On the way to math, she saw old Mr. Hedley.

“How’s Jaylen?” she asked, trying to look more chipper than she felt. “Is his knee all healed up?”

“He’s back!” Mr. Hedley lit up and leaned against his classroom’s doorframe. “Can’t keep that kid down for long. You hanging in there?”

“Good for Jaylen! Oh, I’m great. See ya, Mr. Hedley!”

When Marianne sat down in math with Mr. Garcia, Vi passed her a piece of paper torn out of a notebook. On it she’d written:

I heard what Mr. Garcia said. Maybe now we’re on the same page. Check your email tonight for materials.

Marianne’s perfect plan didn’t feel so perfect anymore.

Marianne knew the word Skyla had been holding inside: selfish. Or something like it. Maybe something even worse.

So was she supposed to quit? But after joining, wouldn’t it be selfish to quit, too? They didn’t have anyone else on the team!

Skyla wanted her to “try.”

What made Marianne and Skyla so different was that Skyla couldn’t see that Marianne wasn’t going to try to be bad—she just knew she couldn’t do it!

Marianne pulled out her notebook as Mr. Garcia began class.

They were back to X, that unknown and impossible part of an equation that took so much work to get to. So many steps and strategies. So much computing. Just the thought of it all made her want to go to sleep.

She found herself reverting to her usual beginning-of-class thought: How could she pass the time until the bell?

No, she had to listen. She had to improve her grades. No drifting.

Mr. Garcia announced they were moving on to “using the X and Y intercepts to graph linear equations.”

This was the stuff of nightmares.

She prayed he would take it easy on her now that she had joined Quiz Quest and wouldn’t call on her that day. Why couldn’t he be more like Mr. Hedley?

“Just try,” everybody said.

But Marianne knew what happened when you tried. You failed. Usually you failed again and again, in front of everyone.

Fifth grade. Negative integers. Marianne went through the problem five times with Mr. Thorne. First, she gave a positive number. Wrong. Then she answered zero. Wrong. Then she started asking how there could be negative numbers when there weren’t negative things, and however Mr. Thorne tried to explain the concept, it all just sounded imaginary to her. And by the fifth wrong answer, she saw how bored the rest of the class looked and how frustrated Mr. Thorne was. He even sighed. A long, tired exhale, in front of everyone. He probably felt like a bad teacher, and he wasn’t, not at all. Marianne just had a bad brain. And that was one of the millions of times Marianne saw what trying did. It humiliated you.

So would it kill her to try, like Skyla said?

Yeah. Maybe.

And negative numbers still made no sense.

“I think you’ll find this can actually be—dare I say it?—fun when applied to some real-life scenarios,” Mr. Garcia went on.