“Red over here,” yells Norton. “Yellow at the back. Leaders, come and get your papers.”
I look at the questions on the paper. The distance between town A and town B on the map is 9.5 inches. If the scale is 1:100,000, then they are how many miles apart? and I have a 1:40 scale model of a car. The real car is 13 feet long. How long is my model?
I start to panic. Calm down, I tell myself. You’re over all that. You can do math now, remember? But 40 what? 100,000 what? How do you know what to multiply or is it divide by? I try to think what Norton was saying before the cough got in the way.
I make my way over to the table at the back. Badman and Joe have already taken up two chairs each. That leaves the rest of the group, three girls, cramped together on the other side of the desk. I decide not to mention the unfair seating arrangements and sit at the top.
“Good mo-r-n-i-n-g, Mr. Jack-a-s-s,” Badman says in that long drawn out chant we use for teachers. Joe smirks and the others giggle nervously.
I ignore him. “So who knows how to do this first question?” I say quickly.
There’s a short silence while the girls study the paper. Badman is slowly tearing off the corners of his paper and putting them into a little pile. I look at the question again. “I don’t really know where to start, myself,” I begin. “What’s the unit of measurement here?”
Something wet and hard hits me right in the eye. A small scrunched up white ball lands on the table near my hand. Badman’s flicking spit balls. I can feel my right eye starting to water.
“Cry about it,” says Badman.
He and Joe get busy, like assembly workers at a car factory. Or a spit ball factory. I watch as they tear their paper into tiny shreds, and put them in their mouths. They chew until the paper is soft and wet and then, taking a straw each from their pencil cases, they stuff the white mess in. Staring right at me, Badman puts the straw to his mouth and blows. I duck, but the ball hits me on the side of the cheek. I can smell his skanky saliva.
“What I mean is,” I go on, “if the scale is 1:40, what do we put after the numeral? Forty what?”
“Forty jackass try-hards,” says Badman.
The girls are studying their papers hard. I guess they think if they keep their heads down they won’t have to take sides. Joe is laughing like a maniac. The drool from his spit balls is dribbling down his chin. But I’m thinking about Badman’s random choice of units.
“Thanks, Badman, yes, that’s right, the unit can be anything: jackasses, try-hards, feet, inches. Well, anyway, whatever we choose, we have to then convert them all into the same unit. 1:40 means one jackass try-hard on the model car is equal to forty jackass try-hards on the real car. Get it?”
Badman has stopped filling his straw. His mouth hangs open like the lid of our school garbage can.
“So if we choose inches, then do we have to make 13 feet into inches so they’re all the same?” asks this serious girl called Robyn Graves. She’s tapping her pencil nervously on the paper, but her face is all lit up with that excitement you get when you think you’re onto something.
“That’s right!” I smile at her. I stop smiling as a spit ball lands smack on her mouth. It leaves a patch of wet goo on her bottom lip. She sits frozen. I can tell she doesn’t know whether to suck her lip to get rid of it or wipe it with her hand. Either way she’ll have Badman germs inside her. I hand her a tissue from the pack in my pocket.
“Well, well, and how are we doing here?” Norton suddenly looms over us, rubbing his hands together.
Out of the corner of my eye I see Badman hastily sweeping the little piles of wet paper onto his lap.
It would be so easy to say, “Badman’s shredding his paper and making spit balls, sir.” I can feel the girls boring their eyes into me. The tickle in my throat is ballooning. I can hardly swallow.
“Fine, sir,” I mutter.
“Good, good, that’s the way,” he bellows heartily and strides on.
Spit balls catch me and Robyn Graves at the same time. Robyn looks at me and then at Norton’s retreating back. Her eyebrows go up in this pleading expression.
I look away. I want to explain to her that if I report Badman it will only be worse for us. Well, if I’m honest, mainly it will be worse for me. My life won’t be worth living.
But then you couldn’t say it’s exactly heaven right now. I let out a couple of little coughs, hoping that will ease the tension. Robyn has given up looking at me and is scribbling busily on her paper. She’s converting inches and the others are looking over her shoulder, working away. I try to concentrate on my own paper now, but the numbers are blurring, forming into a cloud.
Spit balls land on my neck, my legs. My face is smeared with Badman saliva. I’m so hot inside it’s choking me. I hate my insides. They’re all weak, squishy, like the little polystyrofoam balls that fill a soft toy. Badman stomps on me any time he feels like it.
Why does he hate me so much? Every day, the insults—jackass, nerd, try-hard—other kids smirk, hiding their grins behind their lunches. Is it the math? I don’t think he cares all that much about being good at math. Maybe it’s me and Esmerelda—he’s always trying to get her attention. But he seems keener on Lilly. He doesn’t ever swear around her or make those crappy sex remarks. I heard that last Christmas he gave her a CD. Except it was some heavy metal band she hated so she told everyone she gave it away to her cousin. Then Badman told everyone the CD was only a freebie anyway that came with his Australian Musician magazine.
My ankle suddenly burns like fire. I look at Badman.
“Oh, sorry, Mr. Jack-a-s-s, my foot slipped,” he chants, chewing away.
I say nothing. I look back down at my paper. In my head I start to do one of my challenges. This is how it goes: you have to count by fours, tapping your right foot in time to the first four numbers, 4, 8, 12, 16, then change to your left as you do the next set. On every tenth multiple you have to blink your right eye, then your left, and so on. The object of the challenge is to see how far you can go in the time allotted, doing everything right. Once I got to 1,264 in two and a half minutes. That felt really good.
The cough eases and everything starts to drift far away. The cloud is quilting the space behind my eyes, and it’s soft and floaty. Sometimes I see the numbers in my mind, and they soothe me with their familiar faces. Numbers such as eight are like family members, or maybe pets. I can lay eight on its side so it becomes the infinity symbol and trace the loops back and forth, over and over. It’s like stroking a cat that stays still for you. Don’t you love numbers, the way they just lie where you put them and let you bend them into any shape you want?
For Esmerelda’s birthday, Badman gave her his two favorite fireworks, Overwhelming Joy and Hallucinations. They exploded rainbows 13 feet into the air. He said his father got them on the black market, but they were really expensive just the same.
When I look up, the girls have nearly finished the questions. Soggy bits of paper cover the desk. A gob of spit hangs off my ear.
“All right, class, time to move back to your seats,” bellows Norton. “Leaders, collect the papers from the group and hand them into me. Well done, everyone.”
Badman pushes a soggy mess of spit balls toward me. “There you go, Mr. Jackass. That’s mine.”
You know something? I used to hate math. Numbers gave me the shivers. Especially when they were mixed up with really nasty problems. Why invent problems, I’d rage at the textbook, when there are so many in the world occurring naturally?
Mom says, “Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.” She tries to look at things positively. When I told her it was Helen Keller, a deaf and blind person, who said that first, Mom said, “See, and you think you’ve got problems!” What can you say to that? If you start thinking about all the people in the world who suffer from terminal diseases or life-threatening poverty, your own worries look pathetic. Positively ridiculous. You can end up shouting at yourself in the mirror. I know that. But other people’s pr
oblems don’t make your own any easier.
Fifth grade at Milson Elementary was the worst year of my life. We had this teacher, Mr. Kemp, who gave us math problems every Monday. It was enough to make you mental. Sometimes, looking back on it, I think Mr. Kemp may have been mental himself. For sure he was the meanest guy I ever met, anyway. He was tall and thin as a fuse wire, and he’d whip around the classroom flicking problems at us and choosing the slowest kids in the class to answer them. He’d tap out the seconds on his thigh, and the rhythm would get faster and faster the longer he waited. He had a short fuse, all right, and as the seconds went by and no answer came it was like watching a lit line of gunpowder travel toward its terrible conclusion. He had the loudest shout on him I’ve ever heard.
How can you think with a demon breathing down your neck? You could imagine fire coming out of his mouth. You know that expression “his blood ran cold?” Well, that’s how it felt: my body would seize up and go rigid, like concrete setting on a suburban driveway. Mr. Kemp saw the blank look in my eyes and he went in for the kill. He hated me.
That year the problems set for homework were real heartbreakers. One I remember went like this: In a barn there are a number of animals, insects, and spiders. There are some chickens with 2 legs, some cows with 4 legs, some beetles with 6 legs, and some spiders with 8 legs. Guarding this group is a dog who lost one of his legs when he was run over by the farmer’s tractor. If there is a total of 113 legs, how many chickens, cows, beetles, spiders, and dogs could there be? Give at least 3 answers.
Well, I got stuck on the misery of that poor dog. How’s he going to guard all those animals when he’s running around on only three legs? And what kind of careless or maybe mean farmer was this to run over his own dog? All I could think about was how no one seemed to look after their helpless pets anymore, and I tried to feed any dog or cat that came onto our street, particularly the ones that looked like strays with no collars.
And what about those division of fruit problems? Once I was fuming over one of them and Mom left the potatoes on the stove to come and see. Over my shoulder she read out: “If Tom had 24 apples and he sold them for 6 cents each to his friend Ben, but he gave a discount to his brother of 3 cents each, and Ben bought 6, how much did Tom receive?”
“What I want to know,” I told her, “is how angry Ben would be about having to pay the full six cents. And what kind of a friendship is that, anyway? Why the hell wouldn’t you just share your apples with your friend and your brother? They’re only apples for heaven’s sake.”
Mom nodded enthusiastically. “I agree, that’s a typical capitalist sort of question where everyone is trying to rip off everyone else, even their best friends. Human beings can be better than that, can’t they, Jackson? People with apples should share with those who don’t, and they should set a better example in children’s textbooks.”
Well, all through dinner and into the washing up, Mom was still talking about social injustice. By the time Everybody Loves Raymond started on TV she was onto the disappointment of the Russian Revolution.
Good old Mom, she takes on my problems as if they were her own, but so often, I wish she wouldn’t. After the fruit problem she must have realized that I was having real panic attacks over math, so she jumped right in to help. Trouble was, she didn’t ever just tell me the answer to the question I was asking her, she had to go on and tell me the whole history of fractions and their deeper significance in the world. Like two thirds of the world’s population are so poor they never even get to use a telephone. How’s that for a weighty fraction? Then she’d move on to decimals and the division of money by the World Bank and suddenly it was ten o’clock and I could hardly keep my eyes open and there’d still be a page of math to go.
We used to have a lot of arguments about math. She’d go on and on like a laundry tap, and I’d start to fiddle with stuff and look out the window. This made her really mad and when she was tired, she’d start to yell. She goes all red in the face when she’s angry and she looks like a different person. Her transformation used to make me think of the evil queen in Sleeping Beauty, so kind and sweet one minute and a witch the next. She’d tell me how she’d already done school and now here she was having to do it all over again with me. Did I think she wanted to be sitting here listing the factors of 164 when she could be lying on the sofa with a glass of wine listening to Neil Young? When she’d calmed down, she was painfully sorry. That was almost worse. She’d be so mad with herself that you couldn’t ever be.
I think she realized how bad it was getting because she stopped checking on my math homework. She said she had never been any good at math herself and was only making it worse. That was the middle of fifth grade and when she started going out with Dan Smart. (I used to call him Damn Smart, although he wasn’t, really.) Mom hasn’t been out with many men since my dad died, but I think she chose old Dan because she thought he might be helpful. He was a high school math teacher, and very enthusiastic about his subject. She must have told him I was having problems, so as soon as he saw me, without even a hello or a handshake, he’d go, “What’s nine times seven?” He’d hide behind the bathroom door and leap out as I walked past, calling, “If Mary was twenty-seven and her brother was twenty-nine, who is the president of Lithuania?” or something like that.
Well, as you can imagine it didn’t work out, and we went back to the old ways. But Mom started to do yoga and learned to breathe, and I tried to concentrate. Sometimes she’d still get angry and bang the table. I’d go really quiet then, inside myself. I’d imagine I was a snail and all that was left on the outside was my shell. I was waterproof, her words bouncing off like bullets of rain.
And then, one beautiful day in the last term of fifth grade, Mr. Kemp left Milson Elementary (carried away in a straitjacket the rumor went), the sun came out and Miss Braithwaite arrived. She smelled of lavender and patience. She had endless patience. She smiled more than anyone I’d ever met. And it wasn’t that fake kind, the sort that’s pinned there like the tail on the donkey and you’re just waiting for it to drop off. She just really seemed to care about you—not whether you got the answer right, but whether you were okay. Within a week of her existence I’d stopped worrying about helpless dogs and how much fruit everyone was getting. I felt somehow that she would look after them all for me, she had such a big heart, and in place of Tom or Mary I could just put a box with a number in it, and it felt great!
That’s when I began to like numbers. As I calmed down the frozen cloud cleared and I saw patterns where before there was just a jumble of figures. I liked seeing the patterns, there was something so neat and tidy about them, like a well-planned city lifted straight from the map. If you followed the right method you’d arrive exactly where you were supposed to be. I looked forward to seeing Miss Braithwaite’s neat red check next to my answers, and her comments of “Excellent!!” and “Good work!!!” Miss Braithwaite went in for lots of exclamation marks; she wasn’t the kind to hold back. Sometimes after I’d finished my homework, I made up extra math questions and watched myself getting them right. I saw Miss Braithwaite smiling at my brilliance, and I felt powerful, like God or something (if I believed in Him). Numbers that were even seemed the most complete, and I started to make up math problems all the time, like some kids watch TV. When my answers involved eight I felt the best.
That was the hardest thing I ever had to do, leaving that school. But Miss Braithwaite told me that wherever I went, I could take those numbers with me. No one could take that away from me, she said. Just like the Africans and their music. And she was right.
What they can take away from you is your calm. Just like that. And then everything loses its shape. One comment from Badman and I’m a beanbag.
At lunch Asim sits down on the bench and silently passes me a bag of chips. He doesn’t need to say anything. We munch away for a while and watch the pigeons pecking at our chip crumbs. There’s this one kind of bird with a tall plume growing up from its head like an exclamation m
ark. As it bobs about it looks so enthusiastic. I’m really fond of that bird.
“This afternoon if you want to come over, we can finish putting the possum house together,” Asim says after a while. “My father thought we did a good job with the sawing.”
I smile and start on my apple. I remember the feel of the saw cutting into the wood. It was hard at first, working against the resistance of the pine, and then the blade cut through, sliding deeper and deeper, into the groove. I liked standing up all those pieces of wood we’d cut, one against the other, so they made a perfect straight line. I liked, too, working at the bench, surrounded by all the busy jars of nails and screws and the tools hanging neatly on their hooks, polished and ready to use. Thinking of this, my heart lifts a little.
“Dad has left us the brackets so we can put the sides together.”
“They’re those metal things you fix to the wood to make the corners?”
“Yes. They look like they’ll be the right size. We’ll need to trim the roof planks—”
“Ooh, you wanna be careful you don’t hurt yourself with those dangerous tools.” There’s a loud guffaw behind us and we whip around to see Badman and Joe, breathing down our necks. How long have they been standing there?
Badman comes around and slumps down on the bench next to Asim. Joe slouches near me. We’re sandwiched between them now like sardines. What do they want? I feel a cough coming on.
“You making a little home for the possie-wossies?” says Badman. He leans out over Asim. “Isn’t that cute, Joe? And Daddy’s lending them his little tools!”
Joe snorts, nodding like those toy dogs you see in the back windows of cars.
Anger is heating up my cheeks. I can feel my face starting to throb. “Haven’t you got anything better to do than spy on us? What a pathetic life you must have.”
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