Stacey the Math Whiz

  We raced for the door. I was cracking up. New Dad was acting like a big kid.

  Together we yanked the door open.

  “Sorry, my hands were full and I didn’t want to dig the keys out of my pocket,” Mom said in a rush. “Who is that parked in our driveway?”

  When she saw Dad, she stopped short.

  “Surprise,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?” Mom asked.

  “Fixing dinner.” Dad took Mom’s bags and headed into the kitchen. Putting on a terrible French accent, he called over his shoulder, “Yourrr waitair weel be weeth you in a moment, madame.”

  Mom looked dumbfounded. “Stacey, what’s going on?”

  “Well, you see, Dad was —” I began.

  “Notheeng like a leetle downsizeeng to poot ze unemployed chef back in zee keetchen!” Dad called out.

  “Whaaaat?” Mom threw her down coat on the living room sofa and ran into the kitchen. “You’re not serious?”

  “Ah am, mah formair sweetheart!”

  “Stop that, Ed. Talk to me. How could they fire you? What are you going to do?”

  As I walked into the kitchen, Dad was handing her a plate with a steaming red lobster on it. “I intend to rejoice,” he announced. “Become a renowned chef. A kinder ex-husband. A fantastic New Dad.”

  “You don’t mind if Dad stays for dinner, do you?” I asked.

  “I — I don’t suppose I have much choice,” Mom replied. “Where are you staying, Ed?”

  “He’s staying at the Strathmore this weekend and coming to my Mathletes meet,” I said.

  Mom gave him a wary smile. “Mmm-hmm. Great.”

  “Shall we?” Dad said, holding up his plate. “These lobos won’t stay hot forever.”

  Together we walked into the living room. Dad was humming along with U4Me. Mom? Well, let’s just say she was trying hard to look pleasant.

  Usually she likes surprises. But I could tell she wasn’t crazy about this one.

  Oh, well. She hadn’t stomped away in anger. She hadn’t thrown him out.

  Hope, hope, hope.

  It was so great to see Dad. I wanted to make the most of it. I knew that as soon as he found a new job, he’d be a stranger again.

  Might as well live it up while you can.

  I sat down and dug in. Lobster never tasted so good.

  “Excuse me.”

  In the car on the way to Ms. Hartley’s house, I couldn’t stop burping. Mom and I had feasted on leftovers from the previous night’s dinner with Dad. I’d brushed my teeth, gargled, and downed three sugarless mints, but my breath still smelled like lobster.

  I don’t think Mom noticed. She was staring intently at the road, gripping the steering wheel tightly. “So, what time do you think you’ll be home?”

  “Well, the practice is supposed to take an hour and a half,” I replied, “and then Dad’s picking me up to make a nine-twenty movie, so … I guess eleven-thirty, eleven-forty?”

  “And you have a meet and a sitting job tomorrow?” Mom let out a big sigh. “Honestly, I will never understand your father.”

  “I don’t have to get up that early, Mom. I’ll get enough sleep. Dad just wants to spend time with me before he finds another job. I mean, I am his daughter.”

  “I know, sweetheart. It’s just that — well, you know the way he is. Buying that new car, the hotel, the lobsters, peaches and plums in February —”

  “What do peaches and plums have to do with it?”

  “They’re out of season. Which means they must have been imported. That makes them very expensive. Like everything he’s buying. It’s not a healthy pattern, Stacey. An unemployed person can’t throw money around. What if he doesn’t find a job for a while?”

  “Well, what’s he supposed to do, sit around and mope while he’s waiting?”

  Mom chuckled. “Not your father. He’ll just attack joblessness the way he attacks his work. Frantic. Go, go, go. Let nothing or no one stand in his way.”

  I could not believe my mother was being so harsh. It brought back a rush of bad memories, of arguments she and Dad used to have before they were divorced.

  As we pulled in front of Ms. Hartley’s house, I pushed the car door open. “Well, I’m glad he’s here.”

  “I know you are,” Mom said softly. “I don’t mean to be so negative. I do care about your dad, believe it or not. I just hope he knows how to pace himself during the rough times coming up.”

  “I guess some people need to have a little faith,” I replied, closing the door firmly.

  Walking up the steps to Ms. Hartley’s house, I felt guilty. I turned to wave at Mom as she drove away, but she didn’t see me.

  Oh, well. She was just sore at Dad for stealing me away. Believe me, I’ve been through that before. It’s one of the worst things about being a Divorced Kid. I could predict that Mom and I were going to have a loooong talk at midnight about it.

  I tried to put Dad and Mom out of my mind. I was feeling nervous about the Mathletes.

  Who was on the team? I had no idea. It seemed like some kind of secret society. Maybe no one wanted to admit being a member. Maybe they were all pimply little gnomes with unwashed hair and Coke-bottle glasses. Maybe neighbors were taking secret photos of me, to be seen in the Stoneybrook News under the headline POPULAR SMS BABY-SITTER TRANSFORMS INTO SUPERNERD.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late to chase Mom down.

  Stop it, I said to myself.

  I held my head high and rang the doorbell.

  Ms. Hartley yanked the door open. She was wearing jeans, an SMS sweatshirt, and a great big smile. “Welcome! Come on downstairs. Everyone’s eager to see you.”

  I followed her through the house. When we reached the kitchen, she took a foil-covered plate off the counter and handed it to me. “These are sugar-free cookies and pastries from my favorite shop, In Good Taste. The owner’s husband is diabetic, and he devised the recipes himself.”

  Boy, was I impressed. I knew all about these pastries (and I love them). “Thanks,” I said.

  “I’m sure you’ll recognize a lot of faces,” Ms. Hartley went on, leading me into the basement. “Jason Fox, Alexander Kurtzman …”

  Yikes! Dork Alert! Jason, the sports statistics freak who pesters the basketball team. Alexander, the only eighth-grader who carries a briefcase to school and wears a jacket and tie.

  We were not off to a good start.

  “… Emily Bernstein, Gordon Brown, Rick Chow,” Ms. Hartley continued, “Mari Drabek, Bea Foster, and Amanda Martin.”

  By now we were in the basement. There was no turning back. (Which was okay, since I felt a little better about the rest of the kids.) Jason was pumping his fist in the air and dancing around, shouting, “Yyyyyes! Three cheers! Secant, tangent, cosine, sine … three point one four one five nine … Stacey! Stacey! Stacey!”

  Alexander pushed his glasses up his nose and grinned so hard his braces nearly blinded me. “Three point one four one five nine … you know? The value of pi?”

  Puh-leeze.

  “Hi,” I managed to murmur.

  Mari gently took the platter from me. She set it down on a Ping-Pong table, next to some other food platters. Rick was writing PROPERTY OF STACEY ONLY in thick marker on a sheet of paper.

  I smiled at Mari. I sure was glad she was in the group. I knew her pretty well. During a school trip to Hawaii, we were involved in a helicopter accident together.

  I also knew Emily Bernstein, who runs the school newspaper. And Bea Foster, who is about the smartest math student I ever met. Rick and I were on a committee for a school masquerade party. All of them are pretty cool.

  Four out of eight wasn’t bad. I didn’t know Amanda and Gordon that well. And Jason and Alexander weren’t terrible people, really. Just strange.

  I had hope. I vowed to keep my heart and mind open. I would not not NOT be a snob.

  “Hey, what did the maple seed say when it started to grow?” Jason blurted out. “Give up? Geometry! Get it? Ge
e, I’m a tree!”

  (It was not not NOT going to be easy.)

  “Fo-o-o-ox!” groaned Rick.

  “Ignore him, Stacey,” Emily said.

  “Okay, everybody pull up chairs.” Ms. Hartley pushed the food into the middle of the Ping-Pong table and slapped down a manila folder. “Here are copies of last year’s local championship questions. As you know, Stoneybrook Day School won, and we’re facing them tomorrow — as well as Kelsey Middle School. They’re both tough teams, and —”

  “Tough?” Jason snorted. “Uh, riiiight.”

  “Be serious,” Alexander whispered.

  As we dragged chairs to the table and sat, Ms. Hartley said, “Stacey, the meet will be held in the auditorium at Stoneybrook Day School. Basically, there are two types of problems: individual and Mathmania. The individual problems are timed, and everyone works privately. If you get the answer, you receive one point and so does your team. The team with the most points wins the problem. The Mathmania problems are untimed. The team solves them together, the first team to find the answer receives five points, and each member receives one point toward his or her individual total. At the end of the tournament a prize will be awarded for the highest team score and the highest individual score. Got that?”

  I nodded. Seemed simple enough.

  “Okay, let’s start.” Ms. Hartley pulled out a sheet with this shape drawn on it:

  “This cube is made out of blocks,” Ms. Hartley said. “The entire cube is painted blue. How many blocks have blue paint on them?”

  “Does it matter how many sides of the block are painted?” Emily asked.

  “No,” Ms. Hartley replied. “A block with any amount of paint counts.”

  Jason was scribbling in a notebook. “Twenty-seven!” he shouted. “Three blocks long times three blocks wide times three blocks deep. That makes twenty-seven. EHHHHH! And Jason Fox wins a trip to Disney World! Yaaaaaaaay! The crowd goes wild!”

  “Anyone else?” Ms. Hartley asked.

  “I’m with Jason,” Gordon agreed.

  I looked at the cube carefully. The answer seemed so obvious.

  “Twenty-six,” I said.

  Jason howled. “Uh, hello? Where were you when they taught the times tables?”

  “One of the blocks is buried in the middle,” I explained. “It has no paint on it.”

  Total silence.

  Ms. Hartley was beaming. “Good thinking, Stacey.”

  Jason looked as though he’d just swallowed a baby porcupine. “I knew that. I just wanted to see if you did.”

  Rick bopped him over the head with a rolled-up spiral notebook.

  “All riiiight, Stace,” Mari whispered.

  “Just lucky,” I said modestly.

  “Okay, now, who can fill in the next number of this sequence?” Ms. Hartley spread out a sheet of paper that contained these numbers:

  1 2 4 7 12 19 30 43 —

  Scribble, scribble, scribble.

  “Are you sure this isn’t a mistake?” Amanda asked.

  “I get fifty-eight,” Bea volunteered.

  I had a different answer. I looked at Bea’s page and saw all kinds of fancy calculations. I felt sort of stupid. Maybe I was missing a trick.

  Jason looked over my shoulder and read my paper. “Sixty?” he read. “How did you get that?”

  “Well,” I replied, “take the differences between the numbers. You get one, two, three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen. Those are all prime numbers. The next prime number is seventeen. So you add that to forty-three and get sixty.”

  “Exactly!” Ms. Hartley exclaimed.

  Emily burst into applause. “Whoa, this girl is hot!”

  “Stoneybrook Day and Kelsey Middle, you die tomorrow!” Rick cried out.

  Jason fell to his knees and began salaaming at my feet.

  Weird.

  Très weird.

  But I have to admit, I was enjoying it.

  Ms. Hartley kept feeding us problems, one after the other. The session sped by. (No, I did not get every one right. I made an addition error on the second to last one. Hey, I’m human.)

  When Ms. Hartley called the end of the session, I groaned. “I was just warming up.”

  “You mean, you can be even smarter?” Emily asked.

  “It boggles the mind,” Alexander muttered.

  “I say we let her and Bea answer all the questions,” Amanda suggested.

  Jason nodded. “Yeah, the rest of us can just smile and look beautiful.”

  “Let’s hear it for the Stace!” Gordon called out.

  “YAAAAAAAY!” cried the other Mathletes.

  I was blushing. I could feel it. It was nice to be appreciated for my brain.

  Nice? I was almost floating.

  “All right, the meet is at one o’clock tomorrow at Stoneybrook Day,” Ms. Hartley said. “I’d like to have a brushup session in my classroom at eleven-thirty.”

  Thump. I was down on the ground again.

  I had agreed to help Mallory baby-sit for the Pike kids and their friends before the meet.

  As my teammates put their coats on, I said to Ms. Hartley, “What if I can’t make the brushup? I mean, I have a good excuse. I have to do this baby-sitting job and —”

  Ms. Hartley put a calming hand on my arm. “Not to worry. This isn’t the Olympics. We’re in this for the fun.”

  “But I might not be prepared enough for the meet —”

  “Stacey,” Ms. Hartley interrupted. “You’re prepared. The other teams aren’t going to know what hit them.”

  Whew.

  I felt about ten feet tall as I left the house.

  Dad was waiting for me, as promised, with a big smile on his face and a gardenia for my hair.

  Was I lucky, or what?

  “Yaaahh-hah-hah!” screamed Buddy Barrett, jumping out of the bushes near his front porch. “I’m the Abdominable Snowman!”

  Claudia nearly jumped out of her coat. She was already scared out of her mind. She’d been standing at the Barrett/DeWitts’ front door for about three minutes. Frozen. Trying to find the nerve to ring the bell.

  As you can see by her BSC notebook entry, Claudia was having doubts about tutoring Lindsey. If Buddy hadn’t appeared, she might have run right to Ms. Hartley’s house and yanked me out of the basement.

  “Buddy, you nearly gave me a heart attack!” Claudia said. “And it’s Abominable. I think.”

  The front door opened and Mrs. DeWitt peered out. “Hi, Claudia. Did Big Foot attack you?”

  “Rrrraaaagh!” Buddy yelled. He was wearing a down coat with a furry collar and a black ski mask over his face.

  Buddy, by the way, is eight. So’s Lindsey DeWitt. They’re the oldest of seven kids in a blended family. That’s blended as in from two marriages, not as in mixed smoothly. Buddy has two sisters, a five-year-old named Suzi and a two-year-old named Marnie. Lindsey’s siblings are Taylor (six), Madeleine (four), and Ryan (two). Luckily for Claudia, Taylor, Madeleine, Ryan, and Marnie were all at friends’ houses, so Claudia only had three kids to sit for.

  Lindsey came running into the living room, calling out, “Did you scare her away?”

  “Nahhh,” Buddy replied.

  Lindsey took one look at Claudia and slumped. “You dork!”

  “Lindsey, is that any way to talk to your tutor?” asked Mrs. DeWitt.

  “I was talking to Cruddy Buddy!” Lindsey replied, stomping away.

  “Heyyy!” Buddy cried, running in after her.

  Mrs. DeWitt gave Claudia a sympathetic look. “Good luck.”

  Her husband bounced into the room, carrying two winter coats. “Hi. Where’s Stacey?”

  “Claudia’s taking her place,” Mrs. DeWitt answered. “Stacey joined the Mathletes team, so she’s busy.”

  Mr. DeWitt is a nice, easygoing guy. He insists that we call him by his first name, Franklin. But when he heard the news, he looked about as friendly as a cactus. “Oh. So … this is not a tutoring session? It’s just baby-s
itting?”

  “No, I’m tuting,” Claudia said. “I mean, tutoring.”

  “Oh. Okay,” said Franklin’s mouth. His face, however, was saying, You? A kid who flunked out of eighth grade? Some bargain. (At least that’s how Claudia took it.)

  Not exactly terrific for the old self-confidence.

  Franklin and Mrs. DeWitt gave Claudia some last-minute instructions and zipped off to a PTO meeting.

  Claudia walked inside, clutching a manila folder full of my notes to Lindsey.

  The house, as usual, was in chaos. In the kitchen, Suzi was scooping ice cream into bowls, while Buddy was in the family room, rummaging through video cassettes.

  “Mom said we’re all supposed to watch Babe while you teach Lindsey,” Buddy announced.

  “No fair!” cried Lindsey’s voice from behind a closed door upstairs.

  Claudia helped Suzi clean up assorted ice-cream toppings then plopped Suzi and Buddy in front of the TV. As Babe oinked onto the screen, she walked upstairs and knocked on Lindsey’s door.

  “I’m too tired to study!” was Lindsey’s greeting.

  Claudia gently pushed the door open. Lindsey was curled up on her bed, in her clothes, her eyes tightly shut.

  “Don’t worry, I left my torture equipment at home,” Claudia said.

  Lindsey opened her eyes. “No, you didn’t. It’s right in your hand.”

  Claudia set the folder down on the floor and knelt by Lindsey’s bed. “You know, math was my absolute worst subject. When I was in third grade, I’d rather have eaten roasted shoe leather than done my homework.”

  “So why are you tutoring me?” Lindsey snapped.

  “I’m much better at it now,” Claudia replied. “Besides, I have Stacey’s notes.”

  “I don’t care,” Lindsey declared. “They all get to watch a video, and I have to do stupid math! Besides, kids aren’t required to do homework on a Friday. Everybody knows that.”

  “Let’s make a deal,” Claudia said. “Learn what Stacey planned for today, then you can run downstairs and watch.”

  “But it’s too hard!”

  “No, it’s not.” Claudia opened the notes and began reading: “ ‘In problems involving estimation, rounding up is done with numbers half or greater than the value of the place of estimation. That is, five or more if the place is tens, fifty or more if it’s hundreds, and so on. For example, eight hundred thirty seven, rounded to the tens place, would round up, to eight hundred forty; but to the hundreds, it would round down to eight hundred.’ ”