Home Games

by Benjamin Markovits

  “Fine,” I say.

  Mabley is one of those kids who seems to know everybody. She’s always friendly, even early in the morning; people like her. And she’s good at noticing stuff. If somebody has a new haircut, she notices right away and says something like, “You look nice today, Colleen. You had a haircut. They did a nice job.” She says this kind of thing to the boys, too. She doesn’t care who she sits next to.

  Some days, I think we’re becoming friends. She says hi to me in the morning, and we get in line for the bus together and share one of the bench seats on the way to school. But then at other times, she talks to somebody else, kids I don’t know. She’s really the only one I talk to.

  I’ve started catching the bus by myself. Mom likes to drive in early. “Just to get my head on straight,” she says, “before the chaos begins.” I always check for Mabley when I walk up the road to the bus stop. There’s usually a handful of tired-looking kids standing around with backpacks at their feet. One day she isn’t there, and I wander over to look at the house with the refrigerator on the front porch, when somebody grabs me from behind.

  “Pinch, punch, first day of the month,” she says. It’s Mabley.

  I stare at her.

  “It’s the first of September. My great-aunt taught it to me—she was born in Wales. I’m named after her, even though she spells it different.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Here’s what you’re supposed to do back.” She pretends to hit me, then kind of scuffs one of her sneakers against the back of my leg. “A slap and a kick, for being so quick. Unless they say no returns.”

  “I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  She smiles; she’s in a funny kind of mood. I mean, she has a lot of energy, she wants to make me laugh, but it’s also like she’s bored and she just wants something to happen, she wants a reaction. Maybe I disappointed her, because she says in her normal voice, “It’s just a silly thing. It basically means good morning.”

  “Good morning to you, too.”

  The bus comes, and we file on. Mabley’s behind me, but the seat next to me is empty, and she sits down.

  “I don’t even know my great-aunt,” I say, because she isn’t talking. “I don’t even know if I have one.”

  “Mine died last year. She lived in San Antonio.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine. She was crazy. She drove my dad nuts, but she liked me.”

  For a while we don’t say anything—it’s only seven thirty in the morning. My brain is still half asleep. Then Mabley says, “How old are you?”

  “Twelve. Why?”

  “I don’t know. You just seem young for seventh grade. Young and innocent.”

  “My birthday’s around Easter . . . so I don’t usually get a big party.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because everybody goes away for spring break. We used to go away, too.”

  “That sucks,” she says, and I think the conversation’s over, but after a minute she says, “What school did you go to before?”

  “It’s called Latymer. It’s in New York.” And suddenly I remember waiting for the elevator in the morning and sometimes meeting Jake on the way to school. It seems like years ago.

  “I want to go to New York,” Mabley says. “I’ve never been.”

  “My dad lives in London. They’ve got a . . . there’s a school there, just for Americans. It’s right by where the Beatles . . . there’s an album where you can see them crossing the street. It’s like a famous place to cross the street,” and I hear her laugh, and want to keep talking. But I can’t think of anything else to say, so I just say, “That’s where I want to go.”

  She says, “Everybody wants to go somewhere.”

  The bus isn’t air-conditioned, and already the leather seats feel sticky to sit on. We stare out the window for a while and then she asks, “When did your parents get divorced?”

  “They’re not divorced.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m not trying to be . . . it’s just that you said once you shared a bedroom with your mom, and I felt bad about not saying anything. I usually try to say something when people tell me stuff.”

  “I don’t know what they are. . . . My dad just moved to London, and my mom didn’t want to go. She’s from Texas. I guess she wanted to come back home. We’re just living with my granma until we get our own place.”

  “It must be nice to see your granma,” Mabley says.

  “It’s all right.”

  I can always tell we’re getting near the school because the bus goes under a highway. Even with the windows closed you can hear the traffic rumbling overhead.

  After the highway, the streets seem to change. There’s a lot of building going on, brand-new houses with big windows and metal towers and brightly colored walls. But there are also some older houses, where the paint is peeling, and the porch is filled with stuff like sofas and boxes and just . . . stuff. One house has a big front yard with cars on the grass. There are tires lying around and other car parts. Sometimes you see people messing around in the yard or sitting on the porch, drinking soda.

  I don’t want the bus to arrive—I just want to keep sitting there with Mabley and looking out the window. Because as soon as we pull up to the school, I’ll have to get out and join all the other kids going to school and sit in classes for the rest of the day with everybody else.

  Pete Miller’s in my math class. We sit next to each other at the back, but even though we have lunch together every day, Pete doesn’t really talk to me unless Mabley is around. When the bell rings, it takes me a while to get my bags together, and Pete always walks out with other kids. But I don’t really mind. It’s fine with me if people leave me alone.

  Our teacher is Ms. Kaminski. She’s a bony, friendly woman who wears thick glasses and a lot of bracelets and necklaces. Every day, at the beginning of class, she actually gets an apple out of her bag and puts it on her desk, like a teacher in a TV show. She likes trying different kinds of apples, and sometimes you can get her to waste a few minutes at the beginning of class by asking her what kind of apple she has today. They have all kinds of funny names, like Envy or Gala or Pink Lady. She says the study of apples is called pomology. She buys them in Central Market, which is a big supermarket that Granma sometimes goes to.

  But today she has a different announcement to make. “There’s going to be a citywide Number Sense competition. For those of you who don’t know, it’s basically like doing your multiplication tables but just with bigger numbers. We need three kids from the school to enter, which means that for the next few weeks, a few minutes before the bell rings every day, we’ll be doing practice tests. Think of it as the math tryouts,” she says, looking at Pete.

  Pete’s on the basketball team. Last year, he was the only sixth grader to start, and this year he’s probably going to be captain. There was a big article on him in the school newspaper, with a picture of him shooting a basketball, when they announced the teams—the tryouts were last week. Everybody seems to know his name. Even some of the teachers come up to him at lunch to talk about basketball. But I think I can beat him at Number Sense. Math is probably my favorite subject.

  I used to practice the times tables with my dad. That’s one of the things we did together. On most nights, when I was little, Dad got home from work after I was already asleep. Sometimes he came into my bedroom anyway and woke me up. I could feel him sitting next to me.

  “Hey, Shorty,” he would say.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  “Sorry to wake you up.” He’d put his hand on my back and give me a tickle under my T-shirt. Sometimes I thought he didn’t really know what to talk to me about. We’d sit like that for a few minutes. Then he’d suddenly say, “Six times eight.”

  “Forty-eight.”

  “Eleven times twelve.”

  “One hundred thirty-two.”

  “Fifteen squared.”

  “Two twenty-five.”
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  It made him happy if I got the answers right. Afterward, Dad would push himself up on his knees, sounding tired. “That’s what I do all day,” he liked to say. “Play around with numbers. All right, Son. I think we both need to get some sleep. Good night.”

  For the rest of the period, even when we’re talking about other things, I think about the Number Sense competition. I really want to win. With five minutes left, Ms. Kaminski tells us to put our books away. All we need is a pencil and a piece of paper. “I’m going to read out a few questions in a row, and you have to write down the answers as quickly as you can. Without making notes—that’s important. I’ll be walking up and down the aisles just to make sure that nobody cheats.”

  My heart has already started beating faster, even though I tell myself, Don’t be silly, this is just a practice test. Nobody cares, it doesn’t matter. My brain has gone blank, but sometimes that’s a good thing—it’s like wiping the blackboard clean before you start.

  Ms. Kaminski reads out the first question: 23 times 27. And suddenly I feel happy, because I know the trick—my dad taught it to me. If the tens digits are the same, and the unit numbers add up to ten, there’s a shortcut you can take. You just add one to the first tens digit, and multiply it by the other, then you multiply the unit digits together, and that’s your answer. It sounds complicated, but actually it’s pretty simple. My dad showed me why it works, but I can’t remember the proof. That doesn’t matter because it works anyway, you don’t have to know why. Three times two is six, and three times seven is twenty-one, so the answer is six hundred and twenty-one.

  After that, it all seems pretty easy. I just have to stay in the zone. It’s like my brain is better at this stuff than I am, so long as I get out of the way. At the end of the test, Ms. Kaminski goes over the questions one by one. She expects us to call out the answers, but I don’t like showing off. Sometimes I raise my hand, but by that point some other kid has probably beaten me to it. Pete is one of them, he keeps shouting the answers and getting them right, and then I realize that he’s been looking at my paper the whole time and calling out whatever I’ve written down.

  This is how I know, because I finally slide a textbook over my answer sheet, and he sort of smiles at me, like, gotcha. I mean, like you do when you’ve been playing a trick on somebody and they finally realize it. And when you don’t react, or at least, not the way they want you to, it’s like you’re the weird one because you don’t think it’s funny.

  The last question of the day is a bonus question: 99 x 91.

  “Anybody know this one?” Ms. Kaminski asks.

  I like her, but she isn’t the kind of teacher who understands the kids very well. She always seems to be nice to the wrong ones. “All right, Pete,” she says at last, when nobody answers. “Go ahead.”

  “I think we should let somebody else have a chance,” Pete tells her.

  I put my hand up, and Ms. Kaminski finally notices me.

  “Yes, Ben?” she says.

  “Nine thousand and nine.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “I’m impressed. Where’d you learn how to do that?”

  “There’s a trick,” I tell her. “My dad showed me.”

  Ms. Kaminski is standing in front of her desk, with her hands behind her back. She has a way of standing with her feet together, like a ballerina, totally still. And she uses her voice like she’s acting in a play—she says everything very clearly, like it was written down somewhere, and she’s trying to project her voice to the back of the room.

  “Do you want to explain it to the rest of the class?”

  My face feels hot; it’s all gone quiet, and when I start to talk, a couple of kids call out, “We can’t hear you.”

  “Why don’t you stand up?” Ms. Kaminski says.

  I push my desk back a little, but everybody’s looking at me. “You just . . . it’s when . . . it’s when you’re multiplying two numbers, and they end in . . . When the units add up to . . .” It sounds really . . . it sounds embarrassing, like, if you ask me what I’m really thinking, what I’m thinking about is tens digits and units digits, and I know what they’re all thinking. They’re thinking, What a nerd. Finally the bell rings. Ms. Kaminski tries to make them wait until I’ve finished, but everybody gets up anyway. It’s a relief.

  Afterward, she stops me on the way out—she puts a hand on my shoulder and closes the classroom door. “I’m sorry I put you on the spot like that,” she says quietly. “You did great. Your dad must be a good teacher.”

  She looks at me, and I don’t say anything. Her face is kind, but I don’t want to look back at her. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with liking math. Go on, get some lunch. You’ve earned it.”

  Pete is waiting for me in the hallway.

  “What’d you do that for?” he says. When Mabley isn’t around, he sounds totally different. His face has gone red, except for the tip of his nose, which looks pinched and white.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Cover up your answers like that. Like I was copying you.”

  “You were copying me,” I tell him.

  “Who cares? It’s just a stupid math thing.” Then he says as he walks off ahead of me, “I thought we were friends.”

  “But—” I start calling after him, but he doesn’t turn around.

  When I get to the cafeteria, he’s sitting at the table with Mabley and everybody else. He smiles at me, and I think, maybe he isn’t mad at me anymore. When I sit down, he says, “Does your dad know any other tricks?”

  Mabley says, “What are you talking about?”

  “Ben’s dad sounds pretty cool. He knows a lot of tricks.”

  I get out my sandwich and start to eat. Pete says, in his teacher’s pet voice, “Do you want to explain it to the class?”

  “You know I didn’t want to do that.”

  “I still have no idea what anybody’s talking about,” Mabley says.

  “Ben’s like a mathlete,” Pete says. “He’s got a computer brain. You just have to plug him in sometimes and wait for the answers to come out.” Nobody else is paying attention, and eventually they start talking about something else.

  I finish lunch early and walk outside on my own. It’s a bright sunny afternoon but less hot than a few weeks ago. Already a few leaves have started falling from the trees. There’s a bit of wind, which keeps blowing them around. Some kids on skateboards, wearing black clothes and backpacks covered in stickers and badges, mess around by the curb of the parking lot. I watch them playing and talking together.

  The bell’s going to ring in a few minutes, and I’ll have to go back in with all the other kids. You don’t have room to think in school; there are too many people—it’s like they crowd into your brain as well. But for a few more minutes, standing around in the leaves on my own, it’s like my head is quiet.

  I can’t understand why Mabley hangs out with Pete. She’s friendly to everybody, but Pete is only friendly if you count making fun of people as friendly. It bugs me that he has an article about him in the school newspaper, that even the teachers think he’s smart and funny. When really he’s just mean. But for some reason I’m the only one who can see it. Maybe because he’s a bit like Jake, because I had years of putting up with that kind of thing from Jake, but the funny thing is, I miss him, too. Then the bell rings, and I go back in.

  After school, Mabley sits next to me on the bus. The heat is on and the windows have started to fog up—you could play tic-tac-toe on the glass. “You walked off early at lunch,” she says, touching my shoulder, and I turn to face her.

  “Why do you like Pete?”

  It seems to me that if you’re going to get to know people, if you’re going to be friends, you have to be honest, you have to talk about what you’re actually thinking about. At least, that’s the kind of mood I’m in right now. I’ve been brooding about it all since lunch.

  “Peter?” She looks surprised.

  “
Yes, why are you his friend?

  “What do you mean? I’ve always known Peter.”

  That’s another thing that annoys me.

  “Why do you call him Peter? Everybody else calls him Pete.”

  She doesn’t answer for a while. Then she says, “What’s all this about? Why are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not mad at you.”

  “You sound like you are.”

  I look out of the window for a minute—at people’s houses. Somebody’s raking up the front yard; there are big black trash bags in the driveway. When I turn back toward Mabley, I try to use a different tone of voice.

  “I’m just tired of being . . . Pete always makes fun of me.”

  “He’s just goofing around, it doesn’t mean anything. He does that to everybody. It’s just his way of . . .”

  “You know, he cheats,” I tell her suddenly. “Today we had a math test, and he looked at my answers.”

  We’re passing under the highway now. There’s a traffic light, and you can hear the traffic echoing under the bridge, and then the light changes, and when we come out again on the other side, it’s just another neighborhood, with cars parked in the driveways and leaves lying in the yards.

  “You should know something about me,” Mabley says carefully. “I don’t like talking about people behind their backs.”

  “I bet Pete says stuff about me.”

  “Peter never talks about you,” she says.

  Usually, when we get off the bus, we walk home together—it’s only three or four blocks. But this time she stops to talk with somebody else for a minute. She had overheard a conversation, where this kid was getting a dog, and Mabley wanted to know what kind, and I kind of hang around for a few seconds, listening in . . . but nobody turns or says anything to me, and eventually I think, What’s the point, and start to walk off alone. After a couple of blocks, I look back to see if Mabley is following me, but the sidewalk is empty, so I kick a few leaves and go home.

  Ten