The Friendship Riddle Read Online Free PDF Page A

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, andthe 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.
    â€œHey, 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.
    â€œOnly 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.
    â€œNot an expert,” Adam said without looking at me. “I told you.”
    â€œWe’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.”
    â€œBut she doesn’t have the whole context,” Adam replied. He glanced past me at the rest of the cafeteria.
    â€œYou 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.”
    â€œHa!” Adam said. “Told you. She doesn’t know anything about it.”
    â€œWhy don’t you think so?” Coco asked.
    â€œWell, if time isn’t linear, I mean, that’s the whole idea behind time travel, right?”
    â€œObviously,” 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.”
    â€œSo 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.”
    â€œOr 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