33 Minutes

by Todd Hasak-Lowy

Mr. Griegs uncrosses and recrosses his arms, because he thinks slowly. Next he removes his walkie-talkie and checks one of its dials. “You think you’re pretty smart, Lewis, don’t you?”

  I try not to smile, which today is pretty easy. “I think I need to go to the bathroom, Mr. Griegs. That’s all.”

  Mr. Griegs’s mustache appears to twitch. “Go on.” He raises half his upper lip, like he just figured out how bad it smells in here. “Get lost.”

  I hurry out of the cafeteria, hoping to catch Mr. Glassner, if only because he’s always on my side. More and more, that leaves him pretty much all by himself.

  You see, I understood when Morgan decided to watch the Michigan–Michigan State game instead of coming to the Novi Math Olympics Invitational. At least I tried to understand. Even though I skipped the ArithmeTitans’ preseason pizza meeting to watch one of his stupid scrimmages.

  But I didn’t mind missing the pizza meeting. Not that much, anyway. I didn’t even mind when Morgan skipped the Novi Invitational. Okay, I did. But not too much. But I did mind what he did (or didn’t do) at the assembly the next Friday.

  That was the day of the annual fall pep rally. In other words, the annual football rally. Fine, I know people care about football about four thousand times more than they care about math, even though football isn’t responsible for us having cars or computers or cell phones. But Principal Benson was considerate enough (or maybe dumb enough) to mention the ArithmeTitans at the beginning of the rally, since we won the Novi Invitational the weekend before.

  With the entire student body in the bleachers (except for Morgan and the football team, who all stood next to him in their jerseys), Principal Benson announced, “Before introducing our brave Gridiron Vikings, I would like to take a moment to recognize another Viking team that scored an impressive ­victory last Saturday. Our very own Arithme­Titans, led by”—he looked down at his notes—“led by Samuel Lewis, captured the Novi Invitational for the second year in a row. How about a big Viking round of applause for the Arithme­Titans!”

  I was actually sitting next to Amy that day, because I didn’t know who else to sit next to, because I sure wasn’t going to sit next to Chris without Morgan there. Amy gave me a big smile and started clapping loudly. But she was one of only about five people not allowed in the teachers’ lounge applauding. All five of whom stopped when, a couple seconds later, Chris yelled:

  At which point everyone laughed. Except Amy and (most of) the teachers. Everyone including Morgan.

  I told my parents about it that night, even though I wasn’t planning to. It was Mexican Fiesta Night at our house, and everyone was passing around the salsa and the sour cream and the guacamole when suddenly it just came out. They said they were sorry, and then they looked at each other for a while, like they had figured out how to talk to each other without opening their mouths. So I pretended I needed to put more cheese on my taco. Then my mom wiped her mouth with her napkin—which she does a lot, even though I’ve never seen any food stuck to her lips—and said, “I’m sure Morgan didn’t really mean to laugh. It was probably just nervous laughter.”

  Then this weird smile took over her face. A weird smile that could have meant anything other than her being happy. A weird smile that I bet meant she didn’t really believe that he didn’t mean it. I almost was going to say something, but I didn’t, because what good is her lying some more going to do? So I just picked up my taco and kept eating.

  Where is Mr. Glassner?

  11:59

  Hoping to find Mr. Glassner, I turn a corner and hurry down the math hallway. He’s nowhere to be seen, but then:

  “One thousand four hundred forty-four!”

  Mr. Glassner, from somewhere behind me and down the hall.

  I turn around and pause before answering, because somehow it’s more impressive that way. “Thirty-eight.”

  “Thirty-eight. Let’s see.” He’s walking toward me with his small, tight steps, in his trademark double-breasted blazer, since there’s a meet today.

  That’s right, there’s a meet today. They had to reschedule. How could I forget? Hmm, must be something else on my mind, I can’t imagine what. Just my luck to have to miss a meet because of injuries to the butt. Or to the face. Or to the stomach. Or to the everywhere.

  “Carry the six . . . twenty-four . . . that makes . . . Right again, Mr. Lewis, right again.”

  After the square root established itself as the coolest of all mathematical symbols in our Tournament of Most Awesome Mathematical Symbols, Mr. Glassner bet me my own personal pizza party that I couldn’t memorize all the whole square roots up to one hundred.

  “Are we ready to strut our stuff against E. C. Dunbar Middle School’s finest today?” Mr. Glassner, as usual, is smiling. Smiling because he always smiles, smiling because he’s talking with the strongest math student in the school—and captain of the ArithmeTitans, thank you very much—smiling because it will be his pleasure to pay for those pizzas if I keep up my end of the deal (which he knows I will). Mr. Glassner has tiny eyes set far back in his head, the kind that make you wonder how he sees. And when he smiles, which, again, is all the time, they’re even smaller.

  He is my favorite person in this building over the age of fourteen. And yes, I know, nothing boosts your popularity at middle school like being good friends with someone born in 1962. Nothing except being captain of the ArithmeTitans.

  I shrug my shoulders. “Sure, I guess.”

  Mr. Glassner actually stops smiling for a moment. Long enough to ask, “Is everything okay?” Then, back to smiling.

  “I’m fine, sure.” I try looking into Mr. Glassner’s eyes, both because he’s one of about two teachers here who deserves it and because I can’t help but try to find them (his eyes) each time I talk to him. His eyebrows naturally point up at a nearly forty-five-degree angle, which, combined with his endless grin, gives him this cheery “well, what do you know?” expression at all times.

  “Remember my friend from U of M? The professor I told you about?” Mr. Glassner is extra tickled by this question.

  “The math professor?”

  Extra-large smile. “That’s the one!”

  “What about him?” I ask Mr. Glassner.

  He raises his eyebrows, super excited by what he’s about to say. “Does the phrase ‘special celebrity judge’ mean anything to you?”

  I ask Mr. Glassner, “He’s coming to today’s meet?”

  “That he is! Officially to judge, but secretly”—Mr. ­Glassner leans in to share with me his widest smile yet—“to see our brightest star in person.” He points a friendly finger at my chest. “You!”

  Mr. Glassner leans back a bit, dials his smile down to a huge grin, puts his hands in his pant pockets, and begins rocking back and forth on his toes and heels. “There are, you know, summer university programs for students like you, Sam. Places where you can rub elbows with the other whizzes of your generation. Professor Davies sits on the advisory board of one such program. A good showing today, Sam, and you’ll be a shoo-in. He told me as much.”

  It’s not that I don’t like being an ArithmeTitan. I do—a lot, even. Survive recess and Be able to compete today would be two of my three responses if someone gave me three wishes right now (Be friends with Morgan again would be the other one, the first one). But I only joined last year to begin with because I got sick of Morgan being gone at football practice all the time. I couldn’t help being good at it, and then, I don’t know, I didn’t mind being great at it. I wanted to be great. I still do.

  But Morgan seemed to mind, which wasn’t fair. I mean, c’mon, I couldn’t tackle him if my life depended on it, but I still helped him learn his plays. So he’s not so great at math anymore, big deal. So he decided playing football is more important than studying, whatever. Why couldn’t he quiz me on geometry theorems anyway? Why did he have to laugh with everyone else instead?

>   “Five thousand one hundred eighty-four!” Mr. Glassner’s eyes are almost wide with excitement.

  I try to act like I’m taking some pleasure in this. “Seventy-two.”

  “Right again! At this rate you ought to start putting together your guest list for that pizza party I’m going to owe you. No question, Sam, you’ve got what it takes”—he pauses (waiting for me to join in, which I do, almost enjoying it) as we say together, our fists in the air—“to be an Arithme­Titan!”

  “Now off to lunch with you,” Mr. Glassner says. “You can’t very well find x on an empty stomach.” And he starts down the hall again, one tiny step at a time.

  He’s right, I ought to get back to the cafeteria before Mr. Griegs sends out a search party.

  12:03 p.m.

  I’m almost back to the cafeteria when Marc ­Quigley, the most humongous eighth grader of them all, steps out into the hallway and starts heading toward me. I try not looking at him as I slowly drift to the opposite side of the hallway, which shakes every time one of his size eighteen shoes crashes down on the floor. Marc Quigley doesn’t have a repu­tation for being a bully or anything, but how close would you get to the massive foot of a supposedly calm ­elephant?

  Even though the tiling feels like it’s turned into a trampoline, I pass by Mount Quigley without injury. My nose, however, wonders what in the world has gone wrong, because Marc Quigley isn’t just humongous, he’s humongously stinky. Like he’s got a year-old bacon cheeseburger glued under each armpit.

  Maybe that’s where the problems began.

  Because there was that day at the Tripaderos’ last summer. We were on Chris’s roof—me, Morgan, and Chris, along with Jordan Gutman and Brandon Berk. Throwing things, but not bowling balls, at all the trees nearby. The ­Tripaderos’ house has a flat roof, and the place is surrounded by tons of tall trees, so all in all, it’s not such a bad activity. Our parents may not have liked that we were throwing shoes and apples and canned goods and not, say, small rocks, but there weren’t any adults around. In fact, my parents didn’t seem to care much where I was going in the first place, so they definitely didn’t get a vote.

  The object of the game was to hit the trees with the stuff. The farther the tree, the bigger the stuff, the louder the impact, the better. After we ran out of shoes, apples, and cans of tomato paste, Chris went inside and returned with a duffel bag packed with new ammo: dog toys, CDs (which required a Frisbee-like toss and led to a separate game), candles, batteries, and, of course, lightbulbs.

  Morgan quickly emerged as our most skilled and fearless marksman (Chris was our most fearless, and generous, supplier). He kept hitting tree trunks straight on, and one time he actually lodged a thick D battery inside the soft bark of the tallest tree. The competition eventually turned into a performance by Morgan for the rest of us (except for ­Gutman and Berk, who disappeared to the other end of the roof with a stack of twenty recordable CDs).

  Despite some shade from all those trees, the sun was blazing on the roof and we had all worked up a sweat, especially Morgan. Before starting on the lightbulbs, saved for last, Morgan took off his white shirt and tossed it behind us, where it landed on some sort of thin, metal chimney. So I went over to remove Morgan’s shirt, since that chimney looked like the kind of thing that could tear something. I picked up the shirt, which smelled alive, and noticed two dark yellow stains, one in each armpit.

  The lightbulbs, even the heavy fluorescent ones, were a bit of a letdown. Either too light to throw hard or too hard to break against a tree. But Morgan gave it his all just the same. By the end he was dripping sweat, and the muscles in his arms and across his chest and back were huge from the effort. Chris cheered him on the whole time, not caring that we were literally throwing his family’s things away. But me, I was definitely ready for something else, because how long can you watch Chris watching Morgan hurl stuff? I went inside, visited one of their three upstairs bathrooms, and waited for them to get bored.

  When I went back out there (I waited around inside for ten minutes before finally giving up), the other four were on their backs, all shirtless, looking up at the sky. Berk was spinning the last remaining CD on the tip of his finger, and a bright reflection caught me straight on. Chris welcomed me back by joking obnoxiously, “I hope you left some toilet paper for everyone else.”

  Then Morgan said, “Lew, where the hell have you been? Get over here already.”

  So I got on my back, shirt still on, next to Morgan. Chris asked how many bathrooms I used, but I didn’t say anything, silently thanking Morgan for thwacking Chris in the chest and telling him to stop being a dweeb. Morgan stunk, and I wanted to ask him about those yellow stains.

  Instead, I got up, found an extra-large flashlight battery we had somehow missed and a flip-flop peeking out of the duffel bag. “Hey, guys,” I shouted. “Science experiment time.”

  “Science experiments suck” was the quick response, but I didn’t give up.

  “C’mon,” I said, “if we drop them at the same time, which one will hit the driveway first?”

  Chris sprung up first and begged Morgan to launch the battery at the tallest tree. Gutman and Berk, meanwhile, had their eyes on the flip-flop, which they thought would give the last CD some good competition in a final toss-off from the other end of the roof. But Morgan, who still took my side from time to time back then, said, “Shut up, you guys. Lew, what are you talking about?”

  Morgan took the battery from me, held it in his hand, getting a sense for its weight. It was heavy enough to cause Morgan’s bicep to bulge noticeably. The flip-flop weighed almost nothing. “The battery, duh” was his verdict, and the others fell in line behind him.

  I announced, trying to say it as if I had just thought it up, “I think they might hit at the same time.” They cackled, so I asked, trying to sound like I wasn’t sure I thought this was a good idea, “Anyone want to bet?” They all gave each other high fives, and a minute later we had settled on Slurpees. Four for me if I won. One for each of them if I lost. Berk and Gutman ran downstairs to judge from the driveway.

  Me, Morgan, and Chris walked toward the edge of the roof, with me holding both objects. I’m not scared of heights, but I’m not not scared of them either. When we got near the edge, I felt a hand push me on the back. Not hard enough to send me over, just hard enough to terrify me. Chris cackled once more, so I asked him, “Do you always have to be a total idiot?”

  Chris said, sneering, “Maybe I like being a total idiot.”

  I didn’t answer Chris, but Morgan said, “C’mon, Chris, cut it out.”

  Chris murmured, “Who cares, he’s buying me a Slurpee soon anyway.”

  Gutman and Berk ran out onto the driveway, Berk flashing us with the disc to signal their arrival. They counted to three together. I let go. The objects hit at pretty much the exact same time, of course. I tried not to gloat, I really did, but when I turned to Morgan, I couldn’t help showing my satisfaction at having performed a successful experiment. He used to tell me I was awesome when one of my experiments went right.

  Morgan looked extremely confused. “You knew, didn’t you?” Extremely confused and more than a little upset.

  “Maybe,” I said, half smiling, half not smiling, half wanting to smile, half not wanting to smile. A year earlier he would have been totally into the experiment. He even would have listened to me talk about Galileo afterward. Well, at least I was smart enough to keep my lecture to myself up there on that hot, smelly, stupid roof.

  Chris and the others were all making noise about something, but I ignored them. Morgan definitely looked hurt. “You knew,” he said again, shaking his head.

  “Yeah,” I said, and then maybe I did mumble something about Galileo. I guess I couldn’t help myself.

  “Galileo.” Morgan lost his patience. “Who the hell is Galileo?” But before I could answer, he said, “Why do you always gotta be showing
off?”

  This is what Morgan “The Hurler” Sturtz wanted to know.

  Why was I showing off? Me? Did Morgan really say that? Like I was the only one showing off. I couldn’t believe he was actually serious.

  But he was.

  I never even bothered collecting on my Slurpees.

  12:05

  The only thing worse than walking into the Wagner Middle School cafeteria once each day is walking into it twice, like I’ve had to do today. For some reason, it’s way louder now than when I left. I swear I can almost see the noise.

  Thankfully, Mr. Griegs has left his post in order to supervise the cleanup of what looks like a three-student pileup a few feet from the salad bar. Pat McDonald, Armin Dervy, and some girl in pigtails are trying to rebuild their lunches—two hot, one packed—scattered nearby. Mr. Budds, our nine-hundred-year-old janitor, is taking detailed directions from Griegs, because everyone knows that sweeping and mopping are difficult tasks.

  A sudden uproar comes from the darkest, dirtiest, noisiest corner of Lunchland, also known as The Place Extremely Weird and Socially Challenged Sixth-Grade Boys Eat.

  My eyes track down the source of a high-pitched laugh-shriek combo: Benny Fink, an amusing runt who lives down the street from me, is being dragged up, over, and across a table by two of his “friends.” These “buddies” are using my neighbor’s underwear as a handle. Benny, laughing uncontrollably, seems to be enjoying the ride. Mr. Griegs senses this new development and rushes off to squelch it, covering the distance between the two crime scenes in four enormous strides.

  “Sam! Sam! Sa-am!” I finally hear Amy’s voice break through the fog. Somehow she is standing right next to me.

  “Oh, hi. Sorry. I ran into Mr. Glassner.” But she’s already walking away from me, then turning half around and quickly motioning for me to follow her. She has a serious look on her face.