Answers in the Pages

Over the next week, Gideon’s days changed. It wasn’t that school was less boring—it was just that Gideon now had Roberto to look forward to.

On the day after the copies of Harriet the Spy were passed out, Ms. June gave each two-person group a notebook to share.

“This is not so you can spy,” she reminded the class. “Every week or so, I’ll give you an assignment. The first assignment is simple: I would like you to each share five things your group partner might not know about you. Do it one at a time—one of you starts, then you pass the notebook and the other person writes one, and you go back and forth until you each do five. But it has to be something the other person doesn’t already know about you.”

Gideon could see that a lot of his friends in the class weren’t happy about this assignment. Joelle and Tucker had immediately chosen each other as partners, and now they looked concerned—they already knew plenty about each other, so finding five things each was going to be hard.

With Gideon and Roberto, though, it could be anything. Roberto understood this, too, because when Ms. June handed him the notebook, he turned to Gideon and said, “Good thing we don’t really know each other, right?”

Roberto grinned and immediately began to write. But it wasn’t until the end of the day that he passed the notebook to Gideon.

Gideon wanted to open it right away … but not while Roberto was looking. Or in the same room. Gideon hadn’t read that far in Harriet the Spy, but he figured the notebook was supposed to be a private thing. So he waited until he was back home, back in his room, to read what Roberto had written:

I was born in Miami, where my abuela and abuelo (my grandparents on my mom’s side) still live. When I was two, we moved to Mexico City to live with my other abuela and abuelo, but when I was four, we moved back to Miami. We still go down to Mexico City every Christmas. We moved here to Virginia because my dad got a really great job, but he promised I’m still going to spend part of the summer in Miami. It’s weird for me because we usually have lots of tías and tíos and primos and primas around, but here the only family is me, my mom, and my dad. I am trying to get my parents to get us a dog instead of cousins, but so far they say no.

This felt like more than one thing to Gideon, but he didn’t mind finding out so much all at once. He figured he should write back and tell Roberto that he’d lived in the same place his whole life—but Roberto probably already assumed that. And also, Gideon didn’t consider it to be that interesting.

“What’ll I do?” Gideon asked Samson. He knew Samson wouldn’t reply (*because he knew turtles couldn’t talk). But even the non-reply helped get Gideon to an answer.

I like turtles.

I really like turtles.

I have 84 turtles in my collection. 83 of them are not real turtles. But Samson is a real turtle. He lives in my room.

I try to find turtles wherever I go. I got a turtle in New York City and a turtle in Santa Fe. My grandma gave me a glass turtle she got in Copenhagen, Denmark. She didn’t mail it to me because she didn’t want it to break, so I didn’t get it until she visited. Sometimes when the light from the window hits its shell, it makes a rainbow. It might be my favorite turtle besides Samson.

I don’t think I’d like having a dog as much as I like having a turtle. But I hope you get a dog if you want a dog.

Gideon closed the notebook and thought he’d made a good start. Not that many kids in school knew about his turtle collection—just the friends who’d been over to his house.

It was only after Gideon handed the notebook back to Roberto that he began to worry that Roberto would find what he’d written silly … or babyish … or boring. Throughout the day, Gideon saw Roberto take the notebook out and write in it. But even from the seat behind him, Gideon couldn’t tell what he was writing. He tried to distract himself, debating whether Ms. June was wearing the same dress she’d worn last Wednesday or last Tuesday. Then he tried to make new words of six letters or longer from Founding Fathers written on the board.

When Roberto finally passed him the notebook after lunch, it was with a smile. Gideon knew he wouldn’t last until the end of the day, so when Roberto’s back was turned again and Ms. June was deep into a lesson on molecules, he opened up the notebook.

Surrounding the sentence, he had drawn lots of turtles. No two were the same. Some were realistic turtles. Some were cartoon turtles. One was a rainbow turtle.

His joy at finding so many turtles waiting for him lasted for a few minutes. Then he started to stress out. How could he respond to this? There was no way he could draw eighty-four dogs.

At this point, Ms. June saw that he had the notebook out. She didn’t need to say a word—she just locked eyes for a moment with Gideon and he knew he had to put it away and focus on molecules.

At the end of the day, he put the notebook in his book bag and hoped Samson would be able to help him again. On his way out of class, he asked his friend Mia what she’d written to her partner (Isaac) and she said she’d told him a story about the time her cousin sat on her birthday cake. (*Gideon already knew this story, but apparently Isaac didn’t.) As he started to walk the few blocks home, he tried to think of something hilarious that had happened to him on a birthday. Half a block into the walk, he felt someone come alongside him. He turned his head and found Roberto there.

“So why do you like turtles so much?” Roberto asked. His tone was casual, as if they walked home together every day.

“Um … ,” Gideon replied. “I guess I like how they carry their home with them. It’s not like they have a whole house, but it’s like they take their room with them. If they’re tired, they can just pull into their shell and go to sleep. The shells are really cool.” Gideon thought about it some more. “And maybe I also like them because they’re slow. A turtle’s never going to jump out at you. It might snap at you, but it’s never going to attack you in a way that’ll really hurt. You don’t need to walk them or worry about them running away. Also, they can live in water and on land, which means that a turtle probably gets to see more of the world than we do.”

“Sure!” Roberto said. “Do you live nearby? I just have to be home by four for my piano lesson.”

It felt like a miracle to Gideon, that they lived so close together. (*In reality, the town wasn’t very big.)

Gideon was not by nature a rule-breaker. But he did make exceptions when he felt the rules were wrong. For example, his parents did not allow him to have friends over when they weren’t at home. Since they worked until five or six every day, this meant that Gideon was basically not allowed to have any friends over except on weekends. Which wasn’t at all fair.

In breaking this particular rule at this particular time, Gideon was careful. When he and Roberto went to the kitchen to get a snack, he made sure they didn’t pick the same snack, because his mother was much more likely to notice two of the same thing missing than one each of two separate things. He also left the door from the garage open, because when the door from the garage was open, the whole house could hear when someone came home.

When they got to his room to meet Samson, Gideon felt overwhelmed. Roberto immediately started looking around, taking everything in, and Gideon thought to himself that now he’d have far fewer things to put in the notebook, because Roberto was getting to know him much more in five minutes than he would have from any number of pages of Gideon’s writing.

The first destination was the terrarium. As Gideon carefully removed the lid and asked Samson about his day, Roberto looked at the other eighty-three turtles arrayed on their shelves.

“Do they all have names?” he asked. “All my stuffed animals have names.”

Gideon was surprised by the question. It hadn’t even occurred to him to give the turtles names (*besides Samson). Each of them meant something to him individually, and each had a story it carried with it. But not names. They were the blue marble one, the one with too much makeup, the one with the Empire State Building on its shell. And so forth.

“Only Samson has a name,” Gideon confessed. Then he thought for a second about what Roberto had said and added, “How many stuffed animals do you have?”

Gideon removed the turtle from the terrarium and held him up so he was eye-to-eye with Roberto.

The smile hadn’t left Roberto’s face. “It’s very nice to meet you, Samson,” he said.

Samson didn’t reply. (*Because he’s a turtle.) But he didn’t pull back into his shell, which he often did when meeting new people.

He put Samson down, and the two boys sat on the rug and played with him for a bit. Roberto saw Gideon’s copy of Harriet the Spy on the floor next to the bed. He reached over and picked it up, to see where the bookmark was placed.

“I’m not that far,” Gideon admitted, self-conscious again. “Only the first three chapters.”

“You’ll see,” Roberto teased. Then he examined the piece of paper Gideon was using as a bookmark. On it were the words:

Gideon was about to explain further, but then Roberto said, “You rearrange the letters, right? That’s cool. You used all the letters for the last one, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. The heir’s party is the only phrase I’ve found so far that has all the letters from Harriet the Spy.”

Then, for the rest of the time that Roberto could stay, they sat on the floor with Samson and tried.