Solving for M

by Jennifer Swender

  I wonder exactly when my mom noticed it. I’ve seen her run her fingers over the scar millions of times. When did everything change?

  I suddenly think of this silly movie that Mom and I watched once. A guy makes a deal with the devil to have all of his wishes come true. But his wishes keep getting messed up. He asks to be president of the United States so people will respect him. And he does get to be president, but it turns out he’s Lincoln the night he goes to Ford’s Theatre.

  I know I said I wanted things to change. I wanted all this quiet and waiting and emptiness to end. I wanted it all to be over, but this is not what I meant. And if everything can change so suddenly and so randomly, maybe we should just stop pretending that there are any rules at all.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Grandma Beau says. “We couldn’t call over the weekend because it was, you know, the weekend. Well, we probably could have called, but your mom wasn’t ready to call, but now it’s Monday….” Her voice trails off. “I can’t force her to call, Mika. It’s like she doesn’t want to know.”

  “It’s always better to know,” I say, more to myself than Grandma Beau.

  “It’s not the end of the world,” Grandma Beau says in a way that begs me to tell her she’s right. She wipes her nose on her sleeve. “If it is something, you know, they’ll just have to do another excision.” She folds the dish towel in front of her. Then she shakes it out and folds it again.

  “Another scoop out of the old peach,” I say. And I wonder how many scoops you can take before there’s no more peach left to scoop.

  “But if it is something, Mika, it’s…” Grandma Beau pauses for a minute. “It might be not so good.”

  I don’t know exactly what she means by not so good, but I know close enough.

  I stand up and walk to the fridge, but I don’t open the door. Instead, I tear a piece of to-do-list paper off the magnet pad. Then I go into my mom’s office and dial the phone. Katie answers.

  “Hi, Mika,” she says. “We can’t wait to see you. Did you get your ticket?”

  I don’t tell her yet that I’m not coming.

  “Is Dad there?” I ask.

  My dad’s at work, but Katie gives me the number and says she’ll also text him. I call Jeannie and leave her a message, too. Then I call Chelsea. She picks up. Then I try Dee Dee. Her number goes straight to voicemail. Her sister’s probably on the phone, but I know Dee Dee will call me back as soon as she can.

  After a few minutes, the phone rings. I talk to Jeannie. As soon as I hang up, it rings again. It’s my dad. And when I finally come out of the office, about twenty-one million phone calls later, I have my list.

  I go to my mom’s room and sit down on the side of her bed, gently.

  Mom opens her eyes. “Mika,” she whispers. She’s lying on her side, curled up like a little kid trying not to have a nightmare.

  “So,” I start, “it looks like it’s going to take a little longer to deal with all this than we first thought.” I glance at my list. “Number one: I’m not going to Florida.”

  I get ready for the big explanation, to make my case and list my reasons, but Mom just nods.

  “Number two: Dad has a colleague at the medical center here, and she can get you in for something called a PET scan. Dee Dee says it’s sort of like a super-duper X-ray that shows”—I look down at my paper—“metabolic activity.”

  “Okay,” Mom says blankly.

  “You don’t have to stay overnight,” I say. “So Grandma Beau will bring you, and Jeannie will pick you up. But you won’t be back before I get home from school. So number three: Dee Dee and Chelsea will come home with me on the bus that day. We’ll make dinner for everybody. Just the girls.”

  Mom doesn’t say anything, and for a second I wonder if she’s even heard what I said. Then I hear her voice catch.

  “Thank you, Mika,” she says. And then, after a long moment, she asks, “Do we know right then?”

  “It takes a day or two to interpret the data,” I tell her.

  And suddenly I wonder how much different next week will be from this week. Which direction are we traveling on this number line—positive or negative?

  And then the question I really need to know the answer to becomes clear. “Mom,” I say, “are you scared?”

  She takes a deep breath. “Oh, my Mika-Mouse,” she says.

  I lean my forehead on her shoulder and let her hug me. I don’t bother measuring how long it lasts. Then I just cry.

  Math Journal Entry #23

  Think of a question, any question.

  Collect some relevant data to help you find the answer.

  Explain your thinking using words, numbers, and/or pictures.

  The next few days go by in a blur of pretending everything is normal. I wake up. I make my bed. I go to school. I come home. I do my homework.

  Mr. Vann’s data chart now takes up most of the board. He adds another entry at the bottom, and then tells us to interpret, interpret, interpret.

  Looking at the chart, it’s pretty easy to see that on chilly or rainy days, math starts right on time, if not a few minutes early. On nice days, math starts later and later.

  “So what does the data tell us?” Mr. Vann asks. “What does it all mean?”

  Dee Dee summarizes: “When it’s nice outside, we’re late, and when it’s not, we’re not.”

  “On this particular day”—Mr. Vann points to a Thursday where class started twenty-two minutes earlier than usual—“I presume we had a hurricane or possibly a tornado. I hope everyone made it through that extreme weather event unharmed.” He pauses. “Although here it merely says: Overcast. High fifty-nine. Low forty-five. But as Dee Dee explained, when the weather is good, we arrive late. When the weather is bad, we arrive early. And on this day we arrived very early, so the weather must have been very bad.” Mr. Vann raises an eyebrow and waits.

  Chelsea flips through her day planner. “That was an early-dismissal day,” she says. “It had nothing to do with the weather.”

  “Correct,” Mr. Vann says. “Big data is big, and big data is data, but let us not be lured by its temptations. Let us not be confused by promises of exactitudes that do not exist. Let us not be coerced by correlations that may or may not be real. I remind you that no matter how clean your data, life is quite messy.”

  Mr. Vann closes his eyes and stays quiet, I guess to let the thought sink in. And I agree. Data is important, crucial even, but it doesn’t give you the whole story.

  I close my eyes, too. I get this picture in my mind of the person, whoever he or she is, whose job it will be to interpret my mom’s scan results. That person will see tons of data about metabolic activity. That person will learn a whole lot about the cells in my mom’s lower left extremity. But that person won’t really know my mom.

  I open my eyes when I hear the click, click, click of Principal Mir coming down the hallway. She walks into the room and stands by the door. Mr. Vann still has his eyes closed.

  It’s not like the class is misbehaving or anything. Even Dan is quiet. But it’s not like we’re actually doing anything, either. And I remember what Chelsea said way back when about how Mr. Vann might belong in an alternative school and not Highbridge Middle. Principal Mir’s expression looks like she might be thinking the same thing.

  After a few long minutes, I hear the click, click, click leave and fade away down the hall.

  Mr. Vann pops his eyes open. “Who would like to share some data? For example, a survey that shows that nine out of ten people agree that caring is sharing.”

  “Sharing is caring,” Dan corrects him.

  “Yes, it is.” Mr. Vann smiles.

  A bunch of kids share their math journal entries as Mr. Vann walks around the room, this time with his eyes open.

  Dee Dee shares the length of her sister’s telephon
e conversations over the past week. “Due to some ongoing romantic drama at the high school,” she explains, “there has been a definite uptick in phone minutes.”

  “Fascinating,” Mr. Vann says from behind my desk. He takes a minute to peek over my shoulder at my math journal. Then he puts a sticky note on the page.

  I don’t know what I did to deserve any bonus points. I didn’t collect very much data, and my data doesn’t even help me answer the question I really need to answer. But when I look down, the sticky note says Googolplex. I don’t know what googolplex is exactly, just that it’s a really, really big number.

  “Who’s next to share?” Mr. Vann asks.

  Chelsea raises her hand so high it looks like she’s trying to touch the ceiling. “I finally made a birthday chart to keep track of the cupcakes. Better late than never. Then I turned the data into a pie chart, and then I turned the pie chart into an actual pie.”

  Chelsea points to a box on the counter.

  “Three thousand billion bonus points!” Mr. Vann shouts. He reaches into his desk drawer and pulls out a pie cutter, some small paper plates, and a box of plastic forks. Again, how he fits all that stuff in there…

  “I don’t think three thousand billion is a real number,” Dan says.

  “Real numbers were covered in chapter two, Mr. Pimental,” Mr. Vann says, running to the back of the room. He opens the box and starts slicing up the pie.

  * * *

  —

  Dee Dee and Chelsea come home on the bus with me. When we get to my stop, I see Chelsea’s mom waiting in her car on the corner. It reminds me of elementary school, when Mom used to drive out to the bus stop if it was raining or super cold.

  “Hi, Mom!” Chelsea calls. She doesn’t seem surprised to see her.

  “Your mom’s here?” I say. “You can’t stay?”

  Chelsea’s mom gets out of the car and walks around to the trunk. “Hi, girls!” she calls to us. “I’ll pick you up around seven, Chels.”

  Chelsea’s mom opens the trunk and takes out a cooler, the kind you use for camping or a really big picnic. It has wheels and a handle to pull it. She sets the cooler on the sidewalk. Then she waves, gets back into her car, and drives away.

  “Thanks, Mom!” Chelsea calls after her. “Ingredients,” she says to me. “I couldn’t lug everything to school with me, not with the pie.”

  “I’ll get it,” Dee Dee says. She drops her backpack, jogs over, and picks up the handle of the cooler. The back of her T-shirt today says: Stand back. I’m going to try science. Underneath the words, there’s a picture of a huge explosion. I hope that’s not a prediction for our dinner.

  “You didn’t have to do all that,” I say to Chelsea.

  “Yes, I did,” she says. She picks up Dee Dee’s backpack from the sidewalk and runs to catch up with her.

  I look at the two of them ahead of me. I know sometimes I wish I could go back in time, to third grade or even just to the beginning of this year. But back then I thought Dee Dee was a kind-of-odd science geek and Chelsea was a slightly annoying Goody Two-shoes. I couldn’t see all their sides and angles.

  So I guess I was right about calculators after all. They are a handy support when you’re working through a very long and complicated problem.

  Math Journal Entry #24

  Collect some data, any data.

  Let your data paint a picture.

  Then interpret what you see.

  Today, Mr. Vann gives us an actual test from the actual textbook.

  “Principal Mir insists,” he says as he passes out the stapled packets. “Something about needing to know where we stand, although I believe I’m standing right here.” He looks down at his feet.

  Chelsea follows Mr. Vann around the classroom, passing out little baggies of cookies. “One to a customer,” she says quietly.

  “Dear thinkers,” Mr. Vann announces, “please begin.”

  “The cookies or the test?” Dan says with a grin.

  Mr. Vann nods seriously. “Both.”

  The test isn’t just about data. It’s about everything we’ve learned so far this year. I decide to start with the easy questions, and then move on to the more challenging ones. But actually, they all seem pretty easy.

  The thing is the test just asks for the answers. You don’t have to explain your thinking using words, numbers, and/or pictures. You don’t have to embark on reflective discussions of math concepts. You only have to find the answer. It almost feels like cheating.

  I’m done pretty quickly, and Mr. Vann has given us the entire math block, so I check my answers. I’m almost through my second round of attending to precision when I hear the ding-ding-ding of the PA system.

  “Sorry for the interruption,” Ms. Alice says, “but could you send Mika Barnes down to the office, please?”

  At least she said my name correctly. But then I feel it, the clench at the back of my neck, like someone has grabbed me from behind. Dee Dee and Chelsea look up from their tests and over to me.

  I was so lost in math that I’d actually forgotten. Today is the day my mom would probably get her test results. I guess the data has been interpreted. Now we know, and I suddenly don’t know if knowing is always better.

  “Oh, and have her stop by her locker and get her things,” Ms. Alice adds. “She’s going home early.”

  I stand and pick up my test. I walk over and hand it to Mr. Vann. He looks through the pages, scanning the answers. Then he flips back to the first page and skims through the entire test again. He pulls a red pencil from his desk drawer and writes RM in big bubble letters on the front.

  “Mr. Vann?” Ms. Alice interrupts the silence.

  My feet feel stuck to the floor. I don’t want to go.

  “She’s on her way,” Mr. Vann says.

  I walk down the empty hallway. It feels like it takes forever to get to my locker. Another weird thing about time—the way it sometimes gets all pulled out like a piece of gum or a rubber band that stretches way more than you expect it to.

  I fill my backpack. I don’t know if we have a new math journal quandary, but I take my math journal just in case. I swing my backpack over my shoulder and close my locker.

  When I get to the main office, Mr. B is standing outside the door. Today’s tie has cats wearing tie-dyed vests and playing electric guitars. How does that tie exist in the same world where my mom is so sick?

  “Oh, hi, Mika,” Mr. B says, as if I’ve surprised him, as if it was my idea to come down to the office. “Got everything?”

  I nod. I feel my throat tighten and my eyes get hot. I’m staring right at Mr. B’s silly, silly tie. I want to strangle all of those stupid, ridiculous cats.

  This is not where I want to be. I want to be back in Mr. Vann’s class on a regular messed-up day, rolling my eyes at Dan P. or running to Quadrant Two or building three-dimensional figures out of marshmallows or eating Chelsea’s fancy cupcakes.

  If I can’t stand what’s going to happen in the future, then I’d rather just go back to the past. Back to when my biggest problem was wanting my own phone or worrying about what the Onesies were wearing.

  I want to go back to doing the chapters in the right order. I want to go back to the world where two comes after one, and three comes after two, and four comes after three. Where if you follow the directions, the picture always turns out the right way.

  I step into the main office. Ms. Alice has the phone in the crook of her neck as she waters plants on the windowsill. She gestures over to the waiting sofa with her chin.

  There’s Mom and Grandma Beau. I can tell from their faces that they’ve been crying.

  “Mika.” Mom looks up. I feel my own face crumble. I run over and collapse in her lap.

  “Honey, it’s good news,” she says into my hair. “I’m sorry if we frightened you. I can’t
help the crying, but they’re happy tears, Mika. Happy tears.”

  “It’s nothing,” Grandma Beau says, wiping her nose with the back of her sleeve. “Turns out it’s nothing. So we’re going out for lunch, and you’re coming with us.”

  Mom picks up my backpack. “I will let you play hooky just this once,” she says in her Mom-trying-to-be-cool way.

  “Everybody else’s parents let them,” I say through my sniffles.

  * * *

  —

  Jeannie meets us at the eggplant place.

  “We should go to Paris to celebrate,” she says.

  The waitress brings us a stack of extra napkins since the ones on the table have already been used wiping eyes and noses. “You know, carpe diem and c’est la vie and all that,” Jeannie says, blowing her nose with a loud honk.

  I laugh. Like what are the chances of us actually going to Paris?

  “I am totally serious,” Jeannie says totally seriously. “I have more frequent flier miles than I’m ever going to frequently fly. Let’s just go. Let’s go now. Well, after the eggplant.”

  “I have school tomorrow,” I say.

  “And I don’t think I’m quite up to that just yet,” Mom says.

  It’s not like my mom is suddenly all better. What her clean scan means is that nothing has really changed. She’ll still do her treatments. We will keep “watching and waiting,” as her doctors say. It’s the same-old-same-old, which is suddenly pretty great.

  “Besides,” Mom says, “Mika and I are saving Paris for when she graduates from high school. Right, Mika?”

  “Right,” I say with a nod.

  Jeannie doesn’t seem to be listening. She takes out her phone and starts tapping and swiping. “Let’s just see, shall we? Oh là là!” She swoons. “This looks interesting. Not Paris, but it still might be, like, awesome.” She does the last part in her best surfer-girl voice.

  Jeannie hands her phone to Grandma Beau, who scrolls down and nods. “But it’s Wednesday to Wednesday. Mika goes back to school on that Monday.”