His house was a raised ranch, which Alan, Charlotte’s architect dad, claimed was an architectural curse that has been foisted on the people of Maine, but Lucas’s house felt cozy.
I followed him down carpeted stairs to his bedroom. I knew it was his because it had a fake license plate that said LUCAS on it, and stickers from computer games and graphic novels. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. I’d never been in a boy’s bedroom before. I hoped this wouldn’t get back to school somehow. I already had to listen to Melinda humming “Ruth and Lucas, sitting in a tree” all day.
Lucas pushed open his door. The curtains were drawn and it was dark inside, but I could make out shelves taking up the whole back wall and they were filled with aquariums. Some were dark and some had eerie green lights in them.
“Come on,” he said, from inside. He dropped down on the floor and picked up a graphic novel called Cardboard that had a picture of someone with huge eyes on the front. “I have lots of books if you want to read.”
“What are those?” I asked. “Pets?”
“Pets?” he replied, indignant. “Those are insects. I study them. I’m an entomologist, a person who studies bugs, not words. That’s an etymologist. Or maybe I’m just trying to confuse you in case those words come up in the bee.”
“I know the difference between an entomologist and an etymologist, and even if I didn’t, I wouldn’t get the word wrong in the bee, because I could ask for the definition and then I could put it together.”
“Sure,” he said.
I crossed the room to look in the aquariums. There were white maggots crawling over something fleshy looking. I stayed away from that one. In another, there was a chrysalis hanging from a leaf. In a third, a praying mantis, green and delicate, stared back at me. “What do you study?”
“The insects,” he said without looking up from his book.
“What about them? Like what they eat?”
He put down his book, annoyed. “What they eat, what they do, how they react to various stimuli.”
“Stimuli? Like what?” I couldn’t help but picture him pulling the legs off daddy longlegs.
“Lights on, lights off. Water. Heat.”
“Isn’t that torture?”
He half stood, half leaped to his feet like a jack-in-the-box with a hitch. He picked up a binder. “I write it all down in here. Everything I do comes from The Amateur Entomologist, so you know it’s all okay.”
“Do they do anything interesting?”
“Everything they do is interesting!”
He pointed to the praying mantis, which continued to stare at us, rubbing its front legs back and forth. He waved his hand in front of the glass and the insect seemed to disappear, then reappear in a different part of the cage. “Fast, huh?”
I nodded.
“My favorite are the bees. I had a hive at our old house. I’d watch them coming and going, doing the work for the queen, buzzing and dancing. Mom said we couldn’t bring them with us, though, because this house is too close to town and people wouldn’t like us to have bees. I still have some honey, though.”
He told me about swarms, medicated syrup, and mite treatments, and how you get the queen in the mail in a small box. All the while I pictured him walking up to the hive, the bees crawling over his skin-and-bones body, and he trusts, just trusts that they won’t sting him.
“I cried a little when I left my bees behind, but one of my old teachers offered to take them.”
“That’s funny,” I said.
“How is that funny?”
“Not that you cried. I mean about the—”
“Do you mean honey is funny? Because it rhymes? Rhymes aren’t necessarily funny, you know.”
“No, I meant that you keep bees and you’re into spelling bees.”
“I’m not especially into spelling bees. I just like winning.”
My mouth opened a little, and I closed it right up. Mum’s mother has an expression about how you shouldn’t leave your mouth open, because you’ll catch flies. In this room, who knew what all else might land in there. “You don’t care about the bee?”
“Nope,” he said. “I’m still going to crush you, though.” Then, after a brief hesitation, he added, “Sorry. My mom said I should be nice and try not to intimidate you about the bee.”
He wasn’t intimidating me. He was angering me. Exasperating me, to use a spelling bee word. He didn’t even care about the bee, just winning—no matter what the contest. Rubik’s Cube, spelling bees, map quizzes in Ms. Lawson’s class—it was all the same to him: he wanted to win just to win.
On a shelf above his desk were butterflies pinned inside wood-and-glass cases. “Where do you even get something like that?” I asked.
“I made them!” He trotted over next to me. “I catch them outside and then put them in one of these.” He held up a glass jar with a white cotton ball in the bottom.
“You just wait until they run out of air?”
“Of course not.” He twisted open the top and held it out to me. I breathed in and then rocked back. “Formaldehyde. I always have a couple of jars ready. You never know what kind of specimen you might find. I found that blue one outside our house when we first moved in. It was flitting around a peach tree. Isn’t it beautiful?”
The pin was pressed right through its thorax. I closed my eyes, but it didn’t stop me from imagining the beautiful butterfly flitting around the bushes outside Lucas’s house, only to be unceremoniously dumped into a stinky glass jar. It was probably good that Lucas didn’t talk about this hobby at school.
I turned around and examined the insects some more. There was a large beetle, its shell an oily yellow and blue. When I peered closer, it skittered away. “So this is what you do on a playdate?” I asked.
“I’ve never had a playdate,” he replied.
“Not a big bug-hunting crowd at your last school?”
He pursed his lips.
“Insect hunters,” I corrected myself. “Entomologists.”
“My dad used to say that entomology was wasted on the young.”
Used to say. I didn’t ask.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Normally you talk or play something.”
“Do you want to play chess?”
“I don’t know how.”
“It’s easy.” He stood up and went to the wall opposite the insects. This one was filled with books. He yanked out a thin brown one—so ugly, my heart actually fluttered that there might be a note in it—and tossed it to me. Essential Chess. While I flipped through it, he pulled out a board. “I’ll be black,” he said. “Which means you can be white.”
“I’ve figured out that much, thanks.”
“It means you go first. It’s an advantage.” He set up both sides of the board. Naming the pieces as he did so. “King, queen, pawn, knight, bishop—”
“What’s the castle?” I asked.
He groaned.
“What?”
“It’s not a castle. It’s a rook.”
“A rook?” My body leaned in toward him. “A rook and a knight?”
“Yes.” He seemed perplexed. “And a pawn and a bishop and a king and a queen.”
I found the pages that told me which ways the pieces can move.
He beat me in five moves, but I was distracted. My knight in dingy armor . . . by crook or rook.
“That’s just the way the spelling bee is going to go.”
I closed the book. When I left, I took it with me without even asking.
“How was the playdate?” Mum asked, her face pixelated on the computer.
“He has a room full of bugs and he crushed me at chess.”
“Sounds like a regular date, not a playdate.” She laughed.
“But I did get to eat store-bought cookies, so it wasn’t all a loss.”
“Oh, the horror!” Mum cried out, putting her wrist to her forehead. “Store-bought cookies? Don’t tell your mom!”
“I’m right here,” Mom said from the stove, where she was stir-frying vegetables and tofu. She’d read that we should start eating more vegetarian meals. “And Ms. Hosgrove said it went very well.”
“It wasn’t so bad,” I said.
“The bugs?” Mum prompted.
“He’s an amateur entomologist. He has all these different kinds. Praying mantis, maggots—you know, bugs. But you have to call them insects or he gets mad.”
“Understandable,” Mom said. She pushed a pile of snow peas from the cutting board into the pan.
“Hey,” Mum said. “I’m going to go to the library when I’m out here in Seattle. They have over a million books and they get moved around by a robotic system. And the stacks, they go round and round so they never stop, you know. I’ll take some photographs for you.”
“I’d like to see the robots.”
“They aren’t exactly robots, I don’t think. I mean, not like our Hoover robot.” Mum called the vacuum a “Hoover,” which I guess was an old vacuum brand. “Anyway, I have the spelling list here. Do you want to go a few rounds?”
“Sure,” I said. Coco and I had practiced that afternoon, and I was doing pretty well, but a little more practice couldn’t hurt. “ ‘Succotash,’ ” she said.
“Succotash,” I repeated back to her.
“Ask me to use it in a sentence,” she said before I had a chance to start spelling.
“Can you please use it in a sentence?”
“Suffering succotash, I sure do miss you guys!” She tilted her head back and laughed, and the camera on her computer couldn’t keep up with it, so on-screen she jerked around from fuzzy to focused.
“Mum,” I said. “You are a dork.”
“Dinner’s ready,” Mom said. She walked over behind me and brought her own face into our frame. “We’ll talk tomorrow, hon,” she said to Mum.
“Grand,” Mum said.
“Hey, Mum,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I sure do miss you, too.”
Charlotte caught me in the hall before homeroom. I already had my Harriet Wexler book out, ready to sink into a chair and keep reading. I was at a very exciting part. Taryn was trying to forge a stream, but her horse lost its footing and she slid off. Turns out it was more river than stream and she was being washed down, bouncing from rock to rock. The description went on for two pages before she was washed up on the shore.
Charlotte said, “Come here a sec,” and led me to a nook under the stairwell. I hesitated before going in. It could be an ambush.
Or it could be that Charlotte had brought the clue she had found, and she was going to ask me to help solve the rest with her. If she asked nicely, I just might say yes.
I tucked around the corner and found Charlotte tugging on her hair and wearing skinny jeans and those stupid fluffy boots. “I heard you went to Lucas’s yesterday.”
She was invited for a playdate, too. Her dads must be making her go and she wants a preview.
“Yep,” I said. Let her discover those bugs on her own.
“You shouldn’t do that.”
When we were seven, we rode our bikes through town, down by the water. A dog charged out of the yard of a rental property. It was long and lean with muscles as tight as a racehorse’s. It bounded straight toward her with teeth bared and drool spewing. I pedaled hard in front of her, then spun my bike out so my back wheel hit the dog and sent him mewling back home. The hit shook my bike, my hands, my bones. Through her tears, she had said, “Why’d you do that? You shouldn’t hurt a dog.”
She stomped her boot to loosen some snow that was stuck onto the suede. “You can’t just go to Lucas’s house.”
“Why not?” I knew why she thought I shouldn’t—the rumors that would start, his social leprosy—but I wanted to hear too-kind-to-hurt-a-raging-dog-Charlotte say it.
“You just shouldn’t,” she told me. “I’m trying to help.”
I turned toward the hallway. Could I just walk away?
“If you would just be a little more normal, Ruth, it wouldn’t be so bad. You’d see. Melinda’s really nice—if you would just—” She stopped. “Never mind. Forget it.” She turned and left me there standing in the dirty puddle of water that had melted off our boots.
I wanted to be angry, but my heart was pitter-pattering because Charlotte had maybe just told me she still wanted to be my friend.
Eleven
Contrapuntal
I stared right into the nonexistent eyes of Ferdinand Frontenac. He seemed to be sleeping, dreaming of his glory days as the great unifier of the peninsula.
The squares on the floor were made up of four smaller squares, two feet by two feet in total. I flipped through Lucas’s Essential Chess book to the page about how knights can move. They make L shapes. I turned so my back faced the statue, moved two big squares to the left, then forward one. I was about to move forward like a rook, but then I stopped. If Ferdinand was the king, then I should start where the knight would start on a chessboard.
From the gym down the hall, I heard the thump, thump, and squeak of basketball practice. Charlotte was in there. She’d tried out for the team with Melinda, and both had made the cut, though Melinda was on the traveling team, and Charlotte was on the more-junior varsity team, only they didn’t call it that, since they didn’t want to make anyone feel bad.
I flipped back in the book to the diagram of how the chessboard was set for the start of the game. The knight was to the right of the king, with a bishop between them. I moved so there was one square between me and the statue. I wondered if Coco played chess. I could ask him, but then he might want to know why, and I didn’t want to share these clues with anyone. If I found a couple more, I could bring them to Charlotte. Or maybe this would be my solo expedition, like Taryn in The Riddled Cottage. Either way, I didn’t want anyone else involved, not even Coco.
“What are you doing?” It was Melinda, because of course it was Melinda. Her ponytail was high on her head, and she was wearing a white sleeveless shirt and bright pink short shorts that matched her pink-and-white basketball shoes. In her hand she held a shining mouth guard.
“The latest dance craze. Chess hop. Haven’t you heard of it?”
She rolled her eyes.
“My New York City friends told me about it.” I didn’t have any New York City friends, but I could. My moms still had friends down there, and some had kids. I even knew their names if Melinda pressed me.
Melinda, though, looked me up and down. My flannel button-down was not tailored to hug every potential curve. It was a man’s shirt, from L.L.Bean, with the sleeves rolled up. I wore it over old sweatpants that were a little tight and a lot short but long enough to tuck into my snow boots. Lena approved, but Melinda sniffed out the truth: I had been late for school and my weekend clothes were close at hand.
“Charlotte says you’re all right, but I think she’s got you all wrong.”
I couldn’t stop myself. “She said that?”
Melinda smirked. She was the kind of girl you should never show a weakness to, and now she had me.
“Because I think she’s a—” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word Melinda threw around so easily in the locker room. “Traitor.”
Melinda laughed. “I’ll be sure to tell her that.”
I flinched but didn’t tell her not to, because then she’d have me two times over. She spun so her ponytail whipped around, and marched back to the gym.
I stood there wondering how she was going to relay this conversation to Charlotte. I would come off weird, for sure, even weirder than I had actually acted. She would definitely tell Charlotte that I had called her a traitor, and probably embellish it with a few more details. I blew my hair out of my eyes with an exasperated sigh. Stupid. It was stupid to ever open my mouth around Melinda.
I picked up where I had been when she’d interrupted me. I moved like the knight, then I became the rook. Rooks can go in any direction (forward, backward, left, right), as far
as they can until they bump into something. So I walked straight forward. I could see the side door of the school in front of me. I didn’t know what I expected to happen. A loose tile I could pry up? A clue to drop from the sky?
Of course neither happened. I went back to where the knight turned into the rook and tried again. This time to the left. I brushed by the door to the main office. It was not the same as running into it, but maybe this was what the clue meant. So I opened the door. Dr. Dawes, the principal, was still there, in a back office working with a low light. There was a display of old yearbooks, and I paged through them quickly. Nothing but falsely smiling face after falsely smiling face. When we did school pictures this year, I didn’t smile. The photographer tried in a halfhearted way to cajole me, but I remained straight-lipped. Mom made me get retakes and so I grinned like a monkey. She wasn’t happy about that, but she still framed the biggest one and hung it up above the couch in the living room with one of those gallery lights shining on it. I think she was trying to embarrass me, but it wasn’t like I had anyone over. The mice and spiders could laugh all they wanted.
Next to the yearbooks was a stand with some brochures. Nothing. A display case with history and awards. I peeked around looking for a telltale envelope shoved somewhere.
“Oh, hello, Ruth. Can I help you?” Dr. Dawes asked.
I shook my head. “I’m okay.”
Dr. Dawes hesitated. “So, what are you in here for?”
“Oh,” I said. “I wanted to check the lost and found.”
Dr. Dawes pointed to a box by the door. “What did you lose?”
“My retainer.”
I didn’t wear a retainer.
“Oh, dear!” Dr. Dawes exclaimed. She hurried over to the box and started digging through. “I know how expensive those can be. Did you ask in the cafeteria?”
I shook my head again.
She held up a wrinkled sweatshirt that I knew belonged to Charlotte, but I didn’t say anything. She stacked all the clothes on her thigh as she crouched next to the box. “I don’t see it,” she said. “But listen, I can send an e-mail out to teachers.”
The Friendship Riddle Page 8