Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying it’s Katie Kim’s fault that I needed extra help with the first math assignment. Not exactly.
But I am saying that if she hadn’t been so interesting to look at, I might have known what to do when she started passing out these Fun with Fractions workbooks near the end of the period.
When I looked inside, it was kind of familiar, since I’d learned this stuff before, at Hills Village Middle School. But when it comes to school stuff, my brain’s like a pocket with a big hole in the bottom.
Besides, what was I going to ask her? Could you please repeat everything you just said for the last half hour? I don’t think so.
Also, I know from personal experience that I’ll do at least one stupid thing every time I try to talk to a pretty girl. (Or woman? Was Katie a woman? I didn’t even know.)
So I asked the guys for help instead. But Dweebs just said, “Uh, I was kind of hoping you could explain it to me,” and Smurf was more like, “Well, you know, you just… like… multiply that stuff, like… fractions, you know?”
And then I remembered why we were all in summer school to begin with.
That’s when Norman spoke up. He’d been sitting off to the side, minding his own business like always. “It’s not that hard,” he said. “Just multiply the top numbers together and then the bottom numbers together. Then you reduce the fraction, like this.”
He showed me his page. Most of it made sense, except the reducing part, which I never get. But now Norman had me thinking about something else.
“Are you sure you’re in the right group?” I said. Between the math skills and the reading twenty-eight hours a day, I just wasn’t buying it.
“Definitely,” he said right away. “I guess math is kind of the exception for me. I’m really bad at everything else.”
“Like reading?” I said, but Norman didn’t answer. Then before I could ask any more, Katie said the period was over, and Norman got out of there like a hairless cat at a German shepherd convention.
“You know what?” I said to Dweebs and Smurf. “I think that kid’s hiding something.”
“Nah,” Smurf said. “That’s just Booger Eater.” But I wasn’t so sure. Brains-wise, it seemed obvious to me that Norman the Booger Eater was more of a Georgia Khatchadorian than a Rafe Khatchadorian, if you know what I mean.
Maybe I didn’t know how to reduce fractions yet, but I did know one thing for sure: Norman was pretty bad at playing dumb.
The question was—why would he want to?