For math, we played a partner game, and Ms. G. said we could sit wherever we wanted. Bertie and I got out the pillows.

You rolled three dice, and your partner made them into two numbers, one with one digit and one with two digits. Then your partner would tell you to add, subtract, multiply, or divide.

Bertie rolled two threes and a four.

“Forty-three and three,” I said.

“Please don’t do divide,” she said. “Please, please, please.”

“Add,” I said.

“Easy peasy, cheddar cheesy,” Bertie said. “Forty-six. Your turn.”

I rolled a four and two ones.

“Forty-one and one,” Bertie said. “Subtract.” She yawned a fake yawn and patted her mouth. “Easy peasy, bumble beesy.”

“Forty,” I said.

Bertie rolled again. “Six and one and two,” she called out.

“Sixty-two and one,” I said. “Multiply.”

“That’s so easy peasy, it makes me sneezy. Achoo! Sixty-two. If there’s only one of something, all by itself, it doesn’t ever change.”

Now, most schools will call anything a game to make you think it’s going to be fun. But this one really was.

Ms. G. dinged her bell and had us line up. “Approximate time you woke up this morning,” she said.

That one caused a lot of questions and answers and switching places. I was near the front because the sunshine had woken me up so early, and somehow Bertie was right behind me again.

“Art,” she whispered into my arm before I could ask where we were going.

The art teacher’s name was Vanessa, and she called the room a studio and told us that since it was almost the end of the year, today would be Open Studio.

“Yes!” Bertie said. She did a tiny fist pump.

It didn’t take long to figure out that Open Studio was mostly a fancy way of saying you could do whatever you wanted. I grabbed a few toilet paper tubes and some pipe cleaners. I got a hole puncher from the basket next to the scissors. Bertie went to the scrap paper box. Then she got a paintbrush and some glue. “Collage. Collage. Collage,” she sang.

The art room had tall tables with stools instead of chairs. The stools didn’t spin, but it was still kind of cool to sit so high.

I punched holes in the ends of the tubes and wove the pipe cleaners through to connect them. When I had a few together, I thought it kind of looked like the rope the lonely friends used to swing over the creek to get to their magical forest kingdom.

“I admire your courage to work in three dimensions,” Vanessa said to me.

I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but she jogged over to the box with the cardboard tubes and came back with a whole armful. There were tubes from toilet paper and paper towels and even a long roll of wrapping paper. She spilled them onto the table.