thought I could help you study.”

  “Study?”

  “For the spelling bee.” He reached up and scratched behind his ear. The skin on his neck had started to flush.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “If you want to, I can quiz you.”

  “I think I’ve got it.” I spread the magazines out on a table in the back of Ms. Lawson’s room. She let me come in here during study hall since she didn’t have a class. Officially I was her student aide, but mostly it was just an escape. I wasn’t sure how Coco knew to find me there.

  “I helped my sister study.”

  “And she spelled ‘bandersnatch’ wrong.”

  Coco’s skin turned pink starting at his cheeks and diving down to meet the red on his neck.

  I kicked my boot into the floor. “Anyway, my mum is going to help me.” She had about flipped when I’d told her that I had signed up for the spelling bee, and promised we could watch Akeelah and the Bee for inspiration as soon as she got home.

  “Oh,” Coco said. I didn’t know someone could make such a little word sound so forlorn, like the sound of the lighthouse on one of these snowy winter nights.

  “Except she’s British, so sometimes she gets confused. Because, you know, some words are spelled differently. And she always says ‘zed’ for Z.” I was babbling. Taryn Greenbottom never babbled. I clamped my mouth shut.

  “British?”

  I slid an issue from March on top of one from May. “Technically, yes. She’s from Ireland, but Northern Ireland, and they’re British, but she considers herself Irish. The whole island is smaller than Maine, and there are two different countries on it.”

  “I know. It’s kind of like Hispaniola with Haiti and the Dominican Republic.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I like geography,” he said.

  “Me, too,” I agreed.

  “But not as much as spelling?”

  “Not as much as spelling.”

  “Well, if you want help—”

  “She’ll help me,” I said, too hastily.

  “I could help you at school.”

  That actually sounded useful. Who knew when Mum would be home to study with me? And once she got home, she’d just be off again a few days later. “Don’t you want to help Lucas?”

  “Lucas?” Coco furrowed his brow.

  “He’s your friend, isn’t he?”

  “Not really. I mean, I like him fine, but I wouldn’t call him a friend. Anyway, he’s a genius. He doesn’t need help.”

  “Oh.” Another foghorn sound.

  “I mean, you’re smart, too,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Actually, maybe I could use help. My mum travels a lot. And since you have experience—”

  “Emma did go out in the fourth round of the state tournament.”

  He was still smiling, so I smiled back. “I think we’ll be okay.”

  “So,” he said. “Your word is ‘bandersnatch.’ ”

  “Country of origin?” I asked. That was what the spellers always did on television. It drove me and Mum crazy because we knew they were just stalling. “Spell it or smell it,” she would say, which didn’t make much sense but always made me laugh.

  “British, I think.”

  I took a deep breath. “Bandersnatch. B-A-N-D-E-R-S-N-A-T-C-H. Bandersnatch.”

  Ugly books. That was about the only clue I had to go on. The book I found the note in was ugly, and the book Charlotte found her note in was so ugly that they were going to remove it from the library. Ugly like a bandersnatch. I pictured a grotesque figure with spiky horns and torn wings, sharp teeth and drooling mouth, hunched over an old book.

  The conversation with Coco had been about the strangest I’d ever had. I’d thought about it all afternoon. He and I had barely spoken all year. In the fall we’d been paired up for an assignment in math—finding the area of irregular shapes—but that had only lasted for a period and I don’t think we said much more to each other than “Draw a line there,” and “I guess that gives us forty-seven.” But now in two days he’d sought me out two times. He had probably realized that I had no friends and was trying to be nice. That was the kind of guy Coco was. With a guy like that, one who was nice to everyone, well, it hardly mattered if he was nice to you, too.

  After school I went back to the library to search the stacks. This time I started at the end, in the 900s, which is the history section, pulling out the ugliest books I could find. Books with no dust jackets, books with hints of mold, books with renegade dust bunnies on them. Some of the dust bunnies were so big, they looked like they had grown teeth, which made me think of those stories where people have tumors in them and when they are pulled out, they have teeth and hair and sometimes even legs and hands. It’s not like there was another person inside them—the tumor itself grows these extra bits.

  Mum told me about those tumors—teratomas is what they’re called—even though Mom said I had enough trouble with my own imagination, and that I didn’t need to have gruesome reality added to it.

  I shouldn’t have said I would study with Coco. I was a lone wolf prowling the halls of Frontenac Consolidated Middle School until I could have an island in a lake just like Harriet Wexler. I was as solo as Han Solo. I was a one-woman band. I decided I would tell him the next day that I didn’t need his help, after all.

  My fingers started to turn grayish brown from all the dust, and I was beginning to doubt there were any more clues to find. I’d pulled out seventy-three books before, in the 821s, I picked out a book of poetry by someone named J. Samuel Samuelson. When I flipped it open, I saw the telltale origami envelope.

  I told my heart not to race. This could be as big a disappointment as the printer paper.

  The envelope was wedged into the book, and it tore a little and left a thin line of red behind when I pulled it out. The origami paper was so dry, I was afraid it would disintegrate before I removed the note. But I got it, and pulled out the index card. The same red seal with the sharp-beaked bird on it. I’d really and truly found a second clue! I unfolded the card. This one had a border made of stones that pressed against one another. At the top was a drawing of a sculpture of a man’s head. Floating above the head was a golden crown. The picture made me think of Charlotte, and the way she could use her colored pencils to make her drawings
alive. I read:

  I understood the first part. Ferdinand Frontenac wasn’t a king. He was a settler who united the British, French-Canadian, and American Indians on the peninsula. That was why the schools were named after him. Our mascot was the beaver because he traded their fur. There was a statue of him in the school. That had to be the marble man.

  The rest was just gibberish. “Miners with a pan”? Like the gold rush? We studied that in fifth grade, and there was nothing that connected that to Ferdinand Frontenac. And the quote at the end: What could that possibly mean? It seemed like it was giving me a direction, like it was telling me to make a plan and keep going, straight and steady.

  I had to remind myself that the notes weren’t talking to me. I didn’t know who they were talking to. They had to be for someone, didn’t they? I wanted it to be me.

  Mum called us over the computer from Texas that night. She looked all grainy and jumpy on the screen. Behind her was a framed print of a cactus. It’s funny how hotels don’t change much from city to city, state to state: beige walls, white sheets, shiny desk. You’ve got to look for the little details to see the differences: a cactus print instead of a photograph of a skyscraper, pink coverlet instead of brown.

  “I should be home tomorrow,” she said. “As long as the weather holds there.”

  Mom and I were eating dinner while we talked with her. I wound the spaghetti around my fork. “Good.”

  “We can study for the bee.”

  “I’ve started,” I confessed. “There’s this boy, Coco, at school who is going to help me.”

  Mom’s eyebrows jumped up her forehead like jacks out of boxes.

  “And I can help you.” The connection made Mum’s accent harder to understand. It almost sounded like she said “An I can’t help ye.”

  My mouth was full of spaghetti, so I nodded eagerly. I didn’t want Mum to think that studying with Coco meant I didn’t trust her to help me. Swallowing, I said, “I’ve got the Spell It! study site bookmarked on the computer.”

  “Let me know as soon as your flight is confirmed,” Mom said. “I’m on call tomorrow. We need to make plans for Ruth.”

  “I’m fine here by myself,” I said.

  They didn’t even bother to answer.

  “I think we’re looking at another snow day,” Mom said.

  “Here’s hoping I get back in time to enjoy it. Maybe we can go snowshoeing.”

  “Did you know that in Africa, girls are getting married by my age? They run their own households,” I informed them.

  “Africa is not a country,” Mom said. “And every country is different. But in the countries where girls marry young, they usually become part of a larger family unit, with older women to help guide them. No one your age is running a family.”

  I wondered if that was true, absolutely. Somewhere, somehow, there was a girl my age on her own and looking out for a family. “All I’m saying is that you can leave me alone for a night. I’ll be sleeping. What can happen to me when I’m sleeping?”

  Mom looked at Mum on the computer screen. “Not up for discussion,” she said. “Why are you bringing up Africa, anyway?”

  “We’re starting the unit on Africa in humanities. Today we went over the map.”

  Mom’s face lit up. “Did you talk about Côte d’Ivoire?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Tell Ms. Lawson I can come in and talk about it. I can do a slide show. You know that’s actually part of the mandate of the Peace Corps—to share the foreign culture with Americans. In fact, I’ll just e-mail her myself.”

  “When?”

  “Tonight after dinner.”

  “No. When are you going to have time to come in and talk to the class about the Ivory Coast?”

  “I’m sure we can work out a time,” Mom says. She slid a meatball to the side of her plate, then used her fork to cut it in half. “This is a big unit, isn’t it?”

  “Most of the trimester.”

  “Then we’ll surely find the time.”

  “Tell them about the guinea worms!” Mum said.

  “The point is not to gross them out,” Mom replied. “I want them to see what a beautiful country it is.”

  “The guinea worms will hook them, though. Ha, hook them!”

  Guinea worms are long, thin worms that get inside you and lay their eggs. Their eggs. Inside you. Then, when the egg hatches, the worm has to get out. So it works its way out of your skin, usually on your leg. The place where it comes out gets big and red and swollen and painful. But you can’t just yank the worm out, because then it might break and burrow back into your flesh. No, you have to pull it out a centimeter each day, and wrap it around a toothpick that you bandage to your leg.

  I pushed my spaghetti away.

  “You’ve got to know your audience,” Mum said. She winked at me. Or maybe it was just a flicker of the screen. Sometimes I pretended she was a robot version of my mum, and these little tics were glitches in the system.

  “I think I have photographs in the attic. I’ll have to scan them.”

  “Ms. Lawson may not want you to come.”

  “Of course she will. I have firsthand experience.”

  Mum bore her gaze into me across the miles. “It won’t do any harm to ask,” she said.

  No harm.

  Mom reached over to the computer. “I love you, honey,” she said. “We’ve got to clean up from dinner, and I want to send that e-mail.”

  “Love you both,” Mum replied.

  “Good night,” I said, but Mom had already clicked on the red hang-up icon and was opening her e-mail.

  The one good thing about her fixating on coming into my class to speak was that it made her forget my mentioning Coco. That was a close one. In fact, just to make sure I escaped a third-degree grilling on the Mom-B-Que, I grabbed my plate and glass, popped them into the dishwasher, and said, “Off to study science.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Mom said.

  “I have to memorize the classification system.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  “Good dinner,” I told her.

  “Thank you,” she replied, her gaze trained on the screen.

  I backed out of the room just to keep an eye on her. She was a fast one, that Mom, and I wanted to be ready to sprint should she look up at me with those inquisitive eyes.

  Six

  Chauvinism

  Ms. Broadcheck came tumbling into homeroom with a stack of papers. “Everyone has to take the test!” she announced. “The spelling test. The spelling test.” She shook off her coat. “I’m sorry I’m late. My dog pooped in my shoes. Not these shoes, of course. My other shoes.”

  Melinda wrinkled her nose. “In them or on them?”

  “In them, on them, around them. But we don’t have time to talk about my dog’s gastrointestinal distress. Not enough kids signed up for the spelling bee, and we think there might be some secret spellers lurking about, so everyone takes the qualifying test. The top four for each grade will compete in the school bee.”

  Secret spellers. Each night they tucked themselves away in their attics spelling words like “hibachi,” “begonia,” and “hoomalimali.” Maybe they were the smart ones. Maybe I should remain a secret speller, too.

  “Do I have to take the test?” Lucas asked.

  “Everyone has to take the test,” Ms. Broadcheck answered.

  “But everyone knows I will own them. I will rule the spelling bee. This is a waste of my time.” I didn’t want to be like Lucas—known for the wrong reasons. Better to be unknown.

  “You don’t know that, actually, Lucas. Which is what I said during the faculty meeting when some teachers thought it was unfair to change how we qualified students for this. I think it’s unfair that some of you might not even know you’re good at this. This might be fun for some of you and you don’t even know it. Like, well, sometimes I wonder if maybe I was destined to be an Olympic athlete but just never found it. Like maybe I am a world-class luger. Or curler. And I just never got t
he opportunity. Well, one of you might be a world-class spelling bee-er, and here is your chance to be discovered.”

  “I don’t want to be discovered. You can’t force us to be in some lame-o spelling bee,” Melinda said.

  But then, Melinda thought she knew me, didn’t she? Better to be known the way you wanted to be known than the way someone like Melinda decided you were. I wouldn’t allow myself the fantasy of a total shift—my classmates lifting me up on their shoulders in victory—but maybe it would afford me a modicum of respect. (“Modicum” was one of Mum’s favorite spelling words—such a big word for something small.) There was some honor in being good at something.

  Ms. Broadcheck sighed as she placed a sheet of paper in front of each of us. “No one is going to force you to be in the competition. Should you prove to have one of the top four scores, you may abdicate.”

  I didn’t think anyone was too concerned about Melinda having one of the top four scores.

  “Abdicate. A-B-D-I-C-A-T-E. Abdicate,” Lucas said. “It can also mean ‘to disown,’ like giving up a child.”

  “Interesting, but not relevant, Lucas,” Ms. Broadcheck said. “Come on, now, we don’t have much time.”

  Ms. Broadcheck read each word and gave the definition from Webster’s dictionary, the official dictionary of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and we wrote them on our papers. “ ‘Trajectory.’ ‘The curved path along which something—such as a rocket—moves through the air or through space.’ ” Pencils scratched across the paper. This one was easy. “ ‘Ninja.’ ‘A person trained in ancient Japanese martial arts and employed especially for espionage and assassinations.’ ”

  “Can you repeat the word?” Lucas asked.

  “It’s ‘ninja,’ Lucas.”

  “That’s right. I’m the spelling ninja! I will assassinate you with my skills.”

  “We don’t have time for outbursts. You’re going to be late for first period. The next word is ‘inane.’ ‘Empty, insubstantial.’ Secondary definition: ‘lacking significance, meaning, or point; silly.’ ”

  “This test is inane,” Melinda said.

  “No. More. Outbursts.”