Mrs. Porter’s total button ban happened at that all-school assembly almost a month ago, but this morning on the bus? I saw button trading. Not as much as back in September, and not out in the open, but it’s still happening. Turns out that a fad is a tough thing to kill.
So is a friendship. Which is not a theory—I have proof.
Because it’s Friday afternoon one week before Halloween, and in about five minutes Ellie and I are meeting up for the only sleepover we’ve had since last May.
And it’s at my house—which hasn’t happened for years!
* * *
—
Walking back to class after Hank and Ellie came and rescued me in the principal’s office, I felt happier than I could ever remember.
And over the next few days, Ellie and I talked, really talked, maybe for the first time ever. I told her about Grampa’s mill building, and about the buttons he sent me, and about Gramma and graveyards and what my mom said about dying and not dying, and how she said that she wasn’t friends today with a single kid she knew when she was in sixth grade—we talked about everything.
I could tell Hank kind of felt left out when Ellie and I got going, especially at lunchtime. So Hank and I have been texting. A lot. And in our science and math classes every day? Ellie’s not there, which is good.
The day Mrs. Porter called us to the office and handed us the bill for the button cleanup expenses? That was a tough one.
We got into the hallway afterward, and Ellie exploded.
“Six hundred dollars? That’s two hundred dollars each—I don’t have that kind of money! I mean, I’ve got all my birthday cash, but it’s in a savings account, and if I tried to take out that much, my parents would have a fit! Six hundred dollars? That has to be wrong!”
Of course, Mrs. Porter wasn’t wrong at all. Four people doing lawn work for three hours at $22.50 per hour, plus three police officers on special detail for two hours at $55.00 per hour equals $600.00. That’s the math, and numbers don’t lie.
But Hank wasn’t worried, and neither was I. The two of us had already worked out a solution. And once we told Ellie about our plan, she stopped worrying, too.
Okay, it was really Hank’s plan.
Because Hank was the one who had been doing tons of research about buttons, and he knew that vintage buttons are valuable, and he knew that there are active collectors on eBay, hunting for buttons and buying them every single day. And he knew that I had plenty of valuable buttons.
Except we had a problem: A person has to be at least eighteen years old to have an eBay account. Ben is only fifteen, so he was useless. And there was no way that we wanted to get any of our parents involved.
“You want me to do what?”
That’s what Grampa said when the three of us ambushed him on speakerphone one afternoon and explained how we needed him to open up an eBay account and a PayPal account for us so we could earn six hundred dollars by selling vintage buttons.
Grampa said no about twenty times, but one great thing about Ellie? She can talk faster than anybody, and she never gives up. And once Grampa started laughing, that was it, and our top secret after-school button-selling business was off and running.
I gave Hank bags and bags of buttons so he could do research and organize sets of buttons to offer for sale. Next, I took lots of photos of each button group to show what we were selling, and then I emailed the pics to Ellie so she could write descriptions and do the computer work to put each group up for sale in our eBay store.
And Grampa? He just kept working on his old mill building—and worrying about how he was going to explain all this to Mom and Dad if they found out what he’d done.
And they did find out.
Because once the buttons started to sell, orders piled up fast, and then we had to mail little packages of buttons all over the place—and I mean all over. Like to England and Japan and the Netherlands, even to China. And there was no way to keep all that a secret.
So I had to explain to Mom and Dad what we were doing, and then why we were doing it, and then how we were doing it. And Grampa was part of the how.
They were pretty upset about the why, because I told them everything—only I didn’t tell about Ben’s economics lecture and the way he didn’t tell me to do anything.
Ben owes me big-time. And he knows it.
But Mom and Dad understood why I dumped all those buttons, and they were glad everything was good again between Ellie and me. And when I told them how I had two best friends come and stand up for me in the principal’s office, Dad’s opinion of Hank went from high to higher—which Hank totally deserves.
The balance in our PayPal account reached $607.14 after only eleven days of button trading, and the stuff we sold barely made a dent in my three boxes of specialty buttons.
After we had paid Mrs. Porter, Ellie wanted to keep on selling. Her idea was that I would keep 50 percent of the profits because the buttons were mine, and she and Hank would each get 25 percent for the work they did. It seemed fair, but I told her that I was all done with buttons, at least for now.
So Ellie didn’t get her way, but she didn’t get mad, and she didn’t keep pushing, and she didn’t stomp away in a huff—which was something really new.
And really good.
* * *
—
I’ve got the front door open before Ellie can ring the bell, and we both wave goodbye to her mom.
Inside the front hall, she looks around.
“It feels like it’s been forever since I was here!”
“Not forever—just two years, one month, and six days. You came over after school to work on a project for social studies.”
She nods. “Right—fourth grade, and it was about the Illinois Constitution!” Then she looks at me. “And ever since then, I always made you come to my house. You know how come I did that?”
“Of course—so you could be in charge of everything.”
We both laugh a little, but she gets serious again because she knows I’m actually not joking about that.
“So how come you kept putting up with me?”
“Simple—I’ve always known that you’re a really good person. Plus I love that fancy root beer your mom buys!”
We laugh again and then go upstairs.
Ellie stops in the doorway of my room, just looking around. Which is exactly what Hank did that day he came over.
I had started to clean things up when I got home after school today, but then I stopped. Because I wanted my room to look the way it is, not the way I imagined Ellie would like it to look.
She walks over to my dresser, and I stand a little to one side, watching her eyes jump around from object to object. I hope she’s not trying to make sense of it all, because that’s not possible, even for me.
Then Ellie points, and I see what she’s found: The three jagged pieces of the pinwheel button. Just like Hank did.
“Sorry. I meant to throw those away.”
“No, you shouldn’t. Listen, I know you’re pretty tired of buttons, but I brought you one more anyway.”
She hands me a brass button. I run my thumb across the raised letters on the front—STRONG HOLD. And right away, I remember.
“I can’t keep this—it came from your great-great-grandfather!”
She smiles at me. “You know what your mom said, about losing touch with all her sixth-grade friends? Well, we’re not going to be like that. If I ever need this button, you’ll be the first to know. And if that day comes, then you have to show up in person and give it back to me.”
Ellie puts out her hand.
“Deal?”
“Deal!”
And we shake on it.
Dear Reader,
As a kid, I used to poke around in tumbledown barns and sheds, especially in rural Maine, and if I happene
d to spot a rusty ax-head or a broken doorknob or some strange chunk of brass or iron or glass, it was like a treasure to me, and it would follow me home. As those who know me today will tell you, I still can’t resist old tools and odd bits of this and that. My office is loaded with all kinds of interesting and semi-useless stuff that I’ve found or bought over the decades.
Many years ago I worked in an old textiles mill that was soon to be remodeled into apartments, and my company was the last one still in the building. One day as I looked through some junk left in a hallway, I found a box of buttons—blue, gray, and brown, all about the size of a quarter. There were probably two or three hundred buttons of each color. So I took them home and gave them to our young sons. Instantly all four of them went bonkers about buttons.
The boys divided them up (mostly by grabbing, as I recall), and then those buttons were used as money during card games, for creating strange sculptures with wire and thread, for bartering and trading, and, of course, for throwing at each other. The blue buttons mysteriously became more valuable than the brown ones, and the brown ones were more prized than the gray. There was a lot of arguing, a lot of hoarding and hiding, and there were many loud accusations of unfairness and greediness and outright robbery. And then, after only six or seven days, everyone moved on, and those beloved buttons were nothing more than a nuisance littering the floor of the basement playroom.
During the seven years I was a classroom teacher, I saw a number of fads come and go—Mexican jumping beans, Pet Rocks, mood rings, Wizzzer tops, and Star Wars action figures, to name a few. And during the years our sons grew up, my wife and I saw many more fads arrive and exit, from Pokémon cards to Beanie Babies to Silly Bandz. But when I got the idea to write a story about a fad at a middle school, the first memory that skidded into my head was the way our own kids had reacted to that box of buttons. And the result of this happy mental collision is the book you have in your hands: The Friendship War.
Thanks for taking this little journey with me and for helping to make reading the one fad that will never die!
I want to thank Steve Smith of Cornish, Maine, for helping me find most of the buttons that provided background and inspiration for parts of this book. I also want to thank my editor, Shana Corey, for being a cheerful fount of good ideas; my agent, Amy Berkower, for her steadfast help and invaluable advice; and all the talented and dedicated people at Random House Children’s Books for their enthusiastic work on my behalf. I am especially thankful for my wife, Rebecca, whose love and unfailing support make every day far happier and much more productive than it would otherwise be.
A bright red plastic chair sat in the hallway outside the door of the principal’s office. This chair was known as the Hot Seat, and at nine-fifteen on a Tuesday morning, Alec Spencer was in it.
During his years at Bald Ridge Elementary School, Alec had visited the Hot Seat a lot—he had lost count somewhere in the middle of fifth grade. This morning’s visit was the very first time he’d been sent to the principal’s office during sixth grade…except this was also the very first day of school, so Alec had been a sixth grader for less than forty-five minutes.
A kid could end up in the Hot Seat at least a hundred different ways, most of them pretty standard: talking back to a teacher, bullying or shoving or punching, throwing food in the cafeteria—stuff like that.
But Alec was a special case. Every time he had landed in the Hot Seat, he had been caught doing something that teachers usually liked: reading. It wasn’t about what he was reading or how he was reading—it was always because of where and when he was reading.
Maybe his mom and dad were to blame for spending all those hours reading to him when he was little. Or maybe The Sailor Dog was to blame, or The Very Hungry Caterpillar, or possibly The Cat in the Hat. But there was no doubt that Alec had loved books from the get-go. Once he found a beginning, he had to get to the middle, because the middle always led to the end of the story. And no matter what, Alec had to know what happened next.
Today’s situation was a perfect example. Just twenty minutes earlier, Alec had been in first-period art class, and Ms. Boden had passed out paper and pencils to everyone. Then she said, “I want each of you to make a quick sketch of this bowl of apples, and don’t put your name on your paper. In five minutes I’m going to collect the sketches and tape them up on the wall, and then we’re going to talk about what we see. All right? Please begin.”
From across the art room, Alec had looked like he was hunched over his paper, hard at work. But when Ms. Boden got closer, she had discovered that Alec was hunched over a book, reading—something that had happened many, many times in past years. So Ms. Boden instantly sent him off to see the principal.
The second-period bell rang, and the hallway outside the principal’s office filled up with kids—which was one of the worst parts of being in the Hot Seat. If you got sent to see Mrs. Vance, the whole school knew about it.
However, Alec wasn’t just sitting there on the Hot Seat. He was also reading. It was a book called The High King, and in his mind, Alec held a sword in his hand as he ran along beside the main character, battling to save a kingdom. The bell, the kids, the laughing, and the talking—to Alec, all that seemed like sounds coming from some TV show in another room.
But a loud voice suddenly demanded his attention.
“Hey, can you guys smell something?”
Without looking up from his book, Alec knew the voice. It belonged to Kent Blair, a kid who lived on his street, a kid who used to be a friend. These days, Kent was very popular and very annoying, and he always laughed when Alec got in trouble. Kent was also in Alec’s first-period art class, so him showing up like this? It wasn’t a coincidence.
Alec forced his eyes to stay on the page, but he could tell Kent was about five feet away, standing with two other guys. He was talking extra loudly, making a big show of sniffing the air.
“Phew! Seriously, can’t you smell that?”
One of the other guys said, “I think it’s the spaghetti. From the cafeteria.”
Kent turned slowly toward Alec and then pretended to see him for the first time. “Ohhh! Look!” He pointed. “That’s Alec Spencer on the Hot Seat! So the smell? It’s fried bookworm! Get it? Ha-ha!”
The other guys joined right in. “Oh—yeah! Fried bookworm!”
Alec looked up from his book and scowled. He was about to toss out some insults of his own, when all three guys stopped laughing and walked away—fast.
Something on his left moved, and Alec turned. It was Mrs. Vance, holding her office door open.
“You may come in now, Alec.”
The chair in front of Mrs. Vance’s desk was identical to the Hot Seat out in the hallway: hard red plastic with black metal legs. Alec remembered how big the chair had seemed back in first grade, and how scared he had been on those early visits. Today, the chair was a perfect fit, and he felt right at home.
Mrs. Vance looked the same: brownish-gray hair almost to her shoulders, a jacket over a blouse—sometimes it was a sweater over a blouse. And she always wore a necklace of small pearls. She didn’t have what Alec would call a pretty face, but she wasn’t anywhere near ugly either.
She was doing that thing where she rested her elbows on her desk and pressed the palms of both hands together. He thought it made her look like she was praying—maybe she was. Her glasses didn’t have rims, and the lenses were sort of thick, so her brown eyes seemed larger than life. When she looked at him the way she was doing right then, Alec felt like a bug under a magnifying glass.
He knew better than to smile, and he knew better than to talk first. So he waited.
The wait was only five or ten seconds, but it felt much longer. Then Mrs. Vance pulled her hands apart and folded them in front of her on the desk. She spoke slowly and very softly, lips barely moving, her eyes narrowed.
“Alec, Alec, Alec—w
hat are we going to do?” And as she said the word do, her dark eyebrows shot upward.
Alec sat perfectly still. Mrs. Vance had yelled at him before, she had shaken a finger in his face, and once she had slammed both hands down on her desk, hard. But this? This was new.
She opened a file folder on her desk. “I reviewed your academic results and test scores from last year. They weren’t great, but they weren’t as bad as I thought they might be.” She paused and locked her large eyes onto his. “But in terms of your attitude reports, your study skills reports, and your class participation marks? Fifth grade was a disaster!” She paused, then asked, “Do you know how many times you were sent to my office last year for reading instead of listening and participating in class?”
Alec was about to guess eleven—but then decided he’d better keep his mouth shut. He shook his head.
Mrs. Vance leaned forward. “Fourteen times!”
Another long pause. “Your teachers and I know how bright you are, Alec. All of us admire how much you love to read—I don’t think I have ever known anyone who enjoys books more than you do. But when reading gets in the way of your other schoolwork every single day? That is a problem, and it’s gotten worse every year. Starting today, you have to make some definite changes—and you already know what they are. And if you choose not to change your classroom behavior? Then I will require that you attend a special study skills program. This program begins one week after school lets out next June, and the class meets for three hours each morning. The program lasts for six weeks, and unless your attitude and your actions change, that is how you will be spending most of next summer. Do you understand?”
Alec gulped, his mind spinning. A whole summer with no trip to New Hampshire, no time at his grandparents’ cabin, no swimming in the lake—and no water-skiing!
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