The Friendship Riddle

For Matilda
Fierce in battle, sweet at heart—
I know you will succeed in
whatever quest you undertake.

Chapter One: Precipitate

Chapter Two: Rivals

Chapter Three: Illuminati

Chapter Four: Physique

Chapter Five: Neologism

Chapter Six: Chauvinism

Chapter Seven: Serendipity

Chapter Eight: Behoove

Chapter Nine: Metamorphosis

Chapter Ten: Mahal

Chapter Eleven: Contrapuntal

Chapter Twelve: Debacle

Chapter Thirteen: Kith

Chapter Fourteen: Amenable

Chapter Fifteen: Synergy

Chapter Sixteen: Chagrin

Chapter Seventeen: Purga

Chapter Eighteen: Knavery

Chapter Nineteen: Mootable

Chapter Twenty: Discipline

Chapter Twenty-One: Flense

Chapter Twenty-Two: Nemesis

Chapter Twenty-Three: Freebooter

Chapter Twenty-Four: Fidelity

Chapter Twenty-Five: Cynosure

Chapter Twenty-Six: Synchronous

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Graupel

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Quell

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Alchemy

Chapter Thirty: Pandit

Chapter Thirty-One: Planning

Chapter Thirty-Two: Finale

Chapter Thirty-Three: Epilogue

The Motley Crew

Also by Megan Frazer Blakemore

The secret clue was written on an index card, folded in half, placed in an origami envelope, and then tucked into an old book about the Loch Ness Monster. The morning I discovered it in the library, it was snowing. That winter, it was always snowing. The snowdrifts were so high, they went right over the sills of our first-floor windows and made their own little peaks right there on the glass. It was like looking into an ant farm, and I squinted and pretended I could see faint tracks through the snow and that the ants were wearing anoraks while snowshoeing around.

These are the kinds of thoughts that make my teachers write comments on my report cards like “Mind tends to
wander,” “A bit in her own world,” and “Reality does little to faze Ruth.”

The phone rang that morning and I snuggled down deeper into my covers. The phone rang again, and then, a few minutes later, there was my mom telling me she had been called in because another doctor's flight back from some vacation had been delayed. “Barbados? Bahamas?” She shrugged. “The other call was that awful automated message about school being canceled. The person always sounds so somber, like he's calling to tell us that a former president has died or something. Who makes that call, anyway?”

I rolled over and tugged the quilt over my head. “I dunno,” I said. “Good night.”

“I don't think so, darling. Up and at 'em. You're going to the library.”

So we got up, and Mom made herself coffee while I made us oatmeal. We sat down together, and she had a few sips of coffee out of her #1 MOM mug (Mum has one, too), and then she said, “If you were going to make an igloo, would you build up or dig down?”

I gave this question some thought. “Both.”

“When Mum gets back, we should build a snow fort. As long as it doesn't get too cold, this snow should be just right for it.”

“That sounds like fun,” I said. And it did sound like fun. But I knew that even though in that moment Mom had every intention of making that snow fort—she was probably
picturing it in her head, with windows and tunnels and everything—the chances of us building it were slim. There was always
something.

It took us half an hour to dig out in front of the garage after breakfast and to burst through the snowbank left at the end of the driveway by the plow as it cleared the road. “We'll leave the mailbox for later,” Mom said. We'd already gotten two form letters telling us about the importance of digging three feet in either direction so the mail carrier could get her car in to deliver our bills and catalogs. Mom had crumpled them up and thrown each one in the recycle bin.

We drove down the street and into town. The deejays on the radio had to take turns reading the list of school closures, there were so many of them. Our little town was all covered in snow. It clung to street lamps and hung off the edges of windowsills. It looked like a painting. Beautiful.

Maine is a big state. Probably bigger than you realize. Most people just think of the ocean, but there are mountains and forests and even cities. We do live on the ocean, though, in a little town called Promise. If you have fancy friends, they have probably been to Promise. In the summer we are overrun by people from all over the world. That's the word folks in Promise use—“overrun”—but I like seeing all the different people and the license plates from all fifty states and Canada, as well.

I like it in the winter, too, though most of the stores close up. It's quieter, but it's as if everyone who lives here
has been on vacation and they all come back and they're so happy to see one another. Only they haven't been on vacation; they've just been real busy working. I'm like a hawk in a tree looking down on all of it. It's pretty from up here. The problems come when I swoop down to the ground.

Mom turned the car onto Exchange Street and then made a quick turn onto Congress Street, driving up the hill toward the library.

My moms are different from most adults in Promise. They don't work in any of the touristy places, and they don't fish. Mom is a doctor. She works in the emergency room of the hospital in Rockport. Mum can live anywhere because she works everywhere. They came here on a trip once and loved it. “So we just stayed,” they tell everyone, but it's not really true. My moms aren't exactly just-drop-everything-and-leave people. They had to sell the house in Connecticut, and before that, Mom had to get her job. Plus they'd visited on a romantic vacation with just the two of them, and before they could settle down for good, they had to go back and get three-year-old me.

“If you run out of things to do in the library, I'm sure you can go up and see Charlotte,” Mom said. Hope hung on to her voice like the icicles on the side of McCallister's Pharmacy.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

You'd think in this tiny town in Maine, I'd be the only kid with two mothers. And I am. But there's also Charlotte Diamond, who was adopted from China by her two dads. That's
how Charlotte and I met. My two moms and her two dads formed what they called the Support Group, and Charlotte and I were thrown together. We had no choice but to be friends.

Until we weren't.

It was good while it lasted. We had matching blue raincoats with whales on the insides. We liked to read. We would take out the blender that her dads used to make smoothies and mixed drinks, and we'd fill it with disgusting combinations like peanut butter and seltzer and fish sauce, and then we would see who could take even one sip (usually me). When we got to middle school, she started hanging out with the popular girls. It's not like she ditched me or we had a fight. It's like all this shifting and sorting out happened. Like we were dumped into a colander, and all of us small, less interesting pieces fell through and left the big, juicy berries inside. Charlotte is a berry.

Me, I'm a lone wolf. I'm that hawk flying above it all, the quiet observer on the sidelines. And that's the way I like it.

The funny thing is, Charlotte was the one who was nervous about starting middle school. I promised to stick by her. Does it count as breaking a promise if the other person doesn't want you to keep your word?

Mom said “Hold on” as she cruised through the stop sign and turned right onto Main Street. “Phew. I was afraid if I stopped, we wouldn't get going again.”

“We could slide right back down the hill into the ocean. Or maybe the ferry would be there and it would catch
us and we could go spend the day on Swift Island, just you and me.”

“I'm not sure the ferry is even running today. Actually, it just occurred to me—I hope the library is open,” Mom said. “If not, you'll have to come to the hospital with me.”

A day at the hospital is no fun. There are only so many things you can do with tongue depressors and the little cups for urine samples.

We pulled up by a pile of snow higher than our car. “They're running out of places to put it,” Mom remarked. “They'll have to dump it in the ocean.”

“They can't,” I told her. “It's against the law.”

“Really?”

“Really. Because of all the chemicals and everything. They used to, but now I think they take it to the gully on the edge of town.” I'd seen the dump trucks full of snow out the school window, driving away from the center village.

“Clever girl,” she said. “So answer me this. Why is snowy-day quiet different from regular quiet?”

There had to be a reason, something to do with the snow muting the sound, maybe. “I'll look it up,” I told her. “I do have all day.”

“Ruth.”

“I didn't mean it like that.” But I had hurt her feelings, and I didn't know how to take it back. “I love you, Mom. See you later.”

“Love you,” she replied.

She waited and watched as I crossed the sidewalk toward the door. The snow was piled halfway up the plate-glass windows, taller than me. This was the seventh big storm we'd had that winter: we had two in November, before Thanksgiving even, three in December, and we'd already had one earlier that week, our first back from winter vacation. They were talking about taking days off our April vacation so we didn't have to go to school until July.

I pulled open the door and stomped my feet to get the snow out of my boots. A long, long time ago, the library was a Woolworth's department store. When that went out of business, the building—which takes up most of the block—changed hands several times. I love that expression. I picture the building being picked up by giant hands and cupped gently like an egg, then spilled over to another set of waiting, warm palms. Anyway, then Renys bought it. Renys is another department store, one that exists only in Maine, which is too bad for the rest of the country. You can get honey-roasted wasabi peanuts and blueberry shampoo, sturdy socks and school supplies, all at a discount. When Renys moved into an abandoned Walmart farther up the peninsula, they sold the building to the town for a dollar. Alan, one of Charlotte's dads, redesigned the whole building so the first two stories are the library and the top floor is a condo that Charlotte's family lives in. When he designed it, he kept the layout of the department store, so each section of the library takes up an old section of the store.

I found a table upstairs in the teen area (formerly women's lingerie, according to Charlotte) and started unpacking my gear. I was thinking about how I was going to look up why it's quieter when there's snow—
the sound of snow? sound dissipation in winter?
—when I saw her: Charlotte.

Mum said that when she was growing up in Northern Ireland, the Catholic kids went to one school and the Protestant kids to another, and you didn't even have a choice in it. She said I was lucky because all the kids in American towns go to the same school. I wasn't so sure.

Charlotte had her headphones on—the big, bulky kind; hers have rhinestones—and was reading one of those books with a pink cover and a skinny girl wearing too much makeup on it. I didn't expect her to be here. I figured she'd be curled up in her PJs upstairs, maybe redoing her toenail polish (she's actually quite good at pedicures, adding little flowers and sparkly stars).

I sat down at one of the computers and did a search for “quiet snow.” The first hit was from the army. They have a SNOW Research Community, with “snow” all in capitals, and the page was supposed to be about snow acoustics. But when I clicked on it, I got the FORBIDDEN message. Was the military doing secret snow research? If so, they ought to come up here to Promise. We had plenty of it.