The Friendship Riddle

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  “I’m sorry, kiddo. We’ll keep working on it.”

  “Don’t, Dad.”

  “Can’t give up now.” He ran his hand over his smoothed hair, and I wondered if it came off greasy. “If they can have a spelling bee, they can have a geography bee.”

  “I don’t want to do a geography bee.”

  “Why not?” his dad asked while looking at the trophy case. “That’s just the type of thing that Harvard camp would love to see on your application.”

  Coco shook his head.

  “Coco, this is the final stretch here. They’re throwing obstacles in our way, but we can’t let them beat us.”

  “I don’t care about a stupid geography bee or a stupid spelling bee or a stupid anything bee.”

  “You’re helping that girl study.” He turned his eyes away from the gleaming trophies to look at Coco. “Emma told me.”

  Coco traced the toe of his winter boot around the outline of a chessboard tile. “It’s not—”

  His dad waved his hand, and Coco stopped talking.

  Not what? my brain demanded.

  “I’m not concerned about that. I just don’t understand why you want to take a backseat. This geography bee thing—I took a look at the website, and let me tell you, you’d be a shoo-in.”

  “I could have been a shoo-in for the spelling bee, too. But not everything needs to be a competition. It’s just dumb memorization, anyway.”

  His dad cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean, could have been?”

  “Nothing, Dad.”

  “No, Christopher. What do you mean?”

  “I don’t even care who wins the bee, if it’s Emma or Ruth or Dev or someone else entirely. I’m only helping her because—” His voice dropped off. “Let’s just go.”

  Because why?

  “Are you saying that you purposely didn’t make the bee?”

  A phone rang the melody of a popular song, maybe even one of those April Showers songs that Charlotte liked so much. I wasn’t sure. Coco’s dad pulled his phone from his pocket and answered it, all the while watching Coco, who studied the floor. I didn’t know what to do, where to look. I picked up my book, but wasn’t that like I was trying to ignore him?

  I was trying to ignore him. But maybe I should have caught his eye.

  Only.

  Only I wished he would answer his father’s questions. What did he mean, he could have been a shoo-in for the spelling bee?

  But I knew. I knew. Dev said it himself. He said there was no way he could have done better on that test than Coco. And Ms. Lawson had told him right in front of me. Coco should have been in the spelling bee. He messed up the test. On purpose. Because he thought the bee was dumb. Dumb like me.

  I grabbed my book and lifted it in front of my eyes.

  Taryn’s elf songs seemed awfully stupid themselves right about then.

  I couldn’t help but lift my eyes, though, when they walked through the vestibule. His dad came first, staring straight ahead and still talking on the phone. Coco, who gave me a quick glance through wet lashes, came next.

  We didn’t say anything.

  I laid the clues out on my bed. They were all still folded so the red seal with the little bird looked up at me. One at a time I unfolded them, so now I was looking at the words. Each was written in a different pen, but the handwriting was all the same: small letters that were so uniform, they almost seemed like they had been typed. The illustrations were beautiful, too. They looked like they were drawn with the same fancy kind of colored pencils that Charlotte used—not the kind my moms got me at the grocery store. Instead, these were richly colored. But the style was totally different. Charlotte’s drawings were light, bright, and airy, both curvy and elongated. These were darker, with harder edges, but no less gorgeous. They looked like the drawings on the covers of the fantasy books people were always trying to push on me.

  I picked up the first of the two that Charlotte had given me.

  This was the one Charlotte remembered: something about meanings. The border was a chain of metal links that was held by a strong man at the top of the card. The man’s face was strained with effort, as if he was trying to rip the chain apart.

  As I read the clue, I pictured Coco with his dictionary. So, the next one was hidden in a dictionary, then. I started to fold the card when the final phrase caught my eye: “off to school you go.” School. Not the public library, but school. She had gone looking for—and found—the next clue in a dictionary at school. That meant Charlotte had been intrigued, too, and had tried to follow the clues, only she had gotten stuck and hadn’t been able to solve the next clue.

  I smoothed out the card. It was one of the longer clues, and the picture up top was smaller. The image was of a girl with pale white skin, red lips, and dark hair: Snow White. Her border was leaves with little woodland animals peeking out. This one read:

  It seemed like a math problem. Snow White plus her seven dwarfs, well, that made eight people. Then two, then one, then a decimal, and then just the seven dwarfs: 821.7. “This system has your next clue shown.” It was a Dewey number on a book! And that made sense because I had found the clue about King Ferdinand in the J. Samuel Samuelson book of poetry in the 821 section of the library.

  Looking at them in a jumble on my bed wasn’t helping. I rearranged them so they were in the order I found them.

  First the one telling me to look up—so simple and plain compared with the others.

  Next came King Ferdinand, and after that I found the flag clue in the gym. I picked up the page torn from the phone book, a sickly yellow. Then I had the two from Charlotte: the strong man and the maiden Snow White.

  Six clues in total. What would Charlotte think if she knew we had found so many? And how many were there to find? There could be little clues all over this town, just waiting to be discovered.

  As I stared at the cards, I noticed the asterisks on the bottom, each a different number. I rearranged them from least asterisks to most: the strong-man clue had two asterisks, then Snow White had three. Then came King Ferdinand with four, the British flag had seven, the phone book had eight; and the look-up one, the first one I had found, had twelve.

  The stars were the order!

  The strong man led Charlotte to Snow White, and Lena and I had found the phone book note by following the flag clue.

  But wait. I found the flag clue following the moves on the chessboard the way they were described on the King Ferdinand clue. So either I was wrong about the numbering system or I did something wrong with the chess moves.

  I looked over the clues again. Those asterisks, why else would there be a different number of them on each card? What else could it possibly represent? It had to be the order. That meant we were missing at least three: the first one, the fifth one that should have come after King Ferdinand, and then there had to be one in the post office box, one that would lead to another clue, unless the post office box itself was the end.

  Coco would be good at this. All the books he read, and the way he thought about things in such an orderly way. But no. I could still hear him in the hallway talking with his dad. I don’t care about a stupid geography bee or a stupid spelling bee or a stupid anything bee. He didn’t care. I wasn’t sure why he’d been going through the whole ruse of studying with me if he didn’t care about the bee, but in the end it didn’t really matter. The outcome was the same.

  Anyway, I could do this myself. I just needed to think a little harder. I had never relied on anyone in the past except for Charlotte. And look what happened both times: I’d thought he was my friend, but he wasn’t. Just like Charlotte. Just like everyone, probably, in the end.

  I blinked my dry eyes. I needed to go to bed. I swept all the clues into the box, which I’d emptied of everything else except for one small key. It was bigger than a diary key, but much smaller than a house or car key.

  The Summer of Lost Keys.

  Two summers ago, we kept finding lost keys. We found one buried in t
he sand at the beach, silver and warm when we pulled it out. It was just a regular house key. Then, in the library, we found an old-fashioned key with a filigree on one end, and what looked like three uneven teeth to go in the door. We found a key with a key chain that said RAYMOND on it, and we puzzled over whether it was the name of a person or a place. We also found two tiny keys. This had to be one of them. One had been next to a potted plant by the ice-cream place down on the piers, and the other had been sitting on the end of the ferry dock. We kept them all, telling ourselves that these keys meant something, and someday we would be called upon to use them.

  I guess she’d given that up as silly, too.

  My computer dinged to let me know I had a chat message. It was Lena. Or so I assumed. The screen name was CoolerThanYou2.

  Can’t chat. Wanted to let you know that you need to do the Wonder Woman pose. Supposed to be in bed. Talk tomorrow.

  Lena had already logged off, and I decided that maybe I didn’t want to know what the Wonder Woman pose was, anyway.

  After I closed the chat window, I opened up a browser and searched for the camp at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. It was run in conjunction with their Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology. The page was filled with glowing, smiling kids alongside photos of artifacts. It said they would get to handle real bones and other ancient objects and learn the stories behind them. They would even get to look at unidentified items and try to date and figure out where they came from.

  Coco would love it.

  I clicked on APPLY and read what they were looking for: academic excellence. Not a problem. Lucas might be the smartest kid in school, but Coco was definitely the most successful. Cooperative spirit. Perfect. Leadership. I hesitated. He was a leader for sure, but not of any club or team. He just was. But that would be hard to prove, I thought. Each candidate should have a record of achievements, honors, and accomplishments. Like winning a geography bee. Or a spelling bee.

  What about quiet leaders? I wondered. What about guys who would be willing to take a backseat in order to help someone else? It didn’t seem fair. It wasn’t my problem, though, and I didn’t know why I even cared. Coco was as good as dead to me.

  I picked up old King Ferdinand. Lena had her special sources, and I had mine. If I’d messed up the chess clue, then I needed to speak to some chess experts. Taryn sought out help when she needed it; it didn’t mean she was tied to those people forever. In fact, there were only a few characters who appeared in more than one of her books. The next day I would talk to Dev and Lucas, and they would help me solve the King Ferdinand riddle.

  Twenty

  Discipline

  Hoping to catch Lucas before he went into homeroom, I shoved my coat and bag into my locker, slammed the door, turned, and started striding purposefully. I felt like Taryn Greenbottom heading toward a foe. Rounding the corner, I saw Ms. Lawson coming down the hall, waving. I checked over my shoulder, but, no, she wanted me. “Ruth,” she said as she came up to me. “Let’s talk.”

  Instead of going into her room, where her homeroom was gathered in the corner on the couch and beanbag chairs, she guided me to the teachers’ room. Ms. Broadcheck was in there and chose a coffee pod from the decaffeinated box and put it into one of those one-cup machines that Mom says are going to be the actual downfall of our environment. “Morning, Ruth!” she said. “Just getting my morning buzz.”

  “It’s decaf,” I said.

  “My mind is easily tricked,” she said as she left the room.

  Ms. Lawson sat down at a small table and pulled out a stack of maps from her bag. Mine was on top. My stomach plummeted like an elevator cut loose from its line in a cartoon, the wire snapping out above me and hitching in my throat.

  “I need you to explain this to me.”

  I didn’t say anything. What could I say?

  “You had everything right. Everything. And then you erased it all. Why?”

  “I guess I just wasn’t so sure of myself.”

  “About every identification?”

  “Yes.”

  She frowned. “I can’t give you credit for erased answers.”

  “I know.”

  She ran her fingers through her short hair. “Most students would probably put up a fight here. Let me play your part. ‘But, Ms. Lawson, you said yourself you can read them, and if they are right, can’t I at least get partial credit?’ ”

  “You don’t give partial credit. That’s your rule.”

  “I am not one hundred percent rigid,” she said. “I’m trying to help you out here.”

  “I know.”

  “The test was the day after the library collapse,” she said, as if I could have possibly forgotten. “I know that place was important to you and that Charlotte—”

  “Charlotte has nothing to do with this,” I said quickly. Too quickly.

  “Charlotte took a makeup.”

  I lowered my eyes. So Charlotte had not sold me out. She had just walked away. Again. It was stupid to be mad at her for not cheating, but I was.

  “I think you should take a makeup, too. I’ll average the grades.”

  “So the best I can get is a fifty?”

  “Actually, this test warrants a thirty since you did follow the directions for shading and such. You could get a sixty-five and still walk away with a semester grade in the high eighties or low nineties without any extra credit work.”

  “And if I don’t do the makeup?”

  She hesitated. “Your map test goes in as a thirty, which will sink your grade, and your lack of initiative will disincline me from giving extra credit.”

  She was frowning hard now, her lips pressed so hard together that they were white and wrinkled around the edges.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Today during study hall.”

  “But—” I began to say that I had plans to study with Coco, but realized this would give me an excuse not to have to see him.

  She arched her eyebrows.

  “Can you just tell Coco when he comes that I can’t study?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  We stood together and walked out of the room.

  When I finally got to Ms. Broadcheck’s class, homeroom was nearly over, and Lucas was hunched over one of his graphic novels.

  “Is this some kind of alliance?” Lucas asked. “I’m not manipulating the outcome of the spelling bee, if that’s what you’re after.” We were sitting at a table in the library during independent reading time. Lucas had a graphic novel version of Beowulf and Dev had a book with a dragon on the cover. I had my Harriet Wexler book. We were holding them up in front of us, but none of us were reading.

  “That’s not what I’m after. I need some chess help.”

  “So what do you need Dev for?” Lucas asked.

  “Two heads are better than one,” I told him.

  “Three heads are better than my one head. Maybe.”

  “Do you need coaching or something?” Dev asked. He glanced toward Ms. Lawson and Mrs. Abernathy, who shared a table by the circulation desk. “I have a chess coach who is quite good. I can get his e-mail address, and your mom can get in contact with him.”

  “Not exactly. Can you keep a secret?”

  The two boys let their books drop and leaned their heads in. I hesitated for a moment. Once I told them, I couldn’t take it back. But that didn’t mean I had to bring them along for the rest of the clues, did it? No. The clues were mine. I would get the boys’ help and then I’d be back on my own. I’d solve the whole thing, and then wouldn’t Charlotte be surprised.

  I spilled.

  “That. Is. So. Cool,” Lucas exhaled. “Let me see all the clues.”

  “I just have the one with me.” I pulled out the envelope, which I’d tucked into my book like a bookmark. Lucas sighed, but I handed it to Dev.

  He nodded. “Chess moves, sure.”

  “I thought I figured it out. I stood at the sculpture of King Ferdinand
and I followed the floor tiles like a chessboard, and I found a clue. But it’s not in the right order with the other ones I found.”

  “Which knight were you?” Dev asked.

  “Black or white, you mean?”

  “No,” Lucas said, snatching the note. “He means were you king side or queen side.”

  “Oh. I guess I was king side.”

  “So let’s try queen side,” Dev said.

  There was no way we could all excuse ourselves and go out in the hall during the whole school reading period. Just getting them to sit at a table with me—without Coco or Lena or anyone else—had been hard enough and we were pushing it with all our whispering. “Can you meet me after school?” I asked.

  Dev said, “Sure. My brother has basketball practice. I’m stuck here, anyway.”

  “I’ll call home. My mom will probably show up with cookies, she’ll be so excited I have after-school plans. She keeps asking when I want to have you back over.”

  “My mom said once the snow melts,” Dev told him.

  “Not you, Ruth. I told her you probably didn’t want to come suck at chess again.”

  “Gee, thanks,” I said.

  “You do suck at chess.”

  “And you suck at playdates.” Dev laughed, and Lucas didn’t even look put off by it. Still, I added, “But I would come again. I’ve decided on some names for your insects.”

  “You don’t name them. They are not pets,” he told me.

  “Willy the wasp.”

  “No names. Anyway, how could you tell which one is Willy?”

  “Rutherford the dragonfly.”

  “It’s a girl.”

  I giggled. I could see Coco looking over at us from his table. His lips twitched into a smile, but his deep eyes were soft and he gave me a sort of head tilt and shrug as if to say, What is going on over there?

  I picked up my book. I’d managed to avoid him all day, which had taken some quick moves on my part—ducking into the girls’ bathroom, sneaking lunch into the library. But I couldn’t stand to look into his deep brown eyes and realize that they weren’t actually windows to his soul. It had all been a sham—he didn’t care about the spelling bee or me or any of it. There was no way I was going to let him in on the clues.