Free Edison’s Alley by Neal Shusterman and Eric Elfman Page A

grasped the penny and pulled it free in one try, then held it out to him.
    “Penny for your thoughts?”
    “Keep it,” said Mitch bitterly. “I don’t want it. I don’t want
any
of them.”
    Ms. Planck sat down next to him. “I don’t blame you,” she said. “If it means anything to you, I don’t think your father took that money.”
    Mitch looked at her, trying to figure out if she just wanted to make him feel better or if she meant it. She was a no-nonsense kind of woman. Mitch could tell she was sincere.
    “What are you doing here?” Mitch asked. “Did you get called to the principal’s office, too?”
    She held up a clipboard. “Next month’s lunch menu for Principal Watt to approve. He’s got his fingers in every pie.”
    Mitch grinned. “I knew there were fingers in those pies.”
    Ms. Planck raised her eyebrows. “Protein! Tastes good and good
for
you.”
    From behind the closed door came Theo’s wailing pleas for clemency. Mitch resolved that whatever punishment was levied upon him when it was his turn, he would bear it stoically.
    “So I understand you’re spending a lot of time with Petula Grabowski-Jones,” Ms. Planck said.
    “Petula has a big mouth,” grumbled Mitch.
    Ms. Planck shrugged. “There are worse things. She’s unusual, it’s true. But in a good way. And I told her the same thing about you.”
    “Where is this going?” Mitch wondered aloud.
    She put the penny in his hand and closed his fingers around it. “Someplace worth the price of admission,” she said. “I promise.” Then she got up and left.
    When Mitch opened his hand, he discovered something remarkable. Through sleight of hand or some other clever trick, the coin in his palm was now a nickel.
    Meanwhile, Caitlin was having her own troubles. She had always been a fairly decent math student, but during today’s test, she found herself stricken with such
inexplicable dread that she couldn’t catch her breath. She was not prone to panic attacks, and she was becoming more anxious over the fact that she was becoming anxious than by the cause of
the anxiety itself. Then, when she looked around, she realized that she wasn’t the only one suffering. Everyone in the room—including the teacher—was either sweating, or shaking,
or moaning. One kid was chewing his pencil with such nervous intensity that he bit it in half.
    In the midst of the turmoil there was, however, a calm oasis of one: Carter Black, who always sat in the back of the room and had gone unnoticed for most of his life. He was now a hot zone of
focused energy and calculation. He was zipping through the test like it was nothing.
    This was one of those “open book” kind of tests where calculators and other computational devices were allowed. Carter did not have a calculator. His stress-free hands were deftly
flipping the beads of a small abacus—the kind of counting device used in days gone by.
    Carter Black was not a math whiz by any means. In fact, he had earned the nickname “Carter Black Hole,” because his brain seemed to have an event horizon beyond which mathematical
concepts broke down, leading to D-minuses on all of his tests. Any other kid would have to work pretty hard to achieve such consistency.
    As Caitlin’s own math terror increased, Carter’s focus intensified, and although at the moment even adding one plus one was a difficult stretch, she managed it, and came up with the
only possible solution.
    The abacus was from Nick’s garage sale.
    Each time Carter flicked a metallic bead, the wire that held it sparked, giving him brainpower and confidence—by stealing it from his classmates.
    And so, while the rest of the room became more and more mathematically unsound, Caitlin got up out of her seat, made her way over to Carter Black, and ripped the abacus from his hands.
    “Hey, that’s mine!”
    She slipped it into a rather heavy case that was, no doubt, woven from lead-infused fabric, and the moment she did, she felt her