The Friendship Riddle (3 page)

Charlotte waved without looking back at me.

The Department of Public Works trucks fanned out like robots in a military strike and cleared the roads by the next morning. Mom and I had watched the dump trucks full of snow go down Main Street, headed for the edge of town, after she picked me up at the library.

So we had school. Everyone clomped inside in their big snow boots and coats, and the ground by the lockers was slick with dirty water. I walked without lifting my feet, sliding like a cat learning to ice-skate, but it was better than falling on the ground and winding up with a big, muddy puddle stain on my butt.

Homeroom was with Ms. Broadcheck. She's the special-ed teacher and a friend of Mum's, and I think that was why
I wound up in that homeroom. So she could keep an eye on me now that I was in the regional middle school with kids from Port Stewart, the other town on the peninsula with Promise, and Swift Island, right off the coast. At first I thought maybe it was because I was actually a special-ed kid—like there was something a little different about me but everyone had decided to just be nice and not tell me.

Then there were girls like Melinda who just go and shatter the whole notion of kidness for you. Melinda had bright red hair and big teeth and no freckles, which looked weird with the bright red hair. Everyone says she looks
so
Irish, when I'm the one who might actually be Irish. Northern Ireland is a part of Ireland that England owns—though it's much more complicated than that. Mum could talk about that subject for hours. Anyway, Mum considers herself Irish and says most people in Ireland don't have red hair and green eyes, but rather dark hair and blue eyes like me, but you can't stop people's misconceptions.

When I walked into homeroom, Melinda and Charlotte were sitting together in a beanbag chair, their furry boots water-stained and tangled together. Melinda was combing Charlotte's hair through her fingers. “You have the most beautiful hair,” she says. “I'm so jealous. I wish I was Asian and had hair like that, too.”

“Thanks,” Charlotte said.

“Chinese,” I said as I put my book down on the table away from the cacophony of boys. “She's Chinese.”

Melinda looked up as if she hadn't given me the once-over when I came in. “Chinese
is
Asian.”

“But not all Asians are the same,” I told her. “There's Japan and China and Korea and—”

“I was there for the Asian unit in humanities. Thanks for the refresher.”

“That's why you should know better.”

“It doesn't matter,” Charlotte said. But it used to matter to her a whole lot. Melinda looked me up and down and said, “You wore that shirt on Monday.”

Had I worn this red turtleneck on Monday? I might have. If I didn't know, how did Melinda?

“Oh,” I said. “Well.”

“Did you wash it?” she asked.

“Wash it? Oh, sure, of course. Washed it, dried it, the whole nine yards. I even used one of those little bags of lavender so it smells nice. Wanna sniff?”

I reached out my arm, but Melinda turned up her nose, which was good, because I hadn't actually washed it, and as I reached out my arm, I saw a little spot of pesto (green with a ring of oil around it) from dinner on, yep, Monday night.

I slid into my seat across the table from Lucas and next to Lena Fernández del Campo; it's the longest and most glamorous name I've ever heard. She had dark hair cut just below her chin, and on the underside, behind her ear, she had dyed a streak of bright red. It was like a campfire that seemed to have been extinguished, but then you turn over a
log and it's still burning red. She didn't even look up from her tablet, but she whispered, “I like your shirt. Laundry is overrated.”

“Thanks,” I whispered back, blushing that she saw through my lie. I picked up a Rubik's Cube. Ms. Broadcheck had all these little toys around, I guess to keep the special-ed kids focused. Ms. Broadcheck says some kids need something to distract them in order to pay attention. Lucas can't keep his hands off them. He
is
a special-ed kid, the gifted kind. He was sliding the pieces around on one of those puzzles that you have to shift the squares to get them to line up.

“Done!” he called out. “See!” He stood up with the puzzle over his head like it was the Stanley Cup. “Nine seconds. That's a new record. I own this puzzle!”

I swiveled around in my seat and said, “Hey, Charlotte, did you find that note?”

Charlotte looked up at me with her brown eyes widened and gave a subtle shake of her head. Too late.

“What note?” Melinda asked.

“It's just a note,” I said.

“Ruth's mom asked for a recipe, actually, and I was supposed to bring it in, but I keep forgetting.”

“Right,” I said. “I meant a recipe, of course. Not a note.”

“A recipe for what?” Melinda asked.

“Hey, Ruth,” Lucas interrupted. “You done with that Rubik's Cube?”

“Monkey bread,” Charlotte said without hesitation.

“Monkey bread? What's that?” Melinda asked.

Alan used to make monkey bread when I would sleep over at their place. You take balls of dough and cover them in butter and sugar and then stack them up and bake them. When you eat it, you just pull off pieces. It's a big, sticky, delicious mess.

“Just a thing for breakfast. It's kind of gross, it's so sweet. Ruth likes it, though. Your mom was going to make it for you for your birthday, right?”

“Hey, Ruth, are you using that Rubik's Cube?”

“Right,” I said again as I slid the toy over to Lucas.

“Awesome! Do you think I can solve
this
in nine seconds? Someone time me.”

Lucas was standing right behind my chair, his hands lightly holding the Rubik's Cube. I could hear his foot tap, tap, tapping on the ground.

“Is your birthday coming up?” Melinda asked. “Are you having a party?”

“It's a few weeks away,” I said. “And I haven't thought about it yet.”

“Come on, Ruth. Time me. The world record is five point five five seconds.”

“You need to have a twelfth birthday party. A boy-girl party.”

Charlotte was pressing her thumb into the beanbag chair. “I don't think Ruth's moms will let her have a boy-girl party. Do you, Ruth?”

I shook my head.

Melinda laughed. “I always forget that Ruth has two moms and you have two dads. That's so weird. No one in Port Stewart has two moms or two dads. Not weird like bad, of course. Just weird.”

“Weird like how?” I asked.

Lucas tapped my shoulder. “Ruth, come on.”

“Don't get all defensive,” Charlotte said. Her frown was like a toy boat sinking in the bathtub. “She said not weird like bad.”

“I know. I just meant not weird like how?”

“Weird like different. Unusual. Relax,” Melinda said.

“Ruth!” Lucas whined.

I spun around. “What?”

“I need you to time me. I'm going for a record.”

“I don't have a watch,” I told him.

“Use your phone.”

“I don't have a phone. Anyway, they aren't allowed in school.”

“I have a phone,” Melinda said. “You want me to time you, Lucas? Do you?” She used a sickly sweet voice like she was talking to a baby.

“Yes,” Lucas practically sighed.

“Okay. On your mark, get set, go.”

We all watched him as he spun the sides of the Rubik's Cube. He moved his lips in-out, in-out, in-out with each spin. Slamming the toy on the table, he cried out, “Done!”

“Nine point three seconds,” Melinda said. “Maybe next time.”

“Let's go again,” Lucas said. “Right now. I'm ready.”

But at that moment, Ms. Broadcheck finally came into the room. If she really wanted to look out for me, maybe she should've been on time once in a while. She shook off her oversized coat. “What about all this snow, huh? I was up at five, and I still couldn't get it all out of the way to be here on time.” She combed her fingers through her hair, which always stood up like reddish-brown cotton candy swirling around her head. “So sorry to be late when we have so much to do.”

She ran through a litany of announcements: upcoming band concerts, the trip to the soup kitchen, the arts committee looking for people to perform at a coffeehouse, and “Last but not least, sign up for the spelling bee!”

She waved a paper and then put it down on the table between me and Lucas. “Our school spelling bee will be next month. The winner goes on to the Knox County Bee, and from there to the state bee and from there”—she took a deep breath—“to the Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington, DC! You can win thirty thousand dollars and a whole set of encyclopedias—you know, when I was a kid, we used to pore through those things; you guys don't know what you're missing. Anyway, last year everyone who went to the state bee got a free e-reader.”

“Whoop-dee-doo-dah,” Melinda whispered so low that Ms. Broadcheck couldn't hear.

I didn't care what Melinda thought about anything, but especially not about the spelling bee. Mum and I watched the Scripps National Spelling Bee on television every year. We took turns standing up and trying to spell the word before the contestants. Mum blamed her problems on the difference between American and British spellings, but I did well. Really well. The year before, I made it all the way to the second-to-last round before I missed a word. The second-to-last round! I had my pencil out and I was reaching for the sheet when Lucas swooped in and grabbed it from me. “Don't even bother signing up. I am going to crush everyone. Crush them.”

“Lucas,” Ms. Broadcheck said in a warning tone. “Modesty. Respect. Humility.” This was Ms. Broadcheck's mantra for Lucas. They'd been working on it all year, but he didn't seem to get it. Once he told her that he just didn't feel comfortable lying, even if it made people feel better.

“Anyone else?” Ms. Broadcheck asked.

I bit my lip. The thing of it was, Lucas was probably right. If he wanted to win, he would. His mind didn't seem to let anything go—nothing factual, anyway. So what was the point if I couldn't even make it past the school bee? It would only be a big letdown for Mum.

“Ruth wants to,” Charlotte said.

“Is that so, Ruth?” Ms. Broadcheck asked.

I shook my head. “I was thinking about it, but I don't think so.”

“She knows I will crush her.”

“Not necessarily,” Ms. Broadcheck said, but no one believed her, least of all me.

“That's okay,” I said. “It's no big deal.”

“Why don't you just write your name down, and if you change your mind, you can erase it. You can take the weekend to think about it.”

Charlotte gave me just the smallest of nods, and I guess that was enough, because I wrote my name on the line under Lucas's. He wrote his name in all caps, so big that it took up two spaces. I wrote mine in tiny lowercase letters just to balance things out.

The school cafeteria smelled like old hot dogs and pizza and was so loud, you could drive a ride-on snowblower in and no one would notice. I used to eat lunch in the school library, but then they made a rule that you couldn't have food in there because one day Mrs. Abernathy came in and found two dead mice. I don't think this was conclusive evidence that the mice were lured there by food. What did they die of, anyway? Maybe they ate mouse poison somewhere else in the school and wandered into the library with their last, gasping breaths. Or maybe a cat caught them and deposited them there as a gift for Mrs. Abernathy. Our cat, Webster, puts the animals he kills on the welcome mat of our front door.

Still, mice in the library meant no food in the library, and so I had to go to the cafeteria.

Mom said I was still finding my place in this bigger school, and Mum said it would get better in high school. Really comforting. Ms. Broadcheck kept telling me to go sit with a group of girls who were already a cohesive unit of four. Like they wanted someone new. Although, I noticed, Lena was sitting with them today. Lena seemed to sit at a different table every day, though she never landed at mine. Anyway, they were island girls who took the ferry back and forth to the mainland for school, and they only ever talked to each other. Even if I made friends with them, it wasn't like I could go visit them. Mom and Mum would never let me take the ferry by myself.

So I sat at a table in the back corner. It was fine. Just the way I liked it. I had the Harriet Wexler book that Eliot gave me even though I didn't finish all the shelf reading he wanted me to do. It was one of her Taryn Greenbottom books. In this one, Taryn had to travel from her own kingdom to one nearly thirty leagues away. To do so, she had to go through the Forest of Westbegotten, a dark, dreary, and dangerous place. I hadn't gotten that far yet. She was still preparing by feasting with her fellow squires. Taryn's favorite food is cheddar and onion, eaten between slices of fresh bread. The male squires drank mead, but she chose apple cider.

I felt a special kinship with Taryn that day because I had
brought a cheese and chutney sandwich. I was reading and minding my own business when Charlotte walked past. She never came by this part of the cafeteria, but she didn't come to see me. I thought maybe she was going to say something about that morning, maybe an apology for being so weird about the note. Instead she just walked on by.

Lucas sat at a table a couple over from mine. He sat with the smart boys, but with a few seats between them and him. He had moved up here from down in southern Maine, where he went to a private school. He told us that the lunch was much better there and that he had hard-boiled eggs and Rice Krispies and dessert every day. I watched as he dumped a sugar packet onto his ham and cheese sandwich. He read a graphic novel while he ate. He read so much that Mrs. Abernathy actually took him aside and told him that the books were getting in the way of his making friends, and at the very least he should put down the book while walking and eating. He stopped reading while he shuffled from class to class, but had not yet taken the second half of her advice.