Athlete vs. Mathlete: Double Dribble by W. C. Mack Read Free Book Online Page B

Hollis was in the middle of a fairly complicated word problem involving multiple cars, cities, and driving distances. While I took notes, I glanced over at Nitu, who was a bona-fide math whiz, and smiled when I saw that her calculations almost filled an entire page in her notebook.
    Nitu was always at least two steps ahead of me when it came to numbers, and that was saying something.
    I turned back to my page and continued taking notes. All I heard around me were the sounds of pencils scratching paper and the backs of hands brushing eraser bits off of desktops.
    It was like music to my ears.
    I wrote down all the important details in my own special form of shorthand (when Owen saw it for the first time, he thought I’d created an alien language), and I had a pretty good idea of how to solve the problem.
    I was practically humming to myself.
    â€œMr. Hollis?” one M said, interrupting the moment.
    â€œPlease raise your hand if you have a question,” the teacher requested. He was kind of a stickler for classroom rules, which was one of my favorite things about him.
    After all, what kind of a world would it be without rules?
    The twin sighed and lifted one hand as if it was the most ridiculous thing in the world to do.
    As if Mr. Hollis had asked him to scale Mt. Everest with no boots.
    That attitude wasn’t going to get him very far in this class, and there was a small part of me that felt excited, knowing that things were about to turn around for at least one of the Matthews twins.
    â€œYes?” Mr. Hollis said, holding his chalk a couple of inches from the board.
    â€œYour answer will be wrong.”
    My mouth dropped open almost as fast as Nitu’s did.
    â€œI beg your pardon?” Mr. Hollis said, eyebrows raised in surprise. He probably hadn’t been on the receiving end of the word “wrong” in years.
    I turned in my seat, wondering what on earth the twin was going to say next.
    Naturally, I wasn’t sure which one had spoken.
    â€œArizona doesn’t—” one of the boys said.
    â€œChange their clocks,” the other finished.
    They sounded like they’d been practicing the sentence for years, just like everything else I’d seen or heard from them.
    How did they both know what to say? I hadn’t heard them whispering, and I could see from my desk that their notebook pages were blank.
    Completely blank.
    â€œSo,” the first twin continued, “if you don’t take into account the fact that Oregon adjusts for daylight savings while Arizona stays on mountain time and doesn’t roll back their clocks in November, your train’s arrival time in Phoenix is going to be off by an hour.”
    I gulped.
    Daylight savings?
    No one had said anything about daylight savings.
    I looked at the scribbles on my page.
    Why hadn’t
I
thought about daylight savings?
    Mr. Hollis cleared his throat, but before he could speak, the second twin said, “Unless we say that the train trip is happening sometime after next March, when our clocks spring forward and line up with Arizona’s again.”
    Mr. Hollis frowned.
    The other twin nodded. “That would solve it.”
    â€œMr. Hollis?” his brother asked. “Should we say the train trip is—”
    â€œHappening next spring?” his twin finished for him.
    â€œUh … yes,” the teacher said. It was the first time I’d ever seen him at a loss for words.
    And I didn’t have much to say either.
    On the way out of class, Nitu shook her head. “That was interesting.”
    â€œYes, it was,” I agreed. Interesting
and
annoying.
    â€œI can’t believe they thought about something so random. Daylight savings never would have crossed my mind. I mean, I just stick to what’s on the page.”
    â€œSo does Mr. Hollis, obviously.”
    She shrugged. “It was kind of cool.”
    That was the last thing I needed to hear.
    â€œEspecially when they