The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  We all stumbled up the stairs, across the marble floor, and over to the boxes.

  Lena hopped from foot to foot and blew on her hands while I dug in the pocket of my jeans for my key.

  “I still don’t understand what we’re doing here,” Adam said.

  “That clue you helped me with. The one with the natural twenty, it was actually a code about a post office box, and Ruthy and I found it, but we didn’t have the key.”

  “But when Charlotte gave me the box with the clues and our—with everything, it had a tiny key in it. I thought it was . . . I thought it was for something else.”

  “Charlotte?” Adam asked.

  I yanked the key from my pocket. I’d been carrying it with me, wondering if I should give it back to her so all the keys would be together. “Yes, Charlotte.”

  “Charlotte Diamond? Popular Charlotte?” he asked.

  “Beautiful Charlotte,” Dev teased.

  I groaned. Everyone loved Charlotte. Even my own motley crew. “She found some in the library. No big deal. Well, actually . . .” I started to explain my theory that she had sought out one of the clues and found it in the school library.

  “Ruthy! The key!”

  I passed it over to her. “It has to be the right key, doesn’t it?”

  “A post office box.” Dev sighed. “What do you think might be in it? People keep all sorts of treasures in a post office box, don’t they?”

  “That’s a safe-deposit box,” Adam replied. I think he was a little happy to be able to get back at Dev for teasing him about Charlotte. Did Adam really like her? I imagined boys all over Frontenac Consolidated swooning over her, dreaming of her at night.

  Lena jiggled the key. I bit my lip. It was the wrong key. But then, no, it slipped in. It was like we had all been holding our breath, and let it out in one big whoosh of a sigh.

  Lena turned the key.

  The box was jammed full of flyers and circulars—the kind of stuff addressed to Current Resident. She pulled everything out and let it fall right onto the floor.

  “Lena!” Coco said. We both crouched down and began picking up the fallen mail.

  “There!” Lucas said. His hand shot into the box and pulled out a tiny envelope. It was green with silver stars like nighttime on some foreign planet. He handed it to me. The paper rustled as I opened the flap and pulled out the note.

  There was the red seal with the bird staring at me. I unfolded it to find a picture of a science-class-type flask bubbling over with a greenish-brown liquid. The border looked like an old picture frame, and in each corner was a tiny insect. Before I started reading, I noted the nine little stars on the bottom of the clue.

  “Who’s Mr. Douglas?” Lucas asked. We all looked at each other, but no one had the answer.

  “I guess that’s our next mystery to solve,” I said.

  “The quest continues!” Adam cried out.

  “The quest!” Coco agreed.

  And then, as if we had planned it, we all yelled in unison, “The quest!”

  The old postmistress narrowed her eyes at us and shook her head, but as we ran giggling out of the post office, we yelled it again, over and over: “The quest! The quest! The quest!”

  Twenty-Four

  Fidelity

  Lena wanted to make me a special dinner and dessert to get ready for the bee. She asked to do it the night before, but Mom swore Mum would be home by then—it was still almost a week away. So, after we burst out of the post office yelling about the quest, the boys were picked up by their parents, and Lena and I walked down to her house. I sat at the kitchen table while Lena worked, chopping mushrooms and peppers.

  I had the clues laid out in front of me, all in order. There were seven of them. We were still missing the very first clue and the sixth one—the one that should have been on the History Path. “Do you think they found it when they took down the old sign?” I asked.

  “The clue? Maybe. It depends on who took it down. A lot of the grounds guys come to the shack. If they work like they eat, most of them wouldn’t notice. I saw Burt Wildwood take down a full-belly clam sandwich in two bites once. He washed it all down with Mountain Dew. It was the most disgusting and impressive thing I have ever seen in my life.”

  “They probably wouldn’t have realized how important it was, anyway.”

  Lena started peeling potatoes. “Do you want some help?” I asked.

  “Nope. This is your special meal.”

  “Speaking of special meals, my mum told me to pick a restaurant in Portland for us for my birthday dinner.”

  “Really? Man, there are so many places I would like to try. Fore Street, Salt Exchange, Duckfat.”

  “But I was thinking maybe, I don’t know, maybe I do want a party, after all.”

  “Yeah?” she asked. She didn’t sound disappointed. “Like what kind of a party?”

  “A boy-girl party, I guess.”

  “Sure, of course. We’ll invite the guys. But what kind of a party?”

  “Like a theme?”

  She laughed as she tossed the potatoes in salt. “No, no. Unless, of course, you want to do a pirate theme and we can all talk like pirates. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! That would be cool.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I mean, like, will it be at night or in the daytime? Are we going to play games or watch a movie or stuff our faces with pizza or what?”

  “I hadn’t really thought that far. I haven’t even talked to my moms about it yet.”

  “Don’t you think you should soon? Your birthday’s a week from Saturday, right?”

  I picked up the last clue. Maybe dinner was the best idea, after all. I read the clue again to myself, then said, “Mr. Douglas, Mr. Douglas, Mr. Douglas.”

  “Ugh, why are you talking about him?” It was Lucia, passing through the kitchen and trying to steal Lena’s peppers.

  “You know him?”

  “Sure. He’s a science teacher at the high school. In between classes, he stands out in the hall and just glares at all of us like we are all up to no good.”

  “You probably are up to no good,” Lena said.

  “Not me,” Lucia said. She snagged another pepper and said, “Lucky me, I had Ms. Hensworth for ninth grade. Maybe you’ll get stuck with him.”

  “What’s so bad about him?” I asked.

  “Besides the glare? Well, he’s tough, especially on kids that usually do well in school. Margaret Nixon got transferred out of his class because her parents thought he would ruin her GPA. And you can hear him yelling at his class from halfway down the hall. And his classroom is full of dead animals. I mean full.”

  Lena and I exchanged a look. “Does he like to listen to the radio?” I asked.

  “All the time,” she said. “He has a little one playing in his back room. Classic rock. That was a weird question.”

  “You’re weird,” Lena said.

  Lucia responded by taking another pepper and biting her thumb.

  “Do you bite your thumb at me?” Lena asked.

  “I do bite my thumb, sir,” Lucia responded.

  “Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?”

  “No, sir, I do not bite my thumb at you, sir, but I do bite my thumb.”

  They were laughing now, and it seemed like they were speaking another language. Lucia still smiled as she left the room.

  “Romeo and Juliet,” Lena explained. “My parents are a little Shakespeare-obsessed. I’m named after Rosaline, who, by the way, is the girl Romeo supposedly liked before Juliet came along and swept him off his feet. Who names a girl that? That’s why I go by Lena.”

  “I like Lena better,” I said.

  “Good. Me, too.”

  “It must be nice to have your sisters, all of you in this house all cozy.”

  “Ha!” she half laughed. “You mean all up in your business? Oh, hey, I never told you about Wonder Woman!”

  I remembered the chat message she had sent me ages ago. “What about her?”


  “Lucia was telling us that, according to her gym teacher, when you need a confidence boost, you should stand like Wonder Woman. You know, with your fists on your hips and your chest puffed out. Like this.” She put down the knife and stood with her legs shoulder-width apart, hands on hips, elbows back a bit. She shook her head, and the red streak peeked out like a stream of lava. “I feel more powerful already. You need to do this before the spelling bee.”

  “Okay,” I said, but without much enthusiasm.

  “Promise,” she said.

  “Promise?”

  “Do it now,” she demanded.

  I stood up and put my hands on my hips.

  “That’s not it at all!” she exclaimed. She strode over to me and pulled my elbows out so they pointed like wings. “Now lift your chin,” she said.

  “I feel silly,” I said.

  “But strong, too, right? So promise?”

  “I promise,” I agreed.

  “Good.” She turned and went back to the counter. “Now, listen. Mr. Douglas. It has to be him, right? ‘He knows why the sky is blue,’ and what’s the rest of it?”

  “ ‘Why the earth spins round and round, and where the next clue can be found.’ ”

  “So we have to go see him.”

  “And bring him something from the doctor,” I said.

  “Doctor Who again?”

  “There was never any Doctor Who. Just England. But, anyway, it’s not capitalized. It’s underlined. And so is the ‘Pep’ in ‘Peppy.’ ”

  She shook her head. “How are we going to get to the high school?”

  I balled my hands into fists and pushed them onto my forehead. “With this and the spelling bee, I’m too wound up to even think.”

  “You will do awesome. Know why?”

  “Because I’ve been studying and Coco has prepared me and I rock and yadda-yadda-pump-me-up speech?”

  “No,” Lena said. “Well, yes, all of that is true. But you will win because you will be the only one to have Lena’s world-famous mushroom medley frittata!” She dumped all the vegetables into a pie plate and then poured beaten eggs on top of them. “Not to mention molten-chocolate devil cakes with honey!”

  “Honey? Because of the bees?”

  “Yes! But even better, bees and honey are symbols of language and speaking well. It’s perfect!”

  “Where’d you learn that?”

  “Lucas told me.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “You know what else he told me?”

  “What?”

  “That he is going to crush you. Maybe.”

  “He said maybe?”

  “He said maybe.”

  It was the best piece of news I’d heard all day.

  Twenty-Five

  Cynosure

  In the summer, you can barely walk across the street without getting hit by a trolley, but in the winter, the trolleys only run once an hour. Lucas, Lena, and I waited at the stop, stomping our feet to keep warm and seeing who could puff out the biggest cloud of white air.

  “I’m a fire-breathing lizard,” Lena said.

  “There are no lizards that can breathe fire,” Lucas said.

  “Really?” Lena asked. “Isn’t that where the idea of dragons came from?”

  The snow in the road was nearly black and a car drove through a mound of it, sluicing it up toward us. I jumped back, but Lucas got splattered. I don’t think he even noticed. “No,” he said.

  “I thought the idea of dragons came from dinosaur fossils,” I said.

  “Sure,” Lena said. “But the fire breathing had to come from somewhere, right?”

  “What time is it?” Lucas asked.

  Lena checked the time on her phone. “It’s three twenty-seven.”

  The trolley was scheduled for three fifteen. We all peered down the street for the telltale green-and-red vehicle.

  This trip was not entirely sanctioned, not for Lena and me, anyway. Lucas told his mom he wanted to go meet a science teacher at the high school, and since that was perfectly in character for him, she hadn’t flinched. I had told Mom I was going to Lena’s, and Lena told hers that we were going to hang around in town. My mom was going to pick me up at five thirty. The timing was tight. And if we got caught, we couldn’t even claim innocence on a technicality, since the high school was over in Port Stewart.

  Coco had piano practice, which he had begged to get out of, but his dad said no way since he thought Coco had been acting strangely overall and wouldn’t let him avoid another one of his passions. “I don’t even like the piano,” Coco had told me. “I’d rather play the drums. My piano teacher does give me these butterscotch candies, though, from Switzerland, where he’s from. I’ll see if I can get you one.” Adam had an orthodontist appointment. “I think my parents are going to have heart attacks if it turns out I need braces. They’re already talking about raiding my savings account, but they don’t know I have a secret stash.” And Dev, well, without Coco or Adam, there was no way his mom was going to let him come, even if Lena did seem like a nice girl.

  Just then the trolley rolled up. It almost didn’t stop, as if the driver wasn’t expecting passengers, but then it swerved over to us. We each handed our dollar to the Santa-esque gentleman behind the wheel. The only other person on the trolley was an older woman, who sat right up front and held on to the pole with her hand encased in a knit mitten.

  We went to the very back of the trolley. “Lucia says his classroom is on the first floor, third on the left. He’s always there.”

  “Always? Like overnight?” Lucas asked.

  “Of course not,” I said, but Lena said, “Who knows?”

  The trolley wound its way out of Promise and into Port Stewart. The closest stop was about a quarter mile away. As we approached, I noticed we were racing by other trolley stops. “How do we let him know we want to stop?” I asked. I had never actually ridden the trolleys before. They were mostly for tourists, and I hadn’t even realized they ran year-round until we’d started searching for a way to get to the high school.

  “Pull the cord,” Lucas said.

  “What cord?” I asked.

  He looked up, and so did Lena and I, and there was a thin, plastic cord. Lena stood and tugged on it. The driver glanced up in surprise. “You need a stop?” he asked.

  “At the corner of Allagash Street and Frontenac Road,” Lena said.

  The driver nodded but didn’t say anything else. A few minutes later, he pulled over. “The trolley will be back here at five oh five, right?” I asked at the top of the stairs. “To go back to Promise?”

  “That’s Nelly’s route. She’s not always on schedule. Early sometimes. Late sometimes.”

  “You were thirteen minutes late,” Lucas told him.

  “Lucas,” I hissed. I turned back to the driver. “But she’ll wait, right? If she’s early, she can’t leave until five oh five, can she?”

  The driver shrugged. “Nelly does what Nelly does.”

  I glanced at Lena and Lucas. “Maybe we should just—”

  “No!” Lena grabbed my sleeve and tugged me down the stairs. “Thank you!” she called to the driver as he shut the folding doors. “It just means we have to be quick.”

  The window of Mr. Douglas’s door was covered with cartoons and photographs: a supernova, a New Yorker comic about wormholes, a picture of a bee’s eye in extreme close-up. I didn’t recognize that last one; Lucas did, of course, and we practically had to peel him off it to get inside. We knocked, but no one answered, so we pulled open the door.

  I had never seen a classroom like this.

  On the back wall were three large aquariums. One had a bright red snake in it, another a lizard, and the third appeared to be empty, but it had a light shining on it. Shelves on a side wall were full of animal skeletons and taxidermied specimens: possums, river otters, raccoons, all local animals. There was even a weasel about to eat a mouse. Hanging from the ceiling were bee and wasp n
ests of all different sizes. Lucas identified them in a reverent whisper. “Paper wasp, bumblebee, hornet.”

  Just to the left of the door was a bookcase, but it didn’t have any science books on it. It was all fiction, and all different kinds: fantasy, realistic, classics. There was even a Harriet Wexler book.

  The front lab table was covered with papers, and the whole room smelled a bit like a pet store.

  There was no Mr. Douglas. There was, however, faint music playing from a connected room. “ ‘His radio, those ads will sell you. Peppy song will make you wonder, if the world is going under,’ ” Lena whispered to me. And then, louder, “Mr. Douglas?”

  There was a crashing sound, and then a man emerged from the room. He was bald on top of his head, with a ring of blaring white hair around the lower half. His eyes were pale blue, sharp as diamonds, and narrowing down on me and my friends. “Who are you?” he demanded.

  None of us spoke. Lena stepped closer to me.

  Mr. Douglas strode farther into the room and put his hands on the lab table at the front. Picking up a Bunsen burner, he said again, “Who are you?”

  “We are questers,” I heard myself say. “We have come to ask you where the next clue may be found.”

  His eyes flashed and his face softened. “Are you, now? And what makes you think I would have that information?”

  I pulled out the clue. “We found this,” I said. “We’ve been following all the clues and they led us here.”

  He reached across the table in a swift motion and grabbed the clue from my hand. “It says here you are to bring me something.”

  We had hoped we could breeze past that part. We hadn’t figured out what he wanted. “I—” I began. “We—”

  “I, we, what?” he demanded. “This paper is very clear. You are to bring me something from the doctor. Don’t touch that!”

  I swiveled my head to see Lucas leaning very close to a football-shaped nest that was sitting on a table in the back room. “It’s buzzing,” he said.

  “It seems it was not as abandoned as I had been led to believe.”

  “Vespula are tricky like that,” Lucas said as he backed away. He slipped his backpack off and unzipped it. Then he pulled out a bottle of Dr Pepper and handed it to Mr. Douglas, who smiled for half a second. He dropped the bottle in the trash. “Charlie and Storm and the boys would be shocked, but I don’t drink the stuff anymore. I guess you’re still entitled to your clue. Wait here.”