All the Answers (3 page)

“I'll read it one more time,” Mrs. Galvin said. Ava was glad. She'd liked the poking-fun-at-metaphors poem, but this one bugged her, and when Mrs. Galvin read it again, she figured out why. That secret was all kinds of smug about everybody trying to guess it and not knowing.

Mrs. Galvin looked up. “Anybody want to talk about this one?”

“Yeah,” Alex said. “I think the secret's kind of a jerk.”

Leo laughed, but Mrs. Galvin just nodded thoughtfully. “How so?”

Alex just shrugged.

“Because …” Ava surprised herself by answering out loud. Everyone turned her way, and her stomach tensed, but she kept talking. “We all try so hard to figure out what we're supposed to figure out and we get stuff wrong all the time and it's like … it's like the secret doesn't want to help us. Like it doesn't even
care
about all our questions.”

Mrs. Galvin looked right at Ava. She blinked a few times, then nodded. “And when you're a person who really likes answers, that bothers you.”

“Yes.” Ava let out a rush of breath. “It does.”

The bell rang then, and the room emptied out. Ava finished shelving her pile of books and started for the door.

“Ava?” Mrs. Galvin called from the table where she was pushing in chairs. “I'm glad you decided to join us.”

“Yeah … I guess I sort of did.”

“Will I see you for our next meeting?”

“I'll be here,” Ava said. She was pretty sure she meant it.

At the end of the day, Sophie was waiting at Ava's locker to walk home. “Hey, you put up a new Katina D. picture!” Sophie leaned in to check out the photograph and frowned. “Her hair's wet. Is this from the ‘Wash the World Away' video?”

“I guess. I cut it out of one of Gram's magazines.”

“Cool.” Sophie started singing, “Let it rain … Let it pour 'cause I'm not gonna stand for your lies anymore,” and did a few dance moves while Ava reached for her assignment book. “Wash the World Away” was their favorite Katina D. song. Ava loved the video of the band dancing in the pouring rain, even though Gram couldn't get past Katina's too-short skirt.

“Thanks for waiting.” Ava slammed her locker and headed outside with Sophie.

“You never finished telling me about the math test earlier,” Sophie said. “What happened?”

“It was like I kept hearing this voice… .” Ava paused. She hadn't planned to bring up the test-voice again. It sounded so
weird
. In books and movies, it was always crazy people who heard voices in their heads. But this was Sophie, and Ava told Sophie everything. “The voice was … telling me answers.”

“I
knew
you were ready for that test.” Sophie jumped up onto the curb, walked a few steps, and then stretched one leg way out behind her. The whole world was Sophie's balance beam.

“I don't know …” Ava waited for Sophie to start walking again. “The voice was weird. It felt
real
, like I could hear it out loud—not just in my head.”

“I never heard anything.” Sophie kicked an acorn along the sidewalk. “Maybe the math room is haunted.”

“By a helpful ghost who knows formulas and only talks to me?” Ava shook her head. “You want to come over? Gram probably made cookies.”

“Does Gram ever not make cookies?” Sophie had a good point. Gram was Ava's father's mom, and had lived with them since Ava was little. There were always cookies in the kitchen.

Sophie glanced up at her house. “Mom's home and I haven't seen her since Friday because it was Dad's weekend. Let me say hi and I'll come over in a while, okay?” She ran off, and Ava started up her own driveway. She hoped the goats wouldn't be out.

Dad had gotten Lucy and Ethel about a month ago. They were named after characters in his favorite old TV show,
I Love Lucy
. Lucy and Ethel were supposed to give milk, which Dad was
supposed to sell in the store, which was supposed to draw business from miles around. But it hadn't worked out that way, so now they had a cooler full of weird milk that nobody bought and two grouchy goats who sounded like scary, screaming people when they bleated. When she wasn't hollering, Lucy was actually okay. She mostly ate grass and ignored everybody, but Ethel spent her whole life stalking Ava. She'd wait by the fence until Ava got home from school and then run at her.

Dad always laughed. “She won't hurt you.” But Ava never stuck around to see what would happen if Ethel caught her. She'd veer off the driveway into the tall grass and end up covered in burrs and dandelion fluff.

Today the goats were fenced in, and that was good. Ava wanted to get to her room, close the door, and think.

“
Mehhh!
” Ethel bleated at her as she hurried toward the house.

“That you, sugarplum?” Gram called when the kitchen door slammed.

“Yep!” Ava grabbed two warm peanut butter cookies from the kitchen counter and headed for the living room. Gram was there, spraying water on a shirt on the ironing board and watching CNN. Gram's Jesus notebook was open next to the starch. She kept a list of all the situations in the world that she thought needed help so she could pray for them.

Ava knew that her name ended up on Gram's list a lot of days, too. Gram was the first person to notice when Ava was feeling
especially anxious. She always caught Ava blinking too much, a sure sign Ava's insides were in knots. Then Gram would ask if she was okay, and Ava would insist she was fine, but she knew as soon as she left the room her name was going in that notebook right next to the prime ministers and presidents and war-torn nations in Africa.

Jesus had a mustache on the notebook cover now, thanks to Marcus and his black Sharpie. When Ava first saw that, she thought Gram would be furious, but Gram laughed and said if Jesus doesn't have a sense of humor, then nobody does.

“Got homework?” Gram said, turning over the shirt.

“Yep, I'm going to go start on it. Sophie's coming over later.” Ava blew Gram a kiss and headed up to her room. If she had time after homework, she wanted to find a new quote for her wall. She'd started posting them on big pieces of paper, like Mrs. Galvin's in the library.

The bulletin board next to Ava's desk wasn't cluttered with party photos and ribbons and medals like Sophie's, but she did have a couple of ribbons from the fun runs she used to do in elementary school. Ava was pretty fast, even though the only running she did now was fleeing from Ethel. Besides the ribbons, the bulletin board held some yarn-and-feather crafts from her day camp last summer and a couple of school art projects—an Egyptian foil drawing and a black-and-white labyrinth design that had taken her forever.

She had two quote posters now, too, designed with colored
markers and her little owl cartoons. The first quote was from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain
.

Ava didn't know who Henry was, but she liked the quote because it reminded her of that Katina D. video. Ava wished she could be the kind of person who danced through a thunderstorm instead of hiding under the bed with dust bunnies and old stuffed animals. Sophie would do that, at least until Ava warned her that lightning kills an average of sixty people in the United States every year and made her come inside.

The other quote on Ava's wall was attributed to her mom's favorite writer, Maya Angelou:

I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel
.

Ava liked that one because even though she messed up math tests and was afraid to try out for the track team and jazz band, she knew she was a pretty good friend. It was nice to think that mattered.

Ava thought she might add Mrs. Galvin's forgiveness quote from the library next, but she needed to do homework first, so she sat down at her desk and pulled out her math folder. The test review packet was right on top. Ava knew all the formulas now that the test was over. Maybe that voice in class really had been the voice in her head, finally doing its job.

Ava opened her desk drawer and took out a yellow legal pad. Mom ordered boxes of them to use for her financial stuff, and
Ava had come to like them, too. They made her feel organized and official and in control. This one had a dots-and-boxes game on the first page, from when Ava and her mom were waiting at the dentist's office a couple of weeks ago. Mom had promised Ava that if they kept busy finishing those boxes and writing their initials in them, Ava wouldn't have space in her brain to stress out about cavities and Novocain shots. Ava still worried, but at least the game had helped keep her mind off the drill sounds coming from the next room.

Ava turned to a new page on the legal pad, took a pen from the Popsicle stick container she'd made in third grade, and wrote:

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

She listened.

Nothing.

Either Sophie was right and a ghost lived in the math room or it was one of those weird test-taking stress things. Whatever it was, having a magic answer-voice in your head was way better than being number-smothered to death.

Ava pulled out her science folder and took out the extra-credit paper Mrs. Ruppert had sent home. Ava was a big fan of extra credit. People who choked on every test needed all the help they could get. This time, Mrs. Ruppert was offering points to anyone who brought in goldenrod galls, these round things that formed on plants when goldenrod gall flies were feeding on them. Ava set the paper aside; she'd see if Sophie wanted to collect some with her later.

Then Ava found her worksheet on taxonomy and classification. Mrs. Ruppert required pencil, so she pulled the blue one from her backpack. The first few questions were easy enough that Ava didn't need her science book, but then she had to list the order of scientific classification and couldn't remember what came after “phylum.”

Ava decided to try writing the question again, just in case repeating it made the little voice in her head show up.

Under her other question on the legal pad, Ava wrote:

What are the seven levels of scientific classification?

The voice answered, “Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.”

Ava dropped her pencil.

It was back.

Ava looked around her room. This time, there was no chance the voice might be coming from someone else. Unless you counted Ruffles, the stuffed owl on her bed, she was alone in her room. Alone … except for some weird voice giving her answers to her science homework.

Ava still couldn't believe it was real, but she wrote down the seven levels of classification. The next question on the worksheet asked about some specific scientific names. Ava knew humans were
Homo sapiens
and dogs were
Canis domesticus
. But goldenrod gall flies were next, and Mrs. Ruppert hadn't mentioned them in class yet. Maybe the answer was in the book.

Ava started to pick up the book, but then her eyes fell on the
questions on her legal pad. Maybe the voice would tell her. Could it possibly work, even with answers she'd never known? She wrote:

What is the scientific name for a goldenrod gall fly?

“Eurosta solidaginis,”
the voice said.

Ava's mouth dropped open. She scribbled down the words, then looked up goldenrod gall fly in her science book index to check.

There it was, under a photograph on page 241: Goldenrod gall fly (
Eurosta solidaginis
).

Ava put the pencil down. She
knew
she'd never heard of that scientific name, so there was no way the voice was coming from her head. But why did it only work sometimes? Ava looked down at the math question scribbled on her legal pad. Maybe the voice was tired of math.

Ava ran her finger over the unanswered question, and the ink from the pen smudged a little. She looked at the science questions. Then she looked at the pencil. She picked it up and wrote:

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

“Two pi R,” the voice said.

Ava picked up the pen and wrote the exact same thing. The voice was quiet.

She wrote it once more with the pencil. There was the answer again, loud and clear. “Two pi R.”

The voice wasn't coming from her head.

It was coming from the pencil. The blue pencil
knew
things.

“I'm here!”

Ava jumped, and the pencil went flying across her room.

“Nice welcome!” Sophie laughed and swooped down to pick it up. She handed it back to Ava. “What's up?”

“Sit down.” Ava took a deep breath. “You're not going to believe what just happened.”