All the Answers by Kate Messner

Author:Kate Messner
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2015-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

As soon as Ava got to school, she realized that it was the day of the adventure course practice in gym class and a math quiz. Double doom.

She slipped into her seat while Mr. Farkley marched up and down the rows collecting homework. He stopped by Ava’s desk.

“Thank you, Miss Anderson,” he said, picking up her paper. “Do you also have your permission slip for the field trip?”

“No. I’m going to bring it tomorrow.” Ava had no such plans, but she guessed those were the words that would send Mr. Farkley and his bushy eyebrows back to his desk. She was right.

“All right then,” Mr. Farkley said from up front, “I hope everyone is prepared with a pencil.”

Ava was prepared with two. One was a yellow Number Two she’d grabbed from the bottom of her locker. The other was the blue pencil. That one she set carefully on her desk, so it wouldn’t roll away. She didn’t want to use it. She didn’t want to need it the way she did, but at the same time, she knew she couldn’t take the quiz without knowing it was there if she got stuck.

“You may begin,” Mr. Farkley said, and Ava looked at the first question. Relax. Think, she told herself. You can do this. You have the pencil if you need it.

She picked up the regular yellow pencil. She answered the first question and the second, and worked her way down the page, figuring out problems with parallelograms and right triangles and pi. She looked at the blue pencil a few times but didn’t reach for it. Just seeing it there calmed her down, and when she settled in, she found that she really did know most of the answers. There was one she wasn’t sure about, but she didn’t want to use the pencil, so she guessed.

“Pencils down,” Mr. Farkley said, and Ava smiled. She put the yellow one down next to the blue one and let out a long breath. She’d done it. Simply knowing the pencil was there was enough. She’d taken the test without even picking it up.

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