Annika Riz, Math Whiz

by Claudia Mills

  The class roared with laughter.

  “Of course we’re not ready for the carnival quite yet,” he said, turning serious. “There is still a lot to do. One fifth-grade class is renting a cotton candy machine. One second-grade class is selling popcorn. And one fourth-grade class is planning something extremely gross and disgusting for their booth.”

  “What is it?” several kids called out.

  Mr. Boone grinned. “You’ll have to come to the carnival to find out. I’ve also heard that your class is going to be selling the world’s tastiest cookies. Is that right?”

  “Yes!” all the kids shouted.

  “So I’ve come in today, borrowing some of Mrs. Molina’s valuable class time, to remind you to do your best baking.”

  He nodded appreciatively to Mrs. Molina, as if she had invited him into her class rather than having him barge in like a circus elephant himself.

  Mr. Boone continued. “Even more, I want all of you to come to the carnival with your parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and neighbors, so we can make this Franklin School carnival the most successful carnival ever. Are you with me?”

  The class cheered.

  Then, renewing his circus whistle, Mr. Boone made his exit.

  With the disappearance of Mr. Boone, the classroom seemed a good deal duller than it had a minute before.

  “Jacob Evans,” Mrs. Molina said, calling on the boy behind Cody, “what is the answer to problem seventeen?”

  * * *

  Annika took her sudoku book outside for lunch recess. She sat on a shady bench doing a puzzle while Kelsey sat next to her reading and Izzy joined a kickball game.

  On the matching bench across the playground, Simon sat by himself, obviously working through a sudoku puzzle, too.

  Annika pushed herself to complete her puzzle faster. She was going to have to start timing herself, using the stopwatch feature on the new wristwatch she had gotten for her birthday.

  Finally she filled in the last box.

  “Done!” she crowed.

  She looked over at Simon, bent over his own sudoku book. Was he still working on the same puzzle, or had he already started on a new one?

  She hadn’t told her friends about the sudoku contest yet. She wanted to wait until the announcement came that she had won, that she was the best sudoku-puzzle-solver out of every single third grader in every single school in the entire city. Last night she had asked her father how many elementary schools there were in the district, and he had told her: eleven!

  You beat every third grader in all eleven schools? Izzy and Kelsey would exclaim when they found out.

  Yes, Annika would say, trying to look modest. And then she would add, See what happens when you pay attention during math? No, she wouldn’t say that. She’d let them draw that conclusion themselves.

  Gosh, Annika, we never knew you could win a really cool contest just by doing math! Kelsey would say.

  Gee, Annika, maybe math is more important than we thought! Izzy would say.

  Yes, she would tell them about the contest when she won.

  If she won.

  Kelsey had read her a story once about a milkmaid who was carrying home a pail of milk balanced on her head. The milkmaid was thinking about all the butter she could churn from the milk, and all the eggs she could buy from selling the butter, and all the chickens she could hatch from the eggs. She got so excited counting up all these chickens that she did a happy little jig, which caused the pail to fall off her head, spilling all her fresh milk. So she ended up without any milk, butter, eggs, or chickens at all.

  The moral of the story was “Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.”

  Annika remembered the story because it had math in it. And now she was counting her own chickens before they hatched. Instead of counting her chickens, she should be working hard to win them.

  So she turned the page in her sudoku book and started in on the next puzzle.

  4

  Annika, Kelsey, and Izzy decided to bake their first batch of cookies for the carnival after school on Wednesday at Kelsey’s house. They could put the cookies in the freezer so they’d stay nice and fresh till the weekend.

  They stopped at the grocery store with Kelsey’s mother on the way home from school to buy brown sugar, butter, eggs, and three bags of chocolate chips, enough for three batches of cookies, if they baked a batch every day between now and Saturday. They already had the rest of the ingredients in the pantry in Kelsey’s kitchen, things like flour, white sugar, and baking soda.

  Annika studied the recipe on the back of the bag of chocolate chips as they waited in line to pay. “It says each batch makes five dozen cookies, so that’s sixty cookies each time, so if we bake three batches, that’s one hundred eighty cookies total!” Their class booth would make tons of money on chocolate chip cookies alone.

  “Do you need help baking?” Mrs. Green asked once they were home with the groceries unpacked on the kitchen table.

  “No!” the three girls answered.

  Mr. Boone hadn’t said, “I want your parents to get busy baking those cookies.” He had said, “I want you to get busy baking those cookies.”

  “All right, but don’t use the electric mixer, and call me when you’re ready to put the cookies in the oven to bake. I have to supervise that part.”

  Kelsey’s mother preheated the oven and headed upstairs, leaving the girls to mix the dough on their own.

  Kelsey found three aprons in a kitchen drawer. The aprons had flowers and teapots and kittens on them, not numerals.

  Neither Annika nor Izzy had ever baked cookies before, so Kelsey took the lead.

  “First we have to measure out the ingredients,” she said importantly.

  Annika loved measuring things. Together the girls measured two and a quarter cups of flour, Kelsey showing Annika and Izzy how to level off the top of each measuring cup with the side of a table knife so that the measurement would be exact. Kelsey then showed them how to measure three quarters of a cup of brown sugar by packing the brown sugar down firmly into the measuring cup until it reached the three-quarters line. White sugar didn’t have to be packed down; it didn’t smush together the way brown sugar did. One cup of butter was the same as sixteen tablespoons of butter, which was the same as two sticks of butter.

  It was all new and fascinating to Annika. She had never known that baking had so much math in it—so much tasty math!

  She checked the recipe again, sending Kelsey to the pantry to find baking soda, vanilla, and salt.

  “I can’t find the baking soda,” Kelsey said, “but here are the vanilla and salt.”

  “Your mother said you have some,” Annika said.

  “Well, I can’t find it.”

  Izzy squeezed into the pantry next to Kelsey to see if she could spot the baking soda. Izzy was good at finding things that the others couldn’t find, like Kelsey’s spelling homework or the ribbon that had slipped off one of Annika’s long braids.

  “Nope,” Izzy confirmed. “I can’t find baking soda anywhere.”

  Kelsey looked over Annika’s shoulder at the recipe. “Well, it only says one teaspoon of baking soda. That’s hardly anything compared to two and a quarter cups of flour. It can’t matter all that much if we leave out one little teaspoon of something.”

  That didn’t sound like a good idea to Annika. Wasn’t baking like a math problem, where all the different ingredients had to add up to make the finished cookies? But Kelsey was the one who knew about baking, and if Kelsey said one teaspoon either way didn’t matter, Kelsey must be right.

  It was hard work using a big wooden spoon to cream together the butter and two kinds of sugar. The girls took turns blending the butter and sugars into a creamy mass. Izzy finished up because she had stronger arm muscles than the others.

  “Who wants to break the first egg?” Kelsey asked.

  “I do!” Izzy volunteered.

  Izzy picked up the egg.

  “Goodbye, egg!
”

  She smashed it against the side of the mixing bowl. The shell shattered, spattering egg everywhere except for into the bowl where it was supposed to go.

  “Oops,” Izzy said. “Someone else better do this.”

  Annika took a try. When she broke her egg, part of the egg white fell outside the bowl and dribbled onto the counter. When she broke the second egg, part of the eggshell fell into the bowl. She fished it out as best she could. She was definitely better at decimals and sudoku than she was at egg breaking.

  The girls mixed in the eggs and vanilla, then slowly added the flour and salt, and finally dumped in the chocolate chips from the first package—or, rather, the chocolate chips that were left after Izzy’s constant sampling.

  “A few chocolate chips more or less won’t matter,” Izzy said when Kelsey scolded her. “Just like the baking soda.”

  Next, the girls spooned the dough onto five cookie sheets, carefully spacing the dough balls two inches apart.

  “Why do they have to be two inches apart?” Izzy asked, eating a gob of dough with her fingers even though you weren’t supposed to eat raw cookie dough because it had raw eggs in it.

  “They spread when they’re baked,” Kelsey explained. “They spread, and puff up, and turn golden brown and dee-licious.”

  Kelsey’s mother was summoned to help them put the first pan of cookies in the oven, setting the timer for nine minutes.

  While they waited for the cookies to bake, Annika told them how she was trying to train Prime to do math problems.

  “Poor Prime!” Izzy moaned. “Why don’t you train him to run races? I could take him on a leash with me when I go out running.”

  “Poor Prime,” Kelsey agreed. “I think he’d like it better if you read to him. There are tons of books about dogs, millions of them.”

  Izzy and Kelsey would never understand! Annika gave up and changed the subject. “Do you think Mr. Boone will wear a bathing suit for his dunking at the carnival, or do you think he’ll be dunked in regular clothes?”

  The girls debated that question—Izzy said bathing suit, Kelsey said regular clothes—until the timer dinged.

  Kelsey’s mom pulled the tray out of the oven to check the cookies. They looked strangely flat, spread out a bit from the heat of the oven, but not at all plumped up as Kelsey had said they would be.

  Mrs. Green frowned. “Let’s give them a couple more minutes.”

  But after two more minutes, the cookies had turned browner—more of a dark brown than a golden brown—but they remained as flat as before.

  “Maybe they’ll still taste good,” Kelsey said doubtfully.

  “But who will want to buy them if they look weird?” Izzy asked.

  Izzy had a good point.

  “There must have been something wrong with the baking soda,” Kelsey’s mother said.

  The three girls exchanged glances.

  “You did remember to put in the baking soda, didn’t you?” Mrs. Green asked. “A teaspoon of baking soda?”

  “We couldn’t find it,” Kelsey confessed. “And I figured one teaspoon of anything couldn’t make all that much of a difference…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Baking soda,” Kelsey’s mother said, “is what makes cookies rise.”

  “Oh,” all three girls said together.

  Mrs. Green motioned to them to follow her into the pantry.

  “Here it is,” she said, pulling out the baking soda box to show them. “It was right behind this big container of salt. Next time, if you can’t find something, come and ask!”

  Annika couldn’t help being a tiny bit pleased to find out that math did matter in baking after all. But it was too late now to add baking soda to the remaining cookies already spooned out onto the other baking sheets, waiting for their turn in the oven. And it was too late to make another batch of dough today.

  Annika took a nibble of one of the strange-looking cookies. It had a strange metallic taste, too—not the way a cookie should taste at all. These were cookies that even Prime wouldn’t have wanted to eat.

  5

  On Thursday at lunch recess, as Annika opened her puzzle book, Kelsey said, “Don’t you ever do anything but sudoku puzzles anymore?”

  Izzy, who hadn’t dashed off yet for her pickup basketball game, pointed across the playground to Simon. “Simon is obsessed with sudoku puzzles, too.”

  Maybe they’d figure it out. Kelsey loved reading mysteries, and now she had two clues. Clue number one: Annika is doing sudoku puzzles all the time. Clue number two: Simon is doing sudoku puzzles all the time. Could it be that they’re both competing in a sudoku contest?

  “The two of you have sudoku-itis,” Kelsey said.

  Izzy laughed at the funny word.

  Should Annika go ahead and tell them? It was getting awfully lonely practicing all by herself. But what if they said, “A sudoku contest? Borrr-ing!”? What if they said, “Sudoku contests are dumb”?

  Maybe Annika wasn’t being fair to her friends.

  “I was going to keep it a secret,” Annika said slowly. “I was going to make it a surprise, but…”

  Kelsey and Izzy leaned in closer.

  “There’s a sudoku contest at the public library this week. And I’m going to enter it on Saturday.”

  “And Simon is, too!” Kelsey said. So she had solved at least part of the mystery.

  “Poor Simon!” Izzy said.

  “He doesn’t have a chance,” Kelsey agreed.

  Annika was glad Izzy had said “Poor Simon” instead of “Poor Annika.” They had pitied “Poor Prime” for having to learn to count to three, which was hardly any counting at all. They might have pitied her for having to do something as boring and dumb as sudoku. Instead, Izzy jumped up from her seat on the bench next to Annika and began jogging in place, as if she had too much happy energy now to sit still. Kelsey’s eyes were bright with excitement.

  “We can time you!” Kelsey offered. “After school today at my house, in between baking cookies for the carnival, you can do a hundred puzzles, and Izzy and I will take turns timing you to see if you can go faster and faster.”

  “I’ll be late because I have Fitness Club,” Izzy put in. Twice a week all spring Izzy went to the Franklin School Fitness Club to train for the 10K race she was going to be running later that month. Now she sounded disappointed that she had to be off training for her own race instead of helping Annika train for hers. “Kelsey can time you for both of us. But don’t start baking until I get there!”

  “We can make up a math cheer,” Kelsey suggested. She held up her hand to signal the others to be quiet while she thought.

  “Okay, I have it. Annika, Annika, Annika—who? Annika, Queen of Su-do-ku!”

  Izzy squinched up her nose. “Su-do-ku sounds silly.”

  Kelsey held up her hand again. She closed her eyes as if she were entering a trance. A moment later she opened them.

  “Simon, Simon, take a bath,” she chanted. “Annika is the Queen of Math.”

  “Take a bath?” Izzy asked.

  “Getting dunked,” Kelsey explained. “Like Mr. Boone at the carnival? Okay, I’ll try again.”

  This time Kelsey not only closed her eyes, she sat cross-legged on the bench, holding out her hands, thumb and fingers lightly touching, as if she were meditating. When she opened her eyes, her face was serene.

  “This is perfect, Miss Izzy Barr, and you can’t say it isn’t. Are you ready to hear it? Both of you?”

  Annika and Izzy nodded.

  “Annika Riz, Math Whiz.”

  Izzy squealed with pleasure and hugged Kelsey. Then both girls hugged Annika.

  “There is no way that Simon Ellis-Smellis can beat Annika Riz, Math Whiz,” Kelsey said.

  Then Izzy ran off to shoot baskets, and Kelsey opened her library book.

  Annika sat smiling for a long moment before starting her next sudoku puzzle, even though Simon Ellis-Smellis, over on the far bench, was still busy practicing.

  She
had the best friends ever.

  How could she not win the sudoku contest with friends like these urging her on with her own special cheer?

  * * *

  Kelsey might be the best reader in the class, and the best cheer-maker-upper, but one thing she was terrible at was using Annika’s stopwatch. After three attempts, Annika gave up trying to explain it to her. And while Annika sat at Kelsey’s kitchen table working on a new puzzle, Kelsey leaned over her shoulder making unhelpful comments like “Could a three maybe go here?” and “I don’t see why a four went there.”

  “Kelsey!” Annika waved her away.

  “I’m just trying to help,” Kelsey protested.

  “Why don’t I time myself,” Annika asked, “while you read a library book?”

  Preferably a nice long library book.

  “But how is that helping you?” Kelsey wanted to know.

  “It’s—well, you made up the cheer,” Annika reminded her.

  “I could make up another one,” Kelsey offered. She scrunched her eyes shut and furrowed her brow.

  “Annika, Annika, Anni-KAH. She’s the best, hoorah—”

  “Hoorah,” Annika finished the cheer for her.

  Really, Prime was more helpful than Kelsey. His paws were too clumsy to operate a stopwatch, but at least he didn’t talk all the time—or, worse, cheer all the time—while someone else was trying to get ready for a sudoku contest. Maybe some activities weren’t meant to be done to cheers.

  Izzy arrived an hour later, sweaty and panting from her run.

  “I can take a turn timing you,” she said after gulping down a tall glass of water.

  “Um, I think I’m all right,” Annika said. “Thanks, though.”

  Her head ached from sudoku. Numbers were exploding in her brain like hot kernels of popping corn at a carnival booth.

  Speaking of carnival booths …

  “Now that Izzy’s here, we need to bake another batch of cookies,” Annika reminded them.

  In an instant, all three girls were wearing aprons and pulling ingredients from the fridge and pantry.