The Friendship Riddle (23 page)

Lucas placed himself on the crosshairs of the four tiles that made the square for the knight on the left side of the Ferdinand statue. “So forward two, over one,” he said.

“Why not over two, up one?” Dev asked.

“Duh. If this were the start of a chess game and the knight tried to do that, he'd land on one of his own pawns.”

I glanced over at Dev, who admitted, “He's right.”

Lucas took giant steps from block to block, then paused.

I said, “If you go left, you just go outside. I stopped in the office, but there was nothing there. If you go right, you end up in the gym. There was a clue there, but it wasn't the right one.”

“How do you know?” Dev asked.

I pointed at the asterisks on the bottom of the clue he was holding. “Those stars. I think that's how they numbered the clues.”

“Who's ‘they'?” Lucas asked, mimicking Ms. Lawson's voice. She had declared a war on imprecise pronouns. But he had a point. Who had hidden all these clues?

“So I guess I go straight,” Lucas said. “That would be a lousy move. Why would anyone play that?”

“We're talking about an imaginary chess world where knights transform into rooks,” Dev said.

Lucas didn't look convinced, but he took Mother, May I giant steps across the hallway. We could all see the doorway as he headed to it: MAINTENANCE.

Before Dev or I could say anything, he knocked.

Silence.

So he twisted the knob, and the door opened with a click.

“Lucas!” Dev cried out, but we both hurried in after him. I was expecting mops and brooms and shelves of cleaning supplies, but instead there were mechanical workings: pipes, tubes, circuit-breaker boxes. “What next?” Lucas asked.

“That's all it says,” I said.

“Read the whole thing again,” Lucas replied.

Dev lifted the paper and read:

“
 
‘Miners with a pan,'
 
” Lucas murmured.

“That's the only part that we haven't used,” Dev said.

“Gold miners would shake river sand through a screen to see if there was any gold,” I told them, thinking of our fifth-grade unit on the gold rush.

We all looked around. There was no screen. No pan. Certainly no gold.

Lucas got down on his hands and knees and peered
behind the pipes. “Wait,” he said. Crawling on his belly, he slid forward. His head disappeared as his toes pushed him forward. “Yow!!!” he cried out as he jerked back. He was holding his arm.

“What happened?”

“One of the pipes, it was burning hot.”

His skin was turning pink. Dev and I exchanged a look, but before we could say anything, the door was thrown open and there was Dr. Dawes. Her face went from concerned to confused, as if she couldn't imagine three people more unlikely to be together in the maintenance closet. “What exactly is going on here?” she demanded.

I should've said something. This was my quest. But my tongue was swollen in my mouth as if Dr. Dawes were actually a witch who had cast a spell on me—not a bad ability for a school principal, if you think about it. Dev, though, Dev was confident and a good speaker, and polite, too. He'd say something smart. When I turned, though, he looked as tongue-tied as me. Finally, it was Lucas who spoke. “We were looking for a chessboard.”

“A chessboard?” she asked.

“Mr. Noonan plays. We play against each other sometimes, when he's off the clock, of course, and I thought he said this is where he keeps his board. But I guess I was wrong.”

“And your arm?” Dr. Dawes asked. Lucas was still cradling his right arm in his left.

“I jostled up against one of the pipes.”

“Jostled?” she asked.

“To push up against one another. It derives from ‘joust.'
 
”

“Really?” I asked.

“Really.” He nodded.

“Interesting, but not relevant,” Dr. Dawes said.

I began to explain how it was relevant, but Dev grabbed my arm.

“Let's get you to the nurse,” Dr. Dawes said to Lucas. “I think she's still here. If not, we'll go to the athletic trainer.”

“I bet that would be the first time someone went to the trainer with a chess injury, huh?” Lucas asked.

Dr. Dawes put her hand on his shoulder and guided him down the hall. “The three of you should know better than to go into the maintenance closet. Didn't you see all those mechanical systems? That's the heart of the school, the lifeblood.”

“I thought the library was the heart of the school,” I said.

“The library is the intellectual hub of the school,” Dr. Dawes said, and then added without missing a beat, “And where you can go to borrow a chessboard. Dev and Ruth, go ahead there now. I'll take care of Lucas.”

I glanced at Lucas. He nodded. And then, when Dr. Dawes's back was turned, he flicked up his left hand. In it was a tiny orange envelope: a seventh clue.

Homeroom. Lucas could give me the clue in homeroom. With any luck he'd have some subtlety about the situation.
No. This is Lucas. Wait for him by the door.

I shoved my coat into my locker.

That he'd had the note all weekend without my even seeing it was almost too much to bear. I had developed numerous plots for how I could get it from him: snowshoe through the woods into town and then out to his house (I looked online and we lived thirteen miles apart—so twenty-six miles round-trip, but maybe his mother would drive me home), track him down on the Internet and send him repeated messages, or, the most desperate, tell my mom I wanted to have another playdate with him.

In the end, I just stewed. I stewed about the clue and whether it was really the missing fifth clue in the series. I stewed about Mum not being home, and I stewed about Coco. I just couldn't figure out what he wanted. Why had he pretended to be so nice to me, when really he thought I was just a foolish girl with a stupid pursuit? My imagination could conjure no reasonable explanation—though, of course, plenty of unreasonable ones. My personal favorite was that he was a golem, a figure made of clay that has life breathed into it. In Jewish legend, the golem was a savior, so this meant he was some kind of inverse golem. But who had sent him? The person with the most motivation, of course, was Melinda. Mean, sneaky Melinda. But I didn't think she had the patience or the intellect for the dark arts.

When my mind spiraled that way, it was better to get back to thinking about Lucas. He could have solved the next riddle and already found the next clue. This was why you didn't bring people into your own private sagas. They took them over. I should have just kept it to myself—no Dev and Lucas, no Adam, and maybe even no Lena.

“Hey, Ruth.” I knew the voice. It was Coco, still sounding warm and friendly even though he was a big betrayer. Sure, I knew there was no golem, but I had seen him talking so chummily to Melinda that same day. I couldn't shake the idea that she was in on this: some elaborate plan to make me crash and burn at the bee so that Charlotte could win.

I pretended to be looking for something in my locker.
This was a mistake, because it gave him a chance to come over and stand next to me. I could smell the brown sugar oatmeal he must have had for breakfast.

“I was just checking on studying for today. We have a lot to do since we missed Friday.”

“I was taking a test.”

“Right,” he said. Ms. Lawson had turned him away at the door just as she had promised. “What about today?”

I still had my head in my locker. Way in the back, there was a squished-up granola bar.
Gross
. “I have to get something in the library.” This wasn't exactly a lie. When I had finished the map test—100 percent correct again—I had gone to the library and worked with Mrs. Abernathy to try to figure out why the world seemed so quiet after a snow. We couldn't find anything, and she'd suggested we e-mail a professor at UMaine. She'd promised she would get some names for me.

“We could meet in the library and once you get what you need, we could study.”

“Um, I don't think so. Mrs. Abernathy and I are working on something.”

He shifted his feet in the brown puddle of dirty snow that had melted off his boots. “We're getting close to the bee,” he said.

“I know.”

“So we still have work to do.”

“I guess so.”

“What are you even looking for in there?”

I pulled out the granola bar. He wrinkled up his nose, and his freckles seemed to hop around like popcorn kernels in a pan. “I just need to throw this away,” I told him. I remembered now. Mom had packed it even though we weren't allowed to have nuts in school, and so I'd taken it out of my bag and forgotten about it. “It's contraband,” I told him. And then I left him right by my locker as I dropped the old, ruined granola bar into a trash bin and went on my way to homeroom.

I felt a little bit bad about it, thinking of him there in the puddle with his hat on crooked and not realizing what he had done wrong. But I knew. He was messing around with me. I wasn't sure why, but he was. Maybe he was working for Melinda. Or maybe he was part of some mad cabal set on overthrowing the tyranny of the Scripps National Spelling Bee. “Cabal” wasn't a spelling bee word, but Mum liked it because she found conspiracy theories fascinating. Anyway, I decided not to feel bad anymore, and instead pushed open the door to Ms. Broadcheck's room.

Lucas was waiting just inside the door, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Finally,” he exclaimed, and thrust the envelope at me. I snatched it from him. It was warm and slightly damp from being in his hand.

“It's a doozy,” he said.

So he hadn't figured it out!

When I turned my head, I saw Charlotte watching us,
but she snapped her gaze in the other direction as quickly as I grabbed the envelope from Lucas.

I kept the envelope in my hand until science class, where I pulled it out. The little bird seemed to be winking at me. Unfolding it, I saw that a dusty-looking path wound its way around the outside edges of the card and finished up at the top, in a graveyard, the headstones crooked and moss-covered. It read:

At the bottom were five asterisks. My theory was right! The asterisks indicated the number of the clue, which meant this one would lead me to the sixth clue, filling in the gap before the Union Jack clue I had found in the gym. If I solved the riddle and found the next clue, I would have numbers two through eight. That still left the problem of the post office box, but I could deal with that later. One thing at a time.

“Everyone, the mnemonic for taxonomy,” Mr. Sneed directed.

“Kings play chess on fine grain sand,” we all sang back to him, just as we had every day since we'd started studying species classification.

“And that means?”

“Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.”

Truthfully, I would probably never forget. Also, “mnemonic” was a great spelling bee word with that silent
M
at the beginning.