This time Annika made sure to add a teaspoon of baking soda right away to the bowl with the measured cups of flour, while Kelsey headed upstairs to enlist her mother’s help with the oven and Izzy poured herself a third glass of water. Then Annika wandered over to the window to look at the dog next door playing fetch. The dog was nowhere near as cute as Prime, and Annika doubted that he could count at all.
She rejoined the others to help spoon the dough onto the baking sheets and watch as Kelsey’s mom slid the first sheet into the oven.
But when the timer rang, the cookies were no longer neat round blobs. They had turned into one big mass of puffy dough, run together and spreading in every direction right up to the edges of the pan. They had become monster cookies—or, rather, one great big rectangular monster cookie.
“So who put in the baking soda?” Kelsey’s mother asked.
All three girls spoke at once.
“I did,” Annika said.
“I did,” Kelsey said.
“I did,” Izzy said.
“Girls…” Kelsey’s mother began, but there was no point in saying anything else.
The cookies were ruined.
Again.
6
“All right, Prime,” Annika said when she and her father got home from Kelsey’s house. “Here is why you need to learn how to count. With one teaspoon of baking soda, you get dozens of delicious cookies to sell at a carnival booth. With three teaspoons of baking soda, you get no delicious cookies at all.”
Prime wagged his tail. At least he always acted enthusiastic about his math lessons, even if he hadn’t learned much counting yet—or any counting, if Annika was going to be completely honest about it.
“I think we’re not going to have you count by barking,” Annika told him. “Barking hasn’t worked out so well because you get too excited about counting and then you bark just because you’re excited. Instead, you’re going to count by tapping your paw.”
Annika picked up Prime’s paw to show him how it was done.
“When you see one biscuit, you give one tap.”
She tapped his paw in place.
“When you see two biscuits, you give two taps.”
She did it for him. Tap. Tap.
“Oh, and we’re going to work up later to counting to three. For now we’re just going to try counting to one and two.”
From the bag in the pantry she retrieved a dog biscuit.
“Sit!”
Prime jumped up to try to get the biscuit.
“Prime, how can you possibly tap your paw the right number of times if you’re using it to leap up into the air?”
With her non-biscuit-holding hand, she pushed Prime’s hind end down until he was sort of sitting.
“One biscuit!”
She held it up.
Prime barked and barked and barked.
“Now you tap your foot once.”
When she bent down to help him with the tapping, Prime snatched the biscuit out of her hand.
“Prime!” Annika wailed.
Dog biscuits were too distracting, that was the trouble. Somebody should invent a new kind of treat that dogs liked enough to do tricks for, but didn’t like so much that they were too excited about the treat to do any tricks at all.
Annika finished the lesson by tapping Prime’s foot once more while she said “One,” and twice more while she said “Two.” She didn’t reward him for it afterward. He had eaten his reward already.
* * *
At school Friday morning, Annika, Kelsey, and Izzy met by the big stuffed elephant in the front hallway. Perched on its trunk was a sign that said, WIN ME AT THE CARNIVAL THIS SATURDAY! Seated, the elephant was taller than Annika and twice as wide.
“I hope I win you,” Izzy told the elephant.
“I hope I win you, too,” Kelsey echoed. “If one of the three of us wins, we can all share him, don’t you think?”
“Are you kidding? I’m not buying a ticket,” Annika said, shocked that the others were ignoring the plain math facts of the situation. “Do you know what your chances are of winning? There are four hundred kids at Franklin School, so if each one buys a ticket, you have a one-in-four-hundred chance of winning. That’s practically no chance at all.”
“But somebody has to win,” Izzy pointed out.
“So it could be us,” Kelsey said.
“Forget it,” Annika told them. “You have a better chance of … of…” She tried to think of something completely preposterous. “Of getting Mrs. Molina to agree to be dunked in the dunking booth!”
Kelsey stroked the elephant’s trunk.
Izzy stood on tiptoe to pat him on his head.
Annika looked away, determined to ignore him completely.
* * *
“I know the carnival is tomorrow evening,” Mrs. Molina said once the bell had rung and everyone was in his or her seat. “But we are not going to spend any class time talking about the carnival today, do you understand?”
Cody put up his hand.
“Yes, Cody?”
“I heard what the really gross booth is going to be. The one Mr. Boone was talking about.”
“Tell us!” lots of kids shouted.
“We are not going to spend class time talking about the carnival,” Mrs. Molina repeated.
Another kid waved his hand. Without being called on, he announced, “I baked four dozen cookies last night.”
“I baked five dozen,” another kid reported.
Annika, Kelsey, and Izzy would have had ten dozen cookies by now, if they hadn’t put too little baking soda in the first batch and too much in the second batch. But instead they had ended up with no sellable cookies at all.
“Open your math books to page 192,” Mrs. Molina said.
Nobody did, except for Simon and Annika.
“I want to win the elephant!”
“My mom is helping my brother’s class with face painting!”
“Mr. Boone is going to get soaked!”
“The two other third-grade teachers are going to get dunked, too!”
Mrs. Molina looked as angry as Annika had ever seen her.
“If you don’t settle down…” Mrs. Molina began. She paused, obviously trying to think of a suitably terrible threat. Annika knew she wished she had the power to threaten to cancel the entire carnival there and then. “If you don’t settle down, I’ll give you a decimal quiz.”
It must have been enough of a threat because the students finally opened their books, though Izzy was still giggling.
“Izzy Barr, why don’t you start us off with question number four?” Mrs. Molina asked.
Izzy’s giggles died away.
“Question number four,” she said, clearly stalling for time.
“Yes, question four. What fraction is point one?”
Izzy hesitated.
How could anybody not know the answer to such an easy one? Annika wasn’t going to whisper the answer to her this time, she wasn’t!
But then she thought of how Izzy had come running back to Kelsey’s house to time her sudoku practice. And how Izzy had joined in Kelsey’s cheer. And how much both of her friends wanted her to win the contest.
“One-tenth,” she whispered.
“One-tenth,” Izzy repeated.
The next kid called on got her answer wrong, and the kid after that.
“I can’t wait,” Mrs. Molina said crossly, “until this carnival is over!”
7
At lunch recess, Annika raced through another sudoku puzzle, politely refusing Kelsey’s offer of timing help; Izzy was off playing kickball. She finished writing in the last number—ta-dah!—when she realized that someone was standing a few feet away, watching her with friendly curiosity.
It was Mr. Boone.
“You’re getting remarkably good at those, Annika,” he said.
Annika couldn’t remember any time that Mr. Boone had ever spoken to her before, just to her, all by herself. She couldn’t believe that he knew h
er name and that he had noticed she was working so hard at sudoku.
Too shy to say anything, she sat silent, feeling her cheeks flush.
Kelsey took over for her. “The public library’s having a sudoku contest this week, and there’s going to be a winner for each grade, and Annika’s going to be the third-grade winner!”
“Well, I’m going to try to win,” Annika corrected, grateful to find her voice again. Honesty compelled her to add, “Simon Ellis is awfully good at math. Plus, there will be kids from all the other schools, too.”
“Step one is trying,” Mr. Boone said, “and you’re certainly doing that.”
Then he smiled at both girls. “How is the cookie baking coming along?”
“Horrible!” Kelsey replied.
She told him about the two baking soda disasters. Annika wouldn’t have done that. She wanted the principal to think she was a math whiz, not a baking dummy. But he laughed his big, booming laugh, and that made Annika laugh, too.
“If step one is trying,” he said, “then step two is trying again. And again. And again.”
The bell rang for the end of lunch recess, and after grinning at them one more time, Mr. Boone strolled away.
* * *
After school, the three friends decided to take Mr. Boone’s advice and try a third time at baking their carnival cookies.
This time Annika read aloud from the recipe, one ingredient at a time, while Kelsey and Izzy took turns doing the measuring.
“One teaspoon of baking soda,” Annika read.
“We know that!” Kelsey said.
“One, and only one!” Izzy said.
Once again, Kelsey’s mother put the cookies in the oven for them. Today they had made the cookies a little bit larger so that they had four dozen, not five dozen. They were going to bake them all at the same time, placing two of the trays side by side on the middle oven rack and two trays on the rack underneath. They needed to finish up the baking quickly because Kelsey’s family was heading out to have a picnic dinner in the park while listening to her older brother play the trombone in the school band’s “Musical Month of May” concert.
“It’s not ideal to bake them all at once like this,” Kelsey’s mother lamented. “But I’m afraid we’re in a bit of a rush this afternoon. Call me when the timer dings.”
With the cookies safely in the oven—each cookie with the perfect amount of baking soda in it—Izzy went out for a quick run around the block a few times while Annika curled up with her sudoku book and Kelsey curled up with Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown.
Cozily settled on the other end of the family-room couch from Kelsey, Annika lost herself in her puzzle, working faster and harder than she had ever worked before, as fast and hard as she’d need to work when she headed off to do the actual contest—tomorrow morning!
A 7? No, there couldn’t be a 7 there. It had to be an 8.
Another 8 below.
She needed to put in two more 4s.
There went one of them!
Now a 2 …
She sensed rather than saw Kelsey’s mother rushing by them. Kelsey was still hunched over her book.
“Girls!” Mrs. Green called to them in evident distress. “Didn’t you smell your cookies burning?”
Now that Mrs. Green mentioned it, Annika did smell something burning.
No, she smelled something completely burnt.
Had they both forgotten to set the timer? Or had neither girl heard its warning ding, one lost in the world of reading, the other lost in the world of math? Either way, it didn’t matter now.
Mrs. Green had already grabbed the trays out of the oven. She flung open the kitchen windows to air out the room just as the smoke alarm went off with a deafening beep.
The cookies were properly shaped this time; they had risen the correct amount. But they were black like nuggets of coal mined deep from the bowels of the earth.
“Oh, girls!” Kelsey’s mother moaned, once she had turned off the alarm.
“What happened?” Izzy asked, coming into the kitchen from the back door, panting after her run.
“Don’t ask!” Kelsey said.
Silently the three girls scraped the blackened lumps into the garbage.
8
When Annika woke up in her math house on Saturday morning, she lingered in bed, sandwiched between sheets with brightly colored numerals printed all over them. The sheets had all the letters of the alphabet on them, too; she suspected they were intended for little kids just learning their numbers and letters, not for big third graders who were already good readers and math whizzes. But she loved them anyway.
Maybe the red, blue, and yellow numerals on her pillow—the sheets seemed designed to teach colors, too—would seep into her brain if she lay there long enough. Then they would slide down her arm and pop out the end of her pencil when she sat down at the library in another hour to do the sudoku contest.
She didn’t let herself open a sudoku book at the breakfast table. She didn’t want her brain to be tired out from sudoku before the contest even began. Prime’s training would have to wait as well. The dog didn’t seem to mind, lying at her feet underneath the table as she sprinkled salt from the 3-shaker and pepper from the 4-shaker onto her scrambled eggs. She hoped eggs were good brain food.
“Do you feel ready for the contest?” her mother asked.
Annika nodded, her mouth full of egg. She was definitely ready! But dozens of other third graders from all over the city must be ready, too—including Simon.
“Don’t feel you have to rush through the contest puzzle,” her mother told her. “Calm and steady is best. And take plenty of deep breaths.”
After swallowing another eggy mouthful, Annika took a few deep breaths, for practice. Maybe deep breaths would send more oxygen to her brain. She did feel more relaxed when she was done.
She looked down admiringly at her E = mc2 T-shirt and imagined Einstein working calmly and steadily on the theory of relativity, taking lots of deep breaths along the way.
When she stood up from the table, Prime dashed over to the pantry door, obviously expecting her to produce dog biscuits for another counting lesson. He clearly was a very smart dog, even if he couldn’t yet count to two, or even to one, for that matter.
“Not now, Prime,” she told him.
Then she relented.
“Okay, one very quick lesson.”
She reminded him to tap his paw once for one biscuit, twice for two, demonstrating again how to tap, in case he had forgotten.
“Now you do it,” she told him. “All by yourself.”
She held up one of the biscuits she had retrieved from the pantry. “One!” she said loudly and distinctly.
Prime didn’t tap his foot, but he did give one low, deep bark. Maybe barking was going to work out better than paw tapping after all.
“Excellent, Prime!”
Annika gave him the biscuit.
She held up two biscuits, one in each hand, so he could see them clearly. “Two!”
Prime barked seven times.
Oh, well. At least he had given one bark for one biscuit. And he had gotten the idea that two was a bigger number than one. That was something. Still, she had to admit that her star pupil—her only pupil—wasn’t yet ready to win a counting contest. Or even to enter one.
* * *
Annika’s father drove her to the library. She wanted to get there right when it opened at nine. In her hand she clutched three perfectly sharpened pencils with three never-before-used erasers.
“I’ll be back in an hour or so to pick you up,” her father said as he gave her a parting kiss. “Good luck, sweetie.”
But Annika knew there was no luck involved in sudoku, nothing except whatever talent you started out with, plus lots and lots of practice.
She had somehow expected to see Simon there, already waiting on the library steps, but she was the only one hurrying through the library doors on the dot of nine. It probably would have been too much of a coinc
idence if she and Simon had both arrived at the exact same time. Simon could have done the contest any day during the past week, and there was still the rest of the day until the library closed at five o’clock, right when the Franklin School carnival was going to begin.
Annika shivered with happiness at the thought of having a sudoku contest and an all-school carnival both on the same day. If only one of their batches of cookies had turned out! She hated to think how disappointed Mr. Boone would be if he knew. If he was willing to be dunked over and over again, the least Annika and her friends could do was bake some cookies to sell.
But she couldn’t think about that now.
She found the children’s librarian at her desk, a grandmotherly woman who looked up at Annika with a friendly smile.
“I’m here for the contest,” Annika said.
The librarian looked puzzled.
“The sudoku contest?” Annika explained.
“Oh, the sudoku contest! Let me see, I have the contest materials around here somewhere. What grade are you in?”
“Third.” Annika drew herself up taller and straighter.
“All right, here it is. I see you came prepared with your own pencils. Now where should I put you?”
This librarian must be a special Saturday librarian. She certainly didn’t seem to know anything about what had been going on in the library all week, with kids from all over the city streaming in to compete in the contest.
“How about the quiet study room?” The librarian led Annika to a small room off the main children’s area, containing one rectangular table surrounded by six chairs.
The librarian consulted the directions for the contest on the sheet she held in her hand. “When you’re ready, I’ll record the time you begin”—she pointed to the digital clock sitting on one end of the table that read 9:06—“and when you’re all done, write down the time you finish and then bring the completed puzzle to me. All right?”
Annika swallowed hard. This was it!
She was glad no one else had shown up to do the contest at the same time. It would have made her nervous to hear every scritch and scratch of someone else’s pencil, especially if that someone was Simon.
Annika Riz, Math Whiz Page 3