The Friendship Riddle (18 page)

“I guess so,” he agreed.

“Why don't you want to tell Coco?” Lena asked. “I bet he'd be great at these riddles. He would have known who wrote ‘The Raven' and we wouldn't have needed to get my sister involved.”

She was right. He would be great at it. And I bet he would like it, too: digging into the clues was kind of like uncovering the mysteries of the bones. I shoved my hands into my coat pockets. “I just don't want it to be a big thing.”

“You don't want anything to be a big thing.”

Lena walked with her left foot pointing out and her right foot pointing in to leave strange tracks in the snow. “Anyway, I talked to Adam. He about fell out of his chair when I told him I had a Dungeons and Dragons question.
He grabbed me and dragged me down like he didn't want anyone to know. How stupid is that? So he likes a game. So what?”

“Adam?” I demanded. “You told Adam?”

“Yeah. I just told you: he's a big gamer.”

“But you can't just go blabbing about it all over the place.”

Lena stopped walking and turned to look at me. “You wanted to know the answer, didn't you?” Her voice was flat, but I could hear a bit of an edge underneath it. I nodded. “What else was I supposed to do?”

I kicked at a chunk of ice stuck to the sidewalk. “I don't know. Just ask him without telling him about the clues.”

“Just go up and say, ‘Oh, hey, Adam, can you tell me what “natural twenty” means? And “level seven”? And “flying high”? No reason, just because.' Like he wouldn't smell that out.”

“But Adam? Of all people?”

“We can't all be hanging out with Coco, can we? Oh, wait, you don't want to tell him, either, for some weird, secret reason.”

“It's not a weird, secret reason. I just don't—”

“Don't want it to be a thing—I know.”

We stood there in the cold, our breaths filling up the space between us with puffy white clouds. But not the nice type of puffy white clouds that might have leprechauns floating upon them. The mean kind, blown out by an angry wind.

It had never been this hard with Charlotte.

The clock tower in town hall chimed off four rings.

“We should go,” Lena said.

But then, Charlotte had left.

“It's just that . . . ,” I began. “It's just that I'm not used to having all these . . . all these”—I spread my hands wide—“people around, you know?”

She cocked her head to the side. “My life is full of people, remember?”

“I just don't know if we can trust him.”

“Sometimes you don't know, Ruthy. I didn't know with you. I just saw someone who stood up to Melinda, and I liked that.”

“I don't stand up to Melinda. I cower in front of Melinda.”

“Well, you didn't that day in the locker room.”

“You're the one who's brave,” I said.

“I know,” she agreed. “And smart. And gregarious.” She linked her elbow around mine and we started walking again. “Do you know that word? It's one of Lucia's vocabulary words, and I thought I would use it to stump you.”

“It means ‘outgoing and friendly.' Which you are. And I am not.”

“You could be,” she said. “Or not. I like you just the same. Now, let's go find this clue.”

“Did he at least tell you what it meant?”

“Sort of. He said we were right, that rolling a die is how you get your power and the power of spells. It was all kinds of confusing, but a natural twenty is the best roll you can get. And then each character has levels that they go through,
and I think that maxes out at twenty. He's a level-seven dwarf, by the way, and I think you should be very proud of me for not calling him a level-seven dork. Not because of the game, but because of everything else.”

“And the clue?”

“He didn't really have any insight.”

“Perfect.” So another person knew about the clue, and he didn't even have anything valuable to add.

“But we should just go into the post office, I think. Maybe there will be something there that makes it clear.”

The post office was an old, stately building at the corner of Main and Congress Streets. The steps were slabs of granite that were slick with water and salt. We held tightly to the railings as we climbed. When we opened the door, we saw a counter with three windows, each surrounded by a filigreed archway.

“Charlotte's dad Alan, he's an architect, and he said those archways used to have gates—bars, you know, because people used to send so much money through the post office and they didn't want to get robbed.”

“Bang-bang,” Lena said. “If I'd been born in a different time, I could have been a bank robber.”

Now there was just one old postmistress sitting behind the middle window. She glanced at us when we came in and narrowed her eyes.

There was a display of Valentine's Day cards and stamps, and, beyond that, a shelf of shipping materials.

“Boxes?” Lena whispered. Then she shook her head. She knew that hiding a clue in those boxes could only result in its being found accidentally, maybe after it was mailed halfway across the world. Then she tugged on my arm. “Boxes!” she said again, with just a little more volume. The far right wall was covered with small boxes, each with a tiny window and a keyhole.

“Post office boxes,” I said. “That has to be it!”

We walked closer and saw that each one had a number. “Twenty and seven,” I said. “Twenty-seven?”

We followed the numbers, but we couldn't find one with a twenty-seven on it. They seemed to start at one hundred.

“Count the columns,” Lena said.

We counted over twenty rows.

“And then up seven,” I said. We started at the bottom and whispered the numbers together:
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

The window on the box was painted orange.

“This is it,” she hissed.

I pressed on the door. I guess I expected it to pop open, but nothing happened. Lena tried to pry it open with her fingernails. It stayed firmly shut.

“This is it,” she said. “It has to be it. The orange paint. All of it lines up.”

“But there's no key.”

We stood there and stared at the bronze box with the orange window. Just stared and stared and stared.

“I guess I'll go back to the library,” I told her, admitting defeat.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess I'll go back to clams.”

Outside, it was snowing again. Light flakes fell slowly as if they were stuck in honey.

That night I took out the glass measuring cup, the one that measured in milliliters, since a milliliter is the same as a cubic centimeter. I filled it up to 250. Mom came into the kitchen, glanced at the measuring cup, and arched her eyebrows. “What do you think the volume of your mouth is?” I asked her.

“The volume? Like length times width times height?” She opened her mouth wide and put her fingers in as if she had a tiny ruler.

“Volume as in the amount it can hold. Then we can convert it into centimeters.”

She nodded and crossed the kitchen over to me. “Is this for science?”

I shook my head. “It's just a thing we were talking about. We're going to pour as much as we can into our mouths and then subtract it from 250 milliliters. Then we will know the volumes of our mouths.”

“We?”

“Me and Coco.”

“Coco who is helping you to study for the spelling bee?”

I wanted to say, “No, the other Coco.” But I said, “Don't start. Just watch me and make sure I don't spill any.”

I tipped my head back and poured the water in slowly. I had to move my tongue out of the way to keep the water from shooting back out like a waterslide. The water got stuck at the back of my throat and I thought maybe I would gasp like a drowning person, but I closed my eyes and waited until the water was at my lips. Mom took the cup from my hand, and I spit into the sink.

“Two hundred five milliliters are left in the cup.”

“So that means forty-five milliliters in my mouth.”

“My turn,” Mom said.

“Really?”

She dumped the cup and filled it up again. “Did you ever find out about the snow?” she asked. “Why it's so quiet?”

“Not definitively,” I said.

Outside, the moon lit the yard: white, white, and more white. This must be how astronauts feel in their little space capsules, staring out at the cold vastness. “Do you think it's warm when you're in space? I mean in the shuttle or the space station or whatever?”

“Well, they do show them wearing T-shirts and stuff,” she told me. “You know that gravity changes their muscles. Their legs get small and their torsos get bigger. They have to exercise their legs so they don't get atrophied.”

“Because there's no gravity?”

“I think so,” she said. “We had an astronaut come and talk to us at med school. He was pretty cute.”

“Mom!” I said.

“This was before I met your mum, of course.”

I shook my head. She picked up the measuring cup. “Ready?”

She closed her eyes as she poured it in. Her mouth was cupped like one of those fish pitchers that were so popular in the tourist shops this summer. Singing fish pitchers. They were supposed to make a lovely sound when they were being poured, but to me they just looked like a fish was about to kiss another fish and got frozen.

Mom pounded the counter, and I took the measuring cup from her. “Fifty-five milliliters.”

She leaned over and let the water out of her mouth in a smooth stream. “Really?” she said. “That big?”

I nodded.

“We never built that snow fort.”

“I thought we were waiting for Mum,” I told her. It was a lie. I had never thought we were ever going to build the fort.

I wrote down our numbers.

Outside, big clumps of fluffy flakes fell down. “Mum's never coming home,” I said as I watched them cling to the glass of the kitchen windows.

“Don't say that,” Mom said, her face tight.

“Not until springtime,” I said. “It's like we're frozen in here and she has to wait for the ice to melt to get back.”

“Thankfully this isn't a fairy tale. She'll be back next week.”

“If you say so.”

“I do.”

But Mother Nature had different plans.

It snowed all night, but they kept school open. There were just four of us in homeroom: Lucas, Melinda, Charlotte, and me. None of the island kids were there, because the ferries weren't running. And the people who lived out farther, in the smaller towns or right on the coast, like Mitchell and even Lena, they didn't make it in, either. I'd looked for Coco before school, so we could compare the results of our water-in-the-mouth experiments, but his bus had swerved off the road and stuck itself in a snowbank before the driver had even picked up any kids.

Melinda and Charlotte were all twisted up together like usual, and Lucas was working on the Rubik's Cube, so I sat at a table as far from them as possible and read my book.

When Ms. Broadcheck came in, late again, she told us that they only needed to feed us for it to count as a day, then they could send us home and we wouldn't have to make it up in the summer. I felt like all the other kids owed us one for making it in.

Since there were so few of us—and so few teachers, too—they sent us to the gym. Ms. Wickersham set up stations like basketball free throws and the mini-trampoline. Ms. Lawson tried to teach some girls how to knit. Mr. Wynne, the art teacher, rolled out a huge piece of paper and let kids write and draw all over it with markers. That was where Melinda and Charlotte went, drawing pictures of flowers and hearts and unicorns and writing “Melinda and Char”—that's what Melinda had started calling Charlotte—“BFFs forever.”

I went over by Mrs. Abernathy, the librarian, to read. A seventh-grade girl sat against the wall and wrote poetry in her journal in large block letters.

Dev was there, too, with Adam, playing chess on a fabric board. Lucas crouched down next to them with his hands wrapped around his legs. I watched Adam move his knight.

Mrs. Abernathy slid a book over to me. The cover was plain with no picture.
The Hobbit
by J. R. R. Tolkien. People were always trying to get me to read J. R. R. Tolkien.

“It's fantasy,” she said. “You love fantasy.”

“I love the Taryn Greenbottom books. Not the same.”

“You should give it a try. Every reading diet needs a little variety.”

I wondered if this was true, or if it was just the type of thing librarians said to keep themselves in business. “No, thanks. I'm fine with my reading diet.”

“You've read Andromeda Rex,” Dev said. “That's variety.”

“Exactly,” I said to Mrs. Abernathy, though I was loath to admit reading the rival of Harriet Wexler. “I've read Andromeda Rex.”