The Red Blazer Girls (14 page)

“Six. That's kind of amazing that it came out to be a whole number like that, don't you think?”

“Well, it definitely makes me think we got it right,” Margaret says. “Obviously, he set the problem up that way on purpose—making it easy with the floor tiles and working it out ahead of time so it comes out with a nice round number like six. This also means that we have the first half of the problem done already. See how easy
that was, once we set our minds to it? The first equation is X + 3Y = 6. Right?”

And then I see the look—and this time it is
way
beyond that hundred-watt-bulb-over-the-head look. She is onto something
huge
, and frankly, she is scaring the ka-jeepers out of me. See, Mr. Eliot told me about this Mr. Krook character in Charles Dickens's novel
Bleak House
, who spontaneously combusts, leaving behind nothing but a smelly, greasy spot on the floor. I swear that's going to happen to Margaret Wrobel one day. She's going to be thinking really hard, with her hands over her ears, and then—poof!—she'll just burst into flames right before my eyes.

I'm also starting to believe Mr. E's theory that
whatever
the life question, Dickens has an answer.

Yikes! I almost forgot about my guitar lesson, which I have every Saturday at five o'clock. It is almost four when we leave the church for the last time, and I still have to go home, grab my guitar, and catch a crosstown bus to the West Side. I haven't practiced much during the week and I have to get my butt in gear.

Margaret is serious about her music and totally understands my commitment to the guitar and my dream of superstardom, and Raf looks like he's had about enough intrigue for one day, so we jump on the subway at Sixty-eighth and head for Ninety-sixth Street. Raf agrees to wait and take the bus across town with me—is that weird? When we get to my apartment, he throws himself onto the sofa while I run into my bedroom and zip my guitar into its carrying case.

“Where is everybody? I haven't seen your parents in a long time. How's your dad doin' anyway? He's kinda cool.”

My dad? Cool? On what planet? “Um, I don't know. I guess Dad's at work, and Mom's probably teaching a lesson. They're fine; I'm sure they're just like they were the last time you saw them. They're parents—they don't change.”

“And they trust you here alone?” he says as I saunter into the living room, guitar strapped to my back.

“Uh, yeah, I guess. It's not like they're never here. One of them is practically
always
here. Are you ready? What's the time?”

“Four-thirty-five. Plenty of time.”

“C'mon. Let's go, let's go. I don't wanna be late.”

Raf slowly pulls himself off the sofa and we are on our way. I have the weirdest feeling that he doesn't want to leave—that he wants to stay and hang out with … me? When I mention it to Margaret later, she doesn't try to discourage me or anything, but she says that it could just be because he's a lazy, lazy boy.

We get seats together on the bus and because of the way that guys sprawl across seats on the bus or subway, my leg is against his for the entire trip. I've never been so eager
and
reluctant to get off a bus in my life.

Somehow, my lesson
rocks
. Even Gerry (I can teach you guitar in 12 EZ lessons!) notices the difference. “You're playing with a lot of
feeling
today, Sophie. What's going on? Are you in love or something?”

I blush for the second time that day. God! “N-no. I'm not in
love
.”

“Hey, it's okay if you are. Love is a good thing for musicians. Next to practice, it's probably the most important thing.”

When I get home after my lesson, Mom doesn't feel like cooking, so she takes me out for Chinese—General Tso's Chicken. My fortune cookie promises “romance from an unexpected source.” Yay!

As long as I don't get into too much trouble and keep my grades up,
and
practice my guitar, my mom is pretty easygoing. When she asks what I have been doing all day, I can't tell her
everything
, but I try not to out-and-out lie. Is leaving out some of the truth the same as lying? I suppose that if I had told her we'd been to a nightclub, a tattoo parlor, and a Wicca convention, she would have asked more questions. But a museum, a coffee shop, and a church? C'mon, how wholesome can you get?

We stop at Blockbuster on the way home and pick up a light and fizzy romantic comedy. I am
so
looking forward to a lazy, mellow evening at home, curled up on the couch with Mom, eating popcorn and watching the movie. And then the phone rings.

“Where have you been!” Margaret scolds. “We've been trying to call you for hours.”

“You have?” I check my cell phone, and sure enough, it's dead. “Oops.”

“Well, you have to get over here.”

“Now?” The opening credits are still rolling on the movie. That couch looks mighty inviting.

“Yeah, now. My parents took my grandmother out to dinner and then to a concert, so I actually have my room all to myself. Becca and Leigh Ann are already here.”

“They are? Jeez.”

“So, you coming?”

“Umm …” The movie is starting, and Mom looks over at me.

“Go,” she says. “You're not going to hurt my feelings.”

“Are you sure?” The slightest hesitation on her part, and I have a perfectly valid reason to quietly vegetate for a few hours.

Margaret actually has an enormous message board—the kind you can write on with different-colored markers—in her bedroom. She keeps track of her assignments and her responsibilities at home, and her parents leave her messages on it. She has cleared all that stuff away and in its place has drawn the following diagram:

“Now before anybody freaks out on me, this isn't homework. I figured something out really important about the puzzle. It took me a while to put it all together, but I've got it.”

She sits Rebecca, Leigh Ann, and me down on the edge of her bed while she starts right in on her lesson. (Wasting time is frowned upon in Sister Margaret's classroom.)

“You should remember at least part of this from last year. Remember, at the end of the year we did some problems on a graph like this one? Some of it's going to be new, but you guys are smart, so I really don't think it will be that hard.” She points at her perfectly drawn diagram. “Remember this?”

“I remember this X and Y thing you've got there,” I say.

“It's some kind of geometry, right?” Leigh Ann asks.

“It's called coordinate plane geometry, and you're going to get a really quick review lesson. This whole
thing
here on the board, Sophie, with the X-axis and the Y-axis, is called the coordinate plane. Okay, do you remember how, if we find any point out here, in any of these four sections, we can give that point a name?”

I suggest that we call one Zoltan.

“Not that kind of name.”

“How about Ophelia?” Leigh Ann says. “Maybe they're girls.”

“I think I'll name mine … Frodo,” says Rebecca, a huge
Lord of the Rings
freak. With the red marker, she makes a dime-size dot on the board, taps it with her outstretched finger. “I dub thee … Sir Frodo the point.”

Margaret draws an empty set of parentheses next to Frodo. “Actually, children, we use two
numbers
to name every point. The first number is the distance you travel on the X-axis away from the ‘zero point’ in the sideways direction, either to the right or to the left. The second is the distance you travel on the Y-axis away from zero. So, using Frodo here as an example, you start at the zero point—and you count. One, two, three, four along the X-axis. So the first part of the ‘name’ of this point is four.” She writes the number four inside the parentheses.

“That one is called the X-coordinate. Then you have to go up—and see, now we're moving in the Y-axis direction, up and down—one, two, three, and you're there. So, the second number in the name is called the Y-coordinate.” She writes a 3 in the parentheses next to the 4, so she has (4,3) next to the Point Formerly Known as Frodo.

It is all starting to come back to me. “And you can do negative numbers, too, right?”

Margaret nods enthusiastically. “Absolutely.” She writes (-4,2) at the top of the board. “Where is this point? And remember, you
always
go in the X direction first. You go left if it's negative and right if it's positive.”

I stand and count out four spaces to the left, and then move up two and make another red dot. “Right here.”

“Perfect! You even went the right direction on the
Y-axis. On the Y-axis, positive numbers are up, and negative numbers are down. All right, so far, so good. Any questions?”

I raise my hand. “Um, Miss Wrobel, don't get me wrong, I'm having fun in your class, and you're learnin' me
reeeal
good—but what does all this have to do with the puzzle?”

“A just
question,” says Rebecca, nodding solemnly at me.