“To town. Mr. Ronnie sent this for you,” I say, and show Birdie the doll.

“Oh! Sweet dirty baby.” Birdie grabs the baby doll and hugs it to her chest, then throws it across the room into the kitchen sink. “I clean you up.”

Chapter 24

Most granite once was hotter than lava, but it cooled and hardened deep underground.

—Carroll Lane Fenton and Mildred Adams Fenton, Rocks and Their Stories

I go up to my room and open my notebook.

What makes a quarry?

How did the granite get on Bower Hill?

How do you follow the lines in the granite?

The pages of the Q encyclopedia Mrs. Kay gave me smell like the inside of Nana’s old wooden trunk, and pressed between some of them are dried leaves. I turn the brittle pages carefully until I find what I’m looking for. I’m concentrating so hard I don’t notice at first when Fiona comes into the room.

“You’re reading the encyclopedia? Who reads the encyclopedia?”

Fiona’s dark brown eyes are curious and puzzled at the same time.

“I do. Not the whole encyclopedia. Just volume Q.” I hold up the heavy book.

“That’s a very old book.” Fiona comes over and traces the gold letter Q on the black spine. “My mother and I dropped off a casserole, so I thought I’d come say hi. I didn’t know you could read,” she teases.

“I can read. What kind of casserole?”

“Noodles and peas and mushrooms, mostly. It sounds strange but it’s really good.”

“Mushroomy,” I say.

“Yes, definitely mushroomy. What are you reading about? Quicksand? Quiches?”

We both laugh at that.

“Granite quarries. We have one on the other side of the hill. I just read that granite rock used to be molten lava.”

Fiona sits down next to me on the floor, and I turn the encyclopedia so she can see the photo of the Rock of Ages granite quarry in Vermont. The picture is in black-and-white, but it says the water at the bottom of the quarry is green.

She looks at the photo, and then she notices my notebook on the floor. “Henry Ten. What does that mean?”

“It’s my homeschool notebook. I get one every year on my birthday. I can write, too.”

Fiona laughs.

“We had to keep a notebook in English last year. With a list of all the books we read and what we thought of them. Is that what’s in your notebook?”

“No, it’s mostly questions. About science or experiments I’m thinking of doing.”

“I got an A-minus on my notebook. The minus ’cause I write sloppy. What about you? What grades do you get?”

“No one looks in my notebook. It’s just for me. I don’t get grades. How sloppy do you write?”