And then Jackson makes a big slide to the right, pivoting the whole conversation so that she’s not in between us anymore. “Well, Greer, since you have a game, and I’ve got to work on mein Gruppenprojekt, maybe we can do the other thing this weekend?” My mouth falls open. “Saturday morning?”
“Yeah,” I manage. “Saturday. Sure. That could work.”
Red scowls, like she hasn’t realized until this point that I am capable of speaking. I’m a little surprised by it myself.
“Great! Have a good game tonight,” he says, and allows himself to be tugged down the hall by the envious Fräulein.
“You too,” I say automatically. “I mean thanks. I mean danke.” They are too far gone to hear me.
I float into math class wondering what I just agreed to and land in front of Kurtis and Omar, who are comparing homework. “Greer! Can we see what you got for fourteen?” says Kurtis.
“Huh?”
“Did you do the homework?”
These guys have known me for ten years. Kennedy doesn’t have a math team, but if it did, we’d be it. Have I ever not done the homework?
I pass my notebook back to them, trying to imagine what Jackson might be imagining about going to the spice place this weekend. Is it politeness because there’s a secret shop that’s off the grid and he would feel guilty if I got lost? Is it charity because my mother told his mother that I don’t get out much? Is it because he’s still kind of new and he doesn’t have that many friends and I am not completely vile to be with when Max Cleave and the baseball team are busy? Or is it because he actually wants to do something with me?
No, just a friend thing. I’m Re-Lo Jr.! Not threatening. Friendly like a sister. A sister who is not a klepto elf.
But remember when he brought that muffin?
Kurtis and Omar are bickering behind me. They have gotten different answers on number fourteen. Whenever this happens, they check to see who got the same thing as me. “Hey, Greer!”
The problem is that all three of us have different answers this time, so there’s no majority consensus.
I pull my notebook back and walk them through it. Kurtis is off from the beginning. Omar has the right idea but one of his calculations is wrong, which messes him up for all the steps afterward. Omar’s handwriting is awful, so most of what he gets wrong is because he can’t read what he did before. These guys trust me, though. I’m the Jessa here.
Ms. T is giving the speech she always gives before she returns a test. She knows she is dealing with a bunch of fragile smart kids. If you have a class where 100 percent of the students have been getting As in math for 80 percent of their lives, and then you set the curve so that 70 percent of them will get a B or less, you’ve got 90 percent of your class freaking out all the time. She explains the weighted grading and the retake policy for the hundredth time this quarter. The longer and slower she talks, the more people did badly on the test. Judging by her eulogy today, there will probably be tears.
Even though Asher Moonpie and Anitha Das get straight As, they look like they’re going to be sick before they get their tests back. I don’t freak out about these things. It’s not just that I know what I’m doing. It’s that I know that I know what I’m doing. In math.
I freak out about legitimately scary things. Like going to shop for Indian spices with a polite and non-maniacal fellow student.
There are sighs of relief from some and tiny embarrassed gasps from others as Ms. Tanner walks the papers around. Anitha, whose eyes were watery until the moment she grabbed the paper out of Ms. T’s hand, smiles at her test. She did well, as always, and is for some reason surprised, as always. Asher looks kind of sick. He’s staring at the second page and scratching one spot on his head very hard. He probably got one wrong. Kurtis and Omar are handing their papers back and forth, so I’m guessing they both did all right. I know the groaning sound that Kurtis makes if he bombs a test, and I know that if Omar bombs, Kurtis tries to cheer him up.
I get a 38 out of 35. That’s not bad math; it’s the bonus questions. Ms. T gives everyone a minute to come down off their high or pull themselves up from the pit of despair before she starts in on homework review.
Once we dive into the homework, I have the entire period to dwell on the spice store. Until:
“Greer!” Kyle Tuck snorts as the bell sends us packing. “Could you help me with this problem?” His goony friends are standing behind him laughing through their nostrils. Kyle hands me a scrawled equation on a half sheet of notebook paper:
[arctan (1) × 1,290]—2(4!)
I can guess what he’s trying to do, and let my hair fall in front of my face so they won’t see my cheeks turn red. I’m more mad at myself than at them for that. I’ve promised myself I won’t let them get to me, but they always do anyway. I go from the ultra-confident A student to the ultra-awkward H cup in one second flat.
Not flat.
Never flat.
I set down my backpack to edit his scrawl. “But, um, don’t you want to do it on the calculator?” Kyle is disappointed that I am doing the work with a pencil, because the joke only works if it’s on a calculator.
But the joke won’t work on the calculator, either, because he’s done it wrong. His equation equals 58,002, or ZOO,BS.
I change the last part to 7(3!) and hand back the corrected problem. That will get them the answer they want. I can’t make them understand how horrible they are, but at least I can prove that I am smarter than they are.
“I think this is what you were going for. And you have to use degrees instead of radians.” On my way out, I add, “How did you guys even make it into this math class?” I don’t wait for them to input the problem into their calculators so they can finally see some BOO,BS.
CHAPTER 39
“Take choir. It’s easy.” Kate Wood is on her knees, leaning over the back of her seat to talk to me and Jess.
“I’m not really a singer,” Jessa says.
“Doesn’t matter. They don’t grade you on your singing. They grade you on participation.”
We’re trying to decide what Jessa should take next year to get her second fine arts credit. It can be performing arts or visual arts or, in a very strange loophole, robotics. I already took ceramics freshman year, and Maggie wants me to do printmaking with her second semester. Maybe I should talk her into sewing with Ms. K-B—except that that class is called Fashion and Design, and Maggie thinks the “fashion industry exists to commodify women’s insecurities about themselves.” She might be right, but what if I could sew a shirt that fit? Maybe I could make Quin a pair of longer pants.
“Do you think you have to be good at drawing to take studio art?”