by Greg Pincus
“You want me to what?” Gregory asked Mr. Davis incredulously.
“I want you to teach the class about Fibonacci,” Mr. Davis replied as he vigorously erased the blackboard in his class after school. His teacher was smiling, and Gregory had a good guess as to why.
“Is there a juggling competition coming up? Do you need some extra practice time?” Gregory tried to wrap his head around it, but all he could say was “You want me to teach math class?”
“No, no, and yes. I just think the class would be interested, and you really have a handle on it, seems to me.” Mr. Davis clapped his erasers together, generating a beautiful puff of chalk dust. “And they’d love the Fibonacci poetry.”
“You want me to teach math class,” Gregory stated rather than asked.
“Yes, I do.” Mr. Davis said it as enthusiastically as he said everything else, but Gregory kept waiting for the kicker … the punch line … the twist. It never came.
Mr. Davis sat at his desk, looking over a class calendar. “How about the next-to-last Wednesday in May?”
Gregory did the math. It gave him just over three weeks, but he was working on City Math too. They were both about Fibonacci, it was true, but it seemed like too much. “Uh. Uh. I have that … uh … that thing that Wednesday,” Gregory said. “You know what I’m talking about, right?”
“Not a clue.” Mr. Davis was clearly fighting a smile.
“Uh. You know. I have uh …” Gregory had many things, but at this moment, he didn’t have a fib that would work. “I have … uh, school. And math class.”
“Perfect.” Mr. Davis wrote GREGORY K.! on the calendar in huge letters. Then he gave Gregory a pat on the shoulder. “Now go make it a great day and write some more about math!”
An hour later, Gregory was still at a loss for words, though part of this was because he was at the Slice eating blueberry pie with vanilla-infused whipped cream. The other part, though, was math.
“What are the odds that Mr. Davis would ask me to teach class?” Gregory asked with blue-stained teeth.
“Apparently, they’re one to one,” Kelly answered.
“What am I gonna do?”
“You teach me about poetry all the time!” Kelly said. “So, you can do this too.”
“But this is math.” Gregory paused with a forkful of joy, inhaling the sweet, fruity aroma before devouring it. “It’s not poetry. It’s math.”
“And poetry. You should focus on that part. Besides, G, aren’t you doing your City Math presentation on Fibonacci too? This is perfect. You can prepare for both at once!” Kelly said it like it was a great idea, and he knew it probably was, but at the moment it seemed like a punishment.
Kelly stabbed the last piece of pie. “Oh, this is a perfect bite. Equal parts crust and filling and whipped cream!”
Gregory stuck out his fork, and Kelly cut the perfect-thirds bite in half. They both sighed as they chewed.
“That was math. And that was delicious,” Kelly said with a smile. “I’d call it poetry.”
“Stop it!” Gregory said, trying not to grin.
“You know,” Kelly said softly, “this might be the last time blueberry comes up in rotation.”
“Would you stop with that too?” Gregory said without any hint of a smile. It was only early May, but the two were now counting the days instead of weeks until Kelly left.
“I’m just saying, that’s all.” Kelly shrugged. “It’s not fun for me either. So let’s go back to talking about you teaching math class.”
“No!” Gregory said. “Can’t we talk about something else?”
“Author’s Camp? City Math?” Kelly laughed. After a moment, so did Gregory. Kelly got up from her chair and took the few steps to the counter. She grabbed the two glasses of cold milk her mother was just finishing pouring.
“I can’t wait for City Math to be done,” Gregory said as Kelly came back to the table. “I never should’ve said I was doing it. Ever.”
“Duh,” Kelly said, and Gregory’s calf hurt spontaneously. She handed one glass to Gregory, and the two friends clinked the cups together in a milk toast. They drank until there was no milk left.
“I’m just gonna write some Fibonacci stuff and put it up at the event, hide in the back, and wait until it’s done. No one sees me embarrass myself. I get my certificate, and it’s over.” Gregory shivered, thinking about what was to come.
“Hey, now. Since you’re doing it, I want to see you there,” Kelly said.
“Fine. Only you,” Gregory said.
Kelly pressed a few crumbs on the pie plate down with her finger, smooshing them onto her skin so she could lick them off. Gregory absentmindedly drummed on the tabletop.
“Do you remember Miss Edgerton?” Gregory asked after a few moments.
Kelly shook her head.
“She was the substitute we had for two days in second grade when Mrs. Franklin broke her toe,” Gregory said.
“Okay. I’ll believe you. So what?”
“She had us write poems. She gave us two lines.”
“Oh, right!” Kelly said. “Roses are red. Violets are blue.”
“And I wrote” — as Gregory continued, Kelly joined with him — “‘if you hold your breath, then your two lips are too.’”
Kelly’s laughter filled the Slice. “Oh, I’d forgotten about that! Boy, she laughed and laughed and laughed.”
“Yeah. And the next day, she brought in a magazine. Cricket, I think it was called. It was some bug or another, anyway. And she opened up to page twenty-three and showed me a poem. She’d written it. She’d gotten money for it. And there was her name in black and white in a magazine. For a poem.”
“I never saw that,” Kelly said as she gathered up their dirty dishes.
“I think she just showed it to me. And you know what she said?” Gregory asked as he took a napkin and wiped the crumbs off the table. Kelly shook her head.
“‘Write poetry, Gregory. The world always needs poetry.’” Gregory sighed and finished cleaning. “Sometimes I wish Mrs. Franklin never broke her toe. Up till then, I did math. I was ahead of the class, ya know? But I came home and asked my dad for a blank notebook so I could write my poem out for him and Mom. And he gave me a blank notebook and a bunch of pencils and a slide rule and a compass and he wrote a note at the top of the first page: For All Your Great Math Ideas!!! With three exclamation points.”
“And did you show him the poem?” Kelly asked.
“He wouldn’t have liked it.” Gregory took the crumpled napkin and aimed for the nearest trash can. It went straight in.
“So you didn’t show it to him. That’s too bad.”
“You know what I did? I brought it here the next day and read it to your mom. She laughed and gave me pie!”
“She gave you pie every time you were here, silly,” Kelly said. “Though she didn’t always laugh.”
“I wonder what would’ve happened if Miss Edgerton had given us a math assignment and then brought in a textbook where she’d written a problem or something like that….” Gregory faded off.
“You’d’ve ended up writing poetry, G,” Kelly said. “And it’d be good.”
“I still have that notebook.”
“Empty?”
“Totally,” Gregory said.
There was a long silence. Kelly carried the dirty dishes to the back, while Gregory drifted off in thought. After a while, Gregory realized that Kelly had returned and was studying him with a look he’d seen so often before.
A lot of times, the look was followed by her telling him exactly what he’d been thinking, a talent Kelly had that used to freak him out but now was just part of their friendship. He wondered if she’d lose that skill when they didn’t see each other all the time.
“You’ve come up with a plan, haven’t you?” Kelly asked. “You’re just sitting there, but the mind is scheming.”
“Yeah. I need pie,” Gregory said.
“We just ate pie!”
“A we
ek from tomorrow. I need a full one for home. Apple.”
“But that’ll be Weird Wednesday. Shouldn’t you ask for an avocado flax-meal pie or something?” Kelly asked, but got no reaction. “Well, besides, apple pie is not on the schedule.”
“I know, but I’m gonna talk to my parents then. Dad’s gone tomorrow, but a Weird Wednesday with amazing pie will be perfect. I’ll be the hero. And then I’ll tell them about my poetry and how I want to … no, how I need to go to Author’s Camp.”
“And about teaching math …” Kelly reminded him.
“I don’t think that’ll come up. If I get off track, it’ll never happen, Kelly. You know that.” Gregory was adamant. “I need your mom’s apple pie.”
Kelly mulled for a minute, then nodded. “You’ll get your pie. But I want something too.”
“Name it.”
“Meet me at the park after school next Wednesday. South side. Have an hour to spend, okay? We’ll get the pie on your way home.” Kelly’s voice left no room for argument.
So, even though he had no idea what was in store for him in the park, Gregory agreed. Over time, he’d learned to trust Kelly. Besides, if it got him apple pie, it was worth well more than an hour.
After he left the Slice, Gregory went home and, without even thinking twice, opened up a book about Fibonacci and math and tried to plow through it. He tried again two nights later. And the next Tuesday too. That night, he felt like something had clicked, and he grabbed his pen to take notes. But it was a false alarm, so he laid the book down and pulled out his math journal instead.
Once
Twice
Three times
I have tried
Fibonacci’s math
I think I’ll stick to poetry
I know. I know. You said I didn’t need to understand all his advanced equations and stuff. That’s good, because I don’t. I actually asked my dad to try and explain a little again, and I think he’s still up in Mathland talking. And I asked him two days ago!
You were right too that I’m not the first person to write poems based on the Fibonacci sequence. Too bad. It would’ve been cool to be first, but I’m about one thousand years too late, cuz apparently there was really old writing that kinda followed the same rhythms. I guess people have experimented since then, and some guy even wrote a book with each chapter having a Fibonacci number of sentences. I’ll stick to these short poems.
Hey!!!! Short Fibonacci poems = Fibs.
Fibs! What could be better for me than that???!!!!!!
When Gregory got his journal back from Mr. Davis the next day after school, he practically sprinted off to meet Kelly in the park. It was a marvelous May day, and the bright sun and dark shadows it cast were in perfect contrast. He ran to the south end of the park and, though he didn’t see Kelly, he couldn’t help himself. He held his journal up in the air and shouted, “I got a ‘fantastic and stupendous’ in math!”
Kelly’s happy hoot of a reply bounced down from a tree above Gregory. “That is fantastic and stupendous, Gregory K. Now put your stuff down and climb up here.”
It was an easy climbing tree, and Gregory clambered up to join his friend. Kelly was sitting comfortably in a mass of branches, a single leg dangling down. In her hand, she held two notebooks with pens attached. She gave one to Gregory.
Wordlessly, Gregory settled into the tree beside Kelly. The two friends opened their notebooks, grabbed the pens, and waited for inspiration to strike. Soon they were both writing.
“This was our first tree, you know,” Kelly said when she finally took a break. “The first place we wrote.”
“I’ll trust you on that.”
“It’s true. We moved trees years ago, but this is where it started, sitting here in this tree with you.” Kelly leaned back, cradled in the branches with the sun and shadows playing on her face. “I needed to come back here one last time.”
“Are there trees where you’re moving?” Gregory closed his eyes and leaned back too, balanced in the branches.
“Yeah. There are.”
“Good.”
The two friends sat in silence for a while, a gentle breeze rustling the leaves around them. Then they wrote some more, traded notebooks, laughed, and watched the light change until the sun told them it was time to go pick up Gregory’s pie.
Kelly’s mom had left the pie at her house, not wanting to risk a crowd demanding pieces at the Slice. Gregory carried the pie home, trying hard to breathe in every bit of its delicious cinnamon-rich aroma so that others wouldn’t start following him.
While he was normally not much of a planner, Gregory had decided exactly when he was going to launch into his speech to his family. It was a no-brainer, really — after bite three of the pie.
After bite one, everything you say is lost in a haze of absolute bliss, and then you have to take bite two to make sure that it isn’t a dream. With bite three, you accept the pie in all its real glory, and from then until the end of the piece, you tend to hear everything with a very open, and very happy, mind.
Kelly had been on bite three of apple pie when her mom told her she’d be moving, and she was convinced her mom waited until just that moment to pass on the news. It still didn’t go over well … but Gregory could only imagine if it had come at another time.
At home, Gregory’s mom resisted for about eight seconds when he suggested serving the pie even though it was Weird Wednesday, but resistance faded when he gave her the still-warm, aromatic, golden-perfect confection. She even decided to surprise the others with the pie and kept it out of sight before dinner.
When dinner finally came, Gregory had to admit it was almost pleasant. Not the food — nonmeat loaf made from, well, no one was bold enough to ask — but the conversation stayed on “safe” topics, and O acted completely out of character, only speaking once and then only to say, “Pass the milk, please.”
Soon it was time for dessert. When his mom brought the pie to the table, Kay and his dad literally squealed with delight. Gregory tried to stay calm. He had vowed not to eat the pie until after he spoke, fearing that he might get lost in it and miss his window.
Slices were cut. Plates were filled. Gregory held his fork, never cutting into his piece. He watched his parents eating, waiting for his moment.
Apparently, he should’ve been watching O, because just as the second bite was being swallowed …
“I’m not going to do City Math this year,” O said.
“What?” their father said.
“What?” their mother said.
Gregory sat frozen in his seat, unable to get words out to interrupt.
“I’m giving up my spot because everyone who’s seen my project says I’m guaranteed to win, so I wanted to let someone else have a chance. Besides, there’s a national contest that I want to enter it in instead, and the rules say it can’t have been in any other event first,” O said.
“That’s super!” Dad said.
“You sure you’re okay with that, O?” Kay asked. “I know you like the trophies.”
“There’ll be more this way,” O said with a smile. “And … I thought maybe we could keep it all in the family, so I suggested that Gregory get my main stage spot. That means he gets to present to the entire crowd. Isn’t that super?!”
“Oh, that’s great, honey,” Mom said.
“It’ll be a math highlight for you forever, Gregory,” Dad chimed in. “I should start charging the video camera now! What do you say?”
All eyes were on Gregory, and he felt it. And he knew this was his moment. And he knew exactly what he had to say.
“Fantastic and stupendous! O’s absolutely made my day!”
Immediately, his calf started to hurt. He tried to drown out the pain by taking a bite of pie. Normally, that would put him in a blissful place … a sugar-cinnamon-apple dreamland. This time, however, it did nothing more than taste good. Mighty good, sure, but the needed power was gone. It was a dismal moment.
O, however, seemed to be lov
ing it….
“How could you do that to me?” Gregory yelled at his brother as they cleaned the dishes after dinner.
“Do what? Put you on center stage at City Math or steal your pie effect?” O asked with a grin.
“Pie effect? What do you mean?” Gregory looked innocent as he scraped some nonmeat into the trash.
“What were you going to tell Mom and Dad? You don’t bring home a pie then watch people eat it if you don’t have major news.”
Gregory stammered and stuttered until finally admitting defeat. “But you cheated. You only waited two bites.”
“Because mine was good news. I’d’ve said it when I came home, but I smelled your plan, all perfect and sweet.” O waved the pie tin under his brother’s nose. “So, were you gonna tell ’em you weren’t really in City Math?”
“I am in City Math! And I can’t wait to be on the big stage doing all my math … stuff,” Gregory said far too loudly.
“And to think I was just going to offer to take it back….” O let it hang there, waiting for his brother to react.
Gregory did some calculations in his head. It could be a trap. It could be real. It could be that —
O put him out of the math zone by starting in again. “So what were you gonna tell ’em? You can’t stand Mom’s food? You’re failing math? You got kicked out of school?”
“I write poetry.” Gregory said it simply and firmly.
“Oh,” said O.
The two brothers scrubbed and stacked and dried quietly for a minute. Then O began to giggle.
“Stop it,” Gregory said. “Whatever you’re thinking, just stop it.”
“Poetry!!! You. Write. Poetry!” O was now laughing hard. “That was your big news, but you know what happened? Nothing, except I got pie. That’s poetic right there, isn’t it? Gonna write about it?”
“It isn’t funny. None of it’s funny.” Gregory slammed down a plate. “I’m not a numbers genius like you, okay? I can’t do math that makes Dad proud, all right? I just can’t.”
“Maybe you just don’t try hard enough,” O said dismissively.