The Friendship Riddle (28 page)

“I like Lena better,” I said.

“Good. Me, too.”

“It must be nice to have your sisters, all of you in this house all cozy.”

“Ha!” she half laughed. “You mean all up in your business? Oh, hey, I never told you about Wonder Woman!”

I remembered the chat message she had sent me ages ago. “What about her?”

“Lucia was telling us that, according to her gym teacher, when you need a confidence boost, you should stand like Wonder Woman. You know, with your fists on your hips and your chest puffed out. Like this.” She put down the knife and stood with her legs shoulder-width apart, hands on hips, elbows back a bit. She shook her head, and the red streak peeked out like a stream of lava. “I feel more powerful already. You need to do this before the spelling bee.”

“Okay,” I said, but without much enthusiasm.

“Promise,” she said.

“Promise?”

“Do it now,” she demanded.

I stood up and put my hands on my hips.

“That's not it at all!” she exclaimed. She strode over to me and pulled my elbows out so they pointed like wings. “Now lift your chin,” she said.

“I feel silly,” I said.

“But strong, too, right? So promise?”

“I promise,” I agreed.

“Good.” She turned and went back to the counter. “Now, listen. Mr. Douglas. It has to be him, right? ‘He knows why the sky is blue,' and what's the rest of it?”

“
 
‘Why the earth spins round and round, and where the next clue can be found.'
 
”

“So we have to go see him.”

“And bring him something from the doctor,” I said.

“Doctor Who again?”

“There was never any Doctor Who. Just England. But, anyway, it's not capitalized. It's underlined. And so is the ‘Pep' in ‘Peppy.'
 
”

She shook her head. “How are we going to get to the high school?”

I balled my hands into fists and pushed them onto my forehead. “With this and the spelling bee, I'm too wound up to even think.”

“You will do awesome. Know why?”

“Because I've been studying and Coco has prepared me and I rock and yadda-yadda-pump-me-up speech?”

“No,” Lena said. “Well, yes, all of that is true. But you will win because you will be the only one to have Lena's world-famous mushroom medley frittata!” She dumped all the vegetables into a pie plate and then poured beaten eggs on top of them. “Not to mention molten-chocolate devil cakes with honey!”

“Honey? Because of the bees?”

“Yes! But even better, bees and honey are symbols of language and speaking well. It's perfect!”

“Where'd you learn that?”

“Lucas told me.”

“Of course.”

“Of course.”

“You know what else he told me?”

“What?”

“That he is going to crush you. Maybe.”

“He said maybe?”

“He said maybe.”

It was the best piece of news I'd heard all day.

In the summer, you can barely walk across the street without getting hit by a trolley, but in the winter, the trolleys only run once an hour. Lucas, Lena, and I waited at the stop, stomping our feet to keep warm and seeing who could puff out the biggest cloud of white air.

“I'm a fire-breathing lizard,” Lena said.

“There are no lizards that can breathe fire,” Lucas said.

“Really?” Lena asked. “Isn't that where the idea of dragons came from?”

The snow in the road was nearly black and a car drove through a mound of it, sluicing it up toward us. I jumped back, but Lucas got splattered. I don't think he even noticed. “No,” he said.

“I thought the idea of dragons came from dinosaur fossils,” I said.

“Sure,” Lena said. “But the fire breathing had to come from somewhere, right?”

“What time is it?” Lucas asked.

Lena checked the time on her phone. “It's three twenty-seven.”

The trolley was scheduled for three fifteen. We all peered down the street for the telltale green-and-red vehicle.

This trip was not entirely sanctioned, not for Lena and me, anyway. Lucas told his mom he wanted to go meet a science teacher at the high school, and since that was perfectly in character for him, she hadn't flinched. I had told Mom I was going to Lena's, and Lena told hers that we were going to hang around in town. My mom was going to pick me up at five thirty. The timing was tight. And if we got caught, we couldn't even claim innocence on a technicality, since the high school was over in Port Stewart.

Coco had piano practice, which he had begged to get out of, but his dad said no way since he thought Coco had been acting strangely overall and wouldn't let him avoid another one of his passions. “I don't even like the piano,” Coco had told me. “I'd rather play the drums. My piano teacher does give me these butterscotch candies, though, from Switzerland, where he's from. I'll see if I can get you one.” Adam had an orthodontist appointment. “I think my parents are going to have heart attacks if it turns out I need
braces. They're already talking about raiding my savings account, but they don't know I have a secret stash.” And Dev, well, without Coco or Adam, there was no way his mom was going to let him come, even if Lena did seem like a nice girl.

Just then the trolley rolled up. It almost didn't stop, as if the driver wasn't expecting passengers, but then it swerved over to us. We each handed our dollar to the Santa-esque gentleman behind the wheel. The only other person on the trolley was an older woman, who sat right up front and held on to the pole with her hand encased in a knit mitten.

We went to the very back of the trolley. “Lucia says his classroom is on the first floor, third on the left. He's always there.”

“Always? Like overnight?” Lucas asked.

“Of course not,” I said, but Lena said, “Who knows?”

The trolley wound its way out of Promise and into Port Stewart. The closest stop was about a quarter mile away. As we approached, I noticed we were racing by other trolley stops. “How do we let him know we want to stop?” I asked. I had never actually ridden the trolleys before. They were mostly for tourists, and I hadn't even realized they ran year-round until we'd started searching for a way to get to the high school.

“Pull the cord,” Lucas said.

“What cord?” I asked.

He looked up, and so did Lena and I, and there was a
thin, plastic cord. Lena stood and tugged on it. The driver glanced up in surprise. “You need a stop?” he asked.

“At the corner of Allagash Street and Frontenac Road,” Lena said.

The driver nodded but didn't say anything else. A few minutes later, he pulled over. “The trolley will be back here at five oh five, right?” I asked at the top of the stairs. “To go back to Promise?”

“That's Nelly's route. She's not always on schedule. Early sometimes. Late sometimes.”

“You were thirteen minutes late,” Lucas told him.

“Lucas,” I hissed. I turned back to the driver. “But she'll wait, right? If she's early, she can't leave until five oh five, can she?”

The driver shrugged. “Nelly does what Nelly does.”

I glanced at Lena and Lucas. “Maybe we should just—”

“No!” Lena grabbed my sleeve and tugged me down the stairs. “Thank you!” she called to the driver as he shut the folding doors. “It just means we have to be quick.”

The window of Mr. Douglas's door was covered with cartoons and photographs: a supernova, a
New Yorker
comic about wormholes, a picture of a bee's eye in extreme close-up. I didn't recognize that last one; Lucas did, of course, and we practically had to peel him off it to get inside. We knocked, but no one answered, so we pulled open the door.

I had never seen a classroom like this.

On the back wall were three large aquariums. One had a bright red snake in it, another a lizard, and the third appeared to be empty, but it had a light shining on it. Shelves on a side wall were full of animal skeletons and taxidermied specimens: possums, river otters, raccoons, all local animals. There was even a weasel about to eat a mouse. Hanging from the ceiling were bee and wasp nests of all different sizes. Lucas identified them in a reverent whisper. “Paper wasp, bumblebee, hornet.”

Just to the left of the door was a bookcase, but it didn't have any science books on it. It was all fiction, and all different kinds: fantasy, realistic, classics. There was even a Harriet Wexler book.

The front lab table was covered with papers, and the whole room smelled a bit like a pet store.

There was no Mr. Douglas. There was, however, faint music playing from a connected room. “
 
‘His radio, those ads will sell you. Peppy song will make you wonder, if the world is going under,'
 
” Lena whispered to me. And then, louder, “Mr. Douglas?”

There was a crashing sound, and then a man emerged from the room. He was bald on top of his head, with a ring of blaring white hair around the lower half. His eyes were pale blue, sharp as diamonds, and narrowing down on me and my friends. “Who are you?” he demanded.

None of us spoke. Lena stepped closer to me.

Mr. Douglas strode farther into the room and put his hands on the lab table at the front. Picking up a Bunsen burner, he said again, “Who are you?”

“We are questers,” I heard myself say. “We have come to ask you where the next clue may be found.”

His eyes flashed and his face softened. “Are you, now? And what makes you think I would have that information?”

I pulled out the clue. “We found this,” I said. “We've been following all the clues and they led us here.”

He reached across the table in a swift motion and grabbed the clue from my hand. “It says here you are to bring me something.”

We had hoped we could breeze past that part. We hadn't figured out what he wanted. “I—” I began. “We—”

“I, we, what?” he demanded. “This paper is very clear. You are to bring me something from the doctor. Don't touch that!”

I swiveled my head to see Lucas leaning very close to a football-shaped nest that was sitting on a table in the back room. “It's buzzing,” he said.

“It seems it was not as abandoned as I had been led to believe.”

“Vespula are tricky like that,” Lucas said as he backed away. He slipped his backpack off and unzipped it. Then he pulled out a bottle of Dr Pepper and handed it to Mr. Douglas, who smiled for half a second. He dropped the bottle in the trash. “Charlie and Storm and the boys would be
shocked, but I don't drink the stuff anymore. I guess you're still entitled to your clue. Wait here.”

We stood by the lab table. “How did you know?” I asked.

“What do you mean?” Lucas asked. “
 
‘Doctor,' ‘peppy,' ‘fizzy bubbles.' They might as well have spelled it out.”

Mr. Douglas returned holding a small origami envelope. My heart raced in the familiar way. He handed it to me. “Thank you!” I said. “We won't bother you anymore.”

“Wait,” he said.

According to Mr. Douglas's clock, it was four thirty. Plenty of time if Nelly came on schedule, but if she was early, we could miss the last ride back into town. “We really ought to be going,” I said.

He ignored me and walked around the lab table over to the small bookshelf of fiction. From the top right, he pulled out an old, worn book. Another clue? He held out the book to me. “Take this.”

The Fellowship of the Ring
by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Why were people always trying to get me to read Tolkien? “Um, I already have a copy. Two, actually.”

“Not this one.”

No, I certainly did not have an old, smelly version.

“What grade are you in?” he asked.

“Sixth,” I said.

He nodded. “Then you should have plenty of time to read it by the time you get to me. Get wise.”

I swear I could hear the clock ticking behind me. I took
the book from him and shoved it into my backpack. It seemed lighter than it looked. Maybe it was printed on that old, thin paper. “We really do need to go,” I said.

“We need to catch the trolley,” Lena explained.

He shook his head. “We'll see if I'm still around by then, of course. Students, teachers. I don't know half of them half as well as I would like, and I like less than half of them as well as they deserve.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You'll have enough time to forget, at least,” he said.

“Forget what?” I asked.

“Everything you've learned so far.” He checked his watch. “You'd better hurry. Nelly is early more often than she's late, and late more often than she's on time.”

He pushed open the door for us and watched us as we ran down the hallway for the door. I had the eerie feeling he was watching us the whole way home.