The Friendship Riddle (32 page)

Dr. Dawes announced that there would be a break. I practically ran from the stage to the bathroom. I didn't realize how badly I had to go until she announced it.

When I stepped out of the stall, Melinda bumped up against me. Hard. I stumbled back against the metal frame of the door and shook the whole thing. “Whoa,” I said. I didn't mean to talk. It was like the force of her blow pushed the air from me.

“What are you doing up there?” she demanded. She was so close to me, I could smell the baby-powder-scented deodorant she used and the peanut butter she must have had with breakfast.

“Spelling,” I said, and resisted adding: “Duh.”

“I thought you were her friend. She said you were her friend.”

“Charlotte?”

“Yes, Charlotte, you idiot. Charlotte your friend who lost her house and they're going to blame it on her dad. And this is how you treat her?”

I didn't care what Melinda said, not one bit. But Charlotte, she had said that all I cared about was myself and my stupid games. And here I was doing it again.

I wished Melinda would ram me against the stall again, maybe sucker punch me to the belly. It would hurt about as much.

The chairs were rearranged while we had our break. Emma, Lucas, me, Charlotte. She was already sitting there when I sat down, looking down at her shoes. Real shoes—ballet flats—not the stupid, useless boots she had been wearing since she met Melinda, even when it was still seventy degrees in the fall. Her hands were folded in her lap and her hair fell down like a curtain between us.

I could let her win.

Except I couldn't control Lucas or Emma.

Wait and see. I had to wait and see, and if it got down to just me and Charlotte, then I'd do what I had to do.

Dr. Dawes returned to the podium as Lucas and Emma sat down. She shook a piece of paper. “As we go into the final rounds, the rules change ever so slightly. If everyone in the round gets their words wrong, they all stay and a new round begins. To win the bee, you must win by two words. That is to say, if three of the spellers in the round spell the word incorrectly, and the fourth speller spells his or her word correctly—”

“His,” Lucas whispered, but he was not speaking to me or Emma. He was speaking to himself—or perhaps to Dr. Dawes, correcting her.

“—then that speller must spell a final word in order to win the bee. If he or she misspells that championship word, then each of the spellers from the previous round return. Let's begin. Emma.”

Emma's face was fully red now, all the way down to the
collar of her shirt, and probably beyond. In the audience, Coco watched her with his hands clasped together.

“
 
‘Pachyderm,'
 
” Dr. Dawes said.

“Can I please have the definition?” Her voice cracked.

“
 
‘A type of animal that has hooves and thick skin.'
 
”

“Could you use it in a sentence?”

“Ruby the elephant is a pachyderm.”

“Pachyderm,” Emma said. And then, more clearly, “
P-A-C-H-Y-D-E-R-M
. Pachyderm.”

Coco made a little “Yes!” gesture, but I was thinking,
No, no, no, it's
I-D-E-R-M.

Dr. Dawes nodded and my stomach sank. Wrong. I was wrong. Would all the words in this round be so hard? Maybe I wouldn't need to let Charlotte win, after all. I'd lose without intending to.

Emma sat and Lucas stood. Dr. Dawes smiled down at him from the podium. “
 
‘Infinitesimal.'
 
”

“
I-N-F-I-N-I-T-E-S-I-M-A-L
,” he said, while I was still picturing the word in my head.

I shook as I walked to the microphone. I was wrong to think I could do this. Wrong, plain wrong. And Coco would be disappointed, and Mum, too. She sat next to Mom, leaning so far forward, she was practically bent in half.

“Ruth, your word is ‘dip-thong.'
 
” That was what she said, anyway, but I could picture the word in my head.

I knew this one. I knew it.

I glanced down at Coco, who had drilled it with me.

“Diphthong.
D-I-P-H-T-H-O-N-G
. Diphthong.”

“Very good!”

Coco shook his head, though, because I went too fast and didn't ask any questions.

When Charlotte went to the microphone, the whole crowd of popular kids rose to their feet and started hooting and hollering. It took Dr. Dawes two full minutes to get them calmed down, and even then it meant that teachers moved over and sat with them. Mom and Mum and even Alan and Eliot craned their heads around to see what all the fuss was. Mum gave me a shrug and another thumbs-up.

“Charlotte, your word is ‘apartheid.'
 
”

Her whole body relaxed. We had studied apartheid in humanities.

Still, she wrote the letters on her hand as she said them. “
A-P-A-R-T-H-E-I-D
.”

And so we started again. When Lucas went up for his turn, Coco, Dev, Adam, and Lena beat their hands together, and when it was my turn, they yelled out “Ruth,” low and deep like when Red Sox fans used to cheer for Kevin Youkilis: “Yooooouuuukkkk,” but for me it was “Ruuuuttthhhhhh!” And Charlotte's fans waved their pom-poms but didn't get all wild again.

We did three more rounds, then four. On the sixth round, Emma got a word that sounded just like “Nana,” like your
grandmother or the last part of “banana.” She froze. Her cheeks got redder and redder, and I could even see her scalp under her hair burning.

She repeated the word, and Dr. Dawes repeated it back to her.

“Can I have the definition?” she asked.

“
 
‘Knowledge,'
 
” Dr. Dawes told her.

“Origin?” she asked.

“It's a Sanskrit word.”

“Nana,” she pronounced. “Nana, nana, nana. Could you use it in a sentence?”

“He practices nana yoga,” she said.

“Are there any alternate pronunciations?”

“Yes. Gyana.”

I shook my head. I had no idea. Emma cleared her throat. “
G-Y-A-N-N-A
.”

“I'm sorry, no. It's
J-N-A-N-A
.”

Coco had both his hands over his mouth while Emma went and slumped back into her chair. In the audience, I looked for her father to be scowling. Maybe he would even stand up and walk out. Instead he gave her a smile. I tried to see if she smiled back, but Lucas was in the way as he walked back up to the microphone.

He spelled “gingham,” I spelled “ersatz,” and Charlotte spelled “sassafras”—another one I probably would have gotten wrong, adding an extra
s
to the end. But still, I felt like I was in that zone Adam had talked about.

Unfortunately, so were Charlotte and Lucas. We went nine more rounds.

And then it happened.

“Lucas, your word is ‘aviary.'
 
”

As the grin spread across Lucas's face, I knew what was happening. I wanted to leap out of my chair and tell him,
No, no, no! Ask for the definition!
But he started spelling. “
A-P-I-A-R-Y
.
 
”

“I'm sorry, that's wrong.”

“What?”

“It's wrong.”

“No, you see, I'm a beekeeper, or I was. I know how to spell ‘apiary.'
 
”

Dr. Dawes's face softened as she understood what had happened. The judges in the front row exchanged glances, but we all knew the rules. “Your word was ‘aviary,' Lucas, not ‘apiary.'
 
”

His eyes widened, but he returned to his seat on the stage. He knew the rules, too.

I tried to catch his gaze as I made my way up to the microphone, but he kept looking at the pocked boards of the stage.

“Ruth, your word is ‘shrieval.'
 
”

Lena made a whooping sound. I wanted to smile, but my stomach was all roiled up because of what had happened to Lucas. And because if Charlotte and I both got our words right, it would just be me and her, but if I got mine wrong,
and she got hers right, then she would only need to spell one more to win.

I could give her that. I could give her that small thing.

“Ruth?” Dr. Dawes prompted.

But she might get her word wrong. Or her championship word. There was no telling.

“Shrieval,” I said. “Can I get a definition?”

Lena raised her hands in a
what are you doing?
gesture.

“
 
‘Of or relating to a sheriff.'
 
”

I saw Ms. Lawson in the first row, and I thought of the map test.

Melinda glared at me. If she could, I knew she would have sent blasts of ice from her eyeballs to freeze me to my spot.

You don't know her
, I thought.
You might be her best friend, but you don't know her at all.

“Shrieval.
S-H-R-I-E-V-A-L
. Shrieval.”

“That is correct!”

Charlotte walked to the microphone. Melinda beat her hands together until Ms. Broadcheck put a hand on her shoulder.

“Charlotte, your word is ‘detente.'
 
”

“Detente,” she said. She looked over her shoulder at me. We just stared at each other. She gave a tiny smile. Maybe. Then she turned around and said, clear and confident, “
D-A-Y-T-A-N-T
.”

Dr. Dawes tilted her head to the side and made her eyes look soft. “That's incorrect.”

“Okay,” Charlotte said.

So it came down to this. Get the word correct, and I was the champion.

“Choke!” I heard someone yell. Not Melinda. Ms. Broadcheck would be right on her. She was sitting there, though, smiling like a cat on a mouse.

Again, louder. “Choke!”

Lena leaped to her feet and spun around. “This is a spelling bee, not a basketball game, you classless hooligans!” she yelled.

Dr. Dawes rapped at the podium like a judge calling for order. “The enthusiasm for this year's spelling bee is remarkable, but Lena is correct. This is not a sporting event, and at any rate, Frontenac Beavers always practice good sportsmanship. Please refrain from heckling.” She took a deep breath. “Ruth, your championship word is ‘perfidy.'
 
”

Perfidy. I knew the word. How to spell it, what it meant, that it was Latin in origin, but I asked, “May I please have the definition?”

“
 
‘The quality or state of being faithless or disloyal.'
 
”

Behind me, Charlotte scuffed her foot across the floor. In front of me, my friends held hands.

Faithless or disloyal.

What would it mean, in this instance, to lose faith in Charlotte? To be disloyal to her?

What had it meant to her?

Because she knew that
D-A-Y-T-A-N-T
was wrong. Really wrong. Hadn't she?

Was that perfidy toward me? Throwing the bee and giving it to me. Had she lost faith in my ability to win? Or was it loyalty?

My hip and shoulder still stung from being slammed into the stall.

I knew this much: Melinda knew nothing of either loyalty or faith.

“Perfidy,” I said. “
P-E-R-F-I-D-Y
. Perfidy.”

“Correct!”

That night I sat in my room and looked at the certificate I had earned. Maybe earned. I couldn't shake the idea that Charlotte had muffed on purpose.

Either way it would be the two of us headed to the Knox County Spelling Bee. Only one of us could go on to the state bee, though.

My stomach was full of the strawberry shortcake we'd had to celebrate. Mom had made the biscuits the night before. When I asked her what would have happened if I had lost, she'd said, “Not a possibility.”

I had downloaded a chess app onto my tablet, and I was thinking of doing some practicing—I wanted to get better so I could play with Lucas, Dev, and Adam—but then I noticed
my backpack. The book Mr. Douglas had given me stuck out of it. It looked a little off. Like it wasn't quite holding its shape as a book. Taryn would think it was a book with a spell on it.

I wasn't sure how I felt about Taryn now that she was off kissing royalty who had spent some time being trolls. Everyone changes, I guess, even old, familiar characters in books. And, anyway, maybe Lucas was right, and if I just read some Tolkien, people would stop insisting that I needed to. So I pulled the book out and flipped it open.

I blinked.

The pages had been cut out carefully so that a space about the size of two decks of cards was left. In that space was a pewter figurine of a dragon, a die with twenty sides, and two folded-up packs of paper.

The first was graph paper, and when I unfolded it, I saw a map. It was drawn carefully with pencil, busier at the middle but spanning out to the edges of the page. It seemed to be of a town, but an older town, or a fantasy town. The map's key promised that the town held places like the Word Hoard, the Hill of the Dead, and the
Cursus Publicus
, perhaps a place for publicly cursing others? A mermaid was drawn in the water.