The Amanda Project: Book One

The Amanda Project: Chapter Seven

CHAPTER SEVEN

Bio and English were a total blur except for when Ms. Burger pointed out that today was March fifteenth and warned us to "beware the Ides of March." Her words created a flicker of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. Could there be some connection between the date and Amanda's prank? But what? I couldn't even remember why we were supposed to beware the Ides of March, and by the time Ms. Burger told us to open our books to Shakespeare's Sonnet 138, I'd gone back to ignoring what was going on around me, just focusing on the clock as I counted the seconds until last period.

I was totally sure Amanda was going to be in math class, so sure that I actually jogged the last fifty yards to the room. Even though I was pretty confused and starting to get more than a little annoyed about everything that had gone down over the course of the morning, it would be such a relief to see her. Was she really friends with Hal and Nia? Why had she spray-painted Thornhill's car and our lockers? I'd run over in my head what I was going to say to her so many times I practically had it memorized.

It didn't mean anything that she wasn't there when I pushed open the door of room S-51 (when was Amanda ever on time for anything?). It didn't even mean anything that she hadn't shown up by the time the late bell rang. But as the minutes ticked by and Mrs. Watson took us through the homework problems (problems Amanda and I had just done together the night before), the excitement I'd felt started to morph into frustration. Where was she? It was one thing to cut school; god knows Amanda did that fairly regularly. It was another thing to cut school on a day when you'd pulled a prank that got several other people in mad trouble. Of course, knowing Amanda, she would just respond with a raised eyebrow or a quotation of unknown origins to direct questions she didn't care to answer.

That was so not going to fly this time.

It's not exactly a major problem when I can't concentrate in math class. When I don't pay attention in history, I know I'm a goner on the next test. But math is totally different. Math is like . . . okay, you know when you're shopping for jeans and you try on ten million pairs and each one is just a little too tight, or a little too loose, or it's got some freaky acid washed thing going on, and then all of a sudden, right when you're like, Oh, forget it, I'm just going to live without a new pair of jeans, you try on one last pair and as they slide up your legs it's . . . it's like you were born to wear them. That's what math is like for me, like a language I was somehow born knowing.

Actually, I probably was born knowing it. My mom is one of the best mathematicians in the world. I mean, I might be good at math, but she's brilliant. Like, if you ask me to multiply two three-digit numbers, I can do it in my head pretty fast, but that's nothing compared to my mom. If we're at the grocery store and she's trying to estimate what everything's going to cost, she can glance at the cart and figure out to the penny what the total's going to be. And if you ask her in July how many days until Christmas, she can tell you the answer in less than a second.

For me, it's more . . . well, when Mrs. Watson puts a new concept up on the board, like when we learned sine and cosine this fall, it feels like the whole time she's talking and writing stuff down, I'm just thinking, Right. Right. Of course. That makes total sense. I can't really explain how I understand something when it comes to math-I just understand it.

That was why I was so totally bummed back when Mrs. Watson asked me to catch up the new girl in our class, Amanda Valentino, on one of her first days in school, maybe Halloween or the day after. First of all, I was already half out of my mind because of everything that was going on with my mom, but even when I'm functioning normally, I'm lousy at relaying math concepts to other people. Traci used to ask me to help her with her math homework when we first became friends; after I tried to teach her a few times, she got so irritated by my inability to show her how I was getting my answers that she just told me to forget it. So I knew assigning me to teach Amanda Valentino two months' worth of math was destined to end in failure, but I mean, what can you say? I'm sorry, Mrs. Watson, I swear I wasn't cheating, but there's no way I can explain my work to another human being.