The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “Really, I would like to help you find it.”

  “You know, the more I think about it, the more I think I just forgot to put it in this morning.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  She dropped the clothes back into the bin, and then, in one quick motion, stood and put her hand on my arm. “How are you doing, Ruth?”

  “Fine. It’s really no big deal. I’m practically done with it.”

  “I meant in general. You feel like things are going okay?”

  “Sure. I’m excited about the spelling bee.”

  She nodded and pursed her lips in a way that showed me she was really listening. I didn’t think it was an act, but she still looked a little ridiculous. “And friends? Are you making some good friends here?”

  “I’m making friends.” I was making acquaintances, really, like Lena and Coco, but didn’t want to get into it with Dr. Dawes.

  “I’ve seen you chatting with Lena. And I heard Christopher is helping you to study for the bee.”

  “Yes.”

  “He must be a good help. Spelling genes run in that family.”

  “He is. Dr. Dawes?”

  “Yes, dear.” She leaned in.

  “I need to get going.”

  She stood up straight. “Of course, Ruth. See you tomorrow.”

  “See you tomorrow.”

  I eased out of the office and made sure she had gone back to her desk before I tried one last time. Going backward as the rook would just bring me to the wall, so I went right. It brought me to the door of the gymnasium. Through the small window I could see the girls’ basketball team practicing. Charlotte dribbled the ball in place while wearing a yellow pinny. Melinda was talking to her. She leaned in close and whispered something into her ear.

  I’d have to check out the gym another time. No clue was worth walking into that lion’s den.

  Mom had to work late, so after school I went to the library. First I checked my e-mail. The account had been a “gift” for my eleventh birthday. Charlotte had gotten the same, and nearly all my e-mails had been from her at first. Now I only ever bothered to check because I was a member of the Harriet Wexler fan club, the Greenbottoms, and they sent out a monthly newsletter that I hoped would have arrived. Instead I had an e-card from Mum. It was one of those retro ones, with a bee holding a bouquet of flowers. The caption said: “You get my heart buzzing!” Mum’s message said: “Sorry I cannot be there to help in person. STOP.” For some reason, Mum thought it was funny to send me e-mail messages that were like old telegrams. “Here is a link to help you study. STOP. Will arrive by soonest aeroplane. STOP. Much love, Mum.” She never wrote “STOP” after she signed off, because once I told her it looked like she meant she was going to stop loving me.

  I clicked on the link. It went to Word Central from Merriam-Webster with a bunch of games that you could use to study spelling. Before, it would have seemed like fun, but after a few sessions with Coco, it almost seemed like a sad way to study. I would go back later, I decided, and try some of the games then.

  Next I pretended I was still doing the shelf reading for Eliot, but I was just looking for more ugly books that might have notes in them. In the 500s, I found a book called Chemical Equations and YOU! It had a puke-green cover with bland red type. When I pulled it out, I saw that the cover had a picture of a test tube with a man and a woman swirling out of it surrounded by smoke. The woman wore a big flower in her hair and the man had an eye patch. I was flipping through it, sure that a book this ugly must have a note in it, when someone said, “Oh, hi, Ruth, I thought that was you!”

  Coco.

  He carried a stack of books from the tween/teen area and had his hat pulled on so low that it hid his chocolate-brown hair. “Hi,” I said as I twisted my head to read the titles on the spines. He had the latest Andromeda Rex book (yuck), but also two by Harriet Wexler, and one called Corpses and Skeletons: The Science of Forensic Anthropology.

  “Corpses and Skeletons?” I asked.

  “Yeah!” He tugged the book from the bottom of the pile. “Ms. Pepper got it for me. It’s a little old. Hopefully they’ll put out a new edition soon.” He stared at the cover with admiration, but when he looked up and saw me staring at him, he gave a sheepish smile. “Forensic anthropology, it’s, like, studying the remains of people to learn about history. It’s really cool. Not gross.”

  “I don’t mind gross things,” I said. “In fact, Charlotte and I used to mix up really gross concoctions and then drink them. Only she could never do it. Only me.”

  “Really?” He sounded a little impressed. “Anyway, it really isn’t gross. It’s what I want to be when I grow up, I think.”

  “So, like, you’d go around and look at old bodies?”

  He nodded. “That’s how I got interested in geography. But you can do it anywhere. Like, remember when they were digging up Stewart Street, down by the edge of town, and they found that old cemetery? Well, they had to call in all these forensic anthropologists to figure out who the bodies were and how old and everything.”

  It turned out it had been a graveyard for people too poor to pay to be buried. They’d moved all the bodies into the graveyard up the hill.

  “They let me come and watch them. It was amazing.”

  “That does sound cool,” I said. Because it did. “How’d you even get interested in that?”

  “Well, you know, I liked dinosaurs a lot as a kid.”

  “Who didn’t?” I asked.

  “Right. Exactly. But then one day I guess I wondered if anyone studied human bones the same way, and it turns out they do, and that was even more interesting to me.” He shrugged. “Anyway, what about you. What are you looking at? Find something good?”

  I held up the book. “Oh, this? No, I don’t think so.”

  “Why does that man have an eye patch?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He shifted his books from one hand to the other. “I didn’t know you liked chemistry.”

  “Chemistry? I don’t. Not particularly, anyway. I’m looking for ugly books.”

  “Ugly books? Why?”

  If there was anyone I would tell about the notes, it was Coco. He would probably like the mystery and would be good at figuring out the clues. Probably. Or he might think it was a silly waste of time, and then he’d just flutter off like geese flying down south for the winter. “I’m helping Eliot—Mr. Diamond. I do that sometimes. Help in the library.”

  “Ms. Lawson. Mr. Diamond. This town couldn’t survive without you,” he said. When he smiled, his eyes crinkled and you almost couldn’t see them anymore.

  “You have cat eyes,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “They go away when you smile.”

  “Oh.” Now he frowned.

  “It’s not bad.”

  “Is it good?”

  “It’s not good or bad. It just is.”

  He shook his head. “Anyway, Ruth, I heard your birthday was coming up.”

  “Yeah.” I nodded. “Next month. Why?”

  “Well, Melinda said you were having a boy-girl party with the whole sixth grade.”

  “I’m not having a boy-girl party. I’m not having any sort of a party.”

  “Oh, well, that’s too bad. I thought it sounded like fun.”

  “You like boy-girl parties?”

  “I’ve never actually been to one.”

  “Me, neither,” I said. “But they sound terrible. Dancing and boys trying to stick as many marshmallows as they can into their mouths and spin the bottle.”

  Coco blushed. “I don’t think they have spin the bottle at every party. You wouldn’t have to have spin the bottle.”

  “I’m not having a party,” I told him again. I had thought that he was smart—that was what everyone said—but now I was starting to have my doubts.

  “But if you did, you wouldn’t have to play spin
the bottle. It’s your party. You could have whatever games you wanted.”

  I imagined my classmates outside in the snow, running around while I sat in a treestand shooting a Super Soaker at them. I would fill it with grape Kool-Aid and shoot it straight at Melinda in her all-white winter coat. That’s the kind of game I would want to play.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Five.”

  “Five?” I asked

  “That’s how many marshmallows I can fit in my mouth. We did it at Adam’s party. He can do seven.”

  “No surprise,” I said.

  He smiled. “If you did have a boy-girl party, and you invited me, I would come.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “I know,” he said. “Bye, Ruth.”

  I thought about calling after him and telling him that maybe the man had an eye patch because he’d been in a terrible chemical accident and had burned out his eye. The woman was his lab partner, and she wore the flower in her hair to cover up the smell of singed eye-flesh, and also so that he would always be able to find her so they could continue their important work into chemical equations. I wondered what his reaction would be. But he was gone and I slid Chemical Equations and YOU! back on the shelf.

  Twelve

  Debacle

  Mom sent the e-mail to every parent in the sixth grade. And some in seventh, too, if she knew them. The subject: Girls’ Locker Room Issues.

  In it she explained the fact that the boys had to traipse through the girls’ locker room to get to the gym.

  In theory they wait outside the girls’ locker room until someone gives the all clear and then march through and up the stairs to the gym. Calls to appropriate teachers were not returned.

  I knew this because Melinda had a printout of the e-mail, and she read it to Charlotte as they sat, legs intertwined on the beanbag chair in Ms. Broadcheck’s room. “I don’t know why your mom is so upset,” she told me. “It’s not like anyone wants to see you naked.”

  Charlotte folded the piece of paper. “It is a little strange when you think about, how the boys come through our locker room.”

  “But not something to make a big deal about. Right, Mitchell? I mean, it doesn’t bother you to have to wait, right?”

  Mitchell shook his head but kept his eyes on the magnetic blocks he was using to build a tower.

  “It’s not like you want to come in and spy on Ruth?”

  Mitchell glanced over at me. His cheeks were red. In first grade he didn’t know how to read yet, and during quiet reading time, he would sit next to me and I would whisper the words of my book to him. He was littler then, with small fingers whose nails had white half-moons at the base. “I just want to play ball,” he said.

  “See?” Melinda said, as if this proved her point. “Total overreaction. You didn’t tell me how weird her moms were.”

  I didn’t tell her that Mum wouldn’t do this sort of thing. Mum would come to school, have a look around, devise a plan to fix the problem, then bring that to the gym teachers. First, though, she would check to see if I wanted any help.

  If Mum were home, none of this would have happened. But now she was in Seattle with the million-book robotic library.

  Charlotte folded the paper into smaller and smaller pieces. “Yeah,” she said. “Anyway, Melinda, where’d you get that shirt? I really like it.”

  Ms. Wickersham asked to see me before I went into the locker room. She sat on the edge of her desk and held a basketball in both hands. It had signatures all over it, and I wondered who they belonged to. Maybe it was members of the WNBA. That would be cool. Probably it was just the girls’ basketball team.

  She cleared her throat. “Let me begin by saying I’m sorry.”

  I blinked.

  “I try to give you girls your privacy, but I understand that means I might be missing something. It’s a fine line, these days, that we walk. I know—the research shows this—that bullying occurs in the locker room at an alarming rate, all over the country, I’m talking.”

  Her sentences never seemed to end, but to fold in on one another, and I wasn’t quite sure what she was saying, so I just nodded.

  “And I thought I could hear anything that happened from my office, even with the glass, you know, the windows, sound travels through them, so I thought I could hear both within the locker room and coming from without. But it seems I’ve missed something.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  She squeezed the ball. “You tell me, Ruth, I was hoping that’s what would happen.”

  I scratched at some dry skin through my shirt. I tried to think about when I’d been bullied, which was every day with Melinda, so it was hard to think of which one particular incident would have caught Ms. Wickersham’s attention. “I’m not sure I know. Do you mean about the bras?”

  “The bras?” She held the basketball to her stomach and leaned forward over it.

  No, not the bras. Stupid. “Or something else?”

  She didn’t talk. She was going to wait me out.

  “Some of the girls wear them and some don’t. It’s no big deal.”

  “And the boys mentioned this?”

  “No,” I said.

  “The trouble I’m having, Ruth, is, you know, I have this e-mail, we all got this e-mail, and I just wish you had told me, sorry, no, it’s not your fault, but if the boys are bothering you—”

  “No,” I said. “They aren’t. I mean, it’s a little stressful to have to get changed so quickly, and it’s annoying when they are yelling outside.”

  “So they haven’t come in?”

  I shook my head.

  She spun the basketball in her hands. I thought of the cafeteria workers. Was she going to spit on the ball and then make me shoot baskets? She stood up and walked around her desk. “I can offer you another place to change. Someplace else could work, the bathroom, or here, no, the windows, we’ve already discussed the windows.”

  “I don’t need another place to change.”

  “Did something happen, Ruth?”

  “Nothing happened. It’s just my mom—she didn’t know about the locker room, how the boys come in, and when I told her, she freaked.”

  “It’s not an ideal situation, I know.”

  “Please don’t make a big deal out of it.”

  She tugged on her ponytail. “It already is a big deal, my dear.” She gave me a sad little smile and walked to the far side of the room. “I can offer you this,” she said, pulling open a door. There were bins full of balls: soccer, basketball, softball, and more. A stack of orange cones listed to the right.

  “A closet?”

  “It’s spacious. No one goes in but me.”

  “I don’t need to—”

  “Dr. Dawes asked me to work out a solution for you.”

  I sighed. “Let me get my things from my locker.”

  “Okay. The boys are waiting. I’m going to go let them through, and then you change and come on up and join us.”

  Every boy stared at me sitting in Ms. Wickersham’s office as they walked through the locker room and headed upstairs. Even Coco. He didn’t smile.

  And when we played basketball, not one person passed me the ball, even with the three-pass rule.

  Lena followed me into the closet after class. “Whoa, private digs,” she said. “Hold on.”

  A moment later, she came back in with her stuff. “You don’t mind, right?”

  I shook my head, but I was racing to get changed.

  When we stepped out of the closet and joined the line waiting to leave, I said “Oops,” to no one in particular. “I think I left my ponytail holder upstairs.” I had. Purposefully.

  “I can loan you one,” Lena said.

  “I’ll just run up.”

  “It’s just a hair elastic,” she said. “No big deal.”

  “No. I’ll go.”

  Before she could argue, I raced up the stairs and back into
the gym, which smelled of rubber and sweat and sorrow. I needed to get to the bookshelf tucked into the back corner of the gym. I grabbed my elastic from the bleacher where I’d left it, then slid over to the bookshelf.

  It was all sex-ed books.

  I guess I was expecting sports books, like How to Shoot Baskets Like a Pro. Books I’ve seen kids carrying, but from a section of the library I’d never been to.

  I took a deep breath and began flipping through them. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  And then I saw it: when I picked up a particularly large book titled, simply, Sex, I revealed the corner of an envelope peeking from the back side of the shelf. Putting the sex book down, I peered over the back of the shelf and saw the envelope held on by yellowing tape. I freed it, turned, and nearly walked smack into Charlotte and Melinda.

  I tucked the envelope behind my back, but I think Charlotte saw it. Maybe.

  Melinda saw the books.

  “So,” she said. “Doing a little research?”

  “I forgot my elastic,” I told her.

  “And that book just jumped right off the shelf?” She smirked. She always smirked.

  “Yep. Guess so.”

  I bent over to pick it up. Melinda had her foot on it. I didn’t have any interest in the book—at all—but I still felt bad for it with her salty, muddy sole all over it.

  “Let’s go,” Charlotte said.

  “Wait, I want to hear what Ruth’s learned about S-E-X.”

  Country of origin? Can you use it in a sentence?

  I held up my elastic. “Found it,” I said. I gathered my hair at the nape of my neck and begin twisting the elastic around it.

  I heard clomping feet and when I looked up, there was Lena trotting across the gym in her black lace-up boots—Ms. Wickersham would have a fit—“There you are!” she called out.

  “She’s looking at the sex books,” Melinda said as Lena came up to us.

  “And?” Lena replied.

  Melinda cocked her head to the side. She’d never taken on Lena before, and I wondered if she had simply never bothered or if there was something about Lena that scared her a little bit.

  Lena took me by the hand. She looked from Melinda to Charlotte and then back to Melinda again. “Anyway, Ruthy, can we go over that science unit again? I’m nervous for the test.”