The Friendship Riddle (19 page)

“Only the first two,” Adam reminded us.

“Give it a rest,” Dev muttered.

Lucas bounced up and down. “Your move, Dev,” he said.

“It's slight variety,” Mrs. Abernathy said. “I've already checked this out to you. Why don't you just take it?”

“It is a pretty good book,” Dev said without looking up from the chessboard. “You might like it, Ruth.”

I held up
The Riddled Cottage.
“I'm reading an advance copy of Harriet Wexler's new book. I don't have time.”

Dev moved a bishop. “No skin off my nose.”

Lucas slapped his forehead in an exaggerated way. “Dev,” he moaned. “I can't believe you did that.”

“Did what?”

“That!” Lucas said. He gestured with both hands at the board. “I'm not going to say it out loud, because it's possible that Adam hasn't picked up on the horrible, horrible move you just made.”

Adam's gaze scanned the board, zigzagging wildly from corner to corner.

“He doesn't see it!” Lucas said gleefully.

I didn't see it, either, but that was no surprise. I searched the room. Melinda and Charlotte were still drawing on the rolled-out paper. They were stuck together at shoulder, hip, ankle.

Mitchell was shooting free throws with some seventh- and eighth-grade boys.

Ms. Wickersham looked about ready to collapse.

“You know that it's against the rules of chess for you to harass me like this,” Adam told Lucas.

“True,” Dev agreed.

Adam moved one of his rooks and captured one of Dev's pawns.

Lucas shook his head but kept quiet. Still, Adam demanded: “You wanna play? You think I'm doing such a bad job?”

“I've got next game,” he said. “Remember? Unless you wanna play, Ruth? I could see if I could beat you in even fewer moves than I did last time.”

I shook my head. “I don't think that's possible.”

“I liked it, too, by the way,” he said.

“Liked what?” I asked.

“
The Hobbit
. I liked the dragon.”

I did like it when there were dragons in books, but I remained unconvinced. “I'm not going to read
The Hobbit
. I'm only halfway through this, and I still have almost two hundred pages to go.” I shook the book at them.

“I thought it was only so-so,” Adam said. “The Lord of the Rings trilogy was way better, and
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
was even better than that.”

Dev rolled his eyes. “What does
The Hitchhiker's Guide
have to do with
The Hobbit
?”

Dr. Dawes came into the gym. I thought maybe she was going to tell us that we were having lunch, even though it was only nine forty-seven, according to the clock that hung behind a cage above the basketball hoop. Like, do they think that someone is going to steal it? Or that it might break free on its own and run around the court?

“They're both classics,” Adam said, his voice rising in pitch.

Dr. Dawes didn't stop in the middle of the floor or call the teachers over to her. Instead, she marched straight to Charlotte.

“One is science fiction and the other is fantasy,” Dev said. “Totally different.”

“Totally different,” Lucas agreed.

“Sure you'd side with him,” Adam said.

“Your move, Adam,” Dev said, his voice soft.

Dr. Dawes crouched down low and put her hand on Charlotte's shoulder as she spoke. Charlotte's body went tense and still, and even though I had no idea what Dr. Dawes told Charlotte, I knew it wasn't good. Principals just don't talk to you like that when they have good news, or even
neutral news. Dr. Dawes helped Charlotte to her feet and led her out of the gym, arm still over her shoulder.

Melinda tried to lord it over everybody, but she wasn't the only one who had heard Dr. Dawes, so by the time we were dismissed—after a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and premature Valentine's Day cookies—everyone knew what had happened. Or at least part of the story.

Mom picked me up. Without me having to ask, she drove us right into town. You couldn't get too close because of the fire trucks and police tape, but it was near enough to see what wasn't there.

Melinda told everyone that the library had been damaged by the storm, and that there was something wrong with Charlotte's condo. That was what Dr. Dawes had said, according to one of the other girls: “Charlotte, all this snow has done some damage to the library and your home. Your dads want to see you.”

It wasn't damaged, though. It was destroyed.

The roof of the library building had collapsed. Charlotte's home dropped right down into the second floor of the library, everything crashed together like a black hole opening up and then folding in on itself. I half expected to see little astronauts or aliens emerging from the rubble.

We got out of the car and walked closer. There were
books in the snow, dotting it red and blue and green and purple. They were sprinkled over the snow like the Christmas decorations that had just come down. They didn't even look like books there, jostled and out of order. But then the wind picked up and a few of them had pages that fluttered in the breeze. The snow blew around them as if the whole world—my whole world—had been turned into a snow globe.

Mom talked to a police officer. I didn't hear what she said.
What books are lost?
I wondered.
Were any saved? Is Harry Potter completely gone, all seven volumes? And Andromeda Rex?
I couldn't take any comfort in his destruction. And
Tuck Everlasting
and
A Wrinkle in Time
and
The Westing Game
? Was someone able to save poor old
Harriet the Spy
in her red sweatshirt?

They were my friends. My friends are gone.

And the notes. If there were any more clues in the library, I would never find them.

Mom walked back toward me now. She had her arm around Charlotte, whose eyes were red and who wore her father's goofy earflap hat, not caring who might see. “Charlotte's going to stay with us for tonight. Maybe a day or two.”

“Okay,” I said.

I let her have the front seat.

Mom made cream of mushroom soup from a can. It was one of Charlotte's favorites, and mine. She found some frozen
French bread and started reheating that. Then she pulled out the old countertop mixer and searched the pantry for ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies. “We don't have any brown sugar,” we heard her muttering as we slurped our soup. “Why don't we have any brown sugar?”

“It's okay, Theresa,” Charlotte said. “I don't need cookies.”

Mom emerged from the pantry. She was crying.

“I'm sorry, Charlotte. I'm just so sorry.”

“It's okay,” Charlotte said.

“You know you can stay here as long as you need to. Your dads, too.”

I didn't know where her dads were, but I didn't think it was a good time to ask.

Charlotte nodded.

Mom sat at the table with us. She drew one knee up to her chest and started tearing the bread apart and dipping it in the soup. She shook her head.

“We had Valentine's cookies for lunch today,” I told Charlotte.

“Really?” she asked.

“Ruth—” Mom began.

“Yep. I guess they were just clearing out the freezer. Do you think they were meant to be for this year or left over from last year?”

“Maybe the year before that,” Charlotte said, cracking a hint of a smile.

“Like maybe the cafeteria workers went back there and
were like, ‘Hey, what's this? Valentine's Day 1987? Perfect! There are only fifty-seven kids here today, anyway.' And then they watched them while they were baking to make sure they didn't mutate into Killer Cookies from Outer Space or anything.”

“You'd better not let them know you're on to them. They already have it out for you.”

“Why do the cafeteria workers have it out for you?” Mom asked.

Charlotte glanced at me. I shrugged, and she said, “I was just playing along.”

Mom looked from Charlotte to me and back again. I knew she knew Charlotte was lying, that there was something we were hiding, but she almost looked grateful that Charlotte would still lie for me.

After we cleared our dishes, we went into the TV room and tried to find something good to watch. When we couldn't, I said, “We could study for the spelling bee.”

She twisted her fingers together. “Are you sure?”

I wasn't. I mean, what if our studying gave her the one word she needed to beat me? But I couldn't take it back. “Sure.”

We took out our lists and started quizzing each other back and forth. Charlotte didn't ask any clarifying questions, and I didn't tell her why Coco said you should. “
 
‘Ingrate,'
 
” she said to me.

“Ingrate.
I-N-G-R-A-T-E
. Ingrate.”

“Yep.”

“
 
‘Longitude,'
 
” I said to her.

She spelled it perfectly.

We went back and forth like that until we got all the way through the seventh-grade challenge words. She missed four. I didn't miss any.

“I'm really tired,” she said. “Do you think we could just go to bed?”

I gave her some of my pajamas. Mom took her clothes to wash them. “Mix and match with some things from Ruth, and no one will know you're rewearing them.”

If Mom knew that rewearing clothes was such a sin, she could have dropped me a hint.

Charlotte and I didn't talk until the lights were off, like the darkness was a switch.

“I don't know where we're going to go. Where we're going to live,” she said, her voice hitching.

“Mom said you can stay here for as long as you need.”

“But after. After that, then what?”

“Your dads will figure it out. They'll get a new house. It will be okay.”

“Do you think it will still be in Promise? I don't want to go to a new school.”

“It will be in Promise,” I assured her.

She was crying now, just a little, but I could hear her. I didn't know if I should get up and go to her, give her a hug.

“All our stuff,” she said. “I don't even know what I have and what I don't have.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. It was stupid—so very stupid and small in the face of all that had happened—but I didn't know what else to say.

“And all the books,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “It was awful seeing them out in the snow like that, like someone dumped out the world's biggest backpack and didn't even care.”

“The pages just looked so sad,” Charlotte said.

“And the notes. The notes are all gone, too.”

I heard her roll over in bed and tug the covers up over herself. “Why do you have to be like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like you're still nine years old.” She whispered the words. “Mystery games and secret coded messages. It's all dumb.”

And it was, I realized. Compared to her house, it was nothing. “I'm sorry,” I told her.

“I never liked any of it,” she went on, as if I hadn't apologized. “Those drawings you had me do—those kinds of stories. Those weren't the stories I liked. Fairies and elves and all that. Baby stuff. And the ‘experiments' in the blender. Gross. I always just did it for you.”

“Charlotte,” I said.

Her voice was rising in pitch, the words coming faster and faster like she was running toward the edge of a cliff and she couldn't quite stop herself. And then she went over. “That's
the problem with you, you know? You act like the whole world revolves around you, and you don't even realize it. I mean my house—
my house
—is gone, and all you can think about are those stupid clues.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“Whatever,” she said. “G'night.”

“Good night.”