Free You First by Cari Simmons

ingredient. In knitting, if you missed one wrong stitch, you could conceivably have to rip out entire rows just to fix it.
    Gigi was grateful for Mr. Baker’s patience. No matter how many errors she made, or questions she had, he never once got annoyed with her. Or if he did, he hid it very well.
    â€œYou’re an awesome teacher, Mr. B,” Gigi told him. “Thank you.”
    â€œThat’s very kind of you,” he said. Then he leanedin and stage-whispered, “Students like you make it all worthwhile.”
    Because of this, Gigi forced herself to smile through the pain. She felt like she owed Mr. Baker that much.
    As she wrestled with the wretched eyelash yarn—which, by the way, was shedding all over the delicate beaded top she’d unfortunately chosen to wear—Mr. Baker explained to her how knitting incorporated mathematical concepts. He showed her the project that he was working on for his wife. It was one of those infinity scarves, only Mr. Baker called it a Möbius strip. He pulled out a picture of what the finished scarf would look like. “It looks like a continuous loop,” he said, “but see that twist in the loop? That’s what makes the Möbius strip so interesting. Despite its appearance, it’s actually a one-sided surface!
    â€œIf you were to make a model out of paper, and tried to cut the strip down the center, you wouldn’t end up with two Möbius strips,” he continued. “No, you would end up with one much larger Möbius strip. You should try it! Or maybe we’ll make one in class.”
    After ninety minutes, with Mr. Baker helping her every step of the way, Gigi somehow managed to get through four complete rows of something fairly narrow (a skinny scarf, maybe?). Because of the size of herneedles and the slimness of the yarn, the result was something that had lots of loops and holes. In fact, it looked like several moths had used it for a buffet.
    As the Jammers began to pack up their projects, Mr. Baker asked Gigi, “Will I see you back here next week?”
    Gigi was nearly one hundred percent certain that she was not destined to become a true Purl Jammer, but Mr. Baker looked so eager for her to say yes that she couldn’t bring herself to let him down. She settled on “Maybe.”
    â€œThanks again for all your help, Mr. B. I’m really sorry I sucked up all of your time.”
    â€œNonsense,” he said. “It was my pleasure.”
    Gigi found her mother in the checkout line, clutching half a dozen books. “How did it go?” her mom asked.
    Gigi shrugged. “It went.”
    â€œThat bad?”
    Gigi pulled out her holey project and held it up as evidence.
    â€œIt’s . . . unusual ,” her mother said. “In fact, if you’d told me you’d crocheted it, I would say it looked rather advanced.”
    â€œI think we can both agree that I am not a Purl Jammer,” Gigi sighed. “Knitting is way too stressful.”
    At home, in her room, Gigi shoved her knitting “project” and yarn deep into the bottom drawer of her desk. Then she took the yarn back out and looked at the angry lion poised like a regal king on the label. It made her chuckle. Such a fierce expression for such a frilly, delicate product!
    With a small, pointy pair of scissors, Gigi carefully cut into the label and around the oval logo. This, she decided, needed to go on the Wall.
    But as soon as she had that thought, it was replaced by another: I can’t put it there all by myself.
    In the nearly eight years that the massive collage had been in the making, Gigi had never actually pasted anything up on her own. The Wall was an Eff and Gee production, and every single item on it represented something that the two of them had done or thought or said together .
    Even so, Gigi felt her massive knitting fail deserved to be memorialized in some way. And the Wall was in her room, not Finley’s. She