The Friendship Riddle (6 page)

Mum called us over the computer from Texas that night. She looked all grainy and jumpy on the screen. Behind her was a framed print of a cactus. It's funny how hotels don't change much from city to city, state to state: beige walls, white sheets, shiny desk. You've got to look for the little details to see the differences: a cactus print instead of a photograph of a skyscraper, pink coverlet instead of brown.

“I should be home tomorrow,” she said. “As long as the weather holds there.”

Mom and I were eating dinner while we talked with her. I wound the spaghetti around my fork. “Good.”

“We can study for the bee.”

“I've started,” I confessed. “There's this boy, Coco, at school who is going to help me.”

Mom's eyebrows jumped up her forehead like jacks out of boxes.

“And I can help you.” The connection made Mum's accent harder to understand. It almost sounded like she said “An I can't help ye.”

My mouth was full of spaghetti, so I nodded eagerly. I didn't want Mum to think that studying with Coco meant I didn't trust her to help me. Swallowing, I said, “I've got the Spell It! study site bookmarked on the computer.”

“Let me know as soon as your flight is confirmed,” Mom said. “I'm on call tomorrow. We need to make plans for Ruth.”

“I'm fine here by myself,” I said.

They didn't even bother to answer.

“I think we're looking at another snow day,” Mom said.

“Here's hoping I get back in time to enjoy it. Maybe we can go snowshoeing.”

“Did you know that in Africa, girls are getting married by my age? They run their own households,” I informed them.

“Africa is not a country,” Mom said. “And every country is different. But in the countries where girls marry young, they usually become part of a larger family unit, with older women to help guide them. No one your age is running a family.”

I wondered if that was true, absolutely. Somewhere, somehow, there was a girl my age on her own and looking out for a family. “All I'm saying is that you can leave me alone for a night. I'll be sleeping. What can happen to me when I'm sleeping?”

Mom looked at Mum on the computer screen. “Not up for discussion,” she said. “Why are you bringing up Africa, anyway?”

“We're starting the unit on Africa in humanities. Today we went over the map.”

Mom's face lit up. “Did you talk about Côte d'Ivoire?”

“Not yet.”

“Tell Ms. Lawson I can come in and talk about it. I can do a slide show. You know that's actually part of the mandate of the Peace Corps—to share the foreign culture with Americans. In fact, I'll just e-mail her myself.”

“When?”

“Tonight after dinner.”

“No. When are you going to have time to come in and talk to the class about the Ivory Coast?”

“I'm sure we can work out a time,” Mom says. She slid a meatball to the side of her plate, then used her fork to cut it in half. “This is a big unit, isn't it?”

“Most of the trimester.”

“Then we'll surely find the time.”

“Tell them about the guinea worms!” Mum said.

“The point is not to gross them out,” Mom replied. “I want them to see what a beautiful country it is.”

“The guinea worms will hook them, though. Ha, hook them!”

Guinea worms are long, thin worms that get inside you and lay their eggs. Their eggs. Inside you. Then, when the egg hatches, the worm has to get out. So it works its way out of your skin, usually on your leg. The place where it comes
out gets big and red and swollen and painful. But you can't just yank the worm out, because then it might break and burrow back into your flesh. No, you have to pull it out a centimeter each day, and wrap it around a toothpick that you bandage to your leg.

I pushed my spaghetti away.

“You've got to know your audience,” Mum said. She winked at me. Or maybe it was just a flicker of the screen. Sometimes I pretended she was a robot version of my mum, and these little tics were glitches in the system.

“I think I have photographs in the attic. I'll have to scan them.”

“Ms. Lawson may not want you to come.”

“Of course she will. I have firsthand experience.”

Mum bore her gaze into me across the miles. “It won't do any harm to ask,” she said.

No harm.

Mom reached over to the computer. “I love you, honey,” she said. “We've got to clean up from dinner, and I want to send that e-mail.”

“Love you both,” Mum replied.

“Good night,” I said, but Mom had already clicked on the red hang-up icon and was opening her e-mail.

The one good thing about her fixating on coming into my class to speak was that it made her forget my mentioning Coco. That was a close one. In fact, just to make sure I escaped
a third-degree grilling on the Mom-B-Que, I grabbed my plate and glass, popped them into the dishwasher, and said, “Off to study science.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Mom said.

“I have to memorize the classification system.”

“Sounds lovely.”

“Good dinner,” I told her.

“Thank you,” she replied, her gaze trained on the screen.

I backed out of the room just to keep an eye on her. She was a fast one, that Mom, and I wanted to be ready to sprint should she look up at me with those inquisitive eyes.

Ms. Broadcheck came tumbling into homeroom with a stack of papers. “Everyone has to take the test!” she announced. “The spelling test. The spelling test.” She shook off her coat. “I'm sorry I'm late. My dog pooped in my shoes. Not these shoes, of course. My other shoes.”

Melinda wrinkled her nose. “In them or on them?”

“In them, on them, around them. But we don't have time to talk about my dog's gastrointestinal distress. Not enough kids signed up for the spelling bee, and we think there might be some secret spellers lurking about, so everyone takes the qualifying test. The top four for each grade will compete in the school bee.”

Secret spellers. Each night they tucked themselves away
in their attics spelling words like “hibachi,” “begonia,” and “hoomalimali.” Maybe they were the smart ones. Maybe I should remain a secret speller, too.

“Do I have to take the test?” Lucas asked.

“Everyone has to take the test,” Ms. Broadcheck answered.

“But everyone knows I will own them. I will rule the spelling bee. This is a waste of my time.” I didn't want to be like Lucas—known for the wrong reasons. Better to be unknown.

“You
don't
know that, actually, Lucas. Which is what I said during the faculty meeting when some teachers thought it was unfair to change how we qualified students for this. I think it's unfair that some of you might not even know you're good at this. This might be fun for some of you and you don't even know it. Like, well, sometimes I wonder if maybe I was destined to be an Olympic athlete but just never found it. Like maybe I am a world-class luger. Or curler. And I just never got the opportunity. Well, one of you might be a world-class spelling bee-er, and here is your chance to be discovered.”

“I don't want to be discovered. You can't force us to be in some lame-o spelling bee,” Melinda said.

But then, Melinda thought she knew me, didn't she? Better to be known the way you wanted to be known than the way someone like Melinda decided you were. I wouldn't allow myself the fantasy of a total shift—my classmates lifting me up on their shoulders in victory—but maybe it would
afford me a modicum of respect. (“Modicum” was one of Mum's favorite spelling words—such a big word for something small.) There was some honor in being good at something.

Ms. Broadcheck sighed as she placed a sheet of paper in front of each of us. “No one is going to force you to be in the competition. Should you prove to have one of the top four scores, you may abdicate.”

I didn't think anyone was too concerned about Melinda having one of the top four scores.

“Abdicate.
A-B-D-I-C-A-T-E
. Abdicate,” Lucas said. “It can also mean ‘to disown,' like giving up a child.”

“Interesting, but not relevant, Lucas,” Ms. Broadcheck said. “Come on, now, we don't have much time.”

Ms. Broadcheck read each word and gave the definition from Webster's dictionary, the official dictionary of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and we wrote them on our papers. “
 
‘Trajectory.' ‘The curved path along which something—such as a rocket—moves through the air or through space.'
 
” Pencils scratched across the paper. This one was easy. “
 
‘Ninja.' ‘A person trained in ancient Japanese martial arts and employed especially for espionage and assassinations.'
 
”

“Can you repeat the word?” Lucas asked.

“It's ‘ninja,' Lucas.”

“That's right. I'm the spelling ninja! I will assassinate you with my skills.”

“We don't have time for outbursts. You're going to be
late for first period. The next word is ‘inane.' ‘Empty, insubstantial.' Secondary definition: ‘lacking significance, meaning, or point; silly.'
 
”

“This test is inane,” Melinda said.

“No. More. Outbursts.”

We went on and on. Forty words in all. My hand was tired by the end of it. I checked over my sheet. There were only two that I was uncertain about: “mammoth” (
is there a double
m
in the middle?
 
) and “adamant” (
or “-ment” or “-mint”?
 
), but I still thought I'd done a good job. Good enough to be in the top four, I hoped. It would be mortifying to be cut before the bee even happened. Mum would be so disappointed. She'd e-mailed me that she had printed out lists of words and we were going to start studying that night when she got home.

I handed my sheet to Ms. Broadcheck, who took it with a wide smile. “Chin up, Ruth, honey. You're going to be fine.”

Ms. Broadcheck shouldn't make offhand comments like that. They feel like promises, but there's no way to keep them.

Some kids hate gym class, but I'm pretty fast and can actually throw a ball, so I didn't mind as long as we weren't playing volleyball, a game invented with the sole purpose of torturing schoolchildren. It was the locker room that I hated. At Frontenac Consolidated Middle School, the locker room is a really an oversized hallway that's divided by a bank of lockers.

Getting ready, you have to rush because the boys walk through the girls' locker room to get upstairs. They're supposed to wait before they come in, but sometimes they forget. I always tried to get a locker on the side behind the bank of lockers. Trouble is, so did all the other girls. We were all rush, rush, rush as we got ready to go up to the gym. But after class, once the boys passed through and Ms. Wickersham was back in her office, all bets were off.

All the other girls wore bras. Even Lena, who had nothing much that needed to be supported. Even Charlotte, who was smaller. But I didn't.

“Is it true that your moms won't let you get a bra?” Melinda asked me.

I glanced at Charlotte. She dug in her locker for her deodorant.

I pulled my undershirt on over my head. “No,” I said. “That's not true.”

“Huh,” Melinda replied. She made a big show of adjusting the lace on the edge of her bra. It had to be padded. Charlotte shimmied into her shirt. “So it's your choice, then?” Melinda asked me.

“Yes,” I told her.

“Huh,” Melinda said again. “You know that's weird, right?”

I pulled my turtleneck on. “I don't need a bra. Half the girls in this room don't need a bra.”

“Do you hear that?” Melinda asked. “Ruth just called half of you flat-chested.”

“I did not—”

“You said half of them don't need bras. It's the same thing. Right, Char?”