The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  The post office was an old, stately building at the corner of Main and Congress Streets. The steps were slabs of granite that were slick with water and salt. We held tightly to the railings as we climbed. When we opened the door, we saw a counter with three windows, each surrounded by a filigreed archway.

  “Charlotte’s dad Alan, he’s an architect, and he said those archways used to have gates—bars, you know, because people used to send so much money through the post office and they didn’t want to get robbed.”

  “Bang-bang,” Lena said. “If I’d been born in a different time, I could have been a bank robber.”

  Now there was just one old postmistress sitting behind the middle window. She glanced at us when we came in and narrowed her eyes.

  There was a display of Valentine’s Day cards and stamps, and, beyond that, a shelf of shipping materials.

  “Boxes?” Lena whispered. Then she shook her head. She knew that hiding a clue in those boxes could only result in its being found accidentally, maybe after it was mailed halfway across the world. Then she tugged on my arm. “Boxes!” she said again, with just a little more volume. The far right wall was covered with small boxes, each with a tiny window and a keyhole.

  “Post office boxes,” I said. “That has to be it!”

  We walked closer and saw that each one had a number. “Twenty and seven,” I said. “Twenty-seven?”

  We followed the numbers, but we couldn’t find one with a twenty-seven on it. They seemed to start at one hundred.

  “Count the columns,” Lena said.

  We counted over twenty rows.

  “And then up seven,” I said. We started at the bottom and whispered the numbers together: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

  The window on the box was painted orange.

  “This is it,” she hissed.

  I pressed on the door. I guess I expected it to pop open, but nothing happened. Lena tried to pry it open with her fingernails. It stayed firmly shut.

  “This is it,” she said. “It has to be it. The orange paint. All of it lines up.”

  “But there’s no key.”

  We stood there and stared at the bronze box with the orange window. Just stared and stared and stared.

  “I guess I’ll go back to the library,” I told her, admitting defeat.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I guess I’ll go back to clams.”

  Outside, it was snowing again. Light flakes fell slowly as if they were stuck in honey.

  That night I took out the glass measuring cup, the one that measured in milliliters, since a milliliter is the same as a cubic centimeter. I filled it up to 250. Mom came into the kitchen, glanced at the measuring cup, and arched her eyebrows. “What do you think the volume of your mouth is?” I asked her.

  “The volume? Like length times width times height?” She opened her mouth wide and put her fingers in as if she had a tiny ruler.

  “Volume as in the amount it can hold. Then we can convert it into centimeters.”

  She nodded and crossed the kitchen over to me. “Is this for science?”

  I shook my head. “It’s just a thing we were talking about. We’re going to pour as much as we can into our mouths and then subtract it from 250 milliliters. Then we will know the volumes of our mouths.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Coco.”

  “Coco who is helping you to study for the spelling bee?”

  I wanted to say, “No, the other Coco.” But I said, “Don’t start. Just watch me and make sure I don’t spill any.”

  I tipped my head back and poured the water in slowly. I had to move my tongue out of the way to keep the water from shooting back out like a waterslide. The water got stuck at the back of my throat and I thought maybe I would gasp like a drowning person, but I closed my eyes and waited until the water was at my lips. Mom took the cup from my hand, and I spit into the sink.

  “Two hundred five milliliters are left in the cup.”

  “So that means forty-five milliliters in my mouth.”

  “My turn,” Mom said.

  “Really?”

  She dumped the cup and filled it up again. “Did you ever find out about the snow?” she asked. “Why it’s so quiet?”

  “Not definitively,” I said.

  Outside, the moon lit the yard: white, white, and more white. This must be how astronauts feel in their little space capsules, staring out at the cold vastness. “Do you think it’s warm when you’re in space? I mean in the shuttle or the space station or whatever?”

  “Well, they do show them wearing T-shirts and stuff,” she told me. “You know that gravity changes their muscles. Their legs get small and their torsos get bigger. They have to exercise their legs so they don’t get atrophied.”

  “Because there’s no gravity?”

  “I think so,” she said. “We had an astronaut come and talk to us at med school. He was pretty cute.”

  “Mom!” I said.

  “This was before I met your mum, of course.”

  I shook my head. She picked up the measuring cup. “Ready?”

  She closed her eyes as she poured it in. Her mouth was cupped like one of those fish pitchers that were so popular in the tourist shops this summer. Singing fish pitchers. They were supposed to make a lovely sound when they were being poured, but to me they just looked like a fish was about to kiss another fish and got frozen.

  Mom pounded the counter, and I took the measuring cup from her. “Fifty-five milliliters.”

  She leaned over and let the water out of her mouth in a smooth stream. “Really?” she said. “That big?”

  I nodded.

  “We never built that snow fort.”

  “I thought we were waiting for Mum,” I told her. It was a lie. I had never thought we were ever going to build the fort.

  I wrote down our numbers.

  Outside, big clumps of fluffy flakes fell down. “Mum’s never coming home,” I said as I watched them cling to the glass of the kitchen windows.

  “Don’t say that,” Mom said, her face tight.

  “Not until springtime,” I said. “It’s like we’re frozen in here and she has to wait for the ice to melt to get back.”

  “Thankfully this isn’t a fairy tale. She’ll be back next week.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I do.”

  But Mother Nature had different plans.

  Seventeen

  Purga

  It snowed all night, but they kept school open. There were just four of us in homeroom: Lucas, Melinda, Charlotte, and me. None of the island kids were there, because the ferries weren’t running. And the people who lived out farther, in the smaller towns or right on the coast, like Mitchell and even Lena, they didn’t make it in, either. I’d looked for Coco before school, so we could compare the results of our water-in-the-mouth experiments, but his bus had swerved off the road and stuck itself in a snowbank before the driver had even picked up any kids.

  Melinda and Charlotte were all twisted up together like usual, and Lucas was working on the Rubik’s Cube, so I sat at a table as far from them as possible and read my book.

  When Ms. Broadcheck came in, late again, she told us that they only needed to feed us for it to count as a day, then they could send us home and we wouldn’t have to make it up in the summer. I felt like all the other kids owed us one for making it in.

  Since there were so few of us—and so few teachers, too—they sent us to the gym. Ms. Wickersham set up stations like basketball free throws and the mini-trampoline. Ms. Lawson tried to teach some girls how to knit. Mr. Wynne, the art teacher, rolled out a huge piece of paper and let kids write and draw all over it with markers. That was where Melinda and Charlotte went, drawing pictures of flowers and hearts and unicorns and writing “Melinda and Char”—that’s what Melinda had started calling Charlotte—“BFFs forever.”

  I went over by Mrs. Abernathy, the librarian, to read. A seventh-grade girl sat against the wall and wrote poetry in her
journal in large block letters.

  Dev was there, too, with Adam, playing chess on a fabric board. Lucas crouched down next to them with his hands wrapped around his legs. I watched Adam move his knight.

  Mrs. Abernathy slid a book over to me. The cover was plain with no picture. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien. People were always trying to get me to read J. R. R. Tolkien.

  “It’s fantasy,” she said. “You love fantasy.”

  “I love the Taryn Greenbottom books. Not the same.”

  “You should give it a try. Every reading diet needs a little variety.”

  I wondered if this was true, or if it was just the type of thing librarians said to keep themselves in business. “No, thanks. I’m fine with my reading diet.”

  “You’ve read Andromeda Rex,” Dev said. “That’s variety.”

  “Exactly,” I said to Mrs. Abernathy, though I was loath to admit reading the rival of Harriet Wexler. “I’ve read Andromeda Rex.”

  “Only the first two,” Adam reminded us.

  “Give it a rest,” Dev muttered.

  Lucas bounced up and down. “Your move, Dev,” he said.

  “It’s slight variety,” Mrs. Abernathy said. “I’ve already checked this out to you. Why don’t you just take it?”

  “It is a pretty good book,” Dev said without looking up from the chessboard. “You might like it, Ruth.”

  I held up The Riddled Cottage. “I’m reading an advance copy of Harriet Wexler’s new book. I don’t have time.”

  Dev moved a bishop. “No skin off my nose.”

  Lucas slapped his forehead in an exaggerated way. “Dev,” he moaned. “I can’t believe you did that.”

  “Did what?”

  “That!” Lucas said. He gestured with both hands at the board. “I’m not going to say it out loud, because it’s possible that Adam hasn’t picked up on the horrible, horrible move you just made.”

  Adam’s gaze scanned the board, zigzagging wildly from corner to corner.

  “He doesn’t see it!” Lucas said gleefully.

  I didn’t see it, either, but that was no surprise. I searched the room. Melinda and Charlotte were still drawing on the rolled-out paper. They were stuck together at shoulder, hip, ankle.

  Mitchell was shooting free throws with some seventh- and eighth-grade boys.

  Ms. Wickersham looked about ready to collapse.

  “You know that it’s against the rules of chess for you to harass me like this,” Adam told Lucas.

  “True,” Dev agreed.

  Adam moved one of his rooks and captured one of Dev’s pawns.

  Lucas shook his head but kept quiet. Still, Adam demanded: “You wanna play? You think I’m doing such a bad job?”

  “I’ve got next game,” he said. “Remember? Unless you wanna play, Ruth? I could see if I could beat you in even fewer moves than I did last time.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “I liked it, too, by the way,” he said.

  “Liked what?” I asked.

  “The Hobbit. I liked the dragon.”

  I did like it when there were dragons in books, but I remained unconvinced. “I’m not going to read The Hobbit. I’m only halfway through this, and I still have almost two hundred pages to go.” I shook the book at them.

  “I thought it was only so-so,” Adam said. “The Lord of the Rings trilogy was way better, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was even better than that.”

  Dev rolled his eyes. “What does The Hitchhiker’s Guide have to do with The Hobbit?”

  Dr. Dawes came into the gym. I thought maybe she was going to tell us that we were having lunch, even though it was only nine forty-seven, according to the clock that hung behind a cage above the basketball hoop. Like, do they think that someone is going to steal it? Or that it might break free on its own and run around the court?

  “They’re both classics,” Adam said, his voice rising in pitch.

  Dr. Dawes didn’t stop in the middle of the floor or call the teachers over to her. Instead, she marched straight to Charlotte.

  “One is science fiction and the other is fantasy,” Dev said. “Totally different.”

  “Totally different,” Lucas agreed.

  “Sure you’d side with him,” Adam said.

  “Your move, Adam,” Dev said, his voice soft.

  Dr. Dawes crouched down low and put her hand on Charlotte’s shoulder as she spoke. Charlotte’s body went tense and still, and even though I had no idea what Dr. Dawes told Charlotte, I knew it wasn’t good. Principals just don’t talk to you like that when they have good news, or even neutral news. Dr. Dawes helped Charlotte to her feet and led her out of the gym, arm still over her shoulder.

  Melinda tried to lord it over everybody, but she wasn’t the only one who had heard Dr. Dawes, so by the time we were dismissed—after a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and premature Valentine’s Day cookies—everyone knew what had happened. Or at least part of the story.

  Mom picked me up. Without me having to ask, she drove us right into town. You couldn’t get too close because of the fire trucks and police tape, but it was near enough to see what wasn’t there.

  Melinda told everyone that the library had been damaged by the storm, and that there was something wrong with Charlotte’s condo. That was what Dr. Dawes had said, according to one of the other girls: “Charlotte, all this snow has done some damage to the library and your home. Your dads want to see you.”

  It wasn’t damaged, though. It was destroyed.

  The roof of the library building had collapsed. Charlotte’s home dropped right down into the second floor of the library, everything crashed together like a black hole opening up and then folding in on itself. I half expected to see little astronauts or aliens emerging from the rubble.

  We got out of the car and walked closer. There were books in the snow, dotting it red and blue and green and purple. They were sprinkled over the snow like the Christmas decorations that had just come down. They didn’t even look like books there, jostled and out of order. But then the wind picked up and a few of them had pages that fluttered in the breeze. The snow blew around them as if the whole world—my whole world—had been turned into a snow globe.

  Mom talked to a police officer. I didn’t hear what she said. What books are lost? I wondered. Were any saved? Is Harry Potter completely gone, all seven volumes? And Andromeda Rex? I couldn’t take any comfort in his destruction. And Tuck Everlasting and A Wrinkle in Time and The Westing Game? Was someone able to save poor old Harriet the Spy in her red sweatshirt?

  They were my friends. My friends are gone.

  And the notes. If there were any more clues in the library, I would never find them.

  Mom walked back toward me now. She had her arm around Charlotte, whose eyes were red and who wore her father’s goofy earflap hat, not caring who might see. “Charlotte’s going to stay with us for tonight. Maybe a day or two.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I let her have the front seat.

  Mom made cream of mushroom soup from a can. It was one of Charlotte’s favorites, and mine. She found some frozen French bread and started reheating that. Then she pulled out the old countertop mixer and searched the pantry for ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies. “We don’t have any brown sugar,” we heard her muttering as we slurped our soup. “Why don’t we have any brown sugar?”

  “It’s okay, Theresa,” Charlotte said. “I don’t need cookies.”

  Mom emerged from the pantry. She was crying.

  “I’m sorry, Charlotte. I’m just so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” Charlotte said.

  “You know you can stay here as long as you need to. Your dads, too.”

  I didn’t know where her dads were, but I didn’t think it was a good time to ask.

  Charlotte nodded.

  Mom sat at the table with us. She drew one knee up to her chest and started tearing the bread apart and dip
ping it in the soup. She shook her head.

  “We had Valentine’s cookies for lunch today,” I told Charlotte.

  “Really?” she asked.

  “Ruth—” Mom began.

  “Yep. I guess they were just clearing out the freezer. Do you think they were meant to be for this year or left over from last year?”

  “Maybe the year before that,” Charlotte said, cracking a hint of a smile.

  “Like maybe the cafeteria workers went back there and were like, ‘Hey, what’s this? Valentine’s Day 1987? Perfect! There are only fifty-seven kids here today, anyway.’ And then they watched them while they were baking to make sure they didn’t mutate into Killer Cookies from Outer Space or anything.”

  “You’d better not let them know you’re on to them. They already have it out for you.”

  “Why do the cafeteria workers have it out for you?” Mom asked.

  Charlotte glanced at me. I shrugged, and she said, “I was just playing along.”

  Mom looked from Charlotte to me and back again. I knew she knew Charlotte was lying, that there was something we were hiding, but she almost looked grateful that Charlotte would still lie for me.

  After we cleared our dishes, we went into the TV room and tried to find something good to watch. When we couldn’t, I said, “We could study for the spelling bee.”

  She twisted her fingers together. “Are you sure?”

  I wasn’t. I mean, what if our studying gave her the one word she needed to beat me? But I couldn’t take it back. “Sure.”

  We took out our lists and started quizzing each other back and forth. Charlotte didn’t ask any clarifying questions, and I didn’t tell her why Coco said you should. “ ‘Ingrate,’ ” she said to me.

  “Ingrate. I-N-G-R-A-T-E. Ingrate.”

  “Yep.”

  “ ‘Longitude,’ ” I said to her.

  She spelled it perfectly.

  We went back and forth like that until we got all the way through the seventh-grade challenge words. She missed four. I didn’t miss any.

  “I’m really tired,” she said. “Do you think we could just go to bed?”

  I gave her some of my pajamas. Mom took her clothes to wash them. “Mix and match with some things from Ruth, and no one will know you’re rewearing them.”