Much Ado About Baseball by Rajani LaRocca

Author:Rajani LaRocca [LaRocca, Rajani]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: little bee books
Published: 2021-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BEN

THE ECSTASY AND THE AGONY

Things were going great. Fantastic, in fact.

When I got home after the This Is a Stick nightmare, I went back to the puzzle in The Mathematics of The Wild again. It turned out that the answer was on my shirt the whole time.

The leaves and the seed stood for digits, with the leaves representing ones and the seeds a zero. Like this: 1101. But 1101 isn’t particularly special—it’s not even prime since it’s divisible by three.

But then I thought: There are only ones and zeroes. What if it’s in binary?

Like on the shirt I was wearing. The one Trish liked so much.

In binary, you can only use ones and zeroes, but you still can make any decimal number. But instead of the places being the ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on in powers of ten, the places are ones, twos, fours, eights, sixteens, and on and on in powers of two. So:

0 = 0

1 = 1

2 = 10 (like on my T-shirt, There are 10 kinds of people . . .)

3 = 11

And in this case, 1101 = one 1, no 2s, one 4, and one 8, which was 13.

A special number. A prime number. I’d cracked the code!

I wrote my answer, and it turned green. Underneath it, a sentence appeared:

Reveal what’s in your heart.

Well, after starting off the summer feeling trapped playing baseball, I’d managed to improve my playing enough that I remembered all the things I loved about the game. The thrill of a hit, the satisfaction of a good catch, the feeling that only came from sitting in a dugout with friends. I had revealed my heart.

My heart was with my team.

I didn’t need to care about Trish. Even if she said she wanted to be friends. She’d humiliated me in front of everyone, so she didn’t deserve to be my friend.

She didn’t.

I turned the page, and the next puzzle had appeared:

182^ = 13

90^ = 9

30^ = 5

6^ = ?

That was going to take some thought, but I knew I’d get it eventually. I was on a high in baseball and math, and nothing was getting in my way.

Trish came up to me before the start of our next game. “Ben, can we talk? I just want to—”

But I turned away and acted like I didn’t hear.

Abhi had seen what happened. “Talk to her,” he said. “How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!”

“I don’t see Trish weeping,” I said. Though she did look pretty sad. She deserved to.

After eating up the Sports Crisps and truffle fries supplied by the Salt Shaker, we started our game against the Margherita’s Pizza Players. Trish’s fastball seemed slower than usual, and she let three runs score in the first inning, but I narrowed their lead to one with a two-run triple in the bottom of the first. By the time we got to the bottom of the fourth, we were ahead, 6–3. That’s when something weird happened.

I took off my cap to scratch my sweaty head.

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