I can always tell we’re getting near the school because the bus goes under a highway. Even with the windows closed you can hear the traffic rumbling overhead.

After the highway, the streets seem to change. There’s a lot of building going on, brand-new houses with big windows and metal towers and brightly colored walls. But there are also some older houses, where the paint is peeling, and the porch is filled with stuff like sofas and boxes and just . . . stuff. One house has a big front yard with cars on the grass. There are tires lying around and other car parts. Sometimes you see people messing around in the yard or sitting on the porch, drinking soda.

I don’t want the bus to arrive—I just want to keep sitting there with Mabley and looking out the window. Because as soon as we pull up to the school, I’ll have to get out and join all the other kids going to school and sit in classes for the rest of the day with everybody else.

Pete Miller’s in my math class. We sit next to each other at the back, but even though we have lunch together every day, Pete doesn’t really talk to me unless Mabley is around. When the bell rings, it takes me a while to get my bags together, and Pete always walks out with other kids. But I don’t really mind. It’s fine with me if people leave me alone.

Our teacher is Ms. Kaminski. She’s a bony, friendly woman who wears thick glasses and a lot of bracelets and necklaces. Every day, at the beginning of class, she actually gets an apple out of her bag and puts it on her desk, like a teacher in a TV show. She likes trying different kinds of apples, and sometimes you can get her to waste a few minutes at the beginning of class by asking her what kind of apple she has today. They have all kinds of funny names, like Envy or Gala or Pink Lady. She says the study of apples is called pomology. She buys them in Central Market, which is a big supermarket that Granma sometimes goes to.

But today she has a different announcement to make. “There’s going to be a citywide Number Sense competition. For those of you who don’t know, it’s basically like doing your multiplication tables but just with bigger numbers. We need three kids from the school to enter, which means that for the next few weeks, a few minutes before the bell rings every day, we’ll be doing practice tests. Think of it as the math tryouts,” she says, looking at Pete.

Pete’s on the basketball team. Last year, he was the only sixth grader to start, and this year he’s probably going to be captain. There was a big article on him in the school newspaper, with a picture of him shooting a basketball, when they announced the teams—the tryouts were last week. Everybody seems to know his name. Even some of the teachers come up to him at lunch to talk about basketball. But I think I can beat him at Number Sense. Math is probably my favorite subject.