The Friendship Riddle by Megan Frazer Blakemore

Author:Megan Frazer Blakemore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-05-26T16:00:00+00:00

That night I took out the glass measuring cup, the one that measured in milliliters, since a milliliter is the same as a cubic centimeter. I filled it up to 250. Mom came into the kitchen, glanced at the measuring cup, and arched her eyebrows. “What do you think the volume of your mouth is?” I asked her.

“The volume? Like length times width times height?” She opened her mouth wide and put her fingers in as if she had a tiny ruler.

“Volume as in the amount it can hold. Then we can convert it into centimeters.”

She nodded and crossed the kitchen over to me. “Is this for science?”

I shook my head. “It’s just a thing we were talking about. We’re going to pour as much as we can into our mouths and then subtract it from 250 milliliters. Then we will know the volumes of our mouths.”

“We?”

“Me and Coco.”

“Coco who is helping you to study for the spelling bee?”

I wanted to say, “No, the other Coco.” But I said, “Don’t start. Just watch me and make sure I don’t spill any.”

I tipped my head back and poured the water in slowly. I had to move my tongue out of the way to keep the water from shooting back out like a waterslide. The water got stuck at the back of my throat and I thought maybe I would gasp like a drowning person, but I closed my eyes and waited until the water was at my lips. Mom took the cup from my hand, and I spit into the sink.

“Two hundred five milliliters are left in the cup.”

“So that means forty-five milliliters in my mouth.”

“My turn,” Mom said.

“Really?”

She dumped the cup and filled it up again. “Did you ever find out about the snow?” she asked. “Why it’s so quiet?”

“Not definitively,” I said.

Outside, the moon lit the yard: white, white, and more white. This must be how astronauts feel in their little space capsules, staring out at the cold vastness. “Do you think it’s warm when you’re in space? I mean in the shuttle or the space station or whatever?”

“Well, they do show them wearing T-shirts and stuff,” she told me. “You know that gravity changes their muscles. Their legs get small and their torsos get bigger. They have to exercise their legs so they don’t get atrophied.”

“Because there’s no gravity?”

“I think so,” she said. “We had an astronaut come and talk to us at med school. He was pretty cute.”

“Mom!” I said.

“This was before I met your mum, of course.”

I shook my head. She picked up the measuring cup. “Ready?”

She closed her eyes as she poured it in. Her mouth was cupped like one of those fish pitchers that were so popular in the tourist shops this summer. Singing fish pitchers. They were supposed to make a lovely sound when they were being poured, but to me they just looked like a fish was about to kiss another fish and got frozen.

Mom pounded the counter, and I took the measuring cup from her.

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