The Friendship Riddle (4 page)

The smart boys were arguing about the practicalities of the time stop in the first Andromeda Rex book. I could hear them all the way over at my table. Adam, with his long-sleeve polo shirt tucked into his khaki pants, stood up and hit the table. “It is simply scientifically inconceivable.”

Dev tugged at Adam's sleeve to make him sit down. “Don't cause a scene.”

“That's why it's called science fiction,” Coco replied. He
had a flop of brown hair that was always getting in his eyes. He was the smartest of the smart boys, and his name wasn't really Coco. It was Chris. But I guess his big sister couldn't say Chris when she was little, so she called him Coco and it stuck, and he was so smart and kind that he didn't even get made fun of for it.

Coco glanced up and saw me looking at him and smiled, so I looked back down at my book. All the squires had gone home except for Taryn and Benedict, squire to the royal Sir Gandriel. He begged her not to go on the quest, and it seemed he was just about to declare his love, but Taryn stopped him. “Pretty words are wasted on me,” she said. “I leave in the morrow. Without a quest, I am nothing. I am no one if I do not seek.”

That was why I loved the Taryn Greenbottom books: Harriet Wexler didn't mess them up with any of that boy-girl stuff. There's nothing worse than reading along with a good action-adventure story and then
BAM!
Love story.

Charlotte, who adored love stories, was back at her table. She sat between Melinda and Mitchell, who was the most popular of all the popular boys. His dad was a fisherman, and Mitchell started going out on the boat with him this past summer. He came to school in the fall with a nose red and peeling, hands calloused, and shoulders broadened. In Promise, he'd always just been Mitchell, quiet and still, but then Melinda saw him and declared him positively adorable, and
the next thing you knew, quiet, still Mitchell became a star with his own orbit. He had gravitational pull. And that gravitational pull seemed to be working its power over Charlotte: she sat so close, you couldn't even put a quarter between them.

I checked my sandwich. Three more bites and then I could leave the smelly cafeteria and go to the library. I had a space right below the twisting staircase where I liked to sit and read. I could usually get there with twenty minutes left before fifth period.

One bite.

“Hey, Ruth.” It was Coco.

I still had a mouth full of sandwich, so I just nodded. He beckoned me over. Only two bites left. Maybe one and a half if I crammed. I stood up, swallowed hard, and walked over to their table. “Have you read Andromeda Rex?” Coco asked.

“Only the first two,” I replied. I had thought they were okay, but then I went online and read that the author, Timothy Desmond Green, had called Harriet Wexler a “no-talent, derivative” writer whose “act of being a recluse is just a posture designed to garner the affections of mooning preadolescent girls.” I wouldn't ever read another one of his books.

“Not an expert,” Adam said without looking at me. “I told you.”

“We're talking about the first book,” Dev said. Then, to me: “Sorry. He's rude. No excuse for it, really. It's just the way he's made.”

“But she doesn't have the whole context,” Adam replied. He glanced past me at the rest of the cafeteria.

“You know how Andromeda stops time so he can go and change things? Move them around and all that? Do you think that's in any way possible?” Coco asked.

I reached back in my memory to try to recall what I thought when I read the book. “I don't know,” I said. “But I don't think so.”

“Ha!” Adam said. “Told you. She doesn't know anything about it.”

“Why don't you think so?” Coco asked.

“Well, if time isn't linear, I mean, that's the whole idea behind time travel, right?”

“Obviously,” Adam said. “If you are going to travel through time, it's not just front and back. There are alternate time lines and so on and so forth.”

“So on and so forth?” Dev asked.

Adam tugged on the end of his sleeves. “We don't really have the time here to go into a full discussion of the physics of time travel.”

“Or maybe you just don't know,” Dev said.

I interrupted their bickering. “The point is, let's say time is a wheel that's spinning. But it's not just one wheel—it's a lot of wheels side by side. So if you stopped the one you were on,
the other ones are still spinning. You might stop it here, but not there.”

“That's
one
theory of time travel and time manipulation,” Adam said, still adjusting his shirt cuffs. “But that might not be Timothy Desmond Green's version. You have to work within the confines of the book, you know. Remember, Coco, we talked about that at Brain Camp.”

“Brain Camp,” Dev said with disgust. “It wasn't even camp. It was like—summer school.”

There was a big science company on the peninsula—they made medicines and vaccines, I think—and they had a camp where their experts taught classes to kids. It could be their field of study, or just something they were passionate about. I had taken one on genetic engineering in the hopes of learning how to build an army of genetically superior animals, but all we did was talk about Punnett squares and the ethics of parents choosing, say, green eyes for their children. The teacher was a young woman with long brown hair and hipster glasses who referred to all of us as “dear” and “honey.” She worked in the lab, testing their products on mice, and I sometimes wondered if that was how she talked to the rodents.

“Our teacher said that when you are looking at the science of science fiction, you need to consider the world of the novel as well as the confines of science. And Timothy Desmond Green is very clear about how time works in his books, and so—”

“The question is whether it's possible at all, not possible in the books,” Dev interrupted.

I started to say that I wasn't really sure, but then Coco said, “I think Ruth's explanation makes sense.”

“It sure does,” Dev said, grinning, but I knew it was just because he liked getting the upper hand over Adam. Sometimes it seemed the only thing that tied Adam and Dev together was Coco, each of them pivoting around him like the ends of a kayak paddle.

“What does Lucas think?” I asked.

“You try asking him,” Coco said. “He's lost in that book.”

“Hey, Lucas?” I tried to make my voice like Melinda's when she talked to him, but I just couldn't make it that syrupy. “Have you been listening? What do you think?”

He lifted his gaze from the book. His glasses were crooked across his face, and he had a little bit of mustard on his cheek. “I think I'm going to crush you in that spelling bee.”

Ms. Pepper's laugh was like wind chimes in the summer, but she wasn't free and easy with it, so I was glad my story of how I had found
It's Perfectly Normal
buried in the mythology section elicited a little tinkle. But then she cleared her throat and said, “Have you read it?”

“Pardon me?”

“It's very informative.”

“I know.”

“You can check it out if you'd like. I still have it right here.”

“I have my own copy.”

“That's fantastic!” She had earrings shaped like Curious George and the Man in the Yellow Hat, and they danced on her ears as she nodded enthusiastically.

“Sure,” I said. “It's not really relevant to my life right now.”

“Not relevant?” The characters swung back and forth like they were on a teeter-totter. “It's about the human body!” Her voice went up in volume and pitch. “Ruth Mudd-O'Flanahan, you have a glorious body!” I swear, her voice echoed around the room.

Body, body, body.

I checked over my shoulder to see if anyone was around. Charlotte passed by. She pretended not to have noticed me, but she had a little smirk on her lips. Would she tell Melinda about this? Would my glorious body be the butt of jokes all over school?

“Thanks, Ms. Pepper,” I said. “I'll take that under advisement.”

“I mean it, Ruth. Never be ashamed of your body.”

I never said I was ashamed of my body. “That's good advice,” I said. “You know, I'm supposed to be helping Mr. Diamond with a project. That's how I found the book in the first place.”

“Well, if you find any more of our juvenile books out of place, you let me know.”

“Sure thing,” I said.

She gave a sharp nod, and George seemed to wink his monkey eye at me.

Ears still red as hot rods, I went back to shelf reading for Eliot. I was in the seven hundreds, the arts, when I found a book on Romanian operas. I didn't know that there were
any Romanian operas, let alone a whole book on them. My sperm donor dad put down opera as an interest, and so I thought genetically my own love of it was inside me somewhere. As much as I've tried to listen, I hadn't discovered it yet. Maybe my love was for Romanian operas.

It was on the very bottom shelf, and as I bent over to pull it out, I must admit I was thinking that this would be the perfect spot to hide another note. I mean, Romanian opera? Not exactly a high-interest topic. Plus the spine was all weathered and tattered.

I pulled it out, carefully, carefully. A piece of paper spun out of it, and my heart beat like those windup chattering teeth bouncing all over the place. The paper was no wider than a staple and dotted with holes. It was the edging of old computer printer paper. You used to have these long reams of continuous but perforated paper that was fed through the printer by pins. Once you printed your page, you tore it off like a paper towel from a roll, and then ripped off the dotted edges.

I recognized it right away because my grandmother—Mom's mom—still had that kind of printer and when she printed, she didn't bother to pull off the edges, so I always ended up tearing them off for her and I tried to use them to make crafts, but they weren't very useful, so most ended up in the recycle bin.

My humanities teacher, Ms. Lawson, would call this “diverging from the task,” but I think it's interesting. Maybe
it's not 100 percent relevant, but it's not
ir
-relevant (“ir” as a prefix making the word its opposite).

So anyway, I picked up this paper. Even though it was not in an origami envelope, I still had hope. It was twisted and I smoothed it out.

Nothing.

I felt as let down as a balloon nearly out of helium, hovering inches above the ground.

I needed to see that other note. I needed to see Charlotte.

“Charlotte?” Eliot echoed my question. “Well, if she's not upstairs, I suppose she's gone into the back room. You can go look for her.”

The back room was where the library staff had their space. There were supplies for cataloging books, and a little kitchenette where they could reheat their lunches. Charlotte and I used to spend all sorts of time there, back when we were friends, but I hadn't been in ages.

“That's okay.”

“It's really fine,” Eliot said. “You can grab me some rubber cement when you go to check for her.”

I scratched my lip. Charlotte had told me it was a bad habit because it looked like I was picking my nose and that I really needed to stop before middle school. I mostly had. Mostly.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll be right back with the rubber cement.”

I pushed open the door and it creaked. The building
was so old that sometimes it creaked a symphony. I figured I'd just go in, grab the rubber cement, then head back out, and forget about even looking for Charlotte. But she was in there, and the door was so loud that she looked up when I came in, right in my eyes, and I couldn't just pretend I didn't see her. Could I? No. She wanted to pretend she didn't see me. I could see it in the way her eyes shifted left and then down and then back up at me as if I were a train wreck and she couldn't quite look away. “Hi, Charlotte,” I said.

“Hi, Ruth,” she replied.

“Your dad needs some rubber cement. I'm getting him some rubber cement.”

“It's right over near the paper cutter.”

“I know.”

She flipped the ends of her hair over her shoulder. It was a practiced gesture. I wondered if Melinda gave her lessons. I took a few steps toward the counter. It was none of my business anymore what Charlotte did with her hair or anything else.

“You really should do the spelling bee,” she told me.

I turned to face her, but I couldn't figure out just what to say. She looked like the old Charlotte. Her cheeks were pinkish and she wore her dad's earflap hat, even though it was really dorky, because it was so cold in the back room.

“It's just that you've always wanted to do it. And I know Lucas has that crazy memory, but spelling bees are as much about luck as skill.”

“There's a lot of skill involved.”