The Friendship Riddle (11 page)

Lucas's mom put the plate of cookies down and gave us each a plastic cup of milk. If I were Lucas's mom, I'd probably
use plastic cups, too. He shoved three cookies into his mouth, gulped his milk, and then said, “Come on.”

His house was a raised ranch, which Alan, Charlotte's architect dad, claimed was an architectural curse that has been foisted on the people of Maine, but Lucas's house felt cozy.

I followed him down carpeted stairs to his bedroom. I knew it was his because it had a fake license plate that said LUCAS on it, and stickers from computer games and graphic novels. He pushed his glasses back up his nose. I'd never been in a boy's bedroom before. I hoped this wouldn't get back to school somehow. I already had to listen to Melinda humming “Ruth and Lucas, sitting in a tree” all day.

Lucas pushed open his door. The curtains were drawn and it was dark inside, but I could make out shelves taking up the whole back wall and they were filled with aquariums. Some were dark and some had eerie green lights in them.

“Come on,” he said, from inside. He dropped down on the floor and picked up a graphic novel called
Cardboard
that had a picture of someone with huge eyes on the front. “I have lots of books if you want to read.”

“What are those?” I asked. “Pets?”

“Pets?” he replied, indignant. “Those are insects. I study them. I'm an entomologist, a person who studies bugs, not words. That's an etymologist. Or maybe I'm just trying to confuse you in case those words come up in the bee.”

“I know the difference between an entomologist and an
etymologist, and even if I didn't, I wouldn't get the word wrong in the bee, because I could ask for the definition and then I could put it together.”

“Sure,” he said.

I crossed the room to look in the aquariums. There were white maggots crawling over something fleshy looking. I stayed away from that one. In another, there was a chrysalis hanging from a leaf. In a third, a praying mantis, green and delicate, stared back at me. “What do you study?”

“The insects,” he said without looking up from his book.

“What about them? Like what they eat?”

He put down his book, annoyed. “What they eat, what they do, how they react to various stimuli.”

“Stimuli? Like what?” I couldn't help but picture him pulling the legs off daddy longlegs.

“Lights on, lights off. Water. Heat.”

“Isn't that torture?”

He half stood, half leaped to his feet like a jack-in-the-box with a hitch. He picked up a binder. “I write it all down in here. Everything I do comes from
The Amateur Entomologist
, so you know it's all okay.”

“Do they do anything interesting?”

“Everything they do is interesting!”

He pointed to the praying mantis, which continued to stare at us, rubbing its front legs back and forth. He waved his hand in front of the glass and the insect seemed to disappear, then reappear in a different part of the cage. “Fast, huh?”

I nodded.

“My favorite are the bees. I had a hive at our old house. I'd watch them coming and going, doing the work for the queen, buzzing and dancing. Mom said we couldn't bring them with us, though, because this house is too close to town and people wouldn't like us to have bees. I still have some honey, though.”

He told me about swarms, medicated syrup, and mite treatments, and how you get the queen in the mail in a small box. All the while I pictured him walking up to the hive, the bees crawling over his skin-and-bones body, and he trusts, just trusts that they won't sting him.

“I cried a little when I left my bees behind, but one of my old teachers offered to take them.”

“That's funny,” I said.

“How is that funny?”

“Not that you cried. I mean about the—”

“Do you mean honey is funny? Because it rhymes? Rhymes aren't necessarily funny, you know.”

“No, I meant that you keep bees and you're into spelling bees.”

“I'm not especially into spelling bees. I just like winning.”

My mouth opened a little, and I closed it right up. Mum's mother has an expression about how you shouldn't leave your mouth open, because you'll catch flies. In this room, who knew what all else might land in there. “You don't care about the bee?”

“Nope,” he said. “I'm still going to crush you, though.” Then, after a brief hesitation, he added, “Sorry. My mom said I should be nice and try not to intimidate you about the bee.”

He wasn't intimidating me. He was angering me. Exasperating me, to use a spelling bee word. He didn't even care about the bee, just winning—no matter what the contest. Rubik's Cube, spelling bees, map quizzes in Ms. Lawson's class—it was all the same to him: he wanted to win just to win.

On a shelf above his desk were butterflies pinned inside wood-and-glass cases. “Where do you even get something like that?” I asked.

“I made them!” He trotted over next to me. “I catch them outside and then put them in one of these.” He held up a glass jar with a white cotton ball in the bottom.

“You just wait until they run out of air?”

“Of course not.” He twisted open the top and held it out to me. I breathed in and then rocked back. “Formaldehyde. I always have a couple of jars ready. You never know what kind of specimen you might find. I found that blue one outside our house when we first moved in. It was flitting around a peach tree. Isn't it beautiful?”

The pin was pressed right through its thorax. I closed my eyes, but it didn't stop me from imagining the beautiful butterfly flitting around the bushes outside Lucas's house, only to be unceremoniously dumped into a stinky glass jar. It was probably good that Lucas didn't talk about this hobby at school.

I turned around and examined the insects some more. There was a large beetle, its shell an oily yellow and blue. When I peered closer, it skittered away. “So this is what you do on a playdate?” I asked.

“I've never had a playdate,” he replied.

“Not a big bug-hunting crowd at your last school?”

He pursed his lips.

“Insect hunters,” I corrected myself. “Entomologists.”

“My dad used to say that entomology was wasted on the young.”

Used to say
. I didn't ask.

“So what do you want to do?” he asked.

“I don't know. Normally you talk or play something.”

“Do you want to play chess?”

“I don't know how.”

“It's easy.” He stood up and went to the wall opposite the insects. This one was filled with books. He yanked out a thin brown one—so ugly, my heart actually fluttered that there might be a note in it—and tossed it to me.
Essential Chess.
While I flipped through it, he pulled out a board. “I'll be black,” he said. “Which means you can be white.”

“I've figured out that much, thanks.”

“It means you go first. It's an advantage.” He set up both sides of the board. Naming the pieces as he did so. “King, queen, pawn, knight, bishop—”

“What's the castle?” I asked.

He groaned.

“What?”

“It's not a castle. It's a rook.”

“A rook?” My body leaned in toward him. “A rook and a knight?”

“Yes.” He seemed perplexed. “And a pawn and a bishop and a king and a queen.”

I found the pages that told me which ways the pieces can move.

He beat me in five moves, but I was distracted.
My knight in dingy armor . . . by crook or rook.

“That's just the way the spelling bee is going to go.”

I closed the book. When I left, I took it with me without even asking.

“How was the playdate?” Mum asked, her face pixelated on the computer.

“He has a room full of bugs and he crushed me at chess.”

“Sounds like a regular date, not a playdate.” She laughed.

“But I did get to eat store-bought cookies, so it wasn't all a loss.”

“Oh, the horror!” Mum cried out, putting her wrist to her forehead. “Store-bought cookies? Don't tell your mom!”

“I'm right here,” Mom said from the stove, where she was stir-frying vegetables and tofu. She'd read that we should
start eating more vegetarian meals. “And Ms. Hosgrove said it went very well.”

“It wasn't so bad,” I said.

“The bugs?” Mum prompted.

“He's an amateur entomologist. He has all these different kinds. Praying mantis, maggots—you know, bugs. But you have to call them insects or he gets mad.”

“Understandable,” Mom said. She pushed a pile of snow peas from the cutting board into the pan.

“Hey,” Mum said. “I'm going to go to the library when I'm out here in Seattle. They have over a million books and they get moved around by a robotic system. And the stacks, they go round and round so they never stop, you know. I'll take some photographs for you.”

“I'd like to see the robots.”

“They aren't exactly robots, I don't think. I mean, not like our Hoover robot.” Mum called the vacuum a “Hoover,” which I guess was an old vacuum brand. “Anyway, I have the spelling list here. Do you want to go a few rounds?”

“Sure,” I said. Coco and I had practiced that afternoon, and I was doing pretty well, but a little more practice couldn't hurt. “
 
‘Succotash,'
 
” she said.

“Succotash,” I repeated back to her.

“Ask me to use it in a sentence,” she said before I had a chance to start spelling.

“Can you please use it in a sentence?”

“Suffering succotash, I sure do miss you guys!” She tilted
her head back and laughed, and the camera on her computer couldn't keep up with it, so on-screen she jerked around from fuzzy to focused.

“Mum,” I said. “You are a dork.”

“Dinner's ready,” Mom said. She walked over behind me and brought her own face into our frame. “We'll talk tomorrow, hon,” she said to Mum.

“Grand,” Mum said.

“Hey, Mum,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“I sure do miss you, too.”

Charlotte caught me in the hall before homeroom. I already had my Harriet Wexler book out, ready to sink into a chair and keep reading. I was at a very exciting part. Taryn was trying to forge a stream, but her horse lost its footing and she slid off. Turns out it was more river than stream and she was being washed down, bouncing from rock to rock. The description went on for two pages before she was washed up on the shore.

Charlotte said, “Come here a sec,” and led me to a nook under the stairwell. I hesitated before going in. It could be an ambush.

Or it could be that Charlotte had brought the clue she had found, and she was going to ask me to help solve the rest with her. If she asked nicely, I just might say yes.

I tucked around the corner and found Charlotte tugging on her hair and wearing skinny jeans and those stupid fluffy boots. “I heard you went to Lucas's yesterday.”

She was invited for a playdate, too. Her dads must be making her go and she wants a preview.

“Yep,” I said. Let her discover those bugs on her own.

“You shouldn't do that.”

When we were seven, we rode our bikes through town, down by the water. A dog charged out of the yard of a rental property. It was long and lean with muscles as tight as a racehorse's. It bounded straight toward her with teeth bared and drool spewing. I pedaled hard in front of her, then spun my bike out so my back wheel hit the dog and sent him mewling back home. The hit shook my bike, my hands, my bones. Through her tears, she had said, “Why'd you do that? You shouldn't hurt a dog.”

She stomped her boot to loosen some snow that was stuck onto the suede. “You can't just go to Lucas's house.”

“Why not?” I knew why she thought I shouldn't—the rumors that would start, his social leprosy—but I wanted to hear too-kind-to-hurt-a-raging-dog-Charlotte say it.