All the Answers (2 page)

Ava supposed it was meant to look like fun. It didn't.

She stuffed the paper to the bottom of her backpack, down with the banana slime from when she forgot to take out her snack two weeks ago.

“All right. Desks cleared? Pencils out? Brains sharp?”

Mr. Farkley dropped a test on Ava's desk. She swallowed hard and picked up her pencil.

The first four problems were easy—tests did that to trick you into thinking everything would be okay—but the fifth one made Ava's throat dry and squeezy.

She should have reviewed those formulas on the way to school. What was Sophie's pie supposed to remind her of?

Ava pulled her scratch paper from under the test pages and doodled all the maybes.

Pi = π = 3.14

Pi R squared
.

2 pi R squared
.

Pi R
.

2 pi R
.

Pi R Something else
…

The clock ticked.

Ava's eyes burned. She blinked a few times, then squeezed them shut. She knew she was going to have to multiply something by something, and she was pretty sure pi was involved.

Ava tried taking a few more four-count breaths.

She drew some pies on her scratch paper for inspiration. Apple … cherry …

They were not inspiring pies. They were lopsided and lumpy and offered no help whatsoever.

Ava doodled in big, bubbly letters.

What is the formula to find the circumference of a circle?

And a voice said, “Two Pi R.”

Ava jerked her head up. The kids around her were hunched over their papers working as if no one had said—or heard—anything. But whoever answered her question hadn't even bothered whispering. It was loud enough that the whole class should have heard.

“Ava?” Mr. Farkley was staring at her, eyebrows raised. “Is there a problem?”

“No. Sorry. I was … thinking.” She looked down at her paper and carefully, slowly, circled the equation 2πr. Whoever answered her question was right; she remembered now. So she did the problem, checked it over, and looked up again.

The voice couldn't have been Sophie's. She was way across the room. Luke Varnway was the only person sitting close to Ava, but the voice wasn't a boy's. It had sounded more like Ava's mom or Aunt Jayla. How come nobody else heard it?

Ava took a deep breath. Maybe it was like Aunt Jayla told her … if she could just calm herself down, the little voice in her head would give her the answer she'd studied. Maybe, after all the tests she'd bombed, her little voice had finally decided to show up!

It was about time. Ava took another breath and read the next question, about the area of the circle. Was that one pi R? Or pi R squared? Or two pi R squared?

Voice?
Ava thought.
I could use some help here
.

She waited. But the voice in her head was already gone.

Come back!
Ava thought.
Please?
She tried writing down the question, like she had before. Maybe she needed to see it on paper for her voice to kick in.

She wrote:

What is the formula for the area of a circle?

“Pi R squared,” the voice said.

It was back! But it wasn't in Ava's head. It wasn't
her
voice at all. It sounded like it was coming from someone right there in the room. Ava looked around again. How could nobody have heard?

Ava made herself look down before Mr. Farkley saw her eyes wandering. She used the voice's formula to work out two problems.

But the next questions were about triangles, and Ava couldn't remember the triangle stuff.

So she wrote:

How do you figure out the third side of a triangle?

The voice said, “That depends on what kind of triangle it is. You'll need to be more specific.”

Ava's mouth dropped open. She snuck a glance up at Luke, who was chewing his pencil, still working on the circle problems. He certainly wasn't the one talking to her.

Ava looked back at her paper. This triangle had a right angle; she knew that. So she wrote:

A right triangle

Ava waited. The clock ticked one of those big, echoey, you-are-so-running-out-of-test-time ticks.

But the only voice she heard was Mr. Farkley's. “Five minutes until the bell! I'll take papers up here when you're done.”

A bunch of kids got up, walking past Ava's desk to drop off their tests.

Come on
, Ava thought.

She tried again:

What is the formula for figuring out the third side of a right triangle when you know the first two sides?

If that wasn't specific enough, then the voice in her head was a big jerk.

But apparently, her voice liked the new question.

“A squared plus B squared equals C squared,” it said. This time, Ava didn't bother looking up. She wrote down the formula and figured out the problem with a minute to spare, then tucked her scratch paper in her backpack and added her test to the pile on Mr. Farkley's desk.

“How'd you do?” he asked.

“Fine,” she answered, like she always did. But this time, it was true.

“How'd you do on the math test?” Sophie asked as they headed for their lockers before lunch.

“Pretty good, actually. The weirdest thing happened, though. It was like—”

“Ava!” Miss Romero called down the hallway, flapping a pile of sheet music so frantically it looked like she might be trying to get off the ground and fly. Miss Romero was tiny with a streak of green in her curly black hair. She looked like a hummingbird, darting and weaving through the maze of bodies and backpacks. When she reached Ava, she held up the music. “Sophie told me you're trying out for jazz band, so I pulled a few pieces I thought you might like. You'll need to play one of these and do a few bars of improvisation, okay?”

“Umm …” Ava looked at Sophie, who played drums and had told Ava last week that she should come to jazz tryouts. Ava was
certain she hadn't said yes. She'd probably said something like, “That sounds interesting. I'll have to check it out,” which in Avalanguage meant, “That sounds terrifying, but you won't understand, so I'll nod for now and then forget to show up.”

But here was Miss Romero. With music. “Tryouts are two weeks from today in the band room. You can come during study hall or after school, okay?” Miss Romero gave Ava the music and turned to go. “See you then!”

“We'll be there,” Sophie called after her.

“
You'll
be there,” Ava said as she and Sophie walked down the hall. “I never said I'd go for sure.”

“Why not? What's the worst thing that could happen? You try out, it doesn't go well, and you don't get in. Right?”

“Wrong. I could show up with my saxophone and be so nervous that I pass out and hit my head on the floor, and then they'd have to call an ambulance, disrupting the auditions so no one else could try out either, and I'd be known for the rest of time as the girl who singlehandedly shut down the middle school jazz band. Also, my saxophone would be dented and Mom would kill me for dropping it, even if I managed to survive the fall.”

Sophie laughed. “Fine. Ready for lunch?”

Ava hesitated. Her stomach was too tied up in knots for the chaos of the school cafeteria. Plus, Sophie's eighth-grade gymnastics friends had started sitting with them, and Ava couldn't tell if they liked her or not. “Actually, I need to go to the library.” She didn't mention that her need had more to do with space and quiet than shelving books for the librarian, Mrs. Galvin.

“Okay … see you after school, then.” Sophie turned toward the noise of the cafeteria, and Ava headed for the library. She stopped when she saw the sign by the door.

CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE CLUB TODAY

Mrs. Galvin held special activities in the library during lunch and after school. Chocolate Chip Cookie Club was a reading thing with poems and stuff. It used to be called Word Power, but not many people came to meetings until she changed the name.

Ava peered into the library. It was already busier than she liked. She understood that lots of kids liked the club, but she couldn't help feeling resentful about so many loud voices and crumbs invading what she'd come to think of as her sanctuary.

“Ava! I'm so happy you're here today. I think you'll love this group.”

“I don't want to be in the club,” Ava blurted and then felt bad when she saw Mrs. Galvin's smile fade. Ava liked Mrs. Galvin. She recommended good books and had cool quotes posted all over the library, but she and Ava just didn't think the same way.

The one time Ava had stayed in the library for a lunchtime writing workshop last year, Mrs. Galvin had waved her notebook around, telling everyone that “What if” was the greatest phrase in the English language. Ava couldn't have disagreed more. In fact, those were just about the
worst
two words in the universe. They led the charge for every one of Ava's worries. What if I fail math class? What if I lose my pencil before Mr. Farkley's quiz? What if somebody I love dies? What if there's a terrorist attack or an
earthquake or a school shooting? What-ifs were not Ava's friend, and she had trouble trusting anyone who liked them as much as Mrs. Galvin did.

“I didn't know club was today. I was going to shelve books, but I don't have to.” Ava started to turn away.

“That's okay. You can shelve during our meeting.” Mrs. Galvin gave Ava a cart of books and hurried off to print copies of the club's poem for the day.

Ava started with the fiction. There were some some new quotes on the wall above the bookshelves.

A room without books is like a body without a soul. —Cicero

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library
.

—Jorge Luis Borges

The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong
.

—Mahatma Gandhi

Any fool can know. The point is to understand. —Einstein

Ava smiled. Marcus would love the last one. He had an Einstein poster in his bedroom.

“Okay, let's get started,” Mrs. Galvin told the kids at the tables. Ava could hear her voice from the other side of the shelves. “Sometimes, when you talk about poetry in English class, your teacher will want you to analyze every line and look for the similes and metaphors. Can anybody remember what those are?”

“A simile is a figure of speech that describes one thing by
comparing it to something else using the words ‘like,' ‘as,' or ‘than,' ” someone said. It sounded like Leo Kim, with a mouthful of cookie. “And a metaphor is a more direct comparison without ‘like,' ‘as,' or ‘than.' Like if I said, ‘These cookies
are
bites of heaven.' ”

“Great,” Mrs. Galvin said.

“Are we going to read a poem and pick out the similes and metaphors?” someone asked, and a bunch of people groaned.

“No,” Mrs. Galvin said. “We're reading a poem that makes fun of them.”

Ava was curious about that. It was hard to imagine a grown-up poet making fun of something serious like metaphors. She crept around the bookshelf and sat down at an empty table with a pile of books so she could listen while she pretended to sort them. Mrs. Galvin must have noticed; she wandered by and dropped a copy of the poem and a cookie onto Ava's table before she went back to the club.

The poem was called “Litany.” Billy Collins, the guy who wrote it, started out like any other fancy poet by telling somebody—his wife or girlfriend, Ava guessed—that she was bread, a knife, a goblet, and wine. That already seemed like a lot of things for one person to be, but then he went on to compare her to pretty much everything else in the world. She was morning dew and a fish and an apron but
not
boots in a corner or a bunch of other stuff. And then the poet made a list of all the weird things
he
was—the moon and rain and some blind lady's teacup—and it was pretty clear he was totally mocking metaphors.

“That's awesome,” one of the eighth grade girls said when Mrs. Galvin finished.

The boys thought so, too. They started making up their own metaphors.

“I am the touchdown in the final moments of the game,” Luke Varnway said, holding his arms up to the ceiling.

Isaiah Gates scoffed. “Dude, you're the chewed gum underneath the bench.”

“You're the smelly socks I left in my gym bag,” shouted Alex Weinstein. “And the dog poop on the soccer field!”

That made Leo Kim laugh so hard he spit cookie crumbs all over the table, which made Mrs. Galvin raise her voice a little. “I think we have time for one more poem.” She glanced at the library clock—“Maybe a short one”—and flipped through a fat book of poetry from her desk. “This is by Robert Frost,” she said. “It's called ‘The Secret Sits.' ”

Mrs. Galvin read the poem in about five seconds flat. It was about a bunch of people dancing around in a circle trying to guess a secret, and the secret was in the middle, sitting there, doing nothing. That was the whole poem.