She waited to hear Kelsey and Izzy howling with laughter.
We told you that everybody else thinks math is boring!
But they didn’t laugh even a little bit.
“I bet Simon was afraid to enter!” Izzy said.
“He knew you’d beat him, so he didn’t even try!” Kelsey chimed in.
They were the best friends anyone could ever have, even if they thought she was weird for loving math. She gulped back the sob that was surging up in her throat.
The grownup in line behind the librarian interrupted their conversation. “Are you girls here to gab or to sell cookies and lemonade?”
The librarian shot him a silencing look. “Congratulations again, Annika. You deserve to win not just for being such an amazing sudoku-puzzle-solver, but for being the only kid who even tried.”
Annika forced herself to give a small smile. Mr. Boone had said something just like that the other day, and her dad had said something like that, too. Maybe, in the end, the important thing was just trying.
“So what do I owe you for the cookie and lemonade?” the librarian asked. She looked at the sign Kelsey had made. “Oh, I see, one ticket for the lemonade and one for the cookie.”
As Izzy took the two tickets, for the first time Annika saw Kelsey’s sign, lettered in Kelsey’s neat, colorful printing:
DELICIOUS HOME-BAKED COOKIES!
1 ticket per cookie!
DELICIOUS FRESH-SQUEEZED LEMONADE!
1 ticket per glass!
Oh, no!
Annika should have talked to Kelsey first, before she made the sign!
The most important thing about a sign for a carnival sale wasn’t what it looked like, but what price it said.
She tugged on Kelsey’s sleeve and drew her away from the booth. Looking bewildered, Izzy followed. They deserved a break anyway; Simon had showed up to take his shift.
“One ticket per glass?” Annika demanded, trying to keep her voice level.
Even Prime would know better than that!
“It’s the same price as the cookies,” Kelsey said defensively.
“People have been buying a lot of it,” Izzy backed her up.
“Do the math!” Annika wailed.
Her two friends stared at her. They had never done a math problem voluntarily in their lives. She would have to help them through this one.
“How much is a ticket worth?” she asked.
“Twenty-five cents,” both girls replied.
“And each cup is made with the juice of one lemon,” she continued.
They nodded.
“How much did each lemon cost?”
Kelsey and Izzy both shrugged.
“I don’t remember,” Kelsey admitted.
“It added up to a lot of money, I know that much,” Izzy said.
“Exactly! It added up to a lot of money, because we bought six dozen lemons, and they were three for a dollar!”
Amazingly, both girls still didn’t seem to get it.
“Three for a dollar,” Annika repeated. “So how much did each lemon cost? And, no, I’m not going to tell you the answer this time! And I’m not going to tell you any answers anymore, ever again. I’ll help you learn math, but I won’t do math for you. I’ve been whispering math answers to you all year long, and look what happens: you can’t even tell me how much a lemon costs!”
Now Kelsey and Izzy had the same panicked, paralyzed expression, as if Mrs. Molina had just asked them to do a decimal problem. Actually, this was about to turn into a real-life decimal problem.
Mrs. Molina had drawn closer, apparently interested to hear what the three friends were arguing about. Annika could just imagine a small smile playing around the corners of the teacher’s mouth.
Izzy and Kelsey conferred with each other in low voices.
Then Izzy said, “Well, if lemons are three for a dollar, then each one costs a third of a dollar.”
“But what’s a third of a dollar?” Kelsey had always been even worse at math than Izzy. “Okay, a quarter of a dollar is a quarter—it’s twenty-five cents. So a third of a dollar has to be more than that.”
“Thirty-three cents!” Izzy suddenly shouted.
“Thirty-three and a third cents,” Annika corrected. “But you can round it down to thirty-three.”
She heard Mrs. Molina give a low chuckle of satisfaction.
“Oh,” Kelsey said then, her face crumpling. “The price is too low! If each lemon cost thirty-three cents, and we’re selling the lemonade for a quarter a glass, then we’re selling it for way less than it cost to make it!”
Even energetic, perky Izzy looked close to tears. “I’ve been squeezing those stupid lemons forever, and we’re making hardly any money? First we ruined all those horrible cookies, and now even our genius lemonade idea is a total bust. Maybe the three of us should just give up.”
“Quit while we’re ahead,” Kelsey agreed.
“No, quit while we’re behind!” Izzy said. “Before we get even further behind!”
Annika felt sorry for them, now that the sad mathematical truth of the situation had finally dawned.
“Look,” she said. “All we have to do is change the price. It’s still pretty early in the evening, so we can sell lots more glasses at the correct price, which should be…”
She thought for a moment. She didn’t know what the sugar, cups, and straws had cost, but it probably wasn’t that much, and the ice hadn’t been too expensive, either. Two tickets—fifty cents—would cover the cost of all the ingredients and materials, but if that’s all they made, they might as well have just donated the money and skipped all the work of making the lemonade.
“Three tickets,” she concluded. “Does anyone have a marker?”
“I have one here in my purse,” Mrs. Molina offered.
Kelsey and Izzy accepted it gratefully. Kelsey used her beautiful printing to turn “1 ticket” into “3 tickets,” so that it didn’t even look like a correction, but as if that had been the original price.
Hooray for math!
“We’re running low on lemonade,” one of the parent helpers called out.
“I’ll take over,” Annika told her friends. “Go and have fun at the carnival.”
Kelsey and Izzy ran off to the dunking tank while Annika joined Simon in the lemonade assembly line. As they worked together squeezing lemons and measuring sugar and water, she waited to see if Simon would say anything about why he hadn’t entered the contest.
He didn’t. So she finally said, not as a question, really, just as a comment, “You didn’t enter the sudoku contest.”
“I know,” he said glumly. “I should have done it after school during the week, but I waited until today, and then I got busy with baking a gazillion cookies for the carnival with my mom, and when I looked at the clock, it was too late. So I blew it. Did you do it?”
Annika nodded. She might as well tell him. “I just found out that I won.”
She didn’t need to add that she was the only kid who had even entered the contest. Winning was still winning.
“That’s cool!” Simon said. “I probably wouldn’t have won anyway. My best time wasn’t all that great.”
Annika sucked in her breath. Should she ask? Or was it better not to know? No, she had to ask. “What was your best time?”
“Around sixteen minutes. How about you?”
All her happiness came rushing back, but she tried to sound modest. “Fourteen.”
So even if Simon had entered, she probably would have won!
Cody Harmon was supposed to be starting his shift, replacing Simon, but he wasn’t there yet. When he finally raced up, he was panting with excitement.
“Mrs. Molina,” he called out, “I just checked, and any other teachers who want to be dunked can still do it!”
Mrs. Molina’s face showed no eagerness for dunking.
“Come on, Mrs. Molina,” Cody begged. “You’ll do it, won’t you? Mr. Boone was already dunked thirty-seven times!
”
All the kids working at the booth fell silent, obviously waiting to see what Mrs. Molina would say. But none of them joined in with Cody’s pleading.
How could Mrs. Molina be dunked in her regular teacher clothes?
How could she be dunked while wearing her regular teacher glasses?
How could she be dunked and still be Mrs. Molina?
Mrs. Molina was stern and cross sometimes during math class, but she loved math the way that Annika did, and she had been the one to tell Annika about the sudoku contest.
Annika wanted her still to be Mrs. Molina.
With Cody’s entreating eyes upon her, Mrs. Molina adjusted her glasses.
“Boys and girls,” she said, “Mr. Boone and I show our school spirit in different ways, just as all of you show your spirit in different ways. Annika showed her spirit today by representing our class in a citywide sudoku contest. She’s just been named the third-grade winner for the entire district.”
So Mrs. Molina had overheard that conversation as well.
“Mr. Boone clearly enjoys being dunked in a dunking tank,” she went on. “I do not. Different people enjoy different things. And we can all contribute to our school in different ways. Here’s how I plan to contribute: whatever cookies we have left over at the end of the evening, I will purchase myself to donate to the senior citizen center downtown.”
The kids clapped for Mrs. Molina then. Cody looked disappointed, but Annika knew her other classmates also seemed relieved that Mrs. Molina would still be Mrs. Molina, with dry clothes and neatly combed hair.
Besides, Mrs. Molina was right.
People were different.
Not everybody loved being dunked in a dunking tank and thought it was the most fun ever.
Not everybody loved math and thought it was the coolest subject ever.
But everybody should at least pay enough attention in math to be able to know how to price a glass of lemonade!
* * *
Two hours later, Annika, Kelsey, and Izzy were together eating cotton candy and fishing for prizes at the second-grade fishpond. Annika had won a sparkly bracelet, and Izzy had won a cute clip for her hair; Kelsey was about to dip her fishing pole into the water.
Then, over the loudspeakers set up for the carnival came Mr. Boone’s booming voice.
“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the carnival will come to an end in ten minutes. That’s not a minute too soon for me, because I am completely soaked!”
From the carnival crowd came hearty cheers.
“Now it’s time for our raffle drawing to see who wins the enormous stuffed elephant that has graced our Franklin School front hallway all week. We’re doing the drawing right now over by the dunking tank.”
Kelsey and Izzy took off running.
Annika didn’t bother to run after them. She hadn’t bothered to buy a raffle ticket, either. No true math person would buy a raffle ticket when you had such a mathematically low chance of winning.
Instead she headed back to their class booth and started counting up tickets in the ticket box to see how much money Mrs. Molina’s class had made at the carnival. The box was stuffed full to overflowing.
“All right,” came Mr. Boone’s voice over the speakers again. “We’ve drawn our winning ticket. Luckily I didn’t drip water all over it, so I can still read the winning name. The winner of our elephant is—”
Annika hardly listened, busy counting under her breath: forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine.
“Our winner is one of our terrific third graders: Annika Riz!”
Annika must have heard him wrong. Maybe some other third grader had a name that sounded like hers, if you weren’t really paying attention.
Then Izzy sprinted up to her, screaming, “You won, you won, you won!”
Breathless, Kelsey raced up to her, too.
“No, I didn’t! I couldn’t have won,” said Annika. “I didn’t even buy a ticket! I would never buy a raffle ticket.”
“We bought it!” Kelsey crowed.
“We bought three tickets, one for each of us,” Izzy sang out.
“I know you said raffles were dumb,” Kelsey explained, “but we figured, okay, if we enter we probably won’t win. But if we don’t enter, if we don’t at least try, we definitely won’t win. And we did win!”
“We can share him,” Annika said. “He can belong to all of us.”
“Because we’re best friends!” Kelsey and Izzy said together.
And the three best friends hugged again.
Also by
Claudia Mills
Dinah Forever
Losers, Inc.
Standing Up to Mr. O.
You’re a Brave Man, Julius Zimmerman
Lizzie at Last
7 × 9 = Trouble!
Alex Ryan, Stop That!
Perfectly Chelsea
Makeovers by Marcia
Trading Places
Being Teddy Roosevelt
The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish
How Oliver Olson Changed the World
One Square Inch
Fractions = Trouble!
Kelsey Green, Reading Queen
Zero Tolerance
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
175 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010
Text copyright © 2014 by Claudia Mills
Pictures copyright © 2014 by Rob Shepperson
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2014
eBook edition, May 2014
mackids.com
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Mills, Claudia.
Annika Riz, math whiz / Claudia Mills; pictures by Rob Shepperson. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Annika hopes to change her best friends’ hatred of math by winning a Sudoku contest, but she does not realize how important their lack of mathematical ability is until they make a mistake at the school carnival.
ISBN 978-0-374-30335-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-374-30336-5 (ebook)
[1. Mathematics—Fiction. 2. Schools—Fiction. 3. Contests—Fiction. 4. Carnivals—Fiction. 5. Friendship—Fiction.] I. Shepperson, Rob, illustrator. II. Title.
PZ7.M63963Ann 2014
[Fic]—dc23
2013012328
eISBN 9780374303365
Annika Riz, Math Whiz Page 5
