The Friendship Riddle (15 page)

“Yes.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“No. I can just tell.”

I thought of Melinda and Mitchell and Charlotte. I couldn't tell you which of the girls he liked. “I could find out for you,” I told her.

“No!”

“Sorry.”

“Even if he did like me, what would it matter? Melinda likes him.”

“So?”

“So, if Melinda likes a boy, that boy is hers.”

“What about what you told me about Lucas? About how I shouldn't let him keep me from the bee?”

“That's totally different.”

“Why?”

“Because Melinda is my best friend.”

She said it so easily, without even thinking about how that might sound to me. I knew, of course. Knew that I wasn't her best friend anymore, that I had been replaced. But she had moved so far on that she didn't even think to try to shield me.

“She's helping you study, right? For the bee?”

“A little. Not like you and Coco or anything.”

“I thought you were going to drop out.”

“You don't have to worry about me, Ruth. You're the star, not me.”

Outside, an owl hooted.

“You could probably see her house from yours, you know. It's on the other side of the inlet.”

“The hills would be in the way,” I told her.

I heard her move on her bed. “It's this little cottage on a cliff. I guess it used to be someone's summer guesthouse.” She cleared her throat. Maybe she wasn't supposed to tell me that. “Anyway, it makes her lonely.”

“What? Being so far out?”

“The water. She says it makes her lonely.”

I wasn't sure why she was telling me this. Did she want me to feel bad for Melinda in her little cottage over the bay?

The moon was obscured by clouds, and we were just fuzzy lumps to each other. There was so much I wanted to ask her when we couldn't really see each other. Did she really like Melinda, or did she just like being popular? Did she really think that anyone could like Melinda more than they liked her? Did she miss me?

Instead, I curled myself into a ball. The air mattress squelched beneath me. At the same time, she pulled her covers over and heaved a sigh.

“Sorry,” I murmured.

“Yeah,” she said. “Me, too.”

Charlotte was wrong. We had school after a two-hour delay. I'd escaped down to the library, where I resumed my search for an explanation of the quietness of snow with little luck.

All the periods were short, but Coco and I still met to study. I waited in Ms. Lawson's room, and he came in with Adam trailing behind him. I raised my eyebrows, and Coco shrugged. “All I'm saying, Coco, is that I think we should set up a scrimmage.”

“A scrimmage?” Coco asked.

“Yes. Your contestant and mine. One on one. It will help them both. And between you and me, Dev could really use it.”

Coco hefted up his backpack and put it on one of Ms. Lawson's desks. He made a noncommittal
Mmm
sort of noise.

“I mean,” Adam went on, “he knows all the words. But speaking them, he gets all jumbled up. No matter how many times I tell him to just calm down and spell, he can't.”

“Well, how are you telling him?” Coco asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Are you telling him like you're talking to me? Or are you in Adam the Genius mode?”

I snickered at that, which made Adam frown, but he kept talking to Coco. “I try to explain it in my most patient voice.”

Coco shook his head. “Well, there's your problem right there. When you use your patient voice, you sound like you think the other person is an idiot.”

“Well, most people are idiots,” he said. “Present company excluded, of course.”

Coco looked over at me. “I think we're doing okay as it is, but if Ruth wants to scrimmage, we can.”

“Um,” I said. Lena, Coco. Now Dev and Adam. There were getting to be a few too many people around for me to maintain my lone-wolf status. “I don't think so.”

“The speller has spoken,” Coco said.

“Great,” Adam said, throwing his hands into the air. “Maybe you should get Ruth to write your friend recommendation for that camp.”

“Adam—” Coco said.

Adam shook his head, calming down as quickly as he'd gotten riled up. “You're right. I don't want you to see what a tremendous competitor he's become, anyway. And we'll write your stupid recommendation, too. It will tell the story of this spelling bee and how you are gracious in defeat.”

When Adam left, I said, “What was that all about?”

“That was Adam.”

“But the camp? The recommendation?”

“Oh, that.” Coco grinned. He dug into his backpack for our spelling list and pulled out a stack of blank index cards, just like the ones the clues were written on. “I'm applying to go to this camp down at Harvard.”

“Harvard?”

“It's a new program at their museum of natural history. It's an anthropology camp.”

“That's so cool! I mean, that's perfect for you, right?”

“Yeah, but you know, it's really just a weekend. When I'm in high school, I want to go to Bone Camp at the University of Arizona. That's actual forensic anthropology. But this is cool for now. Anyway, we should get studying. I thought today we could work on homonyms.”

“Okay.”

“So anytime it's a homonym, if you recognize it, you need to ask for the definition. Sometimes they will just give it to you but not always.”

“I thought I was always supposed to ask for the definition.”

“You are. But you don't always follow the rules. This is like a rule squared.”

“An exponential rule,” I said.

“If you don't follow it, you'll be thrown into the Pit of Lostness,” he said.

I grinned. The Pit of Lostness was from the Taryn Greenbottom books. Everyone in the universe feared it, especially since the great Lord Charlesmoore had vanished and was feared swallowed by it. “Okay,” I said. “I promise.”

We practiced a few rounds until the bell rang, and Coco began packing up all his stuff. When he was done, we headed together toward the door. “So I'll see you tomorrow, right?” he said.

“Right,” I agreed. “And Coco?”

“Yeah.”

“If Adam flakes or gets mad again, I could write that recommendation.”

Coco's smile flashed across his face at the same time as his cheeks flushed pink. “Thanks, Ruth. I just may take you up on that.”

Lena found me there in the hallway, still with a smile on my lips. She asked me about it, and I told her that I had just rocked the homonyms.

“Sounds super-thrilling. Now, let's get going, or we're going to miss the bus.”

We took the school bus to the library and hopped off, just like I did every day. But instead of going in, we trudged through the hard-packed snow away from the library. She kicked a little ball of snow in front of her, and it scurried along like a white tailless mouse. “Does Charlotte really live above there?”

I nodded.

“That's cool. I would love to sneak down in the night and just pluck any book I wanted.”

“I don't think she does that.”

“What's the story with you two, anyway?”

The story? There was a whole book of stories. A whole library. “We used to be friends and now we aren't. Can we talk about something else? Did you do any pondering?”

“Sure. And all my time spent on
Doctor Who
message boards and watching BBC America has paid off. Do you know what they call a sweater in England?” she asked.

“A jumper,” I told her. It had taken years for Mum to drop that one. She kept a lot of her British phrases but tried to change the ones that were confusing. Now she reserved it for Irish fishing sweaters with their intricate patterns.

“A jumper! Isn't that weird? People are always talking about wearing jumpers, and I picture them in those little-girl dresses, which I could totally rock, by the way, and I think I may wear one tomorrow.”

“You use a lot of words,” I said.

“Wait till you hear my sisters. Anyway, of course you know their word for zits?”

“Spots,” I said.

“Exactamundo. So the clue is just showing different words for the same thing in American English and, um, English English.”

“So we just need to figure out what we call a booth that they call a box,” I said. I was starting to wish Mum hadn't dropped so many of her British expressions. What had she ever called a booth?

A clump of snow fell from a tree onto the sidewalk. I sidestepped it, but Lena clomped right on top of it. “Well, it says to change your suit, so maybe it's like a changing room, like at a store,” she said. This made me think of the bra lady's frigid fingers, and I shivered.

“But we call that a room, not a booth or a box.”

We turned onto Sea Street. The brick sidewalks were shiny with ice that was broken up by blue crystals that melt tiny holes in it, but do little else. “If you fall,” she said, “I'll walk behind you—don't worry.”

“Okay.”

“Maybe it will materialize right in front of us like Doctor Who's TARDIS.”

“All wavy lines and wind?” I asked.

“Yep. And out will step the young doctor, who'll whisk me away from all this.”

“What if it's the older doctor and he's here for your sister?”

“Well then, I'll pretend to be Vera and go with him anyway. It's only a matter of waiting out his regenerations or whatever they're called.”

“You want to leave that badly?” I asked.

She stopped walking and turned so that we were staring eye to eye. “I want to leave this town more badly than a Santoku knife wants to gently slice a tomato. I want to get off this peninsula more than a dog wants the fleas to jump off his back, more than a baby wants a bottle, more than Melinda wants to rule the world with a bunch of demonata to follow her every wish. And you should, too.”

“Why? It's nice here.”

“Says the girl who is harassed on a daily basis.”

I stomped on some ice at the edge of the sidewalk. “It's just a matter of waiting it out, right? And it will take a lot less time than waiting for a fictional character to regenerate.”

“It's not just about the moment. It's like, when I'm sitting in Ms. Lawson's class and we're going over the maps, it makes me think about how big this world is. It seems like a waste of a body to stay in one place.”

I'd never thought of it that way.

But she had more to say. “As for you, I mean, I don't think there's anyplace where you'd be Miss Popularity or anything. You're always going to be your own kooky deal.”

“Kooky?”

“Yeah, you know, not of the normal variety—”

“I'm perfectly normal,” I said, then snorted, thinking of Ms. Pepper and my glorious body and how Charlotte and I had laughed.

“Case in point: I thought you were getting mad, but then you started laughing.”

“I
was
getting mad, but then I thought of something else. Anyway, why wouldn't there be a place for me to be Miss Popularity?”

“Would you want to be Miss Popularity?” she asked.

“I just don't think it's a very nice thing to say.”

“What's nicer than being honest?” she asked.

Before I could think too much on this, a streak of something red and blue caught my eye. “Lena, look!”

We stood outside of Pledge Allegiance Comics. Superman flew across the window.

“You into comics?” she asked. “I like some. I'm not really into the superhero stuff, but, you know, whatever floats your boat.”

“Be a hero,” I said. “Change your suit!”

She looked at me, at the window, then back at me, though now her eyes were flashing. “Superman changes into his suit in a phone booth! A telephone box in England. I totally should have known that. The TARDIS is a police call box.”

“But where is there a phone booth? I mean, do they even exist anymore?”

“Um, Ruthy, take a look.” She pointed: nestled in between
the Promise Cupcake Factory and Pledge Allegiance Comics was a bright red phone booth, just like the ones in England.

“How have I missed this all my life?” I asked.

“You and me both,” she replied. “You don't think it really just app—”

“That's impossible, Lena.” Who was kooky now?

We stood there staring at the booth. It had been painted recently, maybe this past fall. Snow was piled on top of it, but the doorway had been cleared out. “Come on, then. Open the door,” she told me.

So I did.