The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  Mom was so excited that I’d gone over to a friend’s house—on my own without her interference—that she called up Mum so we could all talk about it. What could I say? That we’d found a phone booth and tore out a page from the phone book?

  “Her family runs the Salt and Sea Shack,” I said. “But we had lasagna.”

  “Oh, I love lasagna!” Mom said, as if I had announced we’d had steak tartare or crème brûlée, like it was a rare treat.

  “Is she a speller?” Mum asked. Now her room looked more modern, with a glass-shelved bookcase and a flat-screen TV behind her.

  “No,” I said.

  “Good. You wouldn’t want to go up against a friend.”

  I gave Mom a meaningful look, thinking of how she had sent me to Lucas’s house, but Mom was frowning and shaking her head at Mum, and I realized they were thinking of Charlotte. “She likes to cook,” I said. “But she didn’t make the lasagna. Her mom is Italian, I guess.”

  “Did you get the link I sent you?” Mum asked.

  I nodded. I still hadn’t played the games, though. “Yep. Thanks.”

  “When I get home, it will be spelling boot camp. You will be untouchable!”

  “Of course, you have been studying,” Mom said. She waved her hair in the air in a spiral. “With the boy . . .”

  I wasn’t about to fall into that trap, not even to supply Coco’s name. “Did you know that there was a spelling bee where the kids knew so many words that they had to leave the list and go to the dictionary, and even then they had to stop and then start again on another day?”

  “That is a fascinating story,” Mum said. “But nothing you need to worry about.” Then she clapped her hands together. “Oh!” she said. “Look at this. I got it at the Seattle library.” She held up a package with a figurine of a woman dressed in a blue jacket and a long skirt. She held her finger up to her lips. “Librarian action figure! For Eliot!”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her that he already had three. They stood like tin soldiers in his office at the library. “Where to next?” I asked.

  “I’m driving down to Eugene, and then on to Portland Junior.” Mum always referred to Portland, Maine, as Portland the First, and the one in Oregon as Junior since our Portland came first. “But then I should be flying home to you.”

  “Good,” Mom said. “This trip seems even longer.”

  “Interminable,” Mum said. “Spell it, Ruth.”

  I thought about the root of the word. “Terminus.” “The end.” “Interminable. I-N-T-E-R-M-I-N-A-B-L-E. Interminable.”

  “Good girl, Ruth!”

  “I miss you, Mum,” I said.

  “I miss you, too, sweetheart.”

  Her image on the screen flickered. “It looks like we’re losing you, hon,” Mom said.

  “I’ve got to dash to a meeting anyway. Talk to you soon.” She kissed her hand and then blew it at us. Mom pretended to catch it, snapping her hand closed, then pressed it onto my cheek.

  Fifteen

  Synergy

  On Monday, Coco brought in a game he’d made to help us study. He wrote a bunch of words on cards, and then places of origin on pieces of construction paper that were sun-faded around their edges. Old English was on green that was nearly yellow at its borders, and Latin was on red that had faded to pink on its frame. It made me think of the notes with the intricate borders around their riddles, and once again I thought of telling him about the clues but stopped myself. He shuffled up the index cards, and then I was supposed to put them on the right place of origin as fast as I could.

  “I still don’t understand the point of this,” I said as we were setting up for a second round. It had started snowing again, softly this time, the flakes drifting sideways and up outside the window as much as they were falling down.

  “Spelling isn’t just memorization. It’s patterns. The more patterns you have, the easier it will be for you to figure out a word you don’t know.” He handed me the stack of cards. “Go!”

  I put “ramen” onto Japan, and “muumuu” onto New World (it’s Hawaiian). “Gruff” was Dutch. The next word stopped me: “robot.” I held the card in my hand. “I know how to spell ‘robot.’ I’ll never need to figure it out.”

  “Patterns,” he said again. I tapped the card against my lip, then put it on the Latin pile. He shook his head. “Slavic,” he said.

  “Really? Slavic?”

  “Czech, actually. ‘Robota’ means ‘compulsory labor.’ ”

  “Why don’t you do the bee?” I asked as I put “saboteur” into the French pile.

  “I wasn’t one of the top finishers in the grade.”

  “You should have been,” I said. “Ms. Lawson said so. Dev, too. At the meeting of the participants, he said he couldn’t believe he was one of the top finishers and you weren’t. He said when you guys went to watch your sister last year, you knew all the words up to the very end.”

  “One more.” He nodded at the card in my hand.

  “ ‘Bratwurst.’ ” I placed it on the German pile.

  “Good.” He gathered up the cards. “You know my sister, Emma, won the school bee last year. That was small fries,” he said. “My older brother, Clint, went to nationals.”

  “Really?”

  He shuffled a new set of cards, making a shrifting sound that reminded me of the ocean. “We all went down to Washington, DC, with him, stayed in a hotel, met a lot of the other kids. There was a boy from Alaska who had a bear tooth around his neck. He said he caught and killed the bear himself.”

  “That was just a story, right? To scare the other kids?”

  Coco said, “Maybe, but he looked like he could kill a bear. Anyway, my brother did all the pretests, and he was one of the kids who wound up onstage—on television—and he got his first word wrong. And he had to sit up there through round after round, and then we drove back home.”

  He tapped the stack of cards.

  “So what are you saying?” I asked. Was he afraid of failing? Of having to sit up there, feeling a thousand eyes on him? “Just because your brother and sister flubbed, that doesn’t necessarily mean it would happen to you.”

  His hands shuffled the cards slowly. “It might. The reason they messed up—”

  “Of course it might,” I interrupted. “Anything might happen, but if you prepared yourself as well as you’re preparing me—it just seems unlikely.”

  “They were prepared. Trust me. It’s more complicated than that.”

  I furrowed my brow. “The past, it doesn’t determine what’s going to happen in the future.”

  Coco smiled. Or, anyway, his lips turned up, but his eyes turned down and lost their shine. “That’s what my dad always says about sports. Baseball especially. He says the past isn’t destiny. That statistics are descriptive, not prescriptive.”

  “That’s different, though. I mean, if a baseball player never hits the first pitch, like their batting average on first pitches is 0.075 or whatever, then chances are he isn’t going to hit the ball. But your brother and sister—well, first of all, it’s not a big enough sample size. And second, they’re them, not you.”

  “You like baseball?” he asked. Was he missing my point or changing the subject?

  “My mom really likes it.”

  “The British one?”

  “No. The American one. Don’t tell anyone, but she’s a Yankees fan.”

  He laughed and handed the cards to me. “Are we going to study or what?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let’s study.”

  After the next round, while he sorted the cards again, peering carefully at each one, I asked, “Did your parents say anything about the e-mail my mom sent?”

  He rolled his eyes before he could stop himself.

  “What?” I asked.

  “My mom gave me a big lecture about privacy, about respecting people’s bodies—all of that. I told her I never go in until Ms. Wickersham blows the whistle. It was nothing.”

  “I didn�
��t tell her to say anything.”

  “I know.”

  “I have to get changed in the supply closet now.”

  The red spread across his cheeks. He held one of the cards against his lips. “I was just thinking that maybe I should do something like this with root words. Would that help?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. How did you know I didn’t tell my mom to send the e-mail?”

  “Because you’re smart. Way too smart to do that.”

  I nodded, but what he said didn’t slip by me. “Because kids think it’s stupid, right?”

  “Stupid,” he said as if pondering the word. “Country of origin?”

  “Ha-ha.”

  He wouldn’t look at me, only at the cards. “Anytime something makes your parents stop what they are doing and talk to you about boy and girl stuff, that’s not anyone’s favorite, right?”

  I took the stack of cards from him and began sorting. “Can you really put five marshmallows in your mouth?” I asked.

  “Maybe more,” he boasted, though I thought it was a strange thing to be boastful about.

  “It’s seems impossible. Let’s say each marshmallow is a one-inch cube.” I drew a cube on a piece of scrap paper.

  “At least an inch. We’d have to measure to be sure.”

  “Let’s say one for the sake of argument. So that’s a cubic inch multiplied by five. The volume of the inside of your mouth is five cubic inches?”

  He gaped his mouth wide.

  “That’s three, maybe four, max.”

  “They compress,” he said.

  “So it’s not really measuring the volume of your mouth, or whose is biggest—greatest, I mean.” It seemed important to use the right term with Coco. I didn’t want him to think I was stupid.

  “Adam has the biggest mouth, but not the greatest.” Coco laughed.

  “How could you measure the volume of your mouth?” I pondered.

  We both lifted our heads at the same time.

  “You drink!” he said.

  “Right—and measure how much.”

  “You fill your mouth as much as you can and then spit it out into a measuring cup.”

  We both wrinkled our noses.

  “If you had a set amount, you could fill your mouth and then subtract what was left over,” I said.

  “I’m doing it tonight,” he said eagerly. “You, too?”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll bet you six marshmallows that mine’s bigger,” he said.

  “But mine’s greater,” I replied. Stupid. But Coco just laughed.

  Lena’s head popped up into the window of Ms. Lawson’s room, then disappeared.

  Next she leaned in from the side. Her black hair fell down like the sheets of snow that slid off the roof and crashed to the ground during class.

  Next it was just her fingers: the blue-, black-, and purple-polished tips were flittering bees around a flower.

  “Someone is trying to get your attention,” Coco said.

  “Someone is,” I said.

  “It’s Lena.”

  “I know. We’re working on a project.”

  “The Africa project?”

  “What? No. That’s a solo project, remember? And, anyway, it hasn’t started yet.”

  “You seemed like maybe you worked ahead,” he said with a shrug.

  Lena popped up and pressed her lips against the glass in a big pucker-up smooch.

  I am going to kill you, Lena.

  “I wonder if she knows how dirty that glass is. I saw Toby do a fish face in that exact same spot during homeroom,” Coco told me.

  I wrinkled my nose, and that made Coco laugh, which was too much for Lena. She threw the door open.

  “I’ve got the answer!” she cried.

  “It can wait until after school.”

  Lena stepped farther into the classroom. “So you really do study words in here? That’s it?”

  “Yep.” Coco nodded. He looked at me sideways. “And talk a little, too.”

  Lena managed not to react in an exaggerated way. “About what?”

  “Oh, you know, the problems that have plagued our world for generations,” he said breezily.

  I snorted.

  Lena looked from me to him and back again. She grinned. “Try a word on me,” she said.

  Coco picked up a card. “ ‘Shrieval,’ ” he said.

  “Shrieval,” she repeated. “Like an evil shrew.”

  “Um, more like related to a sheriff.”

  “Oh, well, then, that’s easy. S-H-E-R-R-I-F-A-L.”

  “Ruth?” he prompted.

  “Bzzz. No. Shrieval. S-H-R-I-E-V-A-L. Shrieval.”

  “Exactly,” Coco said.

  “You really have a chance,” Lena said. “My BFF could be the spelling champion of the school.”

  “So what’s your project?” Coco asked.

  Lena opened her mouth, but I said, “It’s not really a project—”

  “More like a game,” Lena interrupted.

  “It’s just a silly thing we’re doing. Girl thing.”

  “Oh.” Coco’s voice was dipped and hollow. But I didn’t want the whole world in on it. Even Lena was maybe more than I wanted.

  “Right,” she said. “Anyway, I found out the thing we need and we can go after school. My mom says you can stay for dinner again if you need to.”

  “I can just meet my mom at the library.”

  “Dude. Don’t subject us to full-bellied clams. Give us another night. I saw ravioli in the freezer.”

  “We’ll see,” I told her. “There’s something I need to do at home tonight.”

  Lena shrugged at Coco. “I guess our Ruthy is a woman of mystery.”

  I pictured myself shrouded in a black coat, stalking the streets of Promise, led on by vague clues. Smoke would drift off the street like it did in movies—where does that smoke come from, anyway?—and then Coco and Lena would emerge, but I would disappear before they could catch me.

  “I guess so,” he agreed.

  Sixteen

  Chagrin

  “Why don’t you want to tell Coco?” Lena asked. “I bet he’d be great at these riddles. He would have known who wrote ‘The Raven’ and we wouldn’t have needed to get my sister involved.”

  She was right. He would be great at it. And I bet he would like it, too: digging into the clues was kind of like uncovering the mysteries of the bones. I shoved my hands into my coat pockets. “I just don’t want it to be a big thing.”

  “You don’t want anything to be a big thing.”

  Lena walked with her left foot pointing out and her right foot pointing in to leave strange tracks in the snow. “Anyway, I talked to Adam. He about fell out of his chair when I told him I had a Dungeons and Dragons question. He grabbed me and dragged me down like he didn’t want anyone to know. How stupid is that? So he likes a game. So what?”

  “Adam?” I demanded. “You told Adam?”

  “Yeah. I just told you: he’s a big gamer.”

  “But you can’t just go blabbing about it all over the place.”

  Lena stopped walking and turned to look at me. “You wanted to know the answer, didn’t you?” Her voice was flat, but I could hear a bit of an edge underneath it. I nodded. “What else was I supposed to do?”

  I kicked at a chunk of ice stuck to the sidewalk. “I don’t know. Just ask him without telling him about the clues.”

  “Just go up and say, ‘Oh, hey, Adam, can you tell me what “natural twenty” means? And “level seven”? And “flying high”? No reason, just because.’ Like he wouldn’t smell that out.”

  “But Adam? Of all people?”

  “We can’t all be hanging out with Coco, can we? Oh, wait, you don’t want to tell him, either, for some weird, secret reason.”

  “It’s not a weird, secret reason. I just don’t—”

  “Don’t want it to be a thing—I know.”

  We stood there in the cold, our breaths filling up the space between us with
puffy white clouds. But not the nice type of puffy white clouds that might have leprechauns floating upon them. The mean kind, blown out by an angry wind.

  It had never been this hard with Charlotte.

  The clock tower in town hall chimed off four rings.

  “We should go,” Lena said.

  But then, Charlotte had left.

  “It’s just that . . . ,” I began. “It’s just that I’m not used to having all these . . . all these”—I spread my hands wide—“people around, you know?”

  She cocked her head to the side. “My life is full of people, remember?”

  “I just don’t know if we can trust him.”

  “Sometimes you don’t know, Ruthy. I didn’t know with you. I just saw someone who stood up to Melinda, and I liked that.”

  “I don’t stand up to Melinda. I cower in front of Melinda.”

  “Well, you didn’t that day in the locker room.”

  “You’re the one who’s brave,” I said.

  “I know,” she agreed. “And smart. And gregarious.” She linked her elbow around mine and we started walking again. “Do you know that word? It’s one of Lucia’s vocabulary words, and I thought I would use it to stump you.”

  “It means ‘outgoing and friendly.’ Which you are. And I am not.”

  “You could be,” she said. “Or not. I like you just the same. Now, let’s go find this clue.”

  “Did he at least tell you what it meant?”

  “Sort of. He said we were right, that rolling a die is how you get your power and the power of spells. It was all kinds of confusing, but a natural twenty is the best roll you can get. And then each character has levels that they go through, and I think that maxes out at twenty. He’s a level-seven dwarf, by the way, and I think you should be very proud of me for not calling him a level-seven dork. Not because of the game, but because of everything else.”

  “And the clue?”

  “He didn’t really have any insight.”

  “Perfect.” So another person knew about the clue, and he didn’t even have anything valuable to add.

  “But we should just go into the post office, I think. Maybe there will be something there that makes it clear.”