Stacey the Math Whiz Page 9

  Did I have stage fright? You bet. All around me, my teammates were talking and waving to friends and brainstorming over problems. I could do nothing but sit and shake. I thought I was having an insulin reaction. I opened my backpack and made sure I had a packet of honey, just in case.

  “We are number one!” Jason shouted, right behind my left ear.

  I nearly jumped out of my chair.

  “Let’s have some quiet, please,” Ms. Hartley continued. “For those of you who are new to these meets …”

  As she went on, I tuned out. At the Eastbury table, the entire team was gathered around George Singh. He looked like a boxer surrounded by his trainers and coaches.

  “You can do it, Stacey,” whispered Emily.

  “You’re only one point behind him,” Bea said.

  I felt sick. This was a team meet, not a one-on-one competition. It was selfish to think of the individual scoring record.

  But I was.

  “… And so, without further ado, we’ll start,” Ms. Hartley said. “Eastbury takes the first spin.”

  The audience fell silent. George Singh spun the wheel.

  We were off and running.

  When Ms. Hartley read the first question, I could not understand it. Literally. I thought she was speaking in another language. It wasn’t until she put it on the overhead projector that I figured out the words.

  I don’t know how I managed to answer that one correctly. But I did.

  And Geoge Singh didn’t.

  The second one was easy. The third was about repeating numbers (yaaay!).

  Pop. My old self was returning. I was on a roll. I didn’t miss a problem until about halfway through.

  It wasn’t a hard problem. I just happened to look out into the audience while I was figuring it out.

  The coat was still on Dad’s chair. He hadn’t come.

  He had lied to me.

  The three-minute buzzer went off before I could finish. Luckily, everyone else on my team had answered it right.

  Unluckily, so had everyone on the Eastbury team. Including George Singh.

  I don’t know how I pulled it together after that. Maybe because I refused to look at Dad’s seat again. But I did manage to snag all the rest of the questions.

  By the end of the meet, the two teams were tied.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, this may be the highest scoring meet in Mathletes history!” Ms. Hartley announced. “Before our final team problem, let’s give both sides a big hand.”

  The audience roared.

  But the roar was different. I heard something in it I hadn’t heard before.

  I looked out. Kristy’s down coat had transformed into my father.

  He was cheering at the top of his lungs, a huge smile on his face.

  I smiled back. All my anger flew out the window.

  “This is a tricky one.” Ms. Hartley put a sequence on the overhead projector. It looked like this:

  “For the final problem of the year, what is the next figure in this sequence? Okay, teams … huddle!”

  Suddenly I felt eight gusts of breath on my neck.

  “Is it code?” Emily asked.

  “Another language?” Alexander suggested.

  “Maybe if we look at it upside down,” Bea said.

  I stared and stared. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see George scribbling furiously as his teammates argued.

  “Okay, these shapes mean something,” I said. “What do they have in common?”

  “Nothing,” Mari whispered hopelessly.

  I began thinking aloud. “Each is one shape, not two … four must be enough to determine the fifth … they’re each symmetrical around a vertical line …”

  I stared at the symbols. I imagined a vertical line down the center of each.

  The answer stared me in the face.

  “I’ve got it!” I screamed.

  I picked up the bell and rang it hard.

  George Singh slapped his pencil down and groaned.

  “St —” Ms. Hartley’s voice caught. “Stacey?”

  I drew this on a sheet of paper:

  “Is this it?” I asked.

  Ms. Hartley stared at it. In the hushed auditorium, you could hear her footsteps as she brought the sheet to the overhead projector.

  “The four symbols,” Ms. Hartley said into the mic, “are a one, a two, a three, and a four — but each is attached to its mirror image.” Her face broke into a grin. “And Stacey McGill, by drawing a five the same way, has won the state championship for Stoneybrook Middle School, and broken the individual state scoring record!”

  She had to shout that last part to be heard over the crowd noise.

  Have you ever seen eight Mathletes try to lift another one onto their shoulders? It’s hilarious. But somehow they hoisted me up there. At that point, I didn’t care if I fell and broke my ankle. I was thrilled.

  Kristy was leading a “Two, four, six, eight” cheer. Mom and Dad were rushing onto the stage.

  I must have hugged about a hundred people. The last was Dad.

  “Congratulations, sweetheart. I am so proud of you,” he said.

  I felt tears welling up. “Where were you? I didn’t think you’d make it.”

  “Sorry, Stacey. I had to take a taxi from Yonkers. My car broke down on the way.”

  “Oh, no! It was brand-new!”

  Dad shrugged. “I was going to get rid of it. Now that I have a new job, I won’t be needing it in the city. Who can afford those outrageous garage rates, anyway?”

  Typical.

  I smiled, but my mind was busy doing Dad math: New job plus no car equals fewer visits. I could feel a little clunk in the pit of my stomach.

  “I guess this is good-bye to the New Dad,” I said.

  Dad laughed. “He was kind of a nuisance, anyway.”

  “Not to me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dad said softly. “I’m marking lots of Stacey days in my book. And the company has a great arrangement with a rent-a-car place. Maybe the New Dad is gone, but the Old, Improved Dad will be even better.”

  “Okay.”

  As we hugged again, I felt someone tugging at my shirttail.

  I turned around to see Lindsey. She was holding out a sheet of paper, and she looked ready to explode with excitement. “Stacey, look!”

  The page was full of scribbles, but in the middle of it all was a big, smudgy

  “That last question — I got it, too!” Lindsey blurted out. “I’M JUST AS SMART AS YOU!”

  Dad burst out laughing.

  So did I. I don’t know why, but that was one of the nicest parts of the whole wonderful day.

  * * *

  Dear Reader,

  Unlike Stacey and the other kids in the Mathletes, I was never a good math student. Math was difficult for me, I had to work hard at it to get even passing grades, and several times I had to be tutored in order to keep up with my classmates. When I graduated from college, I was thrilled because I thought I would never have to work another math problem again. I was wrong. I find that I use math almost every day, especially when I’m sewing, one of my favorite pastimes. Sewing involves a lot of measuring, figuring, and refiguring. I keep a calculator on my sewing table, and it helps, but there are some things you can only figure out with your brain. So as much as I hated math when I was in school, now I find that I really do need it — and all that hard work paid off.

  Happy reading,

  * * *

  Many thanks to Peter G. Hayes

  The author gratefully acknowledges

  Peter Lerangis

  for his help in

  preparing this manuscript.

  About the Author

  ANN MATTHEWS MARTIN was born on August 12, 1955. She grew up in Princeton, New Jersey, with her parents and her younger sister, Jane.

  There are currently over 176 million copies of The Baby-sitters Club in print. (If you stacked all of these books up, the pile would be 21,245 miles high.) In addition to The Baby-s
itters Club, Ann is the author of two other series, Main Street and Family Tree. Her novels include Belle Teal, A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor book), Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, Everything for a Dog, Ten Rules for Living with My Sister, and Ten Good and Bad Things About My Life (So Far). She is also the coauthor, with Laura Godwin, of the Doll People series.

  Ann lives in upstate New York with her dog and her cats.

  Copyright © 1997 by Ann M. Martin

  Cover art by Hodges Soileau

  All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC, THE BABY-SITTERS CLUB, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First edition, February 1997

  e-ISBN 978-0-545-79304-9