her eyeballs shake when she tries to focus on small things (like books) and I think if she ever tried to drive that would definitely be illegal. I felt terrible, leaving the room with Olga while everyone else was getting ready for book groups, but afterward Jeremy was really nice about it. He said I was lucky, that all they did was talk about a boring book called The Hundred Dresses. “If you think one dress is boring, try a hundred,” he said. “I wish I could have left.” Since then, he’s been pretty nice about not pointing out a lot of things like how he always gets 100 percent on spelling tests, and I’ve never gotten better than 70 percent. Or how he’s already in the eights group for multiplication and I’m still back in the twos and threes. I’ve always been bad at spelling, which I would have said was my worst subject, but that was before multiplication came along. It turns out, I’m even worse at multiplication. To me it seems like the multiplication tables are just random numbers that were made up to test kids’ memories. They seem to have no point, even though teachers keep saying there are lots of practical applications for multiplication. Then they give an example like what if six kids bring eight apples each to a Halloween party, how many do they have 37
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