The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “And who can forget,” I said to Lucas, “Bedelia the queen of the honeybees.”

  Lucas dropped his book and threw his hands up with disgust.

  “Lucas, Ruth, Dev.” Ms. Lawson’s voice was sharp from her perch over by the circulation desk.

  I started reading. Taryn was finally about to find shelter: a small abandoned cottage in the woods.

  I glanced back up, though, before I dove into the story. “After school,” I mouthed.

  Lucas and Dev nodded.

  Lucas placed himself on the crosshairs of the four tiles that made the square for the knight on the left side of the Ferdinand statue. “So forward two, over one,” he said.

  “Why not over two, up one?” Dev asked.

  “Duh. If this were the start of a chess game and the knight tried to do that, he’d land on one of his own pawns.”

  I glanced over at Dev, who admitted, “He’s right.”

  Lucas took giant steps from block to block, then paused.

  I said, “If you go left, you just go outside. I stopped in the office, but there was nothing there. If you go right, you end up in the gym. There was a clue there, but it wasn’t the right one.”

  “How do you know?” Dev asked.

  I pointed at the asterisks on the bottom of the clue he was holding. “Those stars. I think that’s how they numbered the clues.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?” Lucas asked, mimicking Ms. Lawson’s voice. She had declared a war on imprecise pronouns. But he had a point. Who had hidden all these clues?

  “So I guess I go straight,” Lucas said. “That would be a lousy move. Why would anyone play that?”

  “We’re talking about an imaginary chess world where knights transform into rooks,” Dev said.

  Lucas didn’t look convinced, but he took Mother, May I giant steps across the hallway. We could all see the doorway as he headed to it: MAINTENANCE.

  Before Dev or I could say anything, he knocked.

  Silence.

  So he twisted the knob, and the door opened with a click.

  “Lucas!” Dev cried out, but we both hurried in after him. I was expecting mops and brooms and shelves of cleaning supplies, but instead there were mechanical workings: pipes, tubes, circuit-breaker boxes. “What next?” Lucas asked.

  “That’s all it says,” I said.

  “Read the whole thing again,” Lucas replied.

  Dev lifted the paper and read:

  “ ‘Miners with a pan,’ ” Lucas murmured.

  “That’s the only part that we haven’t used,” Dev said.

  “Gold miners would shake river sand through a screen to see if there was any gold,” I told them, thinking of our fifth-grade unit on the gold rush.

  We all looked around. There was no screen. No pan. Certainly no gold.

  Lucas got down on his hands and knees and peered behind the pipes. “Wait,” he said. Crawling on his belly, he slid forward. His head disappeared as his toes pushed him forward. “Yow!!!” he cried out as he jerked back. He was holding his arm.

  “What happened?”

  “One of the pipes, it was burning hot.”

  His skin was turning pink. Dev and I exchanged a look, but before we could say anything, the door was thrown open and there was Dr. Dawes. Her face went from concerned to confused, as if she couldn’t imagine three people more unlikely to be together in the maintenance closet. “What exactly is going on here?” she demanded.

  I should’ve said something. This was my quest. But my tongue was swollen in my mouth as if Dr. Dawes were actually a witch who had cast a spell on me—not a bad ability for a school principal, if you think about it. Dev, though, Dev was confident and a good speaker, and polite, too. He’d say something smart. When I turned, though, he looked as tongue-tied as me. Finally, it was Lucas who spoke. “We were looking for a chessboard.”

  “A chessboard?” she asked.

  “Mr. Noonan plays. We play against each other sometimes, when he’s off the clock, of course, and I thought he said this is where he keeps his board. But I guess I was wrong.”

  “And your arm?” Dr. Dawes asked. Lucas was still cradling his right arm in his left.

  “I jostled up against one of the pipes.”

  “Jostled?” she asked.

  “To push up against one another. It derives from ‘joust.’ ”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Really.” He nodded.

  “Interesting, but not relevant,” Dr. Dawes said.

  I began to explain how it was relevant, but Dev grabbed my arm.

  “Let’s get you to the nurse,” Dr. Dawes said to Lucas. “I think she’s still here. If not, we’ll go to the athletic trainer.”

  “I bet that would be the first time someone went to the trainer with a chess injury, huh?” Lucas asked.

  Dr. Dawes put her hand on his shoulder and guided him down the hall. “The three of you should know better than to go into the maintenance closet. Didn’t you see all those mechanical systems? That’s the heart of the school, the lifeblood.”

  “I thought the library was the heart of the school,” I said.

  “The library is the intellectual hub of the school,” Dr. Dawes said, and then added without missing a beat, “And where you can go to borrow a chessboard. Dev and Ruth, go ahead there now. I’ll take care of Lucas.”

  I glanced at Lucas. He nodded. And then, when Dr. Dawes’s back was turned, he flicked up his left hand. In it was a tiny orange envelope: a seventh clue.

  Twenty-One

  Flense

  Homeroom. Lucas could give me the clue in homeroom. With any luck he’d have some subtlety about the situation. No. This is Lucas. Wait for him by the door.

  I shoved my coat into my locker.

  That he’d had the note all weekend without my even seeing it was almost too much to bear. I had developed numerous plots for how I could get it from him: snowshoe through the woods into town and then out to his house (I looked online and we lived thirteen miles apart—so twenty-six miles round-trip, but maybe his mother would drive me home), track him down on the Internet and send him repeated messages, or, the most desperate, tell my mom I wanted to have another playdate with him.

  In the end, I just stewed. I stewed about the clue and whether it was really the missing fifth clue in the series. I stewed about Mum not being home, and I stewed about Coco. I just couldn’t figure out what he wanted. Why had he pretended to be so nice to me, when really he thought I was just a foolish girl with a stupid pursuit? My imagination could conjure no reasonable explanation—though, of course, plenty of unreasonable ones. My personal favorite was that he was a golem, a figure made of clay that has life breathed into it. In Jewish legend, the golem was a savior, so this meant he was some kind of inverse golem. But who had sent him? The person with the most motivation, of course, was Melinda. Mean, sneaky Melinda. But I didn’t think she had the patience or the intellect for the dark arts.

  When my mind spiraled that way, it was better to get back to thinking about Lucas. He could have solved the next riddle and already found the next clue. This was why you didn’t bring people into your own private sagas. They took them over. I should have just kept it to myself—no Dev and Lucas, no Adam, and maybe even no Lena.

  “Hey, Ruth.” I knew the voice. It was Coco, still sounding warm and friendly even though he was a big betrayer. Sure, I knew there was no golem, but I had seen him talking so chummily to Melinda that same day. I couldn’t shake the idea that she was in on this: some elaborate plan to make me crash and burn at the bee so that Charlotte could win.

  I pretended to be looking for something in my locker. This was a mistake, because it gave him a chance to come over and stand next to me. I could smell the brown sugar oatmeal he must have had for breakfast.

  “I was just checking on studying for today. We have a lot to do since we missed Friday.”

  “I was taking a test.”

  “Right,” he said. Ms. Lawson had turned him away
at the door just as she had promised. “What about today?”

  I still had my head in my locker. Way in the back, there was a squished-up granola bar. Gross. “I have to get something in the library.” This wasn’t exactly a lie. When I had finished the map test—100 percent correct again—I had gone to the library and worked with Mrs. Abernathy to try to figure out why the world seemed so quiet after a snow. We couldn’t find anything, and she’d suggested we e-mail a professor at UMaine. She’d promised she would get some names for me.

  “We could meet in the library and once you get what you need, we could study.”

  “Um, I don’t think so. Mrs. Abernathy and I are working on something.”

  He shifted his feet in the brown puddle of dirty snow that had melted off his boots. “We’re getting close to the bee,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “So we still have work to do.”

  “I guess so.”

  “What are you even looking for in there?”

  I pulled out the granola bar. He wrinkled up his nose, and his freckles seemed to hop around like popcorn kernels in a pan. “I just need to throw this away,” I told him. I remembered now. Mom had packed it even though we weren’t allowed to have nuts in school, and so I’d taken it out of my bag and forgotten about it. “It’s contraband,” I told him. And then I left him right by my locker as I dropped the old, ruined granola bar into a trash bin and went on my way to homeroom.

  I felt a little bit bad about it, thinking of him there in the puddle with his hat on crooked and not realizing what he had done wrong. But I knew. He was messing around with me. I wasn’t sure why, but he was. Maybe he was working for Melinda. Or maybe he was part of some mad cabal set on overthrowing the tyranny of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. “Cabal” wasn’t a spelling bee word, but Mum liked it because she found conspiracy theories fascinating. Anyway, I decided not to feel bad anymore, and instead pushed open the door to Ms. Broadcheck’s room.

  Lucas was waiting just inside the door, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Finally,” he exclaimed, and thrust the envelope at me. I snatched it from him. It was warm and slightly damp from being in his hand.

  “It’s a doozy,” he said.

  So he hadn’t figured it out!

  When I turned my head, I saw Charlotte watching us, but she snapped her gaze in the other direction as quickly as I grabbed the envelope from Lucas.

  I kept the envelope in my hand until science class, where I pulled it out. The little bird seemed to be winking at me. Unfolding it, I saw that a dusty-looking path wound its way around the outside edges of the card and finished up at the top, in a graveyard, the headstones crooked and moss-covered. It read:

  At the bottom were five asterisks. My theory was right! The asterisks indicated the number of the clue, which meant this one would lead me to the sixth clue, filling in the gap before the Union Jack clue I had found in the gym. If I solved the riddle and found the next clue, I would have numbers two through eight. That still left the problem of the post office box, but I could deal with that later. One thing at a time.

  “Everyone, the mnemonic for taxonomy,” Mr. Sneed directed.

  “Kings play chess on fine grain sand,” we all sang back to him, just as we had every day since we’d started studying species classification.

  “And that means?”

  “Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.”

  Truthfully, I would probably never forget. Also, “mnemonic” was a great spelling bee word with that silent M at the beginning.

  Mr. Sneed droned on at the front of the room. He’d been teaching science forever. Legend was that he had been a teacher at the high school, and when they moved the high school to a new building and the middle school into the old high school, well, Mr. Sneed had stayed behind, still teaching the same stuff in the same way. He passed out typewritten handouts with a purple hue, and everything he said in class was the same as what was on the sheet, so you didn’t really have to pay attention.

  I reread the clue. The first half made no sense, but I thought I could do the math problem. Lucas probably had started there, too.

  So, the prime numbers under 100. I listed them out as best I could: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 23, 29, 31, 37, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97.

  “Today we are going to examine Cetacea,” Mr. Sneed said. “What class do Cetacea fall under?”

  “Mammals,” we all said back. It seemed like we’d been studying mammals forever, even though Mr. Sneed had said we’d just be hitting a few of the highlights. When he’d said that at the beginning of the unit, his creepy corners-of-the-mouth-only smile made me realize it would be a slog, like Taryn trying to get through the Swamp of Memoriam.

  So, the primes that added up to 10 were 37 and 73. That made the happy median the average? No, wait. I’d missed one—19. Okay, so that made 37 the median. Now what? The cube of 5.

  “Correct. Cetacea are marine mammals. Examples include whales and porpoises.”

  This was exactly what was written on the handout.

  “What’s that?” Coco whispered to me.

  I stared down at the clue. Mr. Sneed couldn’t stand people whispering in his class. Supposedly he’d once heard a girl whispering, even though she was sitting way back in the room. He’d stopped class and given her such a dressing down that she’d started bawling. She had cried so hard, her nose started to bleed.

  “Is that for math?” he asked.

  I narrowed my eyes and refocused.

  The square root of the cube of 5. The cube of 5 was 125, but I had no idea what the square root of 125 was. There was no way I could get a calculator out of my backpack.

  In front of me, Lucas raised his hand. “Yes, Mr. Hosgrove?”

  “Whales get earwax just like people.”

  I tried writing out the equation:

  That didn’t help me much. I could do 3 plus 2, of course, but I was still stuck with that square root of 5 cubed.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hosgrove.”

  “But,” Lucas went on, “they never clean it out. I mean, it’s not like whales have Q-tips, right? So it stays in their ears their whole lives, and when scientists pull it out, it can be up to a foot long.”

  Melinda said, “Eww,” and we all shuddered at the thought of a foot-long tube of earwax.

  “But it’s really cool because the wax tracks everything they’ve gone through. Everything from the salt levels of the water to the pollutants they come in contact with.”

  “Interesting, but not relevant.”

  Lucas’s shoulders slumped. Had the teachers all agreed that this would be their line for him?

  I raised my hand, and Mr. Sneed called on me without any enthusiasm. “I disagree,” I said. “I think it’s very relevant.”

  “Miss Mudd-O’Flanahan, things either are relevant or they are not. There’s no such thing as very relevant.”

  “Fine. But it is relevant. We’re studying the whole classification system, which is like the web of life, right? And the whales and their earwax, that shows all the pollutants in our ocean and what’s going to damage that web. And it’s not just science class stuff. It’s real life.”

  “Science class is facts, Miss Mudd-O’Flanahan. It is real life.”

  “Right, but also, I mean like the fishing industry and tourism—our oceans are vital to the peninsula. And what Lucas is saying is that whale earwax is like the key that tells us what’s going on and then maybe we can try to fight the pollution and the trash and the climate change and everything else that is ruining the web of life.”

  “A very impassioned speech. Perhaps you and your mother ought to write an e-mail about it.”

  Everyone laughed, except Lucas and Lena. Even Coco laughed.

  “Maybe we will,” I said.

  Some people just shouldn’t be teachers.

  “Forty-two,” Lucas said when we got out to recess. He, Dev, and I stood near the building, stomping our feet to try to keep warm.r />
  “But forty-two what?” I asked. “The first part of the clue makes no sense.”

  “We should ask Coco,” Dev said. “He’d be really good at this.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?” Dev asked.

  The snow looked like a field of jagged diamonds. “We don’t need any help. Anyway, he’d just think it was dumb.”

  I could see Coco across the field. He had a black plastic sled and was getting ready to slide down the hill.

  “It’s better with a small group anyway,” Lucas said. “More loot to go around.”

  “We don’t know that there’s any loot,” I told him. “We don’t know that there’s anything.”

  “I’m not saying to invite the whole world. I just think Coco would be really helpful.”

  “No,” I said. “Anyway, I haven’t had a chance to show it to Lena. She might have some ideas.”

  Coco held the sled in two hands, sprinted forward, and then dove onto it like those crazy skeleton riders at the Olympics.

  “Planeswalkers,” Dev said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but it sounds familiar. Maybe I could ask Coco without explaining the whole thing?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  “It’s just that he’s been my best friend forever. We do everything together.”

  “Things change. And maybe you don’t know him as well as you think you do.”

  “You were wrong in science class,” Lucas said to me.

  “What?”

  A chunk of snow slipped off the roof of the building, bringing with it a cluster of long, sharp icicles.

  “You know an icicle can kill you if it hits you at just the right angle,” Lucas said. “I saw it on MythBusters.”

  “What was I wrong about in science?”

  “The web of life and all that. The wax just tells you what was there. It can’t tell you what pollution is coming next or how to stop it.”