Annika Riz, Math Whiz

by Claudia Mills

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Take a deep breath,” the librarian said kindly, just like Annika’s mother.

  “And good luck!” she said, just like Annika’s father.

  “Ready, set…” She paused to write 9:07 on the top of Annika’s paper. “Go!”

  Annika forced herself to take a deep breath. Then she leaped into action.

  4.

  Another 4.

  6.

  2.

  1.

  1.

  6.

  She didn’t let herself glance at the clock, refusing to waste a precious second that could be given to entering numbers on the page. What if Simon came bursting through the door right now, interrupting her train of thought? No, don’t think about that! Keep working!

  4.

  2.

  She was stuck. She couldn’t see what number to put in next.

  Wait. No. Yes. 3!

  Another minute—it felt like a whole minute—spent just thinking and not writing anything at all.

  Then a 4. Another 4. And the final 6.

  Done!

  Half-afraid, she looked at the clock. 9:21! Fourteen minutes! Her best time yet!

  But was it better than Simon’s best time?

  Was it better than everyone else’s best time?

  Back at the librarian’s desk, she held out the completed puzzle and waited to see what the librarian would have to say.

  “That was fast!” The librarian gave her a warm smile. But maybe she smiled that way at all the contestants.

  Annika wished she dared ask her, Faster than this boy in my class, about my height, kind of skinny, with pencils sticking out of his pocket?

  Instead she said, “When will we find out who wins?”

  She meant, When will I find out if I win?

  “I’m so glad you asked!” the librarian said. “I almost forgot to have you fill out this entry form with your name, phone number, the name of your school, and your teacher’s name. We’ll call the winners as soon as we have the results.”

  Annika finished filling out the form just as her father appeared to collect her.

  “How did it go?” he asked her once they were in the car.

  “Pretty good,” Annika said. “I got my best time ever. But it all depends on how fast Simon did. I don’t want to count my chickens before they hatch.”

  “Whatever happens,” her father said, “your mother and I think we hatched one very smart chicken, and we’re both proud of you just for trying.”

  9

  “How was it?” Kelsey and Izzy shrieked as they burst into Annika’s house that afternoon, dropped off by Izzy’s dad.

  Annika gave them two thumbs-up. Prime joined in with a series of triumphant barks.

  “I had my best time ever, but Simon might have done even better. Lots of kids might have beat me. So I don’t really know anything yet.”

  “Nobody is better in math than you are,” Izzy said.

  “If you didn’t give us the answers in math class, we’d die!” Kelsey said.

  Annika was glad to hear their praise, but part of her wanted to say: If I didn’t give you the answers in math class, you might actually learn some math yourself. And then you’d do as well on tests as you do in class. And maybe you’d start to think math is cool and fun. Which it is!

  But she didn’t. Instead she said, “Do you want to see how Prime can count to one?”

  “Are you still making him do that?” Kelsey demanded. “It’s … it’s … cruelty to animals!”

  Izzy chimed in. “It’s probably against the law.”

  “He likes doing it.” Annika reached down to pet him. “Don’t you, Prime?”

  He wagged his tail as if to say Yes, indeed I do.

  As the others watched, Annika had Prime bark once for one biscuit. He did it! But then he barked once for two biscuits, and on the next try, he barked five times.

  “But he still barked once for one biscuit,” Annika pointed out proudly.

  Kelsey and Izzy petted him luxuriously, maybe to make up to him for having to submit to a math lesson. Prime rolled over on his back so that they could rub his tummy, now comfortably filled with doggie biscuits. Kelsey had insisted on giving him five biscuits for his five barks, and Izzy had already given him two biscuits for his two barks. But there was no limit to the number of dog biscuits Prime was eager to eat.

  “Four more hours until the carnival,” Izzy said, once everyone was tired of dog petting.

  Annika couldn’t wait to see all the booths, especially Mr. Boone’s dunking tank, but she hated to think of everyone else arriving with dozens of home-baked cookies while the three of them arrived with nothing. Zip. Nada. Zero! The famous number invented in India hundreds and hundreds of years ago that represented the absence of anything at all.

  “I wish we had something to sell at the carnival,” she said.

  “Should we try baking one more batch of cookies?” Kelsey asked halfheartedly.

  “No!” Izzy said. “Three strikes and we’re out.” In addition to training for her 10K race, Izzy was on a girls’ softball team.

  Annika knew “Three strikes and you’re out” was the rule in softball. But it wasn’t necessarily a good rule for life. In life you might have to try more than three times to get what you wanted. Look how many times she had already tried to train Prime to count! Still, she thought Izzy was right that, given their track record, baking a fourth batch of chocolate chip cookies wasn’t a good idea.

  “We could sell something else,” she said. “Something that goes with cookies, like—”

  “Lemonade!” Izzy and Kelsey shouted together.

  “Like lemonade!” Annika said.

  * * *

  The girls looked up a recipe on the Internet for extra-fancy, old-fashioned, fresh-squeezed lemonade, like the kind you could buy at the baseball games downtown in the summer. In Annika’s kitchen cupboards they found most of the things they’d need: a five-pound bag of sugar, a big stack of plastic cups, a box of straws, and a juice squeezer. Kelsey called her mother to ask if she’d be willing to help make the lemonade at the booth, and Annika’s mother agreed to drive them to the store to buy ice and lemons.

  “But I want you girls to contribute some of the money to buy the lemons,” Mrs. Riz told them. “Maybe you would have been more careful with the baking if you had bought the ingredients yourselves.”

  That wasn’t true. Even if they had spent a thousand dollars on chocolate chips—not that they had a thousand dollars to spend—none of them would have heard the timer ding.

  With money fished out of Kelsey’s and Izzy’s pockets and Annika’s piggy bank, the girls bought six dozen lemons, three for a dollar, and an enormous bag of crushed ice for five dollars. The total came to almost thirty dollars, but Annika’s mother relented and paid for half of it.

  Back at Annika’s house, as the three girls admired their lemons, laid out on Annika’s number-patterned tablecloth, Annika couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong.

  Maybe she was jumpy waiting for the contest results. Or maybe they had forgotten some important item for the lemonade. Sugar, lemons, cups, straws, juice squeezer, water, ice—what else could there be? They’d need measuring spoons, a sharp knife, and a cutting board for cutting the lemons, but her mother was going to send those along to the carnival so that Kelsey’s mother, helping at the booth, could cut the lemons on the spot. They needed a sign, but Kelsey could add the lemonade price to the sign she had already volunteered to make for the cookies. Kelsey had beautiful printing and loved making signs.

  Still, something didn’t feel right in Annika’s math house.

  Then she realized. Prime hadn’t greeted them at the door, jumping up to lick their faces and giving his frantic happy barks. He hadn’t come dashing into the kitchen, skidding on the tile floor with his clumsy paws.

  Where was Prime?

  “Have you seen Prime anywhere?” Annika asked her father, who had arrived i
n the kitchen to take a break from grading math papers.

  “Can’t say that I have. But he has to be somewhere in the house. There’s no way he could have gotten outside while you were gone.”

  But he looked more worried than he sounded. Prime never failed to welcome them when they came home.

  “Prime!” Annika called. “Prime!”

  She heard one feeble answering bark.

  “Prime!”

  Annika listened harder this time. A second muffled bark came from the pantry. She must have forgotten to shut the pantry door all the way when she hurried off on the lemonade shopping trip.

  There, on the floor of the narrow pantry, lay Prime.

  Beside him lay what had once been a partially full bag of dog biscuits, but was now a completely empty bag.

  Prime looked up at Annika with guilty eyes, gave one low moan, and threw up.

  “Dad!” Annika yelled. “Mom!”

  Behind her, Kelsey and Izzy gaped at Prime, while Annika’s dad grabbed a mop from the mudroom and her mother arrived with an armful of old towels.

  “Oh, Prime!” Annika scolded him, but it was really her fault for leaving the pantry door ajar. And for getting him so interested in dog biscuits in the first place.

  His stomach empty, Prime apparently felt better. He barked and barked and barked and barked, more than Annika had ever heard him bark before, as if he was barking once for every dog biscuit in the entire bag.

  “See?” Annika said to Kelsey and Izzy, half laughing, half crying. “Prime did learn how to count after all.”

  At least he now knew the difference between a few dog biscuits and too many dog biscuits, which was what counting was all about.

  And maybe that was enough math for even a mathematically minded dog to learn.

  10

  Annika’s father was going to drive Kelsey and Izzy home at three o’clock to get ready for the carnival.

  “Don’t forget to make the sign,” Annika told Kelsey.

  “I won’t,” Kelsey promised.

  “Let us know if you get a phone call that you won,” Izzy told Annika.

  “They can’t call until the contest ends at five,” Annika said, “and we’ll be at the carnival by then.”

  “Well, maybe your time was so amazing that they declared you the winner early because it was already a world record for third-grade sudoku,” Izzy said.

  “You guys!” Annika shoved them out the door to the garage. Then she did go check the answering machine, just in case she’d somehow missed hearing the phone ring.

  * * *

  The three friends were the first kids at Mrs. Molina’s booth so that they could start making their lemonade. They worked together in a row.

  Kelsey’s mother cut the lemons.

  Kelsey filled a tall plastic cup with ice and poured in one cup of water.

  Izzy stirred in a heaping tablespoon of sugar.

  Annika finished by squeezing in the juice of one lemon; she put half of the squeezed-out lemon in the cup, too, to look pretty.

  By the time the carnival opened right at five, they had twenty-four cups of lemonade lined up ready to sell. Lots of kids had arrived with cookies as well, all of the cookies looking as if they contained the right amount of baking soda and had baked the right number of minutes.

  “Where’s the sign?” Annika suddenly remembered.

  “It’s in my mom’s car,” Kelsey said. “I’ll go get it. Relax!”

  How could Annika possibly relax when at this very minute the sudoku contest at the public library was coming to an end? Her parents were coming to the carnival later, but they had promised to listen for the phone and have one of them drive over to Franklin School the minute they heard anything.

  If they heard anything, of course. The librarian hadn’t said she’d call everybody; she said she’d call the winners.

  Was Annika a winner or not?

  She saw Simon approaching the booth, carrying a carton so enormous he could barely manage it all by himself. He began unloading plate after plate filled with cookies of every kind: chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, cookies studded with M&Ms, cookies filled with raspberry jam, cookies frosted with icing in yellow and green, the Franklin School colors.

  So Simon wasn’t only a math whiz, a reading whiz, a science whiz, and a social studies whiz. Apparently he was a cookie-baking whiz, too.

  Annika was dying to ask him what his sudoku contest time had been. Was it faster than hers or not? But she couldn’t bear to come right out with the question. What if he had beaten her, even after all her practice? Kelsey and Izzy would be so disappointed, too, and they’d try to say something meant to be comforting, like “Cheer up, it was just a dumb math thing anyway.”

  “Go walk around and check out the other booths,” Izzy ordered her as Annika stood twisting one of the lemonade straws so tightly that it broke. “Kelsey and I can take the first shift selling the lemonade. Go!”

  Annika hurried off to explore the carnival.

  She saw Cody waiting in line at one of the fourth-grade booths. This must be the supergross one he kept talking about.

  NOSE PICKING BOOTH, the sign said.

  On a large plywood board was painted a big grinning face. From the two huge nostril holes cut into the painted nose flowed a stream of fake green slime. For two tickets—fifty cents—kids could reach into the nose and pull out a prize. Annika could tell that the fun wasn’t getting the prize as much as it was accepting a dare to do something so disgusting.

  The biggest crowd was at the dunking tank. Above a tall swimming pool Mr. Boone was sitting on a small plastic seat. He wasn’t wearing his bathing suit, but he had on shorts and a Franklin School T-shirt. Annika had never seen a principal in shorts before. His bare feet dangled from his perch. She had never seen a barefoot principal before, either. As of this moment he was completely dry.

  “Don’t dunk me!” he pleaded to the kids swarming around the tank. “Have some respect for your distinguished principal! Please don’t pay eight tickets to dunk me while raising money for the Franklin School PTA!”

  But the ticket taker was already accepting a string of eight tickets—worth two dollars—from one of the pushiest fifth graders, who had shoved his way to the front of the throng.

  “Don’t dunk me!” Mr. Boone mock-wailed. “Don’t—”

  Down he went with a terrific splash to deafening applause and squeals from kids who got drenched from the spray.

  After shaking himself like a wet dog, Mr. Boone climbed back up the ladder to his perch.

  “Don’t dunk me again!” he called out to the crowd. “Once was enough! Don’t do—”

  Splash!

  Then one of the second-grade teachers, also wearing shorts and a T-shirt, climbed up for her own plunge to watery doom.

  Annika knew she should get back to Mrs. Molina’s class booth to let Izzy and Kelsey have some carnival fun, but it was hard to leave the hilarity of the dunking booth. Plus, she wanted to get her face painted, fish for prizes, buy cotton candy—everything! But first she’d wait until Mr. Boone got dunked again.

  “Annika!”

  Over the catcalls from the kids by the dunking tank, she heard someone shouting her name. She whirled around to see who it could be.

  Hurrying toward her was her father, the grin on his face as wide as infinity, a number greater than any other number.

  That could mean only one thing.

  “Guess who won the sudoku prize out of all the third graders in the entire city?”

  Annika snuggled into his embrace. She would have had a harder time winning if she hadn’t been the daughter of two math parents living in the math house with a math dog.

  Then she let him head home to do a little more grading while she pelted back to the booth to share the good news with Kelsey and Izzy.

  Now they’d see how cool math was!

  Now they’d try to do math, too!

  Mrs. Molina’s booth had a gratifyingly long line of customers in f
ront of it. Five or six students were helping with the sales, as well as parent helpers and Mrs. Molina, too. Their teacher wasn’t wearing shorts and a Franklin School T-shirt; even at a carnival she was wearing the same teacher clothes she wore every day to school.

  Izzy was busy handing a gray-haired woman customer a cup of lemonade, while Kelsey was handing her one of Simon’s cookies.

  Annika couldn’t wait another second to tell them. She wouldn’t have blurted out the news in front of Simon, not wanting to make him feel bad in the middle of the carnival, but he wasn’t at the booth right now.

  “I won!” she called out.

  “Yay!” shouted Izzy.

  “Hooray!” shouted Kelsey.

  Then Annika recognized the woman taking the first sip of her lemonade. It was the children’s librarian!

  “I see you heard the good news,” she said, smiling. “Your father told me he’d get the message to you right away. Congratulations!”

  Annika beamed.

  With the librarian standing right here, she had to take advantage of the chance to ask the thing she wanted to know most. “How many third graders entered the contest?”

  It was wonderful enough to have beaten Simon, but every third-grade class in every school probably had its own Simon, and it was even more wonderful to think of beating them all.

  “Well,” the librarian said, looking uncomfortable, “I know we didn’t send out publicity to the schools soon enough. It’s a busy time of year for a lot of people.”

  “So how many were there?” Annika persisted.

  Even beating six people would be something to be proud of.

  Even beating one person, if that person was Simon Ellis.

  “Well,” the librarian said again, unable to meet Annika’s eyes. “The fact of the matter is…”

  Annika waited for her to finish the sentence.

  “You were the only one.”

  11

  Annika’s cheeks flamed.

  No one else had entered the contest?

  Not even Simon?

  All that practice to get her time down to fourteen minutes, when she could have won with a time of fourteen hours, because apparently she was the only third grader in the entire city who cared enough about anything math-y to enter the contest.