The Cinderella Theorem

by Kristee Ravan

  “Well,” he continued, “Midas took the properties of his golden touch and made them marketable in ice cream.” (Apparently, Midas was the one with the golden touch. At least I got the precious metal right.) “So when you buy a carton of Marvelous Midas Cream, you get in your bowl whatever kind of ice cream you want.”

  “That’s convenient,” I said, trying to have a good attitude and be positive.

  “It really is. My grandfather knighted Midas for creating such a useful invention.” My dad smiled brightly, savoring his chocolate golden touch ice cream. “It was very handy when the delegation from Olympus came last month.” He chuckled. “Can you imagine worrying about which god you will annoy because you didn’t have their favorite ice cream?”

  No, I could not. And do you know why? I can only think of one god from literature: Zeus. And here’s another reason: I wouldn’t be entertaining a delegation from Olympus–because they’re not real.

  I just smiled serenely and had a “good attitude” as I took another bite of my magical ice cream.

  4

  Pretzels….Again

  Even though I am only allowed to have one math class, I was glad (for once) to be able to get to school. For me, school now equals normal.

  School now = Normal, because of yesterday, because of my weekend plans, and because my father stayed the night at our house.

  If I turn out seriously deranged, I will not be surprised at all.

  On my walk to school, I thought about how I could not possibly tell anyone a shred of truth about my birthday.

  Oh, wait.

  I can tell them what we ate, right up until the magic ice cream.

  Last year, my friend, Corrie, thought her life was ruined because her four-year-old brother ran through her birthday party–stark naked–screaming about poopy. Corrie is clearly clueless as to what ruins a birthday.

  Before yesterday, I planned to work on some equations from an old math book over the weekend. Now, I am going to E. G. Smythe’s Salty Fire Land to be formally introduced to the populace. Great. When Corrie asks me what I’m doing this weekend, instead of saying, “Nothing really, just some math,” I’ll now be able to say, “Nothing really, just getting away with my formerly dead father and liar mother to the parallel kingdom in our bathtub to be introduced to a bunch of fairy tale princesses and talking animals.”

  I’m going to be very distracted in school today. Little people in berets keep coming down the stairs in my mind. I’m also distracted by the fact that my parents win the award for the World’s Strangest Marriage. When Mom told me my dad was staying the night, I thought, Oh, well maybe the door only works once a day or something, so he can’t get back tonight. That was a false assumption. Any good mathematician knows that false assumptions can destroy an otherwise sound theory. It turns out they wanted to sleep in the same bed again. As I passed my mother in the upstairs hallway, I asked a very rational question about this.

  “Don’t you think having him sleep in your room will be weird, since you haven’t seen him in fifteen years?”

  Mom smiled. “You haven’t seen him in fifteen years, Lil. I’ve seen him nearly every day since you were born.”

  Of course. This makes absolute perfect sense. Why shouldn’t she have seen him? I mean, my goodness, the man rules a fairytale kingdom and travels through a bathtub. Why wouldn’t he have time to see his wife?

  Mom continued, “When you were a baby, he’d come over during your naps and later, when you started school, your father would come over while you were gone. We’d spend the mornings together. Or, sometimes I’d go to Smythe’s SFL to see him. Then, he’d run the kingdom in the afternoons, and I’d get some writing done.”

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s nice that you not only lied to me, but had secret trysts with my father every day, too.” I started to walk away.

  “Lily,” Mom called. “It wasn’t like that. You know he couldn’t see you until you turned fifteen.”

  I turned around in the doorway of my room. “I understand, Mom.” I said impatiently. “I’m going to go to bed now–or is there something weird about my bedroom you haven’t told me? Do the three little pigs live in my closet?”

  “Of course they don’t, Lily. They live in the Fourth Wood.” Mom sighed. “Look. Things are weird now. I know that. Will you just try to be understanding?” She moved a little closer to me. “You’re lucky, Lily. You aren’t stuck living a plain-old, normal life. You’re going to get to experience so many things that people will never be able to imagine.”

  “Or believe.” I closed the door to my room.

  I cannot fathom why my mother thinks I’m lucky. And what, exactly, is wrong with being normal? In statistics, there is a whole equation devoted to the “normal” way data is distributed.[13] Speaking of statistics, my parents have obviously not seen any on teenagers. Otherwise, they would know that being normal (not being royal) is the single most important factor in the equation of high school.

  When I got to school Friday morning, I waited by the east door for Corrie. Corrie always arrives at 7:40. Always. This is because Corrie’s father is obsessed with punctuality and order. He leaves for work at the same time each day, and since he drops her off, she is always here at the same time. It’s a simple equation.

  Usually, I formulate some equations about the number of kids at the door before and after she arrives, but before the bell rings at 7:55. Sometimes I estimate how many will arrive before her or what percentage will be wearing a certain color. But today, I didn’t really feel like doing math.

  Not feeling like doing math = a clue that something is seriously wrong in my life.

  “Happy birthday!” Corrie gave me a clumsily wrapped present. “I would have given it to you yesterday, but—”

  “But you were busy faking sick to get out of your math placement test?”

  “I really did have an upset stomach!”

  “From freaking out about the test. I can’t believe you missed the first day of school just to have an extra day of study.”

  Corrie is obsessed with history. She can’t get enough of Henry VIII and Czarina Alexandra. Her history obsession has led to her being a tad deficient in the mathematical areas of the world. I think it’s a little strange to be so captivated by dead people, but she thinks it’s equally strange to spend your free time reading books about ratios and proportions.

  “It’s called test anxiety, Lily. It’s an epidemic.”

  Corrie is in what I think is a very easy math class. If I were in her class, my only anxiety would come from knowing that I could teach the class in my sleep. But since dead people are her forte, I guess that’s okay. To each her own.

  I opened the present.

  “Do you like it?” Corrie gets very excited by birthdays. The present was a biography of Isaac Newton. Mr. Laws of Motion, himself. “I think it is a nice compromise between history and math.”

  I smiled. Did I like it? I had only been hinting to my mother about this book for three months. And instead of mathy goodness in the form of the life of Sir Isaac Newton, my parents gave me a book of fairy tales. Yeah, I was thrilled by that gift.

  The value of Corrie’s present to me was incredibly > the book of little kid bedtime stories.

  “I love it. Thank you very much, Corrie.”

  “So where did you go for dinner last night? Did you see any famous writers like you did last year?” Corrie flipped her dark hair behind her shoulder.

  Last year, when we were out for my birthday, Mom bumped into a group of famous writers. They all wrote poems and little story things for me about my birthday, right there in the restaurant.

  “Well….” What am I supposed to say? “We didn’t go out. We just had my favorite meal at home.” There. My answer to Corrie = truth (sort of).

  “You ate at home? You never eat at home for your birthday.”

  See? Corrie understood the mathematical quandary that yesterday threw me into. She understood the normal way of celebrating my birthday.


  “I know.” Was there anyway I could change the subject? “My mom just wanted to celebrate quietly at home. She’s been kind of busy since the last book tour.” Also truth. Mom did finish a big promotional tour in July. Of course, she’d want to be alone with her only daughter for her daughter’s fifteenth birthday–alone, with her living (non-deceased) husband and seven small people carrying food.

  “Bummer.” Corrie genuinely understood my birthday disappointment. I mean, she did have the naked, four-year-old poopy screamer last year. “Well, what did you get?”

  Hmm. What did I get? Nothing much, just my father, access to another world, and a book of barely believable children’s stories.

  “A book.” Truth again. Stats on truth-telling: Lily = 100%.

  “Not the book I gave you?” Corrie was horrified that she might have accidentally made my birthday worse.

  “No. I guess Mom was too distracted to notice all the hints I left about Newton.”

  I think Corrie would have asked what the title of the book was if the fight hadn’t started then. Kelly Stewart and Trista Anderson started fighting over who was stealing whose boyfriend. Mr. Hatfield, our principal, and several other teachers ran over to stop the girls. I was blissfully swept away for the moment in a normal high school routine.[14]

  My first class was Legendary Literature. I realize that it is only the second day of school, and I further realize that two days do not equal sufficient time to form an opinion of a class. Nevertheless, I do not like that class. And after today’s assignment, I know I never will.

  “We are going to analyze fairy tales this semester!” (Everything Mrs. Fox says seems to possess an exclamation mark.)

  I rolled my eyes. Not more fairy tales. It’s like I’ve made an error at the beginning of a long equation and now I can’t get the answer to make sense. When did my life become so full of fairy tales?

  “Who wrote fairy tales?! Why have they survived?! Why do we enjoy them so much?! These are some of the questions we are going to answer!” Mrs. Fox continued on and on. “Let’s go around the room and share our favorite fairy tales!”

  Panic. Let me again point out: I do not know any fairy tales. After quickly examining my options, I decided to just copy someone else’s answer.

  “Why don’t we start with……” Mrs. Fox looked around the room for a victim, while her sentence hung there waiting for its exclamation mark. “Lily!”

  I should have known. Was it mathematically possible for Smythe’s SFL to be working its magic against me even at school?

  Wait.

  There could be no answer to that question because I had not yet proven that Smythe’s SFL was mathematically possible. Therefore, the question of whether or not–

  “Lily?!” (How is it possible to ask a question and make an exclamatory statement?)

  “Uh….well….I….” I hate fairy tales. They have turned me into incoherent mush. I tried to recall anything my father might have said about a fairy tale last night. “Oh! I like that King Midian guy.”

  A few people in the class snickered.

  Mrs. Fox looked puzzled for a moment, then, “Oh! You mean King Midas! An excellent tale!” She raced to the board to write King Midas. (The woman even moved like an exclamation.) “Becky! Tell us your favorite!”

  Becky pulled Rapunzel out of the air. Isn’t she the one that slept for a hundred years?

  I stopped paying attention shortly after this, and was in a happy state of solving for x in my head, when Mrs. Fox exclaimed, “For your homework over the weekend, I want you to read The Little Mermaid and write a few sentences in your fairy tale journal about this wonderful tale! For extra credit, tell why you think this tale made Anderson so famous!”

  Who is Anderson? Was the Little Mermaid the one with the evil stepmother and the poison apple? And what is a fairy tale journal? But, on the brighter side of things, I now have something to talk to my father about while we portal to worlds beyond the plumbing.

  The rest of the day was an unmathematical event not worth remembering. The substitute in history never found the lesson plans to give us an assignment. She let us do whatever instead; I read about lovely Mr. Newton.

  No one was home when I arrived. Normally, I would have thought this strange, since Mom works at home, but my ideas about stangeness have shifted somewhat since yesterday’s festivities. Figuring Mom and “Dad” were off gallivanting in the Salt World, I got my pretzels and decided to do my biology homework. I had just answered a question about DNA and its importance to all things living, when the little brown man from the night before crashed onto the dining room table in front of me.

  “Hi, Your Highness!” he said, as a voice from above starting shouting:

  “You weren’t supposed to let her see you!”

  I looked up. The woman in all purple was sitting on the chandelier, where I suppose the brown man had just been.

  “We’re so sorry, Princess,” she continued, though she didn’t really sound sorry, as she started in on Mr. Brown. “Geez, Peridiom, all you had to do was stay up here, and she would never have known we were here.” She sighed, jumped and landed on the table, also.

  “Um, why were you up there?” I asked, very logically.

  “Her Majesty sent us through the tub to make sure you had an afternoon snack. After we put in your pretzels for today, Peridiom said,” she paused here and looked hard at poor Mr. Brown, “that he wanted to climb up the light. Then, you came home, and we were stuck, and stupid Peridiom fell on your homework.”

  “Oh,” I said, as if tiny people dressed in one color, falling from my ceiling were an everyday occurrence.

  “Did you like the pretzels?” Peridiom asked.

  I smiled, nodded, and helped Peridiom and Miss Purple off the table.

  I don’t know how much more of this “normal” life I can stand.

  5

  Keys

  After I finished my biology, I settled into the couch to enjoy Sir Isaac Newton and his first law of motion. Objects in motion were remaining in motion when my parents finally decided to come home to see if their only daughter had returned from school safely. They bounded down the stairs, holding hands and smiling.

  “Are you all packed, Lil?” Mom asked, looking appalled by my biography of Newton. Mom, being a fiction writer and, apparently, the queen of a fairy tale kingdom, has an aversion to non-fiction.

  “What exactly do I pack?” Questions about packing equal stalled time not spent in magical fairy tale kingdom. “Furthermore, why do I need to pack? It seems to me that if I need anything I can just zip back through the tub and get it.”

  “Go pack.” Mom used her rare no-nonsense voice.

  I took the tonal hint and went upstairs.

  In my room, I found my jeans from yesterday. Jeans are nearly mathematical all by themselves. I’ve created an equation regarding how many times you can wear them before you send them to the hamper. And the degree in which you wear them plays a part of the equation. For instance,

  if x = a wearing of jeans,

  2x = two wearings of jeans,

  but x² = dirty to the second degree,

  a really dirty wearing of jeans.

  Math: Happiness and normality even when you are packing to go on a magical journey through your bathtub.

  I stuck my hand in the pocket to clean it out and found the blue marble from The Box. Lovely. The blue marble equals a reminder of happier days when what I knew about my father could be contained in one small box. It’s actually kind of sad, really. But which is sadder: losing The Box of what you know about your father, or being able to put everything you know about him into a box?

  That was not a mathematical question at all, so I couldn’t answer it. Without thinking, I put the marble into the pocket of today’s jeans. (Today’s jeans = 2x.) On to packing.

  Ten minutes, a pair of pajamas, yesterday’s jeans, two shirts, and an assortment of toiletries later I returned downstairs to announce that I was packed.

&n
bsp; “Where’s your bag?” Mom asked, furiously scribbling something onto a post-it note in the kitchen. Several post-it notes, actually. She had quite a pile going.

  “It’s in the bathroom.” Where else do you put your bag for a trip to Smythe’s SFL?

  “Fine…” Mom trailed absent-mindedly.

  “What are you doing?” I wanted to know what was so important it had to be written down at that exact moment. We were supposed to be embarking on our first trip as an entire family.

  My dad came over, putting his hand on my shoulder. “Unfortunately, Lily,” he sighed. “Your mother has been seized with an inspiration.”

  “Shall we sit down then?” I asked, as mom ran to her office, calling, “I’ll only be a minute!”

  “I think so,” my father chuckled, as we walked back into the living room. “Once she ignored me for two whole days.” He smiled. “That was the Battle for the Magic of Andeer.”

  “I know what you mean. The week that she wrote the fall of Sir Wend, I only saw her at supper.”

  “That’s one of her better villain downfalls, though.”

  “It is.” We settled into a little silence; then our quiet was broken by Mom shouting from the office, “I’ve got you now, Tressa! Your plans to marry the prince are going to fail.”

  “Poor Tressa.” My father sank back into the couch and sighed.

  I should have been happy, really. I just had a “moment” of mutual understanding with my new-found father. Too bad the “moment” came from us waiting for my mom to come back from a world that exists only in her brain and computer, so that we can portal through our bathtub to a parallel world inhabited solely by fictional characters. And the awkward conversation we shared was about my mother’s fictional worlds, instead of being a normal awkward conversation about school, the weather, or the new anchor on the six o’clock news.

  And my mother wonders why I’ve found happiness in math.