Gideon didn’t tell his turtle Samson about the new kid, because for the first few days, he didn’t find out much about him.
It wasn’t that Roberto was quiet, exactly. He answered whenever Ms. June called on him. At lunch, he fit right into the boy table, and since the boys around him didn’t ask many questions, there weren’t many answers provided. Gideon had heard him say the word Florida, so that could have been where he was from. Or maybe that was just where his grandparents lived. Or he was talking with the boys at the boy table about a Florida sports team. (*Gideon assumed there were sports teams in Florida even if he couldn’t name one himself.)
Gideon, Tucker, and Joelle always sat at the boy-girl table so they could be together. If Gideon’s curiosity about Roberto was brimming, Joelle’s was about halfway to the top and Tucker’s hadn’t been poured at all.
“What do you think about the new kid?” Gideon asked them at the end of Roberto’s first week.
“He seems nice,” Joelle said.
“I haven’t really noticed,” Tucker mumbled before turning his attention back to his potato chips.
“He likes to wear green,” Gideon observed. (*It was true. Four out of five days, Roberto had either worn a green shirt or a shirt with green stripes.)
“That’s weird,” Tucker said.
“Why?” Joelle asked. “Maybe he likes green.”
“No,” Tucker said. “I mean it’s weird that Gideon noticed. Do you keep track of everyone’s clothes?”
The answer was no, but only because Tucker had said everyone’s. Meaning, the whole class. Gideon did not keep track of the whole class’s clothes. He kept track of Ms. June’s because he was forced to look at her so often and he had to make the most of the time spent eyes-forward. And sometimes he still kept track of what Tucker wore. He used to do it much more often, back when their best-friend group was a duo instead of a trio. He’d even try to guess what Tucker would be wearing before he got to school.
He never told Tucker about this. But maybe this curiosity about Roberto was a little bit like it had been at first with Tucker. Maybe this was start-of-friendship curiosity. With Tucker, it had lasted until Joelle. Then, once the three of them were the three of them, Gideon had felt the curiosity subside, like how when you move into a new house and get a new bedroom at first it’s really intense and you spend a lot of time thinking about it, but then after a while it just becomes … your room.
It made a little more sense to Gideon then, to think that his curiosity was coming from friendship. Or wanting to be friends, since he and Roberto hadn’t really talked to each other yet, and Gideon knew that friends needed to talk to each other to be friends (*with an exception when one of the friends is a turtle).
“He’s been sitting next to Carrie on the bus home,” Joelle told Gideon and Tucker, keeping her voice low. “He told her he likes movies, and when she asked him some of his favorites, he mentioned a few she didn’t know. But he said Lion King was the best Disney movie. She said her favorite was Beauty and the Beast and he said he liked that one, too.”
Gideon tried to absorb these facts. And then, when he was back in class and Roberto was sitting down in front of him, he tried to keep these facts to himself, because if he suddenly blurted out, “Why do you like The Lion King more than Beauty and the Beast?” he’d have to explain to Roberto how he knew that Roberto preferred The Lion King, and then he’d have to explain why he and Joelle had been talking about Roberto in the first place.
So Gideon kept quiet. He studied the back of Roberto’s neck. The nape, he thought, pleased to know the word for it but also confused about why the back of the neck had its own word but the side of the neck didn’t. (*The front, he figured, was the throat, which wasn’t nearly as exciting a word as nape. Which could be rearranged into pane, like a window you could stare at to try to figure out what was on the other side.)
To distract himself from this distraction, Gideon tried to rearrange all the letters in Alexander Hamilton’s name into phrases.
All hen exit and roam
A tiller exam on hand
Lion, relax and math
After a few minutes of this, frustrated by his meager results, he moved on to Roberto’s name, to find the words inside it.
Root
Bet
Too
Boot
Ore
Robe
“Gideon?”
Roberto was staring at him. Well, not really staring. But he had turned around and was passing a worksheet back.
“Thank you!” Gideon hastily exclaimed. In the whole classroom, he was the only kid who said thank you when handed this particular worksheet, with an enthusiasm usually reserved for large presents.
Roberto smiled and said, “You’re welcome.” Then he kept looking-not-staring as Gideon took the paper out of his hand and set it on his desk.
It wasn’t a big interaction. It didn’t last more than ten seconds—twenty seconds, tops.
But in this interaction, Gideon had learned two important things:
(1) Roberto had dimples when he smiled.
and
(2) Roberto knew Gideon’s name.