DON’T ASK ME HOW I DID IT, but I managed to talk Ms. Adolf into grading my paper right away. I attached myself to the side of her desk like a barnacle on the bottom of a boat.
“Will you kindly back up, Henry?” she said. “You are sucking all the air out of my work space.”
“Sorry, Ms. Adolf. I’m just a little anxious to see what I got.”
“Breathing on your paper will not make it better,” she said. “Why this sudden interest your mathematics performance?”
“I think my tutoring with Heather has really worked,” I said. “I feel like long division and I have finally made friends.”
“How pleasant for you,” she said, picking up her red pencil. “Now if you’ll allow me some air, I shall grade your paper.”
Frankie had already told me that I had to get twenty-eight problems right to get a B-plus. That meant I could miss four.
Before she even looked at my answers, Ms. Adolf took her red pencil and wrote “minus one” at the top of my paper.
“How could I have missed anything?” I asked her. “You haven’t even gotten to my answers yet.”
“You didn’t write your full name and the date in the upper right-hand corner. That counts for one whole problem off.”
“But, Ms. Adolf,” I said, almost crying. “My initials are right there. H.Z.”
“Remember Adolf’s Rule Number Six?” she said. “Print your full name and the date legibly in the upper right-hand corner.”
“You can’t take a whole point off for that!” I whined.
“I can, and I did, Henry.”
With that, she moved her red pencil over to the answer column and began to check my answers. I never took my eyes off that pencil as she moved it down my answers. I counted each red check. Number four was wrong. She paused at number seventeen, and I held my breath. Then came the red check. That was two problems wrong. Plus the name thing, so that’s three. She didn’t make another check for a long time, and I could feel myself starting to smile.
You did it, Hank Zipzer. You aced this test!
But then came problem number twenty-seven. I never liked that number twenty-seven. It has an unlucky sound to it. And I missed it, all right. I felt my answer was pretty close to right, and I pointed that out to her.
“Shouldn’t I get some credit for getting really close?” I asked.
“Mathematics is a precise science,” Ms. Adolf said. “Now if you’ll let me continue.”
“Please do. But you’re not going to find anything else wrong. Four wrong is my limit.”
Four wrong was a B-plus. I knew I wasn’t going to miss any more. I could just feel it.
Ms. Adolf’s red pencil slid all the way down to the bottom of the answer column without making another check. Four wrong! Four wrong was a B-plus!
I started to jump up and down like a nutty kangaroo.
“Not so fast, Henry,” Ms. Adolf said.
She placed her pencil on the very last answer of the test. And she put a big, fat red check next to it.
“No!” I said. “That problem couldn’t be wrong. I remember going over it twice.”
I pointed to my work on the test paper.
“See,” I said. “Five hundred and sixty divided by twenty. It’s twenty-eight. I figured it out. I know it’s right. Look, I wrote twenty-eight right there on my paper.”
Ms. Adolf pointed to the answer column.
“It says eighty-two here, Henry. Not twenty-eight.”
“But I just flipped the number around when I transferred my work to the answer column. It happens.”
“Once again, Henry, let me refer you to the word ‘precision.’ Right is right and wrong is wrong. And your answer is wrong.”
She took her red pencil and moved it to the top of the test. MINUS FIVE, she wrote in big red letters. Eighty-four percent.
Eighty-four percent was a B.
“Ms. Adolf,” I said, my heart pounding in my chest. “There’s been a terrible mistake. I technically missed five, but if you look at it untechnically, I really and truly only missed four actual math questions!”
“In my book, it is still minus five,” she said.
“But I’m supposed to get a B-plus. I have to get a B-plus.”
“If I were giving you a grade in whining, you would certainly get a B-plus,” Ms. Adolf said. “Perhaps even an A. But your grade on this math test is a B, Henry. And that’s final.”
“But…”
She took her red pencil and put a giant circle around the B at the top of my paper. Any other time I would have been thrilled to get a B. But when I looked at that big red grade on top of my test paper, all I wanted to do was rip it to shreds.