The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “Sometimes. I don’t like dumb riddles like that one about a stranger coming to the door asking for food and you have peanut butter, tuna, and pickles. What do you open first?”

  “The door,” I replied.

  He grinned. “Of course you got it! I said pickles because you could give the strangers a pickle while you tried to figure out what to give him for a real meal.”

  “I didn’t mean that kind of riddle.”

  “What kind did you mean?”

  “Nothing,” I said. I pointed at the book cover. “It’s just that this book is called The Riddled Cottage, and it got me thinking about riddles. We should get back to studying.”

  He stared right in my face for a minute, and I wondered if he could tell I was lying. Not lying, exactly. I had started down one path and then made a right turn. My riddles. My mystery.

  “ ‘Didgeridoo.’ ”

  “What?”

  “An aboriginal wind instrument from Australia.”

  “Is that on the list?”

  “No. I just like it.”

  “Are there any alternate pronunciations?”

  “I don’t think so, no.”

  “D-I-D-G-E-E-R-I-D-O-O.”

  “Ha! Stumped you!”

  “Is that the old, crusty coach coming through?”

  “Nah.” He smiled. “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t totally perfect.”

  He smiled at me again and so I smiled back.

  And then the bell rang.

  The next afternoon, when I returned to Ms. Lawson’s room for the spelling bee participants’ meeting, the four eighth graders had already claimed the couch. Coco’s sister, Emma, sat to the far left, twirling her blond hair in her fingers and occasionally sucking on the ends. I didn’t have any friends there, of course, so I took a seat next to Dev. He had a notebook in front of him with the words “spelling bee” written in straight, square letters. He bounced his pen on the paper, making the button on the end click, click, click like a playing card in the spokes of a bicycle wheel. I imagined the letters were little soldiers marching to this furious beat.

  “So,” Dev said, but then his voice trailed off. It was like he knew he should say something to me, but didn’t know what. Was he angry, I wondered, that Coco was working with me?

  “So,” I said back. “Do you watch the bee?”

  He hesitated. “Well, yes, I went with—I mean, wait, do you mean the county bee? Or the one on television?”

  “The one on television. The Scripps National Spelling Bee.”

  He shook his head. “I never expected to be here,” he told me. “I don’t actually know what I’m doing here at all.”

  “Secret speller,” I murmured.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Just something Ms. Broadcheck said. About secret spellers. It doesn’t matter.”

  Dev nodded, though, as if he understood. “When Ms. Lawson said we had to take this test, I figured Coco would be here.”

  “Because of his sister?” I prompted.

  “Sure, I guess. And his brother, Clint. But more just him. You know, Coco.”

  I didn’t really know Coco, but I supposed it didn’t surprise me that he’d be expected to do well on the test. He was probably the smartest boy in our grade. Smartest after Lucas, anyway, who at that moment was crouched on the chair of one of Ms. Lawson’s chair-desks reading a graphic novel about Zeus and biting his fingernails.

  As if he could sense me looking at him, he raised his eyes to look at me. “I’m going to write my own graphic novel of Greek mythology. I’m just checking out the competition.” Then he ducked his head again. I heard a snicker from a seventh-grade boy who was so big, his legs stretched way out into the aisle in front of him.

  Dev placed his pen down in the center of his notebook. “Last year I went with him to watch Emma, and he was right next to me writing the words down in a book for her. Only he wrote them before the spellers said them. And he got them all right. Every single one. So how come he isn’t here?”

  I didn’t have a chance to ponder the question. Dr. Dawes, our principal, and Ms. Lawson came into the room together. Ms. Lawson carried a stack of papers. As she began passing them around, I realized Charlotte wasn’t there. So maybe she had dropped out, after all. Good.

  “Welcome, spellers!” Dr. Dawes exclaimed. “This is going to be an exciting few weeks for you!”

  I don’t know if she expected us to break into applause or war whoops of excitement, but we remained silent. The big seventh grader—Max, I think that was his name—scuffed his work boot against the floor. That was about it.

  The door opened, and there was Charlotte, small and tentative. She surveyed the room. There were two open seats in the circle that Ms. Lawson had created. One next to me. One next to Lucas. I saw her weighing her options. Her gaze drifted over to the couch. She was small. She might be able to fit there. If they let her in. She took a deep breath and then slid into the desk next to mine. I guess that meant I was the lesser of two evils.

  “Hi,” I whispered.

  “Hi,” she whispered back.

  And suddenly my mind exploded with a new vision, warm and familiar as the summer sun down by the water, racing together toward the ice-cream stand. Charlotte and I could do this together. We could quiz each other. I could teach her the tricks I had learned from years of watching the bees on television. She would help me to be more poised in front of the crowd. I could practically feel our shoulders pressed together as we studied the word list, her long black hair falling down toward the paper. And when we weren’t studying, we’d be chasing the clues in the books. She was curious. She had to be. It wouldn’t be like old times. Not exactly. But maybe it could even be better.

  Ms. Lawson put a packet down on Charlotte’s desk. “Sorry I was late,” Charlotte said.

  Ms. Lawson just nodded.

  Dr. Dawes explained how the school bee would work. It would be a morning assembly, which made Maybe-Max groan, and ask, “Really?”

  “Yes, really.”

  Dev wrote the words “school assembly” in his notebook. Then, underneath, he wrote: “Wear tie.” His pen hesitated over his paper before he added: “Ask Adam how to tie a tie?” Then he crossed that last bit out with a single straight line.

  “In your packet you’ll find all the rules of a spelling bee,” Ms. Lawson said. “I will be the head judge, and as you all know, I am a stickler, so make sure you know those rules. I am fond of you all, of course, but I’m not going to bend the regulations for you. No mumbling. No backtracking. No corrections. Got it?”

  We nodded. Dev wrote down: “Read all rules. Follow precisely.”

  “What if we run out of words?” Lucas asked.

  “Wouldn’t that be wonderful!” Dr. Dawes said cheerfully. “But I don’t think you need to worry about that. The list is quite long.”

  “It happened,” Lucas said. “In Kansas. At a county bee. They went through so many rounds, they used up all the words the spelling bee people had sent them, and then they went to the dictionary. And it went on so long that they sent everyone home and had to finish it another day.”

  “I suppose we’ll tackle that problem if we come to it,” Ms. Lawson said.

  “I just think you should have a contingency plan in place. I know a lot of words.” He pushed his glasses onto his face with the heel of his hand. “Then again, what am I saying? I could spell all day. The question is, can any of these people keep up with me? And the answer is, I think not.”

  “Lucas,” Ms. Lawson said.

  “Humility,” Lucas mumbled back to her without much conviction.

  Charlotte played with the staple in her packet, wiggling it back and forth like a loose tooth. We could study in the library, I decided, after school. I went there most every day anyway to wait for my mom. And of course that would give us plenty of time to look for clues, too. And it would mean she wouldn’t have to give up any time with Melinda, though I hoped—well, it was too much to hope,
wasn’t it, that she would give up Melinda altogether.

  Dr. Dawes and Ms. Lawson explained some more about the bee and the best ways to study. Dev wrote it all down in his neat handwriting, and I did feel a little bad for stealing away the person who could really help him. Maybe if things were going well with Charlotte, I could tell Coco that he should go help Dev, after all.

  When they finished, I reached down to pick up my backpack, then turned to ask Charlotte if she wanted to meet me at the library to study, but she was already hustling to the door. She had left her packet on the desk, though, so I wrote her name on it. I started to put it into my bag to give to her in homeroom, but Ms. Lawson saw and said, “Thanks, Ruth. I’ll make sure Charlotte gets that tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s probably for the best.”

  I walked out of the room as solo as I had come in.

  Eight

  Behoove

  Friday in the locker room, Lena wasn’t wearing a bra. She flipped off her T-shirt for gym class—it was an old one with a faded Wild Thing doing the Wild Rumpus on it—and pulled on a shirt and then a sweater. Melinda noticed. She wrinkled her nose, that’s how I knew. But she didn’t say anything.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said to her in the hall.

  “Melinda is a witch,” Lena said. “She’s a witch and the word that rhymes with it.”

  “ ‘Twitch’?” I asked.

  Lena raised her eyebrows as if she had misjudged me, and then saw that I was joking. “Actually, I was thinking ‘stitch,’ ” she said.

  “Or ‘switch.’ ”

  “ ‘Fibbledegitch.’ ” She grinned.

  “Still, you didn’t have to do it for me.”

  “Maybe I didn’t do it for you.”

  “Oh,” I said. And blushed.

  “Or maybe I did,” she said back. She was smiling. She didn’t make any sense at all. “You know, women used to burn their bras for women’s rights.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Lena put her hand up in the air. “Solidarity, sister.”

  Somehow I didn’t think our not wearing bras was going to bring down the tyranny of Melinda. Lena wrapped a silk scarf around her neck and tied it in a big, beautiful bow all while we walked to our lockers.

  I jammed my bag into the narrow metal space and took out my lunch in its insulated bag from L.L.Bean. I had to beg Mom not to get it monogrammed with my name. Lena had her lunch in a hand-sewn fabric bag. I went to my usual table and she sat down next to me. I guessed it was my turn in the rotation of where she sat.

  Coco glanced over at us from his table with the boys.

  “Who do you think the cutest boy in sixth grade is?” Lena asked me.

  Well, that was an abrupt disappointment.

  “What?” she asked.

  “All this boy-girl stuff.”

  “I think it’s Coco. Don’t you?”

  I glanced at Coco. He had warm brown eyes, and I thought his hair would be soft to touch.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “And I think Charlotte is the cutest girl. She must be like a million times cute, because she’s next to Melinda all the time and that makes anyone look ugly.”

  “She’s not that cute,” I said.

  “You guys used to be friends, right?” Lena asked.

  “Sure,” I said. “I guess. My moms and her dads are friends.”

  She nods. “I shouldn’t have asked that. About the cute boys. I don’t have a lot of girlfriends. I have three older sisters. Twins and one in between them and me. They talk about boys all the time. I guess I thought that’s what we’re supposed to talk about.”

  This raised a million questions in my head: Who are your friends? Where are they? Are we friends? “What do you want to talk about?” I asked her.

  “What are you eating?” she asked.

  “Peanut butter and Fluff,” I said, wishing this had been another chutney and cheddar day. Lena’s was in a little tin bowl and I couldn’t quite tell what it was. It looked lumpy and not at all appetizing. “You?”

  “Chicken garam masala. I got the recipe from Dev’s mom, but I don’t think I made it right. I didn’t have all the spices she put down, so I had to improvise, like on those cooking shows.”

  “You made it yourself?”

  “My sister Vera helped. I like to cook, but she actually wants to be a chef. Well, actually, she wants to be a restaurateur. I don’t think restaurateurs actually cook. She says when she gets older she’s going to turn the Salt and Sea Shack into a real nice sit-down restaurant.”

  “I love the Salt and Sea Shack!” I exclaimed. It was out by the piers and you could get the best fried clams and milk shakes.

  Lena rolled her eyes. “You and every yokel who makes his way up the coast.”

  I reddened.

  She didn’t seem to notice. “You’d feel differently if your whole house smelled like oil and sour clams.”

  “Your family owns the Salt and Sea Shack?”

  “Third generation,” she said. She twisted her hair and the streak of red flashed for a moment.

  “I like the red in your hair,” I told her.

  “It’s a compromise,” she replied, letting her hair fall back down. “It’s all my mom would let me do. I wanted to dye the ends red all around, red and orange so it would look like coal on fire.”

  “That’s what I thought when I saw it!” I said. “Like it was a log in a fire, only you can’t see that it’s still hot until you turn it over.”

  “A secret fire? I kind of like that.” She smiled to herself. “Coco’s watching you.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t look. He stopped watching.”

  “He’s helping me with the spelling bee. He probably just wants to know if we’re going to practice today.”

  “Are you?”

  I shook my head. “I want to get that science homework done before the weekend.”

  “Wanna do it together during study hall?” She paused. “Are you in study hall?”

  “I usually go to Ms. Lawson’s room. I’m her student aide.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I help her out.” I poked at my half-eaten sandwich. “Though really most of the time I just read.”

  “Cool. So, do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Want to work on the science together?”

  I hesitated. I don’t like working with other kids on schoolwork, because, frankly, they are usually just too slow. And, anyway, this entire conversation had been utterly perplexing. Half the time she was being nice, and the other half she seemed to be insulting me. “Maybe.”

  “Hey, it’s no great shakes or anything. I was just asking.”

  “No, we can. I just need to tell Coco.”

  “So go tell him.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes, right now. But first wipe the peanut butter off your face.”

  Coco, Adam, and Dev were huddled around something in the center of their table. When I got closer, it just seemed to be a plain plastic cup of water, about half-empty. Coco lifted his head and looked up at me through his brown hair. A grin spread on his face, and I was afraid I was about to be asked to settle another bet. “Ruth!” he said. “Hi!”

  “Hi,” I said. He kept staring up at me and I realized that it was still my turn to talk. “I, um, I came to say I can’t study for the spelling bee today.”

  “Oh,” he said. The smile faltered.

  “Tomorrow I can.”

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” Adam said.

  “Right. Monday, then.”

  Coco stared at the cup of water.

  “Yeah, Lena wants me to help her—I mean, Lena and I are going to do the science homework together.”

  Coco picked up a packet of salt, ripped open the top, and dumped it on the table. “Well, that makes sense.”

  “If you’re looking for someone to study words with—” Dev began.

  “What a
re you doing?” I interrupted.

  “I’m going to balance this cup on its edge.” Coco’s eyes were focused on the cup, and his hands hovered just beside it.

  “We’re each going to give him a dollar if he can,” Adam said. “And if he can’t, he has to give each of us a dollar. You want in?”

  I shook my head. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw Lena. She leaned her elbows on the table with her chin in her hand and was watching the whole thing like it was a silent movie.

  Coco took the cup and tilted it on its side so the water nearly touched the lip, then placed it down in the pile of salt. Slowly, like how we approached our old cat, Webster, when it was time to take him to the vet, he removed his hand from the cup. It held still on its edge. He leaned forward, pursed his lips, and blew the salt away. The cup didn’t move at all.

  He held his hands above his head. “That’s a dollar from each of you!” he exclaimed. Then he looked up at me. “Smart move not betting against me!” His smile stretched from ear to ear.

  “How’d you do that?” I asked.

  “A magician never reveals his tricks.”

  “It’s not magic; it’s science,” Dev mumbled.

  “Either way, it’s my trick,” Coco said, then turned to me. “But I’ll tell you if you win the spelling bee.”

  “Okay.”

  Lena was still watching us. It was a good thing she couldn’t hear me and my dopey reactions.

  “We could all do science together,” Coco said.

  “Well, I—”

  “I thought we were going to work on that together,” Adam said.

  “We are,” Coco said. “With Ruth and Lena. Right, Ruth?”

  “Right,” I agreed.

  “Great!” he said. “See you in study hall, then.”

  He looked back at the cup, which was still balanced on its edge like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I guessed that meant we were done, so I started backing away. When I was a few steps back, I said “Bye” in a soft voice, then spun and strode back toward Lena, who seemed as pleased with the whole interaction as Coco was with his cup.

  Nine

  Metamorphosis

  Mum was supposed to be home for twenty-four hours that weekend, but they were forecasting more snow, so she flew from Texas to Seattle for her next appointment. Once Charlotte asked me, “What exactly does your mum do, anyway?”