The Friendship War Page 4

  “I’ve got this one last thing. My grandmother on my mother’s side of the family? After my grandfather died, she took all his wool business suits and used the cloth to make a big quilt, and I’ve seen it—mostly gray and blue and brown, kind of ugly. But she also kept every single button from all those suits. And here they are. And…and it’s like all I have left of my grandfather now is this little bag of buttons. Don’t you think that’s just so…sad?”

  It gets very still.

  Kevin, Taylor, Brooke, Hank—all the kids around the lunch table are genuinely moved by what Ellie just said.

  I feel a little choked up, too…and kind of ashamed.

  Because I’ve been sitting here, gritting my teeth while Ellie does her dramatic, super-expanded show-and-tell, and I’m feeling like she’s showing off—and, of course, Ellie is showing off.

  But this moment? It’s a side of her I haven’t seen very often, maybe only three or four times in all the days we’ve spent hanging around together. And what made Ellie get so thoughtful and full of feelings? Some old buttons—which is totally strange!

  But it’s also touching, and sort of sweet. And seeing that? It’s a good reminder that Ellie knows how to be sweet—when she wants to be. And this makes me happy in a way I hadn’t expected.

  Ellie knows she just hit the high point of her big show.

  “So, all these other buttons? They’re just from sewing projects and stuff.”

  As Ellie pours the contents of a large Tupperware container onto her last two trays, I can tell that a lot of these buttons are nicer than the ones other kids had—probably just from more expensive clothes.

  Maybe from Paris—like her sneakers.

  And now I’m mad at myself for getting all snarky and jealous. Again.

  Because that’s the problem—Ellie keeps making me feel this way.

  And, of course, this is my perfect opportunity to make her feel jealous. About fifteen other kids are standing around our table now, and I’ve got a chance to one-up the one-uppiest girl in the world, to show that Ellie does not have the most and the best and the prettiest, not this time.

  All I have to do is reach down into my backpack, pull out seven other plastic bags, and then drop my button bomb—a massive assortment of colors and designs and sizes—KA-BOOM!

  But I don’t.

  It doesn’t feel like something a best friend would do, that’s all—or even just a friend. And it isn’t like Ellie put on her little show to try to make me feel jealous. She’s just being…herself.

  And besides all that? I still kind of like this feeling that I’ve got a secret. It’s like I’m super rich, and no one else has a clue.

  “Hey, Grace—Cody and I are trying to figure out a game here, and we need six green buttons and six blue ones. Do you maybe want to swap some buttons with us?”

  The question catches me by surprise, and I hear myself saying, “Um…no, that’s okay—just go ahead and take the ones you want. I’ve got a lot there.”

  “Really? Thanks!”

  “So, could I have four, but all different colors?” It’s James Kinney, one of the kids from Mr. Scott’s homeroom.

  “Sure,” I say, and then some other kids jump right in.

  “Could I have four?”

  “How about five?”

  I’m almost laughing now. “Anybody who wants to can take up to six buttons from my tray, okay?”

  And right away, everybody waits for a turn to take six, including all the spectators. Plus Ellie.

  Then Ellie says, “And…um, if anybody wants to take one…or maybe two buttons from my last trays right here, go ahead. Because my mom said I could do whatever I want with them.”

  And everybody takes one or two, including all the spectators. Plus me.

  Some other kids begin drifting over to see what’s going on, and as Ellie quickly gathers up her buttons, she says, “I’m really glad I thought of this. It was kind of fun, don’t you think?”

  A few kids smile at her, but most of them are still gathered around my tray, trying to decide if they picked the right buttons, or if they should trade some in for different colors. The tray is almost empty.

  Four minutes later, when the bell rings, I walk out of the cafeteria, headed for math class with Mrs. Lang. And I’ve got the strongest feeling that something just happened—but I’m not sure what.

  So I lay out the facts, which are simple: A bunch of kids looked at a bunch of buttons from a bunch of different homes and places, and then a bunch more kids gathered around to watch.

  Another fact: When I offered some free buttons, nobody refused. Everybody took six buttons, and also one or two of Ellie’s.

  So…right now, more than twenty kids are walking around school with seven or eight buttons clicking in their pockets—buttons none of them even knew they wanted until a few minutes ago!

  Another odd fact? It felt so easy to give most of mine away—actually, I just waved goodbye to about a hundred and thirty buttons!

  But Ellie? She really didn’t want to give away even one of hers.

  How come? That’s simple, too: Ellie’s buttons have history. They mean something to her—the way the smooth gray stone on my dresser means something to me. But those boxes of buttons from Grampa’s mill? To me, they’re just…buttons.

  The main fact? These completely ordinary little objects seem to be changing right in front of my eyes.

  But how?

  And why?

  That’s not clear—so I’m going to need more data.

  The only thing I’m pretty sure of? Whatever’s going on, it’s not over.

  As I walk into Mrs. Lang’s room, I notice one more fact: My stomach is feeling perfectly fine.

  “Hi, Mom, I’m home.”

  She calls back from her office upstairs, which is more like a big closet. “Hi, sweetheart. I’ve got a Skype meeting in about ten minutes—get yourself a snack, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  I go to the kitchen, but food is the last thing on my mind. I open the door to the laundry room, then dig around inside the broom closet until I find the sewing box that Ben and I gave Mom for Mother’s Day four years ago.

  Mom doesn’t sew for fun or as a hobby or anything like that. But she does have some basic sewing stuff. She used to keep it all in a couple of plastic containers from a Chinese restaurant—until we got her this deluxe, denim-covered sewing box. It still looks brand-new.

  I open the lid and lift out a plastic tray loaded with spools of thread. And then, under a large pincushion and three packets of needles, beneath a package of iron-on patches and some loops of flat elastic, way down on the very bottom of the sewing box, I find what I’m looking for: loose buttons.

  Ben comes into the kitchen about fifteen minutes later. “Um…what’s going on here?”

  “I’m recording family history.”

  “Actually, I’m pretty sure that you’re taking pictures of buttons.”

  I straighten up and wave my hand over the table. “See this? Mom and Dad have been married for nineteen and a half years, and these are the family’s unattached buttons—the Hamlin Family Button Collection. There are one hundred and thirty-four of them. That works out to about seven buttons for each year they’ve been married.”

  I pause to let the information sink in.

  “Okay, I’m with you.”

  “Of course, I really wish I knew the order the buttons had been saved in, so I could make an exact timeline from the very first button, right up to the most recent one. But I don’t know that—and wishing is not scientific. And I also don’t know which buttons came from whose clothes, except for a few. See these five pewter buttons with the rose design? They used to be on that red-and-white handmade sweater Mom has, but then one got lost. So she snipped off these five and tossed them in with the sewing
junk, then sewed six new matching buttons back onto her sweater. I could probably figure out what year that happened….”

  I turn to Ben. “Do you think Mom and Dad started finding more stray buttons once they had you and me?”

  “Makes sense—more people, more clothes, more buttons.”

  He picks up a large silver button with a harp design stamped onto the metal.

  “This one is mine, for sure. I lost a button off my middle school band uniform. Mr. Clift made me buy a new one, and Mom taught me how to sew it on myself. Then about a year later she found a button under the cushions of the family room couch. And here it is.”

  That gets me thinking. “You know, every single button here has some kind of a story.”

  Ben squints at me. “Well, yeah…but I bet a lot of these were just extra buttons that came with a pair of pants or a sweater or something. Not much of a story.”

  I’m not giving up. “But every button’s story started way before any of them got to our house, onto our clothes. Because all these buttons had to get designed by somebody, and then each one got made somewhere, right? And then each one got moved around by people and then sewn onto something, or dropped one by one into tiny plastic bags and stuck inside the back pocket of some new pants—right?”

  “Yeah,” Ben says, “except stuff like that happens to everything—like this chair, or my shoes, or that lightbulb. Every single thing in the whole world has a story of how it got made and how it got to be somewhere. And a button is just one other thing.”

  “Okay,” I say, “but tell me this: If you stop using a lightbulb, do you put it in a box in the broom closet and leave it there for nineteen and a half years?”

  “No….”

  “So there is something different about buttons, right?”

  “Yes, because when you stop using a lightbulb, it’s probably because it doesn’t work anymore, so why keep it? But a button can always do what it was made to do, unless it gets crushed or broken in half or something. Which doesn’t happen much. Put an old shirt button onto a different shirt, and it’ll still work.”

  “Exactly!” Then I pause a second to get the next bit right. “And that’s why people hang on to buttons, even if there’s no way they’ll ever use them again. They don’t keep them to use them; they keep them because they might!”

  It feels like I’ve just solved a mystery.

  Ben nods, stroking his chin as if he had a beard. “And I guess figuring out all this proves once more that we are a couple of total geniuses!”

  I laugh and then say, “Except I’m the one who has twenty-seven boxes full of buttons in my bedroom, and you don’t. Which probably makes me a little bit more of a total genius than you are.”

  “Interesting theory,” he says. “But having twenty-seven boxes of buttons in your bedroom probably just means that you’re a crackpot!”

  “Hmm…you could be right.” Then I remember something. “Oh! Could you do me a favor? Please don’t tell anybody that I’ve got all those buttons, okay?”

  “How come?” he asks, but then quickly whispers, “Ohhh, right—the crackpot thing. Don’t worry. Your secret is safe with me. And, like, if you want to tiptoe upstairs and live in Mom and Dad’s attic for the rest of your life? I’m cool with that, too.”

  I cross my eyes and stick out my tongue.

  Then I turn back to the kitchen table and use my phone to take some more pictures.

  Of buttons.

  It’s Thursday, and I wake up thinking about buttons. Again.

  How many do I actually have? Which color do I have the most of? How many of each size do I have? Of all the buttons I have, which has the largest diameter…and the smallest?

  Then I remember what Ben said to me yesterday in the kitchen, and I think, Maybe Ben’s right—maybe I really am a crackpot!

  Forty-five minutes later, I feel even more like an oddball, because right before I leave the house to go to the bus stop, I run upstairs to my room, grab a big handful of cranberry-red buttons, and toss them into my backpack. I just feel like I want to have some buttons with me at school today.

  Which is definitely strange.

  But as I drop into a seat near the back of the bus, I discover that my strange condition is not unique. Because in the row right in front of me, four boys are arguing—about buttons.

  “Are you kidding? Metal buttons are always better than plastic—anybody knows that. And if a metal one is off some kind of a uniform? That’s the best—end of discussion!”

  “Okay…but what if you had a plastic one shaped like the Millennium Falcon or something? I think that’d be lots better than some old metal button.”

  “Well, maybe—but you’re never gonna see that in your whole life!”

  Another kid has his phone out. “Hey—look at this!”

  They huddle around the screen, and one of them reads aloud: “ ‘Handmade Millennium Falcon Button’? Whoa! I’d trade an army button for that thing, any day!”

  “There’s a Chewbacca button, too! And R2-D2…and Darth Vader! That is so cool!”

  But the thing that I think is cool? Not one of these guys was anywhere near my lunch table yesterday, and none of them are in Mrs. Casey’s social studies class either!

  How come they’re talking about buttons?

  I walk myself through it:

  Okay, by the end of lunchtime yesterday, let’s say there were twenty-two kids around our table, and probably half of them were boys, and each one walked away thinking about buttons, plus each had seven or eight new buttons in his pocket. And let’s say those eleven guys each mentioned buttons or showed some to three other guys. Then that would be thirty-three more boys—and if each of them mentioned buttons to three or four others, then, just like that, we’re up to more than a hundred guys with a brand-new interest in buttons!

  It’s a decent theory, but I need to test it.

  “Excuse me….I heard what you guys were saying just now. How come you’re talking about buttons?”

  The boy with the phone turns and looks at me.

  “Everybody’s talking about them, that’s all.”

  “Everybody? But, like, what got you started talking about buttons?”

  He stares at me. “I don’t know. Who cares?”

  “I care. I’d just like to know.” And I smile at him.

  A different boy says, “What, are you the Button Police or something?”

  A kid laughs and says, “Look out, it’s the Button Squad!”

  Another guy snarls in a deep voice, “All right, you punks—up against the wall, and hand over all your buttons!”

  They keep goofing and laughing, and some of the other boys near the back of the bus join in.

  So, I guess this has turned into an experiment about guys showing off for each other. Or maybe just showing off for me.

  But science keeps marching forward, no matter what.

  And I remember something that might be useful.

  I reach into the bottom of my book bag, grab some buttons, and face the boys again.

  “Hey—Phone Guy!”

  The kid looks up from his screen. “What?”

  I hold out my hand. “These aren’t metal, but I’ve got some questions, and I’ll give you two of these blood-red buttons for each question you can answer. Deal?”

  Now I’ve got the whole group’s attention.

  The kid with the phone smiles. “Sure, deal.”

  “Okay. So, when did you start thinking about buttons?”

  “Yesterday…in the afternoon.”

  “How come?”

  “This guy, James Kinney? He’s in my art class, and he started sliding some buttons around on our table, making shapes and patterns and stuff, and then all of us started using them like little air-hockey pucks, just messing around. And everybody t
hought they were cool.”

  “Great—that’s all I wanted to know. Thanks.”

  And I drop four blood-red buttons into his outstretched hand—a very small price to pay for totally proving a theory!

  I stay on high alert during the rest of my ride to school, and also as I walk through the halls after we arrive. And I observe six more conversations about buttons!

  When I get to homeroom, I’m a little out of breath. I look for Ellie—she’s over by the windows with Taylor, Brooke, and Diana.

  “Hi, guys. You’ll never guess what happened on my bus! I was—”

  “Wait!” Ellie says, and then she sticks her arm in front of my eyes. “What do you think?”

  She has a bracelet on her wrist—and it’s made of small white buttons.

  Brooke says, “Isn’t it beautiful?”

  Taylor adds, “And the buttons are all made out of seashells, right?”

  Ellie nods. “They’re mother-of-pearl. All I did was string them like little flat beads onto this thin elastic cord. And now I can stretch it on and off, just like a candy charm bracelet. Here….”

  Ellie rolls it off, lifts my left hand, and slips it onto my wrist.

  I hold out my arm and study the bracelet.

  Again, Ellie has surprised me. I can’t remember her ever doing something creative like this.

  “It looks great on you! Do you want to keep it until lunch?”

  “It’s really pretty, but I think you should wear it,” I say, and hand it to her.

  “Okay.”

  I can see Ellie’s glad I gave her bracelet back.

  Then Taylor says, “Hey—you started to tell us something…about your bus, right?”

  “Oh, that? It wasn’t important.”

  Which isn’t quite true.

  But I’m thinking like a scientist now—at least, I’m trying to.

  Because I want to see if kids are behaving in a certain way, and also why. So, should I go around talking about this particular condition that I’m analyzing? No, because that could start changing the results of my own study—which is bad science, especially if I talk about this condition with people who I think already have the condition I’m observing.