The Prime-Time Burglars

by David Cole

  “I’m in too,” Justin added.

  “We could meet on Saturday mornings, and we—” I began.

  “Um, Saturday mornings aren’t good for me,” Stephanie said. “I have soccer practice.”

  “Well, when is soccer season over?” Justin asked.

  “It’s never really over,” she replied. “There’s a fall season, then the winter indoor soccer league, then spring season. And then there are camps during the summer, which are usually mostly drills but still fun and a good way…”

  “We get it. What you’re saying is that you’re stuck playing soccer every Saturday.” Justin interrupted.

  “Pretty much,” she said, twisting her ponytail tightly around her finger. “But I don’t think of it as being stuck. I really love playing soccer.”

  “Sounds like being stuck to me,” Justin said.

  I stepped in to try to salvage the situation. I didn’t want to see the math club dissolve before it even got started.

  “How about Saturday afternoons? Would that work for everyone?”

  Stephanie and her ponytail nodded vigorously. We both looked at Justin. He took a long pause and then nodded. The club was on!

  Chapter 3

  Okay, what should we call ourselves?” Stephanie asked.

  “How about, the Math Kids?” Justin said.

  “That’s perfect!” said Stephanie. “It says just what we are and isn’t cutesy. I hate cutesy.”

  I had been about to suggest the Three Mathketeers, as another option, which is about as cutesy as it gets, but instead I bit my lip and said “Yeah, that would work.”

  “And Jordan should be president, since it was his idea!” Stephanie said.

  Justin seconded that opinion, and just like that we had a club, a name, and a president.

  We decided to have our first official meeting at my house on Saturday afternoon. We all decided to bring some of our favorite math puzzles. Stephanie said she would bring double-stuffed Oreos. I agreed to supply the milk. With all the club necessities figured out, we dropped Stephanie off at her house and I walked the rest of the way home with Justin, cutting through the Greenfeld’s back yard on the way.

  “You know, Stephanie’s not bad. For a girl, I mean,” I said as Justin left me at my door.

  “Yeah, I guess,” he said without much commitment. I watched him walk away. He’ll come around, I thought. Just wait until the first meeting. The combination of Stephanie’s math skills and her double-stuffed Oreos would be the winning ticket.

  The timing for our first meeting turned out to be perfect because we were about to get the first real challenge as the Math Kids.

  “I’m home,” I yelled as I walked through the mudroom, as if the sound of the slamming door and my backpack getting thrown into my cubby weren’t loud enough to announce my presence.

  “I’ll alert the media,” my sister, Linda, said sarcastically from the family room. I could hear one of her stupid shows on the TV.

  “That’s about as funny as a screen door in a submarine,” I shot back.

  “That joke is as old as grandma’s bathrobe,” she replied.

  “You should know since you smell like her bathrobe.” My comeback didn’t make much sense, but it was always important to get the last insult in.

  That was a typical conversation for my older sister and me. Linda was in middle school now and thought she was too cool to be seen with me in public, but at home with no one around she wasn’t so bad. We teased each other incessantly, but I knew she’d always be there for me if I needed her. She had gotten me out of trouble more than once with my parents, so I guess I owed her.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “Upstairs, I think.”

  “More importantly—”

  “—when’s dinner?” Linda interrupted, finishing my sentence for me.

  “You know me too good.” I laughed.

  “Well,” my mother said as she entered the room.

  “Well what?” I said in confusion.

  “You know me too well,” she said.

  Now I was really confused. “Of course I know you.”

  “You are such a doofus,” my sister said. “She means that it should be you know me too well instead of you know me too good.”

  As I’ve said before, I am really good at math, but I’m a complete flop when it comes to English. I’m clueless about when to when to use good or well, or whether it’s their, they’re, or there. My sister and my mom are always correcting me, but my dad cuts me some slack. He shares my love of all things math. He is a mechanical engineer and always says that you can’t be good at everything, so you might as well be good at something important—like math!

  “Okay, you know me too well,” I said. “But seriously—”

  “—when’s dinner?” my sister finished my sentence with a grin.

  “How did you know that’s what he was going to say?” My mother laughed.

  “It’s not too tough to figure it out when that’s the first thing out of his mouth every day when he walks in the door,” Linda explained.

  “That’s not true,” I argued as I headed for the pantry to see if I could find something to eat. “Sometimes I ask what’s for dinner instead of when’s dinner.”

  “Jordan, don’t go filling up on junk food right before we eat,” my mom said.

  “But I’m starving,” I responded.

  “I think you can hold out for another thirty minutes.”

  “How about if I just have a couple of graham crackers?”

  “Two.”

  “How about four?” I asked.

  “Three, and that’s it.”

  My mom and I had that same conversation almost every day when I came home from school. I said I was hungry. She said to wait for dinner. I asked for graham crackers or some other snack. We bargained on the number. That was alright though. She almost never bargained me down lower than I wanted to go, and I suppose I never got more than she wanted me to have, so in the end it worked out okay for everybody.

  I munched on my graham crackers and had a glass of milk while my mom bustled around the kitchen preparing dinner. She was reading a recipe off of her iPad while she worked. She was making some kind of casserole thing that was full of spinach and vegetables. It even smelled green. It made me wish I’d tried to bargain for a few more graham crackers.

  I had finished my snack and managed to get my glass into the sink with only one reminder from my mom when I heard the garage door go up and I knew my dad was home. Sometimes he’d play catch with me before dinner, but he seemed engrossed in the evening newspaper, so I didn’t ask him this time.

  “Another burglary,” he said as he turned the page in the paper. “That’s the third one this week. They seem to be getting bolder too. The woman was at home and they stole a purse right off of the kitchen table.”

  “She’s lucky she wasn’t hurt,” my mom said without lifting her eyes from her iPad.

  Twenty minutes later, I was poking at my dinner, trying to avoid some of the grosser veggies, when Linda came up with the first challenge for the Math Kids.

  It didn’t start as a math problem, but that’s where it ended up.

  “Daddy,” Linda said—

  I knew right away that she wanted something. When a sentence started with Daddy, it was usually followed by I want or can I. And that was true in this case.

  —“can I have some friends over to celebrate my birthday next week?” she asked.

  “Like a party?” my dad asked.

  “No, more like a little dinner. I was thinking Mom could help me make lasagna and cheesy garlic bread, and maybe some cheesecake for dessert!” Linda said excitedly.

  “That’s a pretty cheesy meal isn’t it?” My dad smiled.

  “Everything she does is cheesy,” I added, drawing a frown of
disapproval from my mother and a stuck-out tongue from my sister.

  “I think we could make that happen,” said my mom. “How many are you inviting?”

  “I was thinking of inviting seven, so there would be eight people altogether,” Linda responded. She ticked names off on her fingers while she listed potential attendants. “Me, Amy, Brad, Beth, Charles, Debbie, Emily, and Frances.”

  “A boy girl party, huh? I thought we had decided no boy girl parties until eighth grade,” my dad said with raised eyebrows.

  “But it’s not a party. It’s a dinner. That’s different,” Linda argued.

  “Sounds like a party to me,” I argued back, drawing a second stuck-out tongue from my sister.

  “Well, I suppose we could give it a try,” Mom said. “But everybody stays in the kitchen the whole time.”

  “I was hoping we could use the dining room,” Linda said, giving Dad her best pleading look.

  “Okay, then everybody stays in the dining room the whole time,” he said.

  “Hope nobody has to go to the bathroom.” I snorted. “That would make a real mess in the dining room.” That comment cost me doing the dishes that night, but it was worth it.

  The discussion continued for a couple of minutes, but I had lost interest in the dinner, or party, or whatever it was, by then. Instead, I was thinking about the first math club meeting the next day. What were we going to take on as our first math challenge? It was then that my sister unknowingly answered the question.

  “Now, all I need to do is figure out where everyone is going to sit,” she said.

  “It’s a round table, so why does it matter where you sit?” my dad asked.

  “It’s not as easy as you think, Dad,” Linda said. “I want to make sure I’m sitting by Amy since she’s my best friend. Brad and Beth are kind of going out, so I know they’ll want to sit next to each other, but Amy and I don’t want to sit next to them while they’re making goo-goo eyes at each other. Frances will want to sit next to Debbie. Amy doesn’t want to sit next to Charles since he wouldn’t dance with her at the summer dance, so I want to sit Charles next to either Debbie or Emily, but that’s going to make one of them mad, so Debbie and Emily can’t sit next to each other. Charles and Frances don’t like Brad, so I can’t put either of them next to him.”

  My mom and dad stared in amazement either at how complicated a simple birthday dinner could be or the fact that my sister could keep all of that information in her head.

  I looked at Linda and made a bold announcement. “I can solve that problem for you, Linda.”

  Linda looked a little unsure.

  “Trust me, I can do it,” I said. “If you can write down all the rules for who has to sit with who and who can’t sit with who, I’ll help you to arrange your table.”

  And with that, the Math Kids had their first problem to solve.

  Wait! Do you want to try to solve this puzzle before seeing if the Math Kids can do it? Try to Find a way to seat eight people around the table following these rules:

  Amy and Linda have to sit together

  Brad and Beth have to sit together

  Charles has to sit by either Debbie or Emily

  Frances has to sit by Debbie

  Amy and Linda can’t sit by Brad or beth

  Charles can’t sit by Brad

  Frances can’t sit by Brad

  Debbie and Emily can’t sit together

  Amy can’t sit by Charles

  There may be more than one right answer.

  Good luck!

  Chapter 4

  That’s not really a math problem, is it?” Stephanie asked as we settled into chairs in my dad’s home office. It was a great place for us to work since it had a large rolling white board.

  Stephanie was right. My sister’s dinner party was more of a logic problem than a math problem, but I still wanted it to be the Math Kids first challenge. I guess I wanted it because it was a real life problem, not just something out of a book. Luckily, Justin came to my rescue.

  “I think it is,” he said. “Logic is about using reasoning.”

  “And math is about operations using numbers,” Stephanie countered.

  “True,” Justin argued, “but when early mathematicians found math things they couldn’t understand they used logic to figure it out. So, without logic we wouldn’t have a lot of the math we have today.”

  Stephanie thought about this for a moment and nodded. “Okay, let’s do it,” she said.

  Yes! Our first challenge as a team!

  “What are the rules?” Justin asked.

  I wrote them out on my dad’s white board in my sloppy but readable handwriting:

  Amy and Linda have to sit together

  Brad and Beth have to sit together

  Charles has to sit by either Debbie or Emily

  Frances has to sit by Debbie

  Amy and Linda can’t sit by Brad or Beth

  Charles can’t sit by Brad

  Frances can’t sit by Brad

  Debbie and Emily can’t sit together

  Amy can’t sit by Charles

  “What is wrong with these people?” Stephanie asked.

  Justin and I broke into laughter. These rules were a little silly, but I still didn’t care because this was our first test.

  “Okay, what’s our first step?” I asked. I had a few ideas of my own, but I wanted to make sure we worked together on solving this.

  “We should—” Stephanie began.

  “We need to be able to see the problem better,” Justin interrupted.

  Stephanie was already on her feet in front of the white board. She drew a circle to show the table, with eight boxes around the circle to represent the chairs.

  “What are the numbers for?” Justin asked. “It’s a circle, so it doesn’t really matter where they sit.”

  “I thought if we give each chair a number, it would be easier to keep track,” she said.

  “Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” Justin said a little reluctantly. Still, I could tell that he was really getting into it. Our first challenge looked like it was going to be a hit.

  “Okay, we’re off to a great start!” I said.

  And then there was silence. Stephanie, Justin, and I stared at the board, our eyes moving back and forth between the rules and the picture of the table.

  “What do you think, Justin?” I asked.

  Justin responded with his usual “Mm-hmm,” and I knew his mind was hard at work.

  “What if we started with putting Linda and Amy at chairs 1 and 2?” I suggested.

  “That makes sense,” Stephanie agreed. “Like Justin said, since it’s a round table, it doesn’t really matter what position we put them at, so 1 and 2 are just as good as any other spots.”

  “And since they don’t want to sit by Beth and Brad, we know Brad and Beth aren’t at spots 3 or 8,” Justin added.

  Stephanie put Linda and Amy in their assigned spots and noted where Brad and Beth couldn’t be seated.

  “Okay, now we’re getting somewhere,” I said.

  At least I thought we were getting somewhere. After that first burst of inspiration, we hit a roadblock. We looked at the rules and the picture of the table, but no one could figure out where to go from there.

  “I’ve got an idea,” Stephanie said.

  Justin and I looked up hopefully.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Cookies!” she shouted.

  I had to laugh. Her excitement was contagious. And, after all, who could argue with cookies?

  We munched on Oreo cookies and drank large glasses of ice-cold milk while we stared at the white board. Somewhere in the middle of a large bite, Justin had an idea.

  “Since no one seems to like Brad, I think we can probably find some other spots where
he can’t sit,” he suggested.

  That makes sense, I thought. I also wondered why no one wanted to sit by Brad. I didn’t even know the guy, but I felt a little sorry for him. I remembered a kid in first grade, Tommy something, who always sat by himself. I used to think about asking him to join Justin and me, but I never did. Now I kind of wish I had.

  “Let’s start finding places Brad can’t sit,” said Stephanie. “Let’s start with spot 4.”

  “Okay, if Brad was at spot 4, who can sit in spot 3?” Justin asked.

  It turned out to be a great question.

  “If Brad sat in spot 4, then we can eliminate Charles and Frances from spot 3, since they didn’t want to sit by Brad,” I said. “That only leaves Debbie or Emily.”

  “And it can’t be Debbie, because she has to sit by Frances, so that only leaves Emily,” Stephanie said excitedly.

  “Where does that leave us?” Justin asked.

  Stephanie updated the picture with Brad in spot 4, Beth in spot 5, and Emily in spot 3.

  We were getting close, unless of course we were wrong about Brad being in spot 4.

  “If we’re right, that only leaves Charles, Frances, and Debbie,” I said.

  “Debbie has to be in spot 7!” Stephanie said excitedly.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Easy,” said Justin. “Debbie needs to sit by both Frances and Charles, so she has to be in the middle of them.”

  “And I think we can put Frances and Charles in either of spots 6 or 8,” I said.

  Stephanie completed the picture and we all stared at it, then back at the rules, then back at the picture of the table.

  I could tell that everyone was running through each of the rules to make sure our answer was right. Stephanie made it official by putting a check mark by each rule as she made sure our answer worked.

  Amy and Linda have to sit together ✓

  Brad and Beth have to sit together ✓

  Charles has to sit by either Debbie or Emily ✓

  Frances has to sit by Debbie ✓

  Amy and Linda can’t sit by Brad or Beth ✓