The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  We went on and on. Forty words in all. My hand was tired by the end of it. I checked over my sheet. There were only two that I was uncertain about: “mammoth” (is there a double m in the middle? ) and “adamant” (or “-ment” or “-mint”? ), but I still thought I’d done a good job. Good enough to be in the top four, I hoped. It would be mortifying to be cut before the bee even happened. Mum would be so disappointed. She’d e-mailed me that she had printed out lists of words and we were going to start studying that night when she got home.

  I handed my sheet to Ms. Broadcheck, who took it with a wide smile. “Chin up, Ruth, honey. You’re going to be fine.”

  Ms. Broadcheck shouldn’t make offhand comments like that. They feel like promises, but there’s no way to keep them.

  Some kids hate gym class, but I’m pretty fast and can actually throw a ball, so I didn’t mind as long as we weren’t playing volleyball, a game invented with the sole purpose of torturing schoolchildren. It was the locker room that I hated. At Frontenac Consolidated Middle School, the locker room is a really an oversized hallway that’s divided by a bank of lockers.

  Getting ready, you have to rush because the boys walk through the girls’ locker room to get upstairs. They’re supposed to wait before they come in, but sometimes they forget. I always tried to get a locker on the side behind the bank of lockers. Trouble is, so did all the other girls. We were all rush, rush, rush as we got ready to go up to the gym. But after class, once the boys passed through and Ms. Wickersham was back in her office, all bets were off.

  All the other girls wore bras. Even Lena, who had nothing much that needed to be supported. Even Charlotte, who was smaller. But I didn’t.

  “Is it true that your moms won’t let you get a bra?” Melinda asked me.

  I glanced at Charlotte. She dug in her locker for her deodorant.

  I pulled my undershirt on over my head. “No,” I said. “That’s not true.”

  “Huh,” Melinda replied. She made a big show of adjusting the lace on the edge of her bra. It had to be padded. Charlotte shimmied into her shirt. “So it’s your choice, then?” Melinda asked me.

  “Yes,” I told her.

  “Huh,” Melinda said again. “You know that’s weird, right?”

  I pulled my turtleneck on. “I don’t need a bra. Half the girls in this room don’t need a bra.”

  “Do you hear that?” Melinda asked. “Ruth just called half of you flat-chested.”

  “I did not—”

  “You said half of them don’t need bras. It’s the same thing. Right, Char?”

  “Right,” Charlotte agreed. If she had hesitated, I might have been able to forgive her. And then maybe I wouldn’t have said what I said next. But she didn’t, and I did.

  “Charlotte doesn’t need a bra, that’s for sure,” I said. “She was thinking of stuffing with cotton balls before we started middle school, but I talked her out of it.”

  “Ruth!” Charlotte cried.

  I narrowed my eyes at her.

  “Ruth,” she said again, her voice softer. “Tell the truth.”

  “Are you lying about Charlotte?” Melinda asked. “You really are a jerk, aren’t you?”

  I tugged my hair into a ponytail—loose and low, not high and mighty like Melinda’s—and grabbed my bag out of the locker. I was not going to say anything else. Not one word more.

  Seven

  Serendipity

  Ms. Broadcheck had a new winter coat. It was white-and-black houndstooth, and she tied it tightly up above her belly. I wondered if she knew that wasn’t where belts go. It was a very fashionable coat, but she wore it with L.L.Bean boots, the kind with green rubber bottoms and leather up top.

  She shook it off and underneath she was wearing a dress. Ms. Broadcheck almost never wore dresses. This one had a belt above her belly, too. So odd. She started digging through her tote bags. She always carried at least three. “I know I put them in here,” she mumbled. We all watched her, this swirl of kinetic energy. She lifted books from the tote bags. Books we might like to read, like The Westing Game and A Wrinkle in Time and Hatchet, and even a book by Harriet Wexler, which wasn’t my favorite one, but still good. Then she started taking out books with boring titles like Reaching Every Child and Your Student, Your Task. All the while she repeated, “Where are they? Where are they?”

  Finally, Charlotte spoke. “Do you need some help, Ms. Broadcheck?”

  Ms. Broadcheck looked up like she forgot we were there. “Help? Oh, no, Charlotte. I just packed my shoes to wear today, and I can’t seem to find them.”

  “The shoes your dog pooped in?” Melinda asked.

  “Why, yes, actually, though of course they’ve had a thorough cleaning.”

  Melinda still wrinkled her nose.

  “They’re my favorite non-clog shoes,” Ms. Broadcheck went on. “And now it seems I’m stuck wearing this dress with these old boots of my husband’s.”

  “You have a husband?” Lucas asked.

  “Lucas,” Melinda cooed. “That’s not the kind of question you ask.”

  “Why not?”

  “Yes, I have a husband. You know, when I was in college, the fashionable girls wore these boots. Not the girls who all dressed the same, mind you, the ones with their own sense of style. Like Lena.”

  Lena herself wore ballet shoes. Not ballet flats, which Charlotte taught me is the name for dress shoes without a heel with a round toe, but actual pink ballet shoes. “I can dig it, Ms. Broadcheck,” she said. “You’ve got to loosen them up, though.” She walked over to Ms. Broadcheck. “Unlace them and pull them loose and then let the laces hang down.” I wondered if Lena would tell her to slide her belt down, too.

  “They’re already two sizes too big, Lena,” Ms. Broadcheck said. “I only grabbed them because I couldn’t find my own boots. And because I was sure I packed those shoes.” She dropped down into her chair. “Oh, well, it is what it is.”

  “Who are you married to?” Lucas asked.

  “Mr. Broadcheck, duh,” said Mitchell. I liked Mitchell better when he wasn’t adorable.

  “Actually, his name is Mr. Kendall. I kept my name.”

  “You could have been Kendall and you kept Broadcheck?” Melinda asked. “Why?”

  “I suppose because I’ve always been Simone Broadcheck. I’m not sure who Simone Kendall would be.”

  “She sounds glamorous,” said Melinda. “I’m going to marry someone whose last name starts with M. So I can be Melinda M-something. Like Melinda Mitchell.”

  “That’s my first name,” Mitchell said.

  “I wasn’t talking about you,” Melinda said. But she giggled. And he smiled. And Charlotte looked away.

  “Anyway,” Ms. Broadcheck said. “Marriage is not the planned topic of discussion for this morning.” She pulled a piece of paper from her desk and shook it dramatically. “The spelling bee qualifying results!”

  I wrapped my hands around my Harriet Wexler book as tightly as Taryn held her sword.

  “Though of course I had no part in the outcome, it still makes me very proud to say that three out of the four sixth-grade finalists for the spelling bee come from this very homeroom.”

  Melinda gave three slow claps. Ms. Broadcheck ignored her. “A drumroll, please.” Lena slapped her hands on the table. “In first place in the sixth grade, we have Mr. Lucas Hosgrove.”

  “Own it!” he exclaimed.

  “In second place, our very own Ms. Ruth Mudd-O’Flanahan.”

  I smiled, but I also tried to wrestle it down, so it probably looked like some weird, twisted scribble of lips. I just didn’t want Melinda to see that it mattered to me. Lena said, “All right, Ruthy!” No one ever called me Ruthy.

  “And in third place, Dev Gupta, who is, of course, not in this homeroom, but whom we will support nonetheless. And finally . . .”

  Lena banged her hands like crazy. I didn’t care who it was. I could take anyone else in this homeroom. Lucas was the one I really needed to worry a
bout.

  “Ms. Charlotte Diamond!”

  Our reactions were right across our faces. Charlotte’s mouth in an open O. Melinda smirking. Me, I’m sure my jaw dropped and my eyebrows went up. I snapped my mouth shut right away, but I knew Melinda and Charlotte saw. Melinda saw everything.

  It’s okay, I told myself. It’s okay because Charlotte is not going to do it. She won’t do anything that Melinda deems dorky.

  “Ms. Broadcheck,” Charlotte said, her voice quavering. I let out my breath. One competitor down. I knew it was not the spirit of good sportsmanship to win by abdication. Mum, whose flight had been canceled due to an engine malfunction, would be disappointed in me if she could read my thoughts from hundred of miles away. But it wasn’t like Charlotte would have been a real competitor, unless she got some easy words and I got hard ones. Eliminating her was eliminating the luck factor.

  “We’re going to need a copy of that word list,” Melinda interrupted. “We have some studying to do.”

  My head swiveled on my neck like the Tin Woodman. Melinda was going to coach Charlotte?

  “Oh, actually—” Charlotte began, still trying to quit.

  “You are going to rock this spelling bee, Charlotte. It’s going to be awesome. I mean, you live in a library, right? You will be the prettiest girl to ever win a spelling bee.”

  “Right,” Charlotte agreed, and then, more sturdily: “Where can we get the list?”

  Coco and I were going to meet at the library to study during study hall, but now that Dev was in the spelling bee, I figured that was off. So I stayed in Ms. Lawson’s room to help her arrange her bookshelves, theoretically. Actually, I was curled up on Ms. Lawson’s ratty old couch reading more Harriet Wexler while Ms. Lawson graded papers at her desk. She had very short hair that was gray and black, or salt and pepper as Mom would say, which always made my mouth feel furry. She held a red pen in her left hand—she once said that the move away from red-penned correcting was the first sign in the decline of public education—and wrote with firm pressure on our papers, frequently shaking her head from side to side.

  Taryn had left the lovelorn Benedict at the edge of the Forest of Westbegotten and had just entered the woods. The woods were not so bad in the daytime, but still she kept her hand on the hilt of her sword. As she walked, she heard footsteps behind her, but every time she paused to look, they were silenced and she saw no one. She told herself it was just an echo or a trick of the mind. Walk. Footsteps. Nothing. Walk. Footsteps. Nothing.

  “There you are!”

  My legs shot out in front of me.

  Coco.

  “I was waiting in the library for you. Did you forget?”

  “No, I just thought that since Dev was in the bee now, you wouldn’t want to help me.”

  “Why not? I said I would.”

  “But that was before he qualified.”

  Coco gave a half shrug. “Adam will help him.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Adam?”

  “It’ll be good for them. Anyway, I’m backing the winner.”

  Ms. Lawson gathered her papers in her hands and tapped them on her desk. “I agree, Ruth,” she said. “With Coco helping you, this could be an unbeatable team.”

  “See?” Coco said.

  “Though I’m a little surprised you didn’t qualify yourself, Coco.”

  Coco’s cheeks burned. “I guess spelling isn’t genetic, after all.”

  “Maybe not.” Ms. Lawson pursed her lips. “Some of the words you got wrong on the test, though?” she prompted.

  “I guess I got confused. Nervous. I got nervous and that’s why I wouldn’t be good at the bee.”

  Ms. Lawson stood up. “My room is open to you as long as you want to study. I’ll be in the teachers’ room if anyone needs me.”

  “I’m not a shoo-in,” I said as soon as Ms. Lawson was out of the room.

  He put up his hands. “Don’t tell me that Lucas is going to win. Step one is to banish that attitude.”

  “If he’s seen a word, he knows it. And we have the list, so he will have seen all the words.”

  “Everyone makes mistakes.” He held up the printout of the study words. “These words are just the start. The final list may contain words that aren’t here.”

  “I know.”

  “This is probably a better place to meet, anyway. You want to be able to practice projecting. Let’s get started.”

  “Are you really sure about this? I don’t want you to lose your friend.”

  Coco smiled. “Dev wouldn’t ditch me over this.”

  “And you really think Adam will help him? I mean, the other day at lunch, about the time stop thing—”

  Coco shook his head. “Dev’s still upset about Brain Camp. He really wanted to go, but his parents wouldn’t let him. That’s where I first met Adam, in that science-fiction class. I actually signed up for one on anatomy, but that one was filled up. Anyway, my mom says that Dev is confusing the two—he’s mad at Adam because he’s mad about Brain Camp.”

  “What do you think?” I asked. I wondered if Alan and Eliot were giving Charlotte some silly story like that about me.

  He shrugged. “Dev and I go way back. Adam, my helping you with spelling, none of that’s going to change our friendship. I mean, we were friends in preschool.”

  “So were Charlotte and I,” I said.

  “Charlotte Diamond? Really?”

  “What’s the first word?”

  “Um, how about ‘aviary’?”

  “Okay. A-V—”

  “No!” Coco shook his head, the flop of hair swinging from side to side. “You have to say the word first.”

  “You don’t actually,” I told him. “Not at the local level, anyway.”

  “But you will when you make it to the Scripps Spelling Bee. And, anyway, if you’ve heard the word wrong, the judges can correct you before you start to spell.”

  I liked how sure he was that I would not only win our school bee but also make it all the way to Scripps. “Okay, I guess. Aviary. A-V-I-A-R-Y. Aviary.”

  “You need to ask for the definition or country of origin, too.”

  “Did I get it right?”

  “Sure, but you should still ask.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you might think you know, but not really know.”

  “That’s just stalling.”

  He shook his head. “Country of origin is really useful. It helps you know the root words.”

  I frowned.

  “If this were a sports movie, I’d say, ‘It’s my way or the highway!’ you know. I’d be the crusty old coach pulled out of retirement, and you’d be the young whippersnapper with an attitude, and I’d train you into shape, and you’d make me realize that my heart wasn’t so hard, after all.”

  “Wow. That was detailed.”

  “My dad likes sports movies. A lot.”

  “Does he know you’re coaching me and not your sister?” I had seen the final list, and Emma was one of the eighth graders to qualify.

  He checked the list. “Your next word is ‘alabaster.’ ”

  “Alabaster,” I began. Then I stopped myself from spelling it. “Country of origin?” I asked.

  He told me Middle English.

  “Alabaster. A-L-A-B-A-S-T-E-R. Alabaster.”

  “Great!”

  We went through a dozen more words. I didn’t get any wrong. “You’re really good at this.”

  “The practice still helps.”

  He glanced down at my book. “Harriet Wexler. She writes all those fantasy books, right?”

  “It’s more than just fantasy,” I told him.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A lot of fantasy is about the world and the creatures and all that. But her worlds are simple. It’s the characters that are complicated.”

  “I see,” he said. And I thought that maybe he did, which was refreshing. Charlotte had once said, “I don’t get it. An elf and a human had a baby? How is that even possible
?”

  I went on: “I think maybe it’s more like the quest. The adventure. I don’t know, they just make you think, think about what you would do, what your quest would be.”

  “Do people go on quests anymore?”

  I wished we did, but he was right. “That’s why you need to read about them. It’s the same as a series like Andromeda Rex. I mean, it’s not like you really think you’re going to have a world with time stops and teleporting through wormholes and all that, right?”

  “Well, that’s science fiction,” he said.

  “But they’re both fiction. They make you think about things, but they aren’t actually real.”

  “But science fiction could be real.”

  “Maybe. But the authors are just guessing, don’t you think? No one knows what’s really going to happen in the future.”

  He pushed his floppy hair out of his eyes. “Adam and Dev and those guys don’t really talk about books like this. They just talk about what’s cool and how they would rule the world if they could stop time or time travel. Adam read When You Reach Me and all he could say in the end was that if he figured out how to go back in time, he would bet on all the World Series games.”

  “I don’t know Adam very well, but he seems pretty financially oriented.”

  Coco laughed. “You could say that. Anyway, it’s nice talking to you about books. Maybe I could borrow one of those Harriet Wexler books sometime.”

  “This one?” I asked.

  “Maybe when you’re done—”

  “ ’Cause I got this one from Eliot—Mr. Diamond—at the library. It hasn’t even come out yet.”

  “I thought you might have others at home.”

  “I do.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh!” I said, feeling like a dunce. “Well, sure, I could bring you one. What one do you think you would like? The Taryn Greenbottom series is the best, but some people like A River Slowly better. That’s a stand-alone book, and it’s more science fiction. It’s about time travel, too. You might like that one.”

  “Whichever. They both sound good.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you like riddles?” I asked. I didn’t know why. I had no intention of telling anyone else about the notes in the books.