The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  I didn’t really have an answer. As far as I could tell, she went to conferences and trade shows and taught people how to use software in order to sell it to them, and then went to their business or wherever and taught them how to use it some more. Sales and training is what she called it.

  Evidently, whatever it was she sold was not needed on the coast of Maine.

  Mom tried to overcompensate. I woke up Saturday morning and smelled pancakes. Not just pancakes, but blueberry pancakes made with blueberries we’d picked over the summer and frozen. There was bacon, too, from pigs raised on Swift Island, and orange juice and hot chocolate with whipped cream. “Wow,” I said when I shuffled downstairs.

  “I was just feeling a little festive this morning,” she said.

  She dropped three pancakes onto a plate and made a frame of bacon around it. She put it in front of me with a flourish. I doused it with maple syrup and started eating.

  I was about a third of the way through the second pancake, my mouth full, when she cleared her throat. “There’s something I need to talk to you about,” she said, then took a drink from her coffee cup.

  “What?” I said through the pancakes.

  “Ruth,” she said. “It’s a little bit awkward. Really it’s my fault. I should have been more open about all this.”

  I swallowed. “What is it, Mom?”

  “I think you’re getting old enough for a bra.”

  I couldn’t help but look down at my chest. It was a straight line down from where my neck hit my body to my waist, as if I’d been cut from one smooth piece of paper. “Not necessary,” I said.

  “Well, sure, maybe not completely necessary, not yet. But you’ll grow. I was a late bloomer, too.”

  I raised my eyebrows. It was Mom who carried me in her belly, but they never told me whose egg it was.

  “I’m not sure about Mum. We can ask her when we videoconference tonight.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Oh, she won’t be embarrassed at all. She’s much better about this sort of thing than I am. Which is funny, I suppose, since I’m the doctor.”

  “No, I mean, that’s okay. I don’t want a bra.”

  She fingered a piece of bacon. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  I thought of Lena and how it was like our thing now: two bra-less girls. I didn’t know if I wanted to have a thing with Lena or not, but I wasn’t ready to cut off that option.

  “Do other girls wear bras?”

  I sighed. Mom could not be more obvious. Charlotte. She was talking about Charlotte. I could just see her running into Eliot and Alan and them telling her how they went shopping for a bra for Charlotte. It would be a great, uproarious fish-out-of-water tale, and Mom would be laughing, but the whole time she’d be thinking, I haven’t gotten a bra for Ruth! I must get a bra for Ruth!

  I took another bite of my pancakes. It nearly lodged in my throat when I realized a much worse scenario: Charlotte told her dads I was one of the only girls in the sixth grade who wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Some do,” I said. “But not all.”

  “Okay.” She still held the bacon, flipping it from side to side on her plate.

  “Okay,” I agreed. Conversation over.

  “Maybe we should go and buy one or two just in case.”

  Conversation not over.

  “We could get training bras. They’re like undershirts, but they cut off right below your breasts.”

  “I know what training bras are.”

  “It’s just that with this weather and my schedule, I don’t know when we’re going to have another chance.”

  Oh, my God, it’s a bra emergency!

  Mom caught me smiling. “So we’ll go?” she asked.

  I had wanted to go to the library to see if I could find another note, or maybe even cajole Charlotte into giving up the one she had. But Mom’s face looked about as excited as it did when I came down the stairs on Christmas morning. “Sure,” I said. “We’ll go.”

  When we got on the highway going down toward Topsham, I figured we were going to go to Old Navy, or, preferably, Target, where we would go to the underwear section lodged between women’s clothes and the baby food, and I’d grab a couple of training bras and we’d go to the checkout, where I’d make sure to pick the line with the middle-aged woman and not the teenaged boy and then we would be on our way. Maybe I would be able to convince her to take us to the movies or one of those big chain restaurants with limitless bread.

  Instead she brought me into a lingerie store for a bra fitting.

  “There’s nothing to measure,” I said.

  “You don’t need to be embarrassed.”

  “I’m not embarrassed. I’m just stating a fact. I thought we were going to get training bras.”

  “When I got my first bra, my mother brought me to Town Shop on the Upper West Side. The New York Times did a feature on them.”

  I’m pretty sure a New York Times feature is what first brought my moms to Promise.

  “So it’s like a rite of passage?” I asked. “When I get my period, are you going to make me go sit in a hut in the woods until it’s over?”

  Mom’s face blanched. “Period? Oh, that will be coming soon, I suppose.”

  “I’d rather do one of those go-out-in-the-woods-and-hunt-a-wolf things that boys do.”

  “Ruth, honestly, I’m just talking about getting a bra that fits you well.”

  “At least I didn’t say I wanted to go through the Spartan rite of passage.”

  “A bra that fits you will give you confidence in your lovely body.”

  I wondered if she had been talking to Ms. Pepper. My glorious body.

  “In Sparta, the boys had to murder someone.”

  “Yes, I know. And it was usually a slave and nothing to be glorified.”

  She navigated through racks of lace and ribbon like we were on a television race show and if we were the first ones to the fitting department, we would win a special prize.

  The prize, as it turned out, was an old woman with cold fingers who wrapped a tape measure around me and tick, tick, ticked her tongue on the top of her mouth. It was like she had a little computer in there and she was type-typing away, sending my measurements off to the bra-computer in the sky, which would surely come back with a message of DOES NOT COMPUTE.

  “Our training bras come in pink, white, and flesh,” the woman said.

  “Whose flesh?” I asked.

  “Ruth, don’t be sassy.”

  “I’m being serious. Not everyone has the same color flesh. Charlotte wouldn’t be that color,” I said, pointing to a beige bra hanging on the rack. It looked big enough for three women.

  “That’s taupe,” the woman said.

  “Pink,” Mom said, and the wrongness of this choice startled me.

  “No,” I said. “White.”

  “How about one of each? For variety.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. It’s not like I was ever going to wear them, anyway.

  When the woman went to get the bras, Mom turned to me. I expected her to tell me that while she admired my sense of equality, a lingerie shop might not be the best place to discuss the nuances of labeling something flesh-toned. Instead she said, “Does Charlotte wear a bra these days?”

  These days?

  “I don’t know. I haven’t asked her.”

  “You haven’t noticed in gym class or anything?”

  So Charlotte had told her dads that I didn’t wear a bra yet. She must have.

  “Mom, I just change and go. The locker room smells, and the boys come through.”

  “The boys?”

  The woman came back carrying three bras. They were about as bland as could be. I wondered where Melinda got her lacy ones. Probably her mom took her to Victoria’s Secret, which, I decided, would be the only thing more horrible than being here.

  Mom and the woman waited and stared at me. “Um,” I said.

  “We’ll wait out here,” the woman
said, and snapped the curtain shut.

  I lifted my undershirt off and pulled the white bra off its tiny hanger. I shimmied it on over my head.

  “What do you mean, the boys come into the locker room? Have you told the gym teachers?” Mom called from the other side of the curtain.

  “They know,” I said.

  “How’s the fit?” the bra lady asked.

  The fit? It was like one of my undershirts, but instead of going over my belly, elastic encircled my torso.

  “Fine,” I said. “These will be fine.”

  “They know? Are they doing something about it?”

  “It’s the only way to get to the gym,” I told her as I took the bra off. “The way it’s set up, the boys have to go through the girls’ locker room to get into the gym.”

  The bra lady returned to the room just as I had my arms straight over my head, my chest exposed. “Back on,” she instructed.

  I decided not to argue and slid the bra back on. She tugged at the elastic band with her bony, icy fingers and did some more tick-tick-ticking.

  “And the boys come through willy-nilly?” Mom asked.

  “They’re supposed to wait.”

  “Frontenac Consolidated School?” the bra lady asked.

  I nodded.

  “It was the same way when I was there. It was the high school then, though.”

  “So it’s been that way for decades and no one has done anything about it?” Mom asked, shaking her head. Her eyes were flashing.

  Oh, no.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “The boys wait outside. And we all just hurry because you don’t want to be the one that’s holding up the whole class. The boys get antsy.”

  “I just think that’s simply unacceptable.”

  Bra Lady raised her eyebrows.

  “It’s fine,” I told my mom. “Really.”

  But Mom’s radar had detected something to be outraged about, and she wouldn’t stop until she had fixed it. It would be just like the yogurt incident in third grade. Mom found out that every day the vegetarian option for school lunch was yogurt. Just yogurt. It didn’t matter that I was not a vegetarian and that I didn’t buy school lunch; she still made this huge fuss about it. The cafeteria workers rolled their eyes every time they saw me coming, and I bet if I had eaten there, they would have spit in my food.

  Mom washed the bras, let them dry overnight, then put them back on their tiny little hangers and hung them in my closet. Sunday afternoon I sat staring at them, contemplating the tiny-ness of the hangers. They must have special tiny hanger machines, so maybe they needed tiny people to run them—or children. Maybe these were made in one of those countries that still use child labor, like China. If she hadn’t been adopted, Charlotte could have been making these hangers.

  That wasn’t actually my thought: it had gotten lodged in my brain by Melinda, who’d said it when we were discussing child labor as part of current events in Ms. Lawson’s class. Melinda said that Charlotte’s parents had rescued her from the floor of some factory, which was stupid because Charlotte was adopted as a baby. Then Charlotte explained how in China people were only allowed to have one baby, and most people valued boys more than girls, so a lot of girls were put up for adoption, or sometimes killed. Melinda started crying and threw her lanky arms around Charlotte as if Charlotte had just, in that very moment, been saved from the clutches of death.

  Mom came in and sat down beside me on the bed. “Do you think that tiny hangers are made in sweatshops?” I asked her.

  She tucked her legs up and considered the question. “Ruthabella, I think far too many things are made in sweatshops.”

  “Were there sweatshops in the Ivory Coast?”

  She shook her head. “Not that I saw. It’s more an agrarian society. Kids definitely worked long days in the field. Most of our cocoa comes from there. And coffee. Some of the farms were great. Others, not so much, and the kids there, well, they were certainly exploited. They took us to visit a cooperative farm. Well, it wasn’t so much a farm. The farmers brought their beans there to be processed. I ate a raw cocoa bean.” She grinned. “It was disgusting. Bitter.”

  “Bitter,” I repeated.

  “Do you think it would be possible to roast cocoa beans and make a drink?” she asked. “Something like coffee?”

  “Maybe.”

  “With sweetened condensed milk. That would be delicious.” She closed her eyes as if dreaming about cold days building snow forts, then coming in and sipping on the fair-trade chocolate drink straight out of her own imagination.

  “I wanted to talk to you about your birthday.” And like that, we were back to reality.

  “What about it?”

  “Alan and Eliot told us that a lot of the kids are having boy-girl parties now. Mum and I talked about it, and while I’m not entirely sold, we do think it would be nice for you to have a party.” She scooted back a little on the bed.

  Of course Charlotte told her dads that. She knew it would get back to my moms, and, she hoped, I would have the party, and she and Melinda could do all the truth or daring or whatever with the boys.

  “We don’t really have room here, but we could do it at the hospital. They have a big room for classes and staff meetings.”

  “You want me to have my party at the hospital?”

  “Did you have someplace else in mind? When I was growing up, kids had them at a roller rink or a bowling alley. Do you want to go to the bowling alley?”

  “No.”

  “Good. We’d probably have to rent out the whole thing in order to have enough lanes.”

  “How many people do you think I’m going to have?”

  “If it is going to be a boy-girl party, we thought it made sense for you to invite the whole class. We’re not convinced that you’ve given—that people have had a chance to really get to know you, the real you.”

  “They know me fine.”

  Mom smoothed her hand over the quilt on my bed. “I’m not sure that’s true, honey.”

  “Why can’t we just do what we’ve always done? I like that. It’s a tradition.”

  “Something special with Charlotte?”

  “No. Not Charlotte.”

  “Someone else?” Her voice radiated hope. Like if it were one of those graphic novels that Lucas liked so much, the letters would be all caps and drawn in wiggly lines with sparkle dashes coming off them.

  “I’m not really sure . . .”

  “How about Lucas?”

  “Lucas Hosgrove?”

  “Maybe after your playdate, you’ll realize—”

  “Playdate?” I interrupted.

  “I told you about that.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Didn’t I? I really meant to. Well, you are going there tomorrow.”

  “No one has playdates anymore.”

  She frowned, but I could see she was determined not to let it bother her. The edges of her mouth twitched like live wires after a thunderstorm. “Fine, then. You’ve been invited over to Lucas’s house.”

  I groaned. “No,” I told her. “My answer is no.”

  “I’ve already said yes for you,” she replied, lips still sparking. “His mother called up during the week and suggested the two of you get together. Since you are both going to be in the spelling bee, she thought that was something you had in common, and I agreed. Great friendships have been built on less.”

  I wondered if Lucas’s mother had called Charlotte’s family or Dev’s. I couldn’t imagine Charlotte going over to Lucas’s house. She would find a way to die of embarrassment. “He’s my top competition,” I said.

  “You can help each other study.”

  “Why would I help my top competition study?”

  “Well, I am sure you can find something else you have in common.”

  I looked at my Harriet Wexler book on my nightstand. She was deep in the forest, hungry and alone. I thought that I should get back to her and help her on he
r way.

  “So you’ll ride his bus home tomorrow,” she said.

  I groaned again. “Can’t we postpone it?”

  “I don’t see why you’re being so difficult about it.”

  “He wants to annihilate me. That’s his plan for the spelling bee. To crush me.”

  “I’m sure that’s just talk. What’s that called? Trash talk? It’s all just part of the game.”

  “Okay, but let’s say this plan of yours works and he and I become friends, then I have to go against him in the bee. I don’t want to like him. I need to be fierce against my competition.”

  Mom gave an exasperated sigh, and it was like all the frustration marched right off her tongue and parasailed its way toward me. “It’s just a school spelling bee, Ruth. Don’t let it rule your life.”

  I lifted my Harriet Wexler book and started reading. Just a school spelling bee? That didn’t even warrant a response.

  “Ruth,” she said.

  “Lena,” I said. “I want Lena to come for my birthday. And I want to go somewhere with good food.”

  Mom’s eyes positively lit up, and she jumped off the bed. I knew she was going to go right to the school directory to look up Lena and send an e-mail off to her parents. Before she went out the door, she spun back, leaned over, and put a kiss right on the top of my head.

  Ten

  Mahal

  Lucas’s mom seemed relatively normal for a woman who thought it was okay to invite near strangers over for playdates. She offered us milk and cookies, which, come to think of it, was awfully suspicious, like she might actually be a robot intent on world domination and this was her acting the way television told her a typical mom should. They were store-bought cookies, the kind that come in a bag and are hard and uniformly round. I hated those cookies. Mum likes them. She likes all the American snack foods, especially Twinkies, which I guess you can’t get in Ireland.

  Lucas’s mom put the plate of cookies down and gave us each a plastic cup of milk. If I were Lucas’s mom, I’d probably use plastic cups, too. He shoved three cookies into his mouth, gulped his milk, and then said, “Come on.”