The Friendship Riddle (21 page)

“Good, because these last two weeks are going to go fast. Stand up.”

I stood at the front of the room. He had his Merriam-Webster dictionary in front of him. We were going off-list. “
 
‘Gusset,'
 
” he said.

“Definition?”

“
 
‘A usually diamond-shaped or triangular insert in a seam—as of a sleeve, pocketbook, or shoe upper—to provide expansion or reinforcement.'
 
”

I knew this one, but I had to play by Coco's rules. “Country of origin?”

He ran his finger across the page. “Middle English from the Anglo-French.”

Anglo-French. Maybe I wasn't so sure, after all. “Can you use it in a sentence.”

He frowned. “Um. That shirt has a nice gusset.”

I said the word, then started spelling: “
G-U-S-S-E-T-T-E
. Gusset.”

“Sorry.
Bzzz
. Wrong. It's
G-U-S-S-E-T
.”

“But you said it was French.”

“Anglo-French. Anyway, you can't assume it's
E-T-T-E
just because it's French. That depends on whether it's masculine or feminine.”

Out the window, the snow swirled around. I couldn't tell if it was snowing again or just the wind picking up the same old flakes and throwing them into the air like day-old confetti.

“You could have asked if there were alternate pronunciations.”

“Are there?”

“Well, the dictionary gives the Anglo-French original, which would be
gous-say
, but truthfully I don't know if the judges would let you hear that. It's worth a shot, though.”

“Sure, okay.”

“Is everything all right?”

I nodded. “I'm fine. Let's keep going.”

He flipped back and forth through the dictionary, quizzing me on word after word. It was enough to get my mind off Charlotte and the box and her house and the map quiz—just barely.

Of course my mom was late, so I ended up sitting in the vestibule between the school and outside. The heat was blowing down from a vent above my head as if it were connected to a portal to the Tropics. I could've just climbed up on the bench, removed the cover of the vent, shimmied through, and before I knew it there'd be white beaches and
blue oceans. I wish I had. Then I wouldn't have heard what came next.

From the seat, I could peek into the office. Mrs. Lambert, the secretary, was on the phone, but her gaze kept going up to the clock. I didn't blame her. I hoped she wasn't waiting for me. Like maybe she had Ruth-duty, stuck waiting here until my mom came to get me.

Silly. There was still basketball practice going on, and, anyway, there was someone else in the office. A man. He stood just outside of Dr. Dawes's office. He had dark brown hair that he wore slicked back, and his cheeks—at least the one I could see—had a streak of red on it as if drawn with crayon by an angry child. He was gesticulating with his hands as he spoke, but I couldn't hear him.

Digging around in my backpack, I found my Harriet Wexler book. Taryn was out of immediate danger and she wandered through the woods singing elf songs to herself. She'd need to find food and shelter, but for now she was so relieved at her narrow escape from the river that she was perfectly content to meander and think about the leaves and the moss and the tiny berries that grew as perfect as moonlit pearls.

There was a whooshing sound as the glass door to the main office opened. It was the angry man striding through, and behind him was Coco. Coco's eyes were glassy, and his cheeks were streaked red, though more like watercolors than his father's crayon marks. I rocked back on the bench and pulled my knees to my chest. “Dad,” Coco said. “Dad.”

“I'm sorry, kiddo. We'll keep working on it.”

“Don't, Dad.”

“Can't give up now.” He ran his hand over his smoothed hair, and I wondered if it came off greasy. “If they can have a spelling bee, they can have a geography bee.”

“I don't want to do a geography bee.”

“Why not?” his dad asked while looking at the trophy case. “That's just the type of thing that Harvard camp would love to see on your application.”

Coco shook his head.

“Coco, this is the final stretch here. They're throwing obstacles in our way, but we can't let them beat us.”

“I don't care about a stupid geography bee or a stupid spelling bee or a stupid anything bee.”

“You're helping that girl study.” He turned his eyes away from the gleaming trophies to look at Coco. “Emma told me.”

Coco traced the toe of his winter boot around the outline of a chessboard tile. “It's not—”

His dad waved his hand, and Coco stopped talking.

Not what?
my brain demanded.

“I'm not concerned about that. I just don't understand why you want to take a backseat. This geography bee thing—I took a look at the website, and let me tell you, you'd be a shoo-in.”

“I could have been a shoo-in for the spelling bee, too. But not everything needs to be a competition. It's just dumb memorization, anyway.”

His dad cocked his head to the side. “What do you mean, could have been?”

“Nothing, Dad.”

“No, Christopher. What do you mean?”

“I don't even care who wins the bee, if it's Emma or Ruth or Dev or someone else entirely. I'm only helping her because—” His voice dropped off. “Let's just go.”

Because why?

“Are you saying that you purposely didn't make the bee?”

A phone rang the melody of a popular song, maybe even one of those April Showers songs that Charlotte liked so much. I wasn't sure. Coco's dad pulled his phone from his pocket and answered it, all the while watching Coco, who studied the floor. I didn't know what to do, where to look. I picked up my book, but wasn't that like I was trying to ignore him?

I
was
trying to ignore him. But maybe I should have caught his eye.

Only.

Only I wished he would answer his father's questions. What did he mean, he could have been a shoo-in for the spelling bee?

But I knew. I knew. Dev said it himself. He said there was no way he could have done better on that test than Coco. And Ms. Lawson had told him right in front of me. Coco should have been in the spelling bee. He messed up the test. On purpose. Because he thought the bee was dumb. Dumb like me.

I grabbed my book and lifted it in front of my eyes.

Taryn's elf songs seemed awfully stupid themselves right about then.

I couldn't help but lift my eyes, though, when they walked through the vestibule. His dad came first, staring straight ahead and still talking on the phone. Coco, who gave me a quick glance through wet lashes, came next.

We didn't say anything.

I laid the clues out on my bed. They were all still folded so the red seal with the little bird looked up at me. One at a time I unfolded them, so now I was looking at the words. Each was written in a different pen, but the handwriting was all the same: small letters that were so uniform, they almost seemed like they had been typed. The illustrations were beautiful, too. They looked like they were drawn with the same fancy kind of colored pencils that Charlotte used—not the kind my moms got me at the grocery store. Instead, these were richly colored. But the style was totally different. Charlotte's drawings were light, bright, and airy, both curvy and elongated. These were darker, with harder edges, but no less gorgeous. They looked like the drawings on the covers of the fantasy books people were always trying to push on me.

I picked up the first of the two that Charlotte had given me.

This was the one Charlotte remembered:
something about meanings.
The border was a chain of metal links that was held by a strong man at the top of the card. The man's face was strained with effort, as if he was trying to rip the chain apart.

As I read the clue, I pictured Coco with his dictionary. So, the next one was hidden in a dictionary, then. I started to fold the card when the final phrase caught my eye: “off to school you go.” School. Not the public library, but school. She had gone looking for—and found—the next clue in a
dictionary at school. That meant Charlotte had been intrigued, too, and had tried to follow the clues, only she had gotten stuck and hadn't been able to solve the next clue.

I smoothed out the card. It was one of the longer clues, and the picture up top was smaller. The image was of a girl with pale white skin, red lips, and dark hair: Snow White. Her border was leaves with little woodland animals peeking out. This one read:

It seemed like a math problem. Snow White plus her seven dwarfs, well, that made eight people. Then two, then one, then a decimal, and then just the seven dwarfs: 821.7. “This system has your next clue shown.” It was a Dewey number on a book! And that made sense because I had found the clue about King Ferdinand in the J. Samuel Samuelson book of poetry in the 821 section of the library.

Looking at them in a jumble on my bed wasn't helping. I rearranged them so they were in the order I found them.

First the one telling me to look up—so simple and plain compared with the others.

Next came King Ferdinand, and after that I found the flag clue in the gym. I picked up the page torn from the phone book, a sickly yellow. Then I had the two from Charlotte: the strong man and the maiden Snow White.

Six clues in total. What would Charlotte think if she knew we had found so many? And how many were there to find? There could be little clues all over this town, just waiting to be discovered.

As I stared at the cards, I noticed the asterisks on the bottom, each a different number. I rearranged them from least asterisks to most: the strong-man clue had two asterisks, then Snow White had three. Then came King Ferdinand with four, the British flag had seven, the phone book had eight; and the look-up one, the first one I had found, had twelve.

The stars were the order!

The strong man led Charlotte to Snow White, and
Lena and I had found the phone book note by following the flag clue.