The Friendship Riddle (16 page)

I wish I could say we opened the door and fell down a rabbit hole into an unknown world of pink magic kittens and golden unicorns. Or that there was a time lord waiting for us. Or even that the phone booth didn't smell like pee. But it did.

It was just a normal phone booth, I guess. I'd only ever seen them on television. There was a phone in one corner, and a shelf below held a phone book with its pages curling back. That was the first obvious place to look. I pulled it out. It was from 1993. That was promising. But when I flipped through it, there were no origami envelopes tucked between its pages.

“Hey!” Lena exclaimed. “Look at this.”

“What did you find?”

I followed her extended index finger. “For a good time call Francesca. That's my mother!” She giggled.

“How do you know?”

“How many Francescas do you think there are in this town?”

“Why aren't you mortified?”

“You haven't met my mother. This is about the funniest thing I've ever seen.” She took out her phone to snap a picture. “I'm sending this to my sisters.”

I read the other graffiti. There were numerous people who you could call if you were looking for a good time. Also, there were quite a few people who would do unspeakable things, allegedly. And there were lots of initials who loved other initials.

“It really smells awful in here,” she said.

I nodded in agreement.

“So what exactly are we looking for, anyway?”

“Another clue, I guess.”

The booth was small and there was barely room for both of us. I shifted around her and she bumped up against the wall.

“Hey, now!” She giggled. “So are those rumors about you true, after all?”

“What rumors?”

“That you're a lesbian. Like your mothers.”

My shoulders drooped. “How can there be rumors that I like Coco
and
that I'm a lesbian?”

“Gossip is an illogical beast,” Lena told me. “Oh, hey,
don't be all sad about it. It's no big deal. You know it's just Melinda being jealous.”

“Jealous?”

“You were Charlotte's friend first. You don't give a crap what anyone says.”

“I do give a crap.”

Lena tilted her head to the side. “Then you, my dear, have one fantastic poker face.”

I leaned back. We
were
just a little too close in here. I slipped on melted snow from our boots and rocked back, catching myself on the shelf and knocking the phone book down. It flipped open to an earmarked page in the yellow pages: TOWING to TOYS. On an ad for a game store I'd never heard of—Wizards and Warcraft—there was a drawing of a wizard crouched over a board and rolling a set of dice. It looked familiar somehow. Written around the edge of the ad were the words:

The Raven's author __ __ __

Walked down the road, abbreviated so we're told. __ __

The bus came by and one departed,

That is to say, he got this. __ __ __

Come on now, it's time to play.

When water's cold it is this way. __ __ __

Put the pieces together, then roll your die.

Natural 20! Flying high!

Find the boxes, nearly there:

Level up to 7, here is there.

********

Lena read it along with me. “What in the heck does that mean?”

“I have no idea,” I replied. “But it's definitely a clue.” I had four clues now. Maybe I didn't even need the one Charlotte had found.

“Good. Let's get out of here. It stinks.” She grabbed the page and tore it from the phone book.

“Lena!”

“What. The store doesn't exist anymore. No one is using the phone. I bet this doesn't even work.” She lifted up the receiver, and we both heard the dull sound of the dial tone.

She held the phone and we stared at it. Then it started to ring.

“It's ringing,” she whispered. “Ruthy, the phone is calling someone. All by itself!”

“I know!”

What would Taryn Greenbottom do in a situation like this? Stay calm! Stay calm!

“Did we find it?” Lena asked. “I mean, did we solve it?”

“I don't know!”

Five rings. Six. Seven.

Then a strange set of three tones.

“Aliens!” whispered Lena.

“If you would like to make a call,” a cheerful female voice came through the line, “please hang up and try again. If you need help, hang up and then dial your operator.”

We gaped at each other with eyes wide as the message started again.

Lena slammed the receiver back onto its hook, then fell out of the booth laughing. I stumbled out after her.

There was a man outside Pledge Allegiance Comics shoveling the sidewalk. He had a long
Doctor Who
scarf just like the one Lena wanted to make. When he saw us, he raised his bushy eyebrows, which just made us laugh more. We clutched our sides as we half ran, half slid down Sea Street to Lena's house.

When we got there, our sides and mouths and cheeks all hurt. Lena's sister Vera was at the table. “Oh, hey,” she said to no one in particular. “Weird Lena just brought home a weird friend. What a banner day this is.”

And all we could do was laugh some more.

“Dinner guest!” Lena yelled.

“Dinner guest!”

“Dinner guest!”

The call went from room to room of Lena's bungalow down off Commercial Street by the wharfs and just around the corner from the Salt and Sea Shack.

Lena turned to me. “When one of us has a friend over for dinner, we get the real food.”

“What do you get the rest of the time?”

“Fried clams,” Vera said from the kitchen table, where she was playing with her phone.

“Every night?” I asked.

“Fried clams, fried haddock. Lobster rolls if it's raining.”

“Or unless Vera or I cook,” Lena said.

“Really?” I asked.

Lena's mom joined us in the kitchen, wiping her hands on her jeans. She rolled her eyes at Lena and Vera but extended a hand to me. “Francesca Filipepi-Fernández del Campo. It's a mouthful. Call me Franny. You must be Ruthy.”

“Ruth,” I said. “Yes.”

“Welcome,” she said, then, turning to Vera: “Get a lasagna from the freezer.”

“I'm not sure if I can stay for dinner,” I said. “My mom said five thirty, but, well, sometimes she's late.”

Lena's mom nodded. “I talked to her. You're good for dinner. And don't listen to these girls. We have a good dinner every night, and when was the last time you girls had clams? Not since the summer? And you know what, you should consider yourselves lucky! People in Ohio, they'd kill to eat the way you girls do.”

Vera pointed at her chin. “Girls in Ohio would die with these zits.”

“I don't see anything,” I told her.

“Vera has microscopic vision,” Lena told me. “It's her superpower. Come on. We can boot Lucia off the computer and use it for our research. She's just looking up fan fiction for some stupid television show she watches about vampires and mermaids and guardian angels.”

Lucia was hard to convince, but we got her off the computer by offering to do her dish duty that night. The room was filled with cardboard boxes. Lena looked like she was seeing them for the first time. “We moved over the summer. Height of the season. This room became like the drop zone. Someday we'll clean it out.”

“You lived in Port Stewart before?”

“The thriving metropolis, yes. When this place came up for sale, my parents decided to move to be closer to the shack. Okay.” Lena cracked her fingers. “Where do we start?”

“Do you think it's cheating to use a computer?”

She hesitated. “Okay. Read it to me again.”

I unfolded the yellow piece of paper and read:

The Raven's author __ __ __

Walked down the road, abbreviated so we're told. __ __

The bus came by and one departed,

That is to say, he got this. __ __ __

Come on now, it's time to play.

When water's cold it is this way. __ __ __

Put the pieces together, then roll your die.

Natural 20! Flying high!

Find the boxes, nearly there:

Level up to 7, here is there.

********

“I wonder what those dashes mean,” I said.

“Dashes or underscores?” Lena asked. Then she mused, “The Raven's author?”

“Poe,” Stella, Lucia's twin, called from across the hall.

“What?” Lena asked, sticking her head through the open doorway.

“Edgar Allan Poe,” Stella said. She poked her own head out her door. Her long black hair fell down her shoulders in curls so impossibly beautiful that I would believe she had her own hair styling team tucked away in her closet. “He wrote ‘The Raven.' Duh. And you're welcome.”

“Stop eavesdropping,” Lena replied, a phrase I can't hear without picturing the eaves of a house tumbling down as a nosy neighbor hangs out her window. She shut the door. “All right. Edgar Allan Poe.” She wrote it on a sheet of paper. “Do you think it's
A
-
L
-
L
-A-
N
or E-
N
?”

“I'm pretty sure it's an
A
.”

“You are the speller. Hey, what do you and Coco even do to study?”

“What do you mean? He quizzes me, helps me remember rules and tricks and stuff.”

“All that time and it's just words, words, words?”

“Yep. What's an abbreviation for ‘road'?”

“
R-D
. And you know that. Message received. Don't talk about Coco. Which, by the way, indicates that there is something to talk about, but we aren't talking about it. Totally cool. Next hint.”

“
 
‘The bus came by and one departed. That is to say, he got this.' To his destination?”

“Off,” she said. “When you depart a bus, you get off.” She added the word to her list, and below it, she wrote “ICE.” “That's what water is when it's cold.”

“You don't think it could be frozen? Or slushy?”

“You're overthinking this. Let's see. We're supposed to put the pieces together. Edgarallanpoerdoffice.”

“Office!”

“But what about the first part. Even if we just use ‘Poe,' that doesn't make sense. It would be ‘POERD.'
 
”

“What if it's not as simple as
R-D
 
? What are some other words for ‘road'? Highway? Lane?”

“Street,” she told me. “Man, all that spelling bee study has you avoiding the simple words, hasn't it?”

“Street is abbreviated
S-T
,” I said. “Post! The post office! And look, now each answer fits on the dashes—the letters, like Hangman.”

“We have to go to the post office!”

We both turned our heads to the clock. It was five fifteen—too late to go tonight.

“Let's do the rest of the clue. This is fun. We could be detectives when we grow up. You'd be the no-nonsense, by-the-book one, and I'd be the sassy and unconventional one who runs in high heels. You know, on the TV shows the actresses aren't actually running in heels. They wear sneakers and are just shot from the ankles up.”

“Interesting but not relevant,” I said, echoing what Ms. Broadcheck said to Lucas.

She sighed. “Actually, I think I may have a talk show. Then everything I say will be interesting
and
relevant. “Okay. ‘Level up.' That sounds like a video game,” she said.

“You play video games?”

“I've been known to rock the vids,” she replied. “
 
‘Natural twenty,' though, I have no idea what that is. I think it's okay to look it up.” She started typing. She had her knees drawn up to her chest, which lifted the ends of her pants. I could see a collection of small, circular scars that she'd connected like a constellation with black lines.

“Blackflies?” I asked, pointing.

“Blackflies, mosquitoes, you name it, I'm a magnet. And I can't not scratch, so I'm a walking scar. I used to tell myself they made a map.”

Charlotte and I used to sit side by side squeezing each other's hands so we wouldn't scratch our bug bites.

I wondered if there would come a time when every little thing didn't remind me of her.

“Here we go. In Dungeons and Dragons, when you roll a twenty on a twenty-sided die, it means you rolled a natural twenty.”

“That means nothing to me,” I said.

“I don't know anything about Dungeons and Dragons, either,” she said. “But I know someone who does.”