The Clueless Girl's Guide to Being a Genius (17 page)

Mr. Ripple rushed back and handed her a clipboard with the list of names on it.

“Now a pen,” Dytee demanded. He handed her his ballpoint, and she put a line through Hunter's name. Then she added her own name to the list.

Mr. Ripple took the paper and chuckled. “Nice try, but I don't think so.”

“What's going on?” Bobby asked.

“Professor Wigglesmith just joined the team,” I told him.

The edge of Mr. Ripple's lip began to quiver. “This is not funny.”

“I'm serious,” said Dytee.

“Obviously,” Mr. Ripple told her, “teachers are not allowed to participate in the math competition.”

“But,” I said, “she doesn't teach here anymore.”

Mr. Ripple looked so totally ticked he could have been a time bomb. “You have to be an eighth grader to participate.”

“No,” said Dytee. “I read the rules, and they state that you must be no older than thirteen years of age and reside in the area serving the Carnegie School District. I am, and I do, so unless Eugenia returns, I will be the sixth Frog.”

Mr. Ripple stomped his foot. “That's not fair,” he objected.

“Not fair?” said Dytee. “One might say it's unfair that you write the questions since you know your students' strengths and weaknesses. I don't like to fuss. I'm doing this to give the Frogs a chance to finish the competition. I will fill the sixth seat, but I have no intention of giving them the answers.”

“Fine,” said Mr. Ripple. “There are only three questions left.” He returned to the microphone. “For the Frogs, Professor Aphrodite Wigglesmith will be replacing Eugenia Billsworth Smith.”

A wave of murmurs rolled across the audience. The Lions and the Wolves stared at Dytee with widened eyes and dropped mouths.

Mr. Ripple raised his hand to quiet the crowd. “I will now give the Lions their final question.”

The Lions huddled and worked. Occasionally, one would look over, and Dytee would wink or give a thumbs-up. The looks on their faces were priceless. When their sixty seconds were almost up, an argument broke out, and the Lions' captain pinned a team member against the table.

Mr. Ripple rushed to restore order. In the midst of it, the buzzer rang. Mr. Ripple's hair was still messed up when he returned to the microphone. He took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his forehead. “Do the Wolves have the answer for the steal?” he asked.

“We do not,” said the Wolves' captain.

My team was half listening and half concentrating on finding the right answer.

“I think that's it,” I whispered to Adam.

“There's no time to check,” said Salvador.

“We've got nothing to lose by guessing,” said Adam.

“Frogs,” said Mr. Ripple, “we're waiting. Do you have the answer?”

“The answer is negative 4.7?” said Adam, more like a question than an answer.

“I'm sorry, that answer is”—Mr. Ripple glanced at the answer card and his voice rose an octave—“correct.”

The auditorium shook again with clapping and stomping.

The bikers yelled above the roar. “Lions and Wolves go sing the blues, because you know you're gonna lose!” They sprang from their seats like cheerleaders and made victory signs. “Go, Frogs!”

“That will be enough!” Mr. Ripple shouted. Feedback screeched through the air and silenced the crowd. “The score is tied at 25 all. This is the last question for the Wolves. What is the formula for calculating the perimeter of a rectangle?”

An overconfident Wolf blurted out the answer for calculating the perimeter of a triangle by mistake: Perimeter = side A, plus side B, plus side C.

“The answer is incorrect,” said Mr. Ripple. “Do the Frogs have an answer?”

The Wolves had responded so quickly that we were still huddled.

“If we pick up this steal,” Bobby whispered, “I think we can win. Can you believe it?”

“This is gonna be so sweet,” Keisha said. “I can smell the victory.”

“Not so fast,” I said. “Does anyone know the answer?”

“It's two times side A plus side B,” said Adam.

“No, that's not right,” said Salvador, adjusting his glasses.

“I'm the captain and I say it is,” said Adam.

I folded my arms and sat back. “My vote is with Adam.”

“Why should we care who your vote is with?” Salvador asked me. “You haven't solved a single problem.”

“Your answer?” Mr. Ripple demanded.

“And just because Adam is the captain,” said Salvador, “it doesn't mean he's right.”

“Leave him alone,” said Bobby. “Everyone but you agrees.”

“That doesn't make his answer right.”

“Time is up,” said Mr. Ripple.

It was too late to answer. The boos hit us like tomatoes.

“Quiet down,” Mr. Ripple snapped. “If the Lions know the answer, they can steal.”

“That's it,” said Bobby. “We're doomed. If they pick up the steal, it's over.”

The captain of the Lions smiled. “The answer is two times side A plus side B.”

“Correct!” cried Mr. Ripple.

The crowd erupted, and Mr. Ripple did not move to quiet it.

“We're losers,” said Bobby.

“Not complete losers,” said Adam. “We have one question left, and if we get it right, we'll pull into second place. That's better than third.”

I looked at Dytee to see how she was handling the defeat. The experiment was definitely over and the results were in: we would never be math wizzes. But Dytee was on her way to Mr. Ripple. He covered the microphone as she whispered in his ear. His smile dropped like a dodgeball falling from an airplane. When Dytee returned, she was the one smiling.

“There has been a challenge. I stand corrected. Because the answer failed to indicate that side A plus side B must be enclosed in parentheses, it is not correct. The Lions do not get the steal, and the score remains tied.”

A large woman in the third row fainted onto a row of fifth graders, and the television crew rushed over to get it on film.

“The last question of the night is for the Frogs,” said Mr. Ripple.

Timothy suddenly jumped up from his seat at the top of the bleachers.

“Wait!” he yelled. He crisscrossed to the floor and darted over to where Dytee had been sitting. He put his hand on Mr. Finch's head and rubbed his four-leaf clover tattoo. Then he scampered back to his seat. “Okay! Go ahead.”

The crowd burst into laughter. While they were laughing, Mr. Ripple shuffled his index cards and chose the last question.

“This is a word problem,” he said, reading the card. “Listen carefully. Thirty-five students attend a dance. Nobody may dance with anyone shorter than him- or herself. Sixty percent of the students are over six feet tall. How many couples can dance?”

Our team jotted down the problem.

“Sixty seconds,” Mr. Ripple reminded us.

The Frogs huddled.

“If sixty percent of the students are over six feet tall,” Adam whispered, “that means forty percent are shorter.”

“So only that forty percent could find partners not taller than them,” said Keisha.

“There are 35 couples,” Bobby added. “Forty percent of 35 is 14. So the answer must be 14 couples.”

“I don't know,” said Salvador. “What do you think, Professor Wigglesmith?”

“No,” I said. “Don't tell us.”

“Mindy's right,” Dytee said. “I leveled the playing field for you, but you have to win—or lose—on your own.”

“I agree,” said Adam.

“Wish us good luck?” I asked Dytee.

“You don't need to rely on luck,” she told me. “You've got a knack for word problems. Visualize the problem. I know you can solve it.”

I closed my eyes and concentrated.
Nobody may dance with anyone shorter than him- or herself
. I imagined dancing with Adam under the sparkling disco ball. I was taller than most of the kids at school, but so was Adam. I had never considered which one of us was taller than the other before. Of course, no two people are exactly the same height, no matter how tiny the difference.
Nobody may dance with anyone shorter than him- or herself
.

“Time's up,” said Mr. Ripple.

Adam breathed deeply. I watched as his gaze went to his parents at the top row of the bleachers. He stood. “The answer is—”

“Wait!” I jumped up and cupped a hand over Adam's ear, “It's a trick question,” I whispered. “With every couple, one of them is going to be shorter than the other. If nobody can dance with anyone shorter than him- or her-self, then nobody can dance at all.”

He smiled. “Go ahead. You tell them.”

I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. What if I was wrong? What if the audience burst out in laughter and the kids at school called me an idiot for the rest of my days? Then I remembered something Dytee told me:
Making a mistake doesn't mean you're stupid; it just means you're human.
She was right. The people who were important to me, my real friends, like Dytee and Adam, knew I wasn't a bonehead. More important, I knew it, too. So what if I got it wrong? So what if people laughed? I still had “infinite potential.” I
was
the kind of girl who could land on her feet. “The answer,” I said, “is zero.”

Mr. Ripple's jaw dropped, and he stuttered out the result: “Correct.”

First place! We jumped and hopped around like we really were frogs. I latched onto Adam, and we got pressed into a huge group hug. Spectators from the bleachers ran onto the floor, whooping and hollering.

People in the crowd supporting the Lions or the Wolves began to chant, “Rematch. Rematch. Rematch.”

I looked for Dytee, but the crowd was rushing against me. Suddenly a burly biker pulled me off my feet and tossed me onto his shoulders like I was a rag doll. All the Frogs were on shoulders. Spectators had brought cans of Silly String and were spraying them. A television camera was getting it in the lens. There was so much confusion, so many people; I couldn't find Dytee anywhere. She was gone.

T
hey say that if everybody is special then nobody is, but I think that's a load of doggie doo-doo. Can't everyone be special in their own different way? Some people are math geniuses and some people are baton geniuses. Other people are really good at throwing up neatly into their laps, like Eugenia, or at caring enough about their friends to eat garlic and drink vinegar for them to try to get rid of their bad breath, like Roland. Isn't it all genius? That's what I figured out at the Great Math Showdown.

The next day, I went to say good-bye. Even though school wasn't quite over, it was the last day the remedial math class would be meeting; Principal DeGuy had been so impressed by the Frogs' first place win that he said everyone in the class had already earned an A. The students decided to throw a party to celebrate. They had used the two-hundred-dollar prize from Right Type Office Supply Store to buy drinks, snacks, and a pizza pie for each student. Timothy arranged his pepperoni to make the number 3.14 so he could call his a pizza pi.

I helped myself to a slice of veggie lovers and got out my folder. “I have something for you,” I said. I handed each member of the class a certificate on which I had inscribed my favorite math saying:
Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted
.—Albert Einstein.

Some of the students who hadn't gotten a chance yet to put on their “Why Math Matters to Me” presentations decided to do them. Bobby showed the class how to use math to calculate strikes and spares in bowling, and how to knock down a row of math books using his new bowling ball. LeeAnn—who really had been missing practice to wash her cat, which it turned out had some weird skin problem that they had to rush it to the vet for on the night of the Great Math Showdown—explained how she could beat a role-playing video game ten percent faster by calculating probabilities during a quest.

Holding a gleaming baton trophy in one hand, Mindy read from an index card about how baton twirlers apply torque to make the baton turn in a circular motion. She explained that force, speed, and angular velocity are essential to twirlers. Then she used her baton to show off some basic spins.

“Excellent,” I said. “When math concepts are used to help explain a physical phenomenon, such as how a baton works, we call it physics.” I stepped on the stool so I could write the term high on the board, but it didn't make a sound. Mindy turned to Roland, and he gave her a mysterious thumbs-up.

Timothy was the last student to present. “Math matters to me because there are a lot of really funny math jokes. Ten cats were in a boat and one jumped out. How many were left? None! The rest were copy cats. Get it?”

“Knock, knock,” said Roland.

“Who's there?” Timothy answered.

“Police.”

“Police who?”

“Police stop telling lame jokes.”

Finally, Adam went to the back of the room and pulled a bag from the closet.
Shhhhh
could be heard around the room. He handed the bag to Mindy, who handed it to me.

“Last night,” Adam explained, “after we won the math competition, we wanted to thank you. We'll be going to Carnegie High School in the fall. You'll be going back to Harvard.”

“We wanted to give you something to remember us,” said Mindy.

“Just give it to her,” said Roland.