The Friendship Riddle (20 page)

She was still crying, but I stayed right in my bed.

In the morning, we dug out the snow in front of the garage while Mom made us breakfast. I ate alone, though, because Charlotte wanted to take a shower. She said she sweated and that she smelled bad, which I knew wasn't true.

Mom wrapped her hands around her coffee and watched me eat my pancakes. “You girls seem to be doing okay,” she said.

“Definitely,” I agreed. I wondered if I should start keeping track of all the lies I told her.

“It's a tragedy, of course, but sometimes tragedies bring people together.”

I jammed my mouth full of pancakes, one bite right after
another until it was a big sweet and sticky blob inside my mouth. Mom sipped her coffee.

“Since you can't go to the library after school, I was thinking you two girls could come back here together.”

I swallowed, then swallowed again. “You never let me stay home alone.”

“You wouldn't be alone. You'd be with Charlotte.”

“So now she's my babysitter?”

Mom frowned at her coffee. “You would look out for each other. But no using the blender.” She grinned.

My stomach lurched as I remembered Charlotte's words the night before.

“Charlotte's dads are still figuring out what they're going to do. Insurance will put them up in a hotel, but I said they were welcome to stay here. We'll see.”

Charlotte came into the kitchen then. Her hair was wet and leaving a spot on her T-shirt—my shirt, actually, the one she'd slept in. She was holding her lightly padded bra by a strap. “It's still wet.”

Mom stood up. “Come on. I'll get you one of Ruth's. They're clean and she's never even worn them. Not quite as fancy as that one, but it will do for one day.”

They left together, Mom's hand on Charlotte's back.

“You should have stayed with me!” Melinda declared as she enveloped Charlotte. “You didn't have to stay with her.”

“It was fine,” Charlotte lied.

They were both acting like I wasn't even there, so I sat down with Lucas. He was studying for the map quiz in humanities. “I thought you memorized everything right away,” I said.

“I do. This is the first time I'm looking at it.”

Of course.

“I couldn't believe it when Dr. Dawes came in and then I actually saw the pictures on the news,” Melinda gushed.

“It was on the news?” Charlotte asked.

“Oh, yeah. All over the news. They even had the helicopter shot and that cute news reporter, the one on channel eight. He was there.”

“Oh.”

“You didn't see it?”

“We didn't watch the news,” Charlotte told her.

“If you'd been at my house, you could've watched it.” She rubbed Charlotte's arm. “Anyway, maybe that cute reporter will want to interview you.”

“Maybe,” Charlotte said.

“Mozambique!” Lucas called out.

Charlotte dropped her head. “I didn't study,” she said. She glanced at me. I hadn't studied the night before, either, but I had studied earlier that day with Lena.

“It'll be okay. Ms. Lawson will give you a break,” Melinda told her.

“We've known about the quiz for a week,” Charlotte said.

Mitchell said, “Just sit next to Lucas.”

“Ha!” Lucas said. “Good idea, but I have my patented no-cheater stance.” He demonstrated how he blocked his paper from view. “You lower-level life-forms don't stand a chance.”

Lena came in then, followed closely behind by Ms. Broadcheck, who flashed a soft smile at Charlotte and then said, “On a day like today, I think we need doughnuts.” With a flourish, she pulled out a box of doughnut holes.

“Those aren't doughnuts. They're doughnut holes,” Lucas said.

“Then don't have any,” Melinda said. “I'll have yours.”

Ms. Broadcheck gave us each three, saying, “So I hope you'll understand why I was late today. You would not believe the line at the drive-through!”

The bell rang as we were still eating. I held my last doughnut hole as we filed out, navigating so I was near Charlotte. “You can sit near me,” I whispered.

She raised her eyebrows at me as if she hadn't quite heard me, or didn't understand.

“In humanities. Sit near me.”

She nodded.

My stomach dropped as I realized what I'd just agreed to—what I'd just proposed. On the way out the door, I threw the doughnut hole in the trash.

Instead of my usual seat in Ms. Lawson's room, I sat in the back. Lucas took the seat to the left of me, so I put my bag on the one to the right.

Charlotte entered soon after that. She saw me, saw my bag, and stopped. Her eyes were shiny and sad, like ice cubes in a cup of tea. Melinda was right behind her. “Okay?” Melinda asked.

Charlotte nodded. She started walking toward the seat I had saved for her.

Dev dropped his books on the desk in front of me, and I jumped. I didn't even notice him coming in.

Ms. Lawson wasn't in the room yet. Maybe she was absent. Maybe there would be no map quiz.

Charlotte stopped at the desk in front of the one I'd saved. She bent over and adjusted her sock in her boot. Melinda sighed and grabbed another desk.

I could hear everything. The incessant ticking of the clock. Lucas cracking his knuckles. Charlotte's shallow breaths. It was like I was wearing headphones turned up high. I could even hear my blood pumping. I looked at my wrist. I expected my veins to be pulsing, huge.

Charlotte stood still. She wouldn't look at me, but she took the seat next to me, dropping my bag to the floor as she did.

Usually Ms. Lawson looked all happy on map quiz day, but today she glanced over at Charlotte and gave a sad smile. This could be it. She could say that Charlotte didn't have to take the test, and I wouldn't have to make this decision.

She didn't.

Instead, she passed out the maps.

It was the whole continent of Africa. Some parts were filled in already, and we had to fill in the parts that were not.

It all swam in front of me. The map on the paper and the map in my head wouldn't come together. I coughed. Closed my eyes.

When I opened them, the world was steadier, and I began. Ivory Coast. That was easy because that's where Mom was in the Peace Corps. The equator. Which is on top: Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn? Capricorn is the longer word, so it's like it's the base. It goes below.

The Congo. The Niger. The Nile.

I blocked out everything and just wrote.

Lesotho, Burkina Faso, Tunisia.

Maybe I would even finish before Coco today.

Could Charlotte keep up with me? Maybe I should slow down.

Indian Ocean, Red Sea, Mediterranean Sea.

It was perfect. Perfect. Usually I made one mistake or two, but not this time. I knew it.

Maybe I should make a mistake. Maybe Charlotte should.

Neither of us had ever cheated before. At least, I didn't think she had. We didn't know how to do it.

Chad, Zambia, South Sudan.

It wasn't really cheating, though. She would know it
under normal circumstances. She would learn it. Wouldn't she? Yes, she would.

Mount Kilimanjaro. Lake Victoria.

“Ms. Lawson?”

“Yes, Charlotte?”

“I'm not feeling so well. Can I go to the nurse?”

Ms. Lawson hesitated. “Let's step into the hall, Charlotte. Bring your map.”

She knew! Ms. Lawson knew! Otherwise she wouldn't make Charlotte take her map, right?

Charlotte picked up her map. She hadn't written anything on it.

They stood just outside the window. Charlotte was crying. Big, fat tears that I could see all the way from the back of the room. Ms. Lawson looked into the classroom. Maybe she was just checking to make sure that everything was okay. Or maybe Charlotte had told her our plan. My plan. I flicked my gaze back to my map.

All that was left was the big country right in the middle of the continent. I knew it was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but I didn't write it in. Instead, I started erasing my answers.

“Here,” Charlotte said. She handed me a shoe box. It looked like it had been walked all over. The top was dented and the sides were twisted. “My dads brought this by. It's one of the only things that made it through. They thought I would want to have it, but it's actually for you.”

I started to open the box. It was after school, and I was waiting in Ms. Lawson's room for Coco, so we could study some more. He wanted to make up for the day he'd lost because of the school bus accident.

“Ruth,” she said.

It was our things. Us.

There was a picture of us at the Topsham Fair two summers ago. A snow globe from a trip we took to New York
City. There were several drawings she did of my stories. I held up one that showed an old man lying back and looking at the clouds. His hand was extended out toward the sun, and on the tip of his index finger was a spider that seemed to be staring up at the sky, too. I remembered that day. It was the summer before last. Our moms and dads rented a place on a lake in the center of the state, and it turned out to be infested with spiders. I said it was because the original owner left it to his kids, and they were all hermits (the cranky kind, not the literary kind) who hated each other and hated the sun and hated the lake; it was the only reason I could think of to put a place like that up for rent and not spend the whole summer there. I said the old man cursed the place with spiders, so she drew him setting the first one free. The cabin was in the background, just the edge of it. We had shared a room with bunk beds, but we slept together on the bottom one under a mosquito net my moms had picked up at Renys.

I wanted to put the lid back on, but I couldn't help staring.

And as I stared, I noticed something else: two envelopes made from origami paper. “The notes!”

She winced.

She had only told me about one, but there were two, each a different color of origami paper. Now I had six clues!

“They're just a game.”

I pulled them out and placed them on the desk in front of me.
Which shall I open first?

“What do you even expect to find?” she asked, and I realized I'd never thought about the clues leading someplace, of there being an end to them.

“Something.” I suppose I had thought they would lead me to her. I lifted my eyes. “I've found more. That's what I was doing in the gym that day when you and Melinda found me. It's a scavenger hunt, I think, it's—”

“There's no pot of gold or prince at the end. This isn't a fairy-tale quest.”

But it could be, couldn't it? Mum told me a story she'd read in an in-flight magazine. This guy buried a whole bunch of money or maybe gold out west—she couldn't quite remember—and then he wrote a novel that had the clues with where to find it. Maybe these clues were something like that, and somewhere in Promise was a treasure waiting to be found.

“Ruth,” she said. “Let's not talk at school anymore.”

I held the envelopes in my hand: purple and red. The red one had tiny dragons printed on it. I imagined them breathing fire, it coming out and enveloping us both, me and Charlotte. She could draw that, the flames dancing out and surrounding us, pushing us together in a smaller and smaller circle. She could. She would have. Once.

“Okay,” I said.

And then she was gone.

I had the two notes still in front of me, and I put my finger on the one with the pale purple envelope dotted with tiny gray elephants.

Through the door's window, I could see Charlotte talking to Melinda. And Coco. Melinda had her head tucked in toward Coco's like they were old friends.

Maybe they were.

“Sorry I'm late. What's that?” Coco asked as he burst through the door.

“Nothing,” I told him. “I'm ready to start.”