The Friendship War Read online

  FAVORITES BY ANDREW CLEMENTS

  About Average

  Extra Credit

  Frindle

  The Jacket

  The Landry News

  The Last Holiday Concert

  The Losers Club

  Lost and Found

  Lunch Money

  The Map Trap

  No Talking

  The Report Card

  The School Story

  Troublemaker

  A Week in the Woods

  and many others!

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Andrew Clements

  Cover art and interior illustrations copyright © 2019 by Laura Park

  Excerpt from The Losers Club copyright © 2017 by Andrew Clements

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Random House and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Clements, Andrew, author.

  Title: The friendship war / Andrew Clements.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Random House, [2019] | Summary: When Grace takes boxes of old buttons from a building her grandfather bought, she starts a fad at school that draws her closer to one friend, but further from another.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017034192 | ISBN 978-0-399-55759-0 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-399-55760-6 (hardcover library binding) | ISBN 978-0-399-55761-3 (ebook)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Best friends—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Buttons—Collectors and collecting—Fiction. | Fads—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.C59118 Fp 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780399557613

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v5.4

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Favorites by Andrew Clements

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1: All of Them

  Chapter 2: The Ellie Effect

  Chapter 3: Smooshed

  Chapter 4: Discoveries

  Chapter 5: Show-and-Tell

  Chapter 6: Strange Galaxy

  Chapter 7: Buttons for Lunch

  Chapter 8: Total Geniuses

  Chapter 9: Button Fever

  Chapter 10: Bitten by the Button Bug

  Chapter 11: Fashion and Power

  Chapter 12: Showdown

  Chapter 13: Ellie’s Table

  Chapter 14: Halfsies

  Chapter 15: Long Distance

  Chapter 16: Easier

  Chapter 17: The Catalyst

  Chapter 18: Only a Button

  Chapter 19: Scars

  Chapter 20: Fad Gone Bad

  Chapter 21: Kitchen Time

  Chapter 22: Supply and Demand

  Chapter 23: Into the Secret

  Chapter 24: Courage

  Chapter 25: Melting

  Chapter 26: Consequences

  Chapter 27: Deal

  Chapter 28: One More Button

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Losers Club

  About the Author

  For

  Audrey L. Werner, a dear friend and an inspiration to countless teachers, including me

  Flying from Chicago to Boston by myself hasn’t been as big a deal as my dad said it was going to be. But nothing ever is. The second I turn on my phone, it dings with three texts from him:

  12:46

  Text me as soon as you land.

  12:48

  Your plane should have landed by now.

  12:50

  Are you all right?

  So I text him right away:

  All good, just landed. Love from Boston!

  Dad worries. He calls it planning, but it’s worry.

  Mom worries less because she knows I don’t do dumb stuff—not on purpose. My brother, Ben, knows that, too. Actually, Ben understands me pretty well. I understand him totally, which isn’t that hard. He’s fifteen, and he mostly thinks about two things: girls and music.

  Ben’s music isn’t rock or jazz or rap. It’s marching band. Which makes his girlfriend-hunt tougher than it needs to be. At least, that’s my theory. It’s the whole marching-with-a-clarinet-while-wearing-a-cowboy-hat thing. However, if it hadn’t been for Ben’s August band camp, the entire family might be here on the plane with me, and I wouldn’t be getting to spend time alone with Grampa.

  So, hooray for marching band!

  And if Dad had been a little less worried, then he and Mom probably wouldn’t have gotten me my own iPhone a couple of weeks ago.

  So, hooray for dads who worry!

  Grampa’s waiting right at the end of the walkway from the plane, just like Dad told him to.

  “Hey, Grace! Welcome to Boston!”

  “Hi, Grampa! You look great!”

  I’m not saying that to be polite or something.

  When we all came to Massachusetts last summer, it was for Gramma’s funeral, and back then Grampa seemed way too thin. And old.

  He looks much better now, and when we hug, I can tell he’s not so skinny anymore.

  The flight attendant in charge of me looks at Grampa’s driver’s license. After he signs a form, we’re on the move, me with my backpack and him pulling my suitcase.

  “Anything at baggage claim?”

  “Nope.”

  “Good. So we’re headed for Central Parking…unless you’re hungry.”

  “Dad loaded me up with tons of food. I could survive on the leftovers for weeks.”

  “That’s my son-in-law the Eagle Scout—‘Once an Eagle, always an Eagle!’ ” Then he says, “Hey, did you see that link I sent you about how they’re making jet fuel out of vegetable oil?”

  “Yeah, I loved that!”

  Of all the people in the world, I think Grampa understands me best. He’s a real estate agent, but he likes math and science almost as much as I do. Last week we swapped texts while we watched an episode of Nova, and for years he’s been emailing me links to news he finds online—like the article about robots that can travel through space, and they can keep building new copies of themselves, and they do that for thousands of years until the whole galaxy gets explored!

  Except…I can’t prove that Grampa is really into the science stuff. He might be making himself like it because he knows that I like it.

  Either way, it’s pretty great.

  At the car, Grampa loads my gear into the trunk.

  “How about you lean back and take a nap. When we get to Burnham, I’ll wake you up for some ice cream. And I’ve got a surprise for you, too.”

  “A surprise? What?”

  “Not telling.�
�

  “Well…can the surprise come first, before the ice cream?”

  That gets a chuckle. “Excellent idea.”

  It’s so good to hear Grampa laugh!

  We get going, but I don’t want to sleep. I want to stay awake and talk.

  Especially about Gramma.

  Except it might be too soon for him to talk about her. It’s still kind of soon for me, too. During third and fourth grades I called her a couple of times every week, and she just let me talk and talk. I could call her about anything, or about nothing. And if I ran out of stuff to say, she always had something new to tell me, especially about her garden and all the plants and insects and animals. If Gramma hadn’t been so great at describing every little thing she loved, no way would I have gotten into science like I have.

  Anyway, I know we both miss her. Which must be a lot different for Grampa than it is for me. He knew her for so much longer. Compared to him, maybe I hardly knew her at all.

  It’d be nice to talk, but I got up at five-thirty this morning and I stayed awake to watch a movie on the plane. Once we reach the highway, the humming tires wipe me out.

  * * *

  —

  “Where are we?”

  I blink and look around, and I remember.

  The road into Burnham is up near the New Hampshire border, and it winds through hills covered with pine and maple trees. We pass old farmhouses, most of them white, with green or black shutters. There are two apple orchards, then corn and pumpkin fields surrounded by stone walls. Land in Illinois doesn’t look like this.

  The air feels different, too—less humid, sort of crisp, even in the last week of August. Grampa explained once how the soil here is so rocky that it can’t hold moisture the way it does in Illinois—and that got us started on learning about the North American glaciers during the last Ice Age.

  We get to the town center, and Grampa says, “Shut your eyes, and don’t peek till I say.”

  So I close my eyes.

  And then I pretend I’ve been kidnapped and blindfolded—which is probably a weird thing to do. But it makes my observations seem like they matter.

  I feel the car go straight, and I slow-count to thirty before we stop. Maybe a traffic light? No…a stop sign, because we move ahead, then stop, move ahead, stop. And the turn signal is clicking.

  Okay…so we went thirty seconds at about thirty miles an hour. I do the math, and since going sixty miles per hour means traveling one mile per minute, going thirty miles per hour means going half a mile per minute. And we just traveled half a minute, so we went about one-quarter of a mile.

  Which is what I’ll tell the police when I call them with the phone that I cleverly hid in my left sock. So they can figure out how to track the kidnappers. And rescue me.

  The car turns left, and I count up to a hundred and fifteen before we slow to a stop, and I hear the turn signal again. So, almost two minutes at thirty miles per hour, which is one mile.

  Then it’s a sharp right, some bumps and squeaks, and a full stop.

  “Okay—open your eyes now!”

  I’m looking at a gravel parking lot full of tall weeds, and we’re next to a long brick building. Up near the roof there’s a painted sign with faded letters: BURNHAM MILLS.

  “I bought this whole place just last week! Isn’t it great?”

  Grampa sounds like Ben after he got his new clarinet.

  “Yeah, it’s great!” And there’s a lot of zip in my voice because I can tell he wants me to love it.

  But as I’m snapping pictures with my phone, all I’m seeing is a good spot to make a zombie movie—or hide a kidnapped girl.

  The windows on the ground floor of the building are boarded up, the second- and third-floor windows are mostly broken, and the brick walls are covered with graffiti. Cracked granite steps lead up to gray metal doors held shut by a rusted chain and a padlock.

  “I love this place! It cost me almost nothing, and by next year, the first floor’ll be full of nice little shops, with beautiful offices and river-view condos up above. Before you go home, I’m going to give you the grand tour. But let’s head back to Main Street and get that ice cream.”

  It’s funny, but I can’t remember Grampa ever doing something like this before—I thought that he just helped other people buy and sell properties. And part of me wonders if he’d be tackling a project like this if Gramma were here.

  I tell myself that this is scientific curiosity, but I know I’m just being nosy.

  * * *

  —

  A day at the ocean, a day climbing Mount Monadnock, a morning hike around Boston, and an afternoon at the Museum of Science.

  Grampa is definitely back, and that makes me really happy. We’ve been walking so much that I’m feeling like I’ll need a vacation from my vacation.

  The day before I fly home, we’re on the front steps of Grampa’s old building late in the afternoon. He really wants to take me inside the place.

  “Here—put this on.”

  And he hands me an orange hard hat with a headlamp.

  “It’s dark in there?”

  Scientifically, I understand that darkness isn’t an actual condition. Light is actual, and darkness just means no light. Still, I’m not a fan.

  “It’s not dark everywhere—only where the windows are boarded up. And in the stairwells. And down in the basement.”

  He has about ten different keys on a string, and he’s trying to find the one for the padlock on the door.

  “The mill was built in 1849, and along the back side? That’s the Kepshaw River. The water turned a huge paddle wheel to make the power. First it was a carpet mill, then a woolen blanket mill, a cotton mill, a shoe factory, and finally a men’s and women’s clothing factory, which went out of business in 1946. After that, a printer and some small businesses and artists rented space, but it’s been empty for almost fifteen years—which is why it was so cheap!”

  I’m thinking it would be fine if we just look around the outside of the building, but Grampa gets the lock open and then hands me a canvas shopping bag.

  “What’s this for?”

  “In case you find something interesting. You can keep whatever you like.”

  “Really? Anything?”

  “Yup—I own the building and everything in it.”

  I follow him inside, and I’m using my phone, sometimes as an extra flashlight, sometimes as a camera. Right away, I realize that this treasure hunt is why Grampa wanted me to take the grand tour—he knows I love finding stuff, and the old mill is like a gold mine.

  The first thing I discover is a solid brass doorknob, just lying on the floor inside the mill office. Then I find two wooden bobbins loaded with red and green yarn, then a giant pair of scissors, a tin box of sewing needles, an iron gear that weighs about five pounds, two old-fashioned fountain pens, a silver thimble, a key ring with nine brass keys, a hammer with a big flat head, and a pair of antique glasses—the kind that pinch onto the nose. After an hour I feel like I’ve barely started. But we’ve got a dinner reservation at Grampa’s favorite seafood place, so I’m trying to see the whole building before time runs out.

  It’s after five o’clock, and we’re up on the third floor and it’s bright and sunny, with sparrows and pigeons flying in and out the broken windows. There’s not much to see: about twenty large wooden tables bolted to the floor, and some rusty sewing machines next to the windows. I’m watching where I step—bird droppings.

  I point at a doorway on the far wall. “Where does that go?”

  “Let’s look.”

  It’s locked, so Grampa gets out his keys, and it takes five tries to find the right one.

  I turn on my headlamp and pull the door open. It’s a small storage room—wooden shelves loaded with cardboard boxes, each one about a foot high and a foot wide.
I brush off some dust and spiderwebs and carry a box out into the daylight of the large room. It’s heavy. The paper sealing tape tears away easily, and inside…buttons. Plain dark gray buttons, each a little smaller than a dime. I shove my hand deep into the box, grab some, and pull them up to look: just like the ones on top.

  I bring out another box and open it, and then a third—nothing but more of the same.

  Grampa says, “That’s a lot of gray buttons—must be almost thirty boxes!”

  “And it’s okay if I take some of these, right?”

  “Like I said, you can keep whatever you want.”

  I scoop two quick handfuls into my bag, then stop.

  “But, really, Grampa, I’d like to have all of them.”

  He points at the shelves. “All of them?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “What in the world are you going to do with that many buttons?”

  “I don’t know, but I still want them. If it’s okay.”

  Now he’s laughing.

  “Sure, why not? Take ’em all!”

  Then he looks over the shelves again, thinking.

  “It might be a week or so before I can get them shipped, but the boxes should fit onto one pallet. And since you are my one and only granddaughter, I will make it happen! I just wish I could be there to see the look on your mom’s face when the load arrives in Illinois!”

  Latching onto these buttons? It’s not weird, not for me. And Grampa knows that. And he knows Mom will understand, too. After all, she’s the one who stops the car whenever I spot a garage sale. And Gramma? She would have clapped her hands and said, Perfect!