Blue Like Friday Read Free Page B

Romanesque?” (We did cathedrals at school because our teacher is into cool stuff like that. We have the best teacher ever. She’s the adult most like a kid I can think of.)
    This is a game we call Biscuits, by the way, because it began with a question about biscuits: “If you were a biscuit, would you be a Kimberley or a Mikado?” The game is that you answer the question and you explain why. For example, I would be a Kimberley—you know, the squidgy ones with the gingery outsides—because there is a bit of spice to me. Rosemarie and Gilda would both be Mikado—pink and fluffy and too sweet to be good for you. It goes on and on: “If you were a woman in the Bible, would you be Ruth or Naomi?” “If you were a hero-warrior, would you be Fionn Mac Cumhail or Cú Chulainn?” It’s quite a good game if you like that sort of thing, and you find out things about people that you wouldn’t have suspected.
    â€œI wouldn’t be a cathedral,” Larry butted in. “I’d rather be the Colosseum.”
    Now, that is typical of Larry. Wants to muscle in on me and Hal’s games all the time, and messing everything up.
    We both turned on him and yelled, because that’s
cheating, of course. You can’t bob out and change the question, because if you let people do that, the whole game would just disintegrate, and there wouldn’t be any point to it. Rosemarie and Gilda would be two semidetached houses with mown lawns and stiff little hedges, but that wasn’t the question asked.
    â€œYou can’t be the Colosseum,” I said sternly. “You have to stick with cathedrals. That’s how the game works. You answer the question asked.”
    â€œOh,” said Larry. “I didn’t know that.”
    â€œAnd anyway,” I said, “nobody asked you. I’d be Gothic,” I said then, to Hal, “and so would you. Larry’d be Romanesque.”
    â€œNo, I wouldn’t,” said Larry. “I could be the same as you two. Why do I have to be different?”
    Larry doesn’t know anything about cathedrals, even though he is older than us. They don’t do interesting stuff where he goes to school, only math and French and economics. But he is definitely Romanesque: symmetrical and straightforward, a bit like a penguin, very black and white. Hal and I are Gothic because we’re over the top, with unexpected twists, and maybe just a little bit monstrous.
    Well, I suppose it wasn’t really Larry’s fault he didn’t understand the game properly, so to be nice to him, I said, “Let’s play I Spy.”
    Now, you probably think of this as a little kids’ game,
and that is exactly what it is, but Larry likes it, even though he is practically drawing the old-age pension, because he can always think up things that are impossible to guess—words like “flange” or “pivot,” which no sane person under about thirty-five knows—but you can never say he’s cheating because there always is one of those mad things in the room, so he wins.
    I don’t mind him winning, but it gets boring after a while if you know you are never going to be able to guess the answers, though I have to admit you do get to know a lot of useless words.
    After a while I noticed that Hal wasn’t joining in the guessing. It was a word beginning with h , and I’d tried all the obvious things like “house” and “Hal” and “hearth” and “honey” and “herringbone-patterned curtains.” (We don’t usually allow adjectives, but I was scraping the barrel.) When I looked at Hal for inspiration, he was muttering something to himself.
    â€œIs that a spell you’re chanting?” I asked him.
    â€œHmm,” he said.
    â€œHmm?” I guessed, though of course you can’t spy a hmm. (I told you, I was scraping the barrel.)
    Larry shook his head and looked