Free Me and Mr. Bell by Philip Roy

sister’s room. “Do you know what A - r - c - h - i - m - e - d - e - s means?”
    â€œI think it’s a place.”
    â€œI don’t think that’s right. Do you have a dictionary?”
    â€œI don’t need a dictionary.”
    Then I remembered that my father had a dictionary. He kept it on the bookshelf with his other books – his prized possessions. No one ever touched his books but him. But maybe I could just borrow his dictionary for a couple of hours and be really careful with it, and nobody would notice. So I did. I went downstairs quietly, pulled the dictionary off the shelf, shoved it under my sweater and went back up to my room.
    The nice thing about dictionaries was that everything was put in order with the alphabet, and it didn’t matter how slow you were; if you were patient enough you could find whatever word you wanted. It took me a long time to find Archimedes, but there it was. “Archimedes. Ancient Greek mathematician. Born in 287 BC.” Great. What did that mean? Well, I recognized the math part of mathematician . Then I looked up ancient and learned that it meant old. I knew that BC meant Before Christ, which meant it was a really long time ago. I stared at the word born and tried to say it. Suddenly, I knew what Archimedes was. It wasn’t a thing, it was a person. It was the guy who had invented the laws for pulleys and other things. He was the guy that Miss Lawrence was reading about in school. Yay! I had figured it out. I went back to the math book and studied the pictures. Now I was happy.
    I studied for a long time and had to look up more words in the dictionary, and that took forever and was exhausting, but by the time I went to sleep, I was pretty sure I understood how pulleys worked. For every pulley you added to a rope that was pulling something heavy, your work was cut in half. If you wanted to lift a stone that was twice as heavy, you had to run your rope through another pulley. You could lift something really heavy if you wanted to. In fact, you could probably lift a house off the ground if you used enough pulleys and rope that was strong enough.
    But there were a couple of problems. First, every time you added a pulley, you had to use twice as much rope. Second, even though the pulleys turned on little wheels that made everything smooth, the more pulleys you used, the more friction there was against the rope. And that was dangerous. I had to look up the word friction . But even then I didn’t understand it. That’s what took me the longest. The pictures showed sharp lines coming from the pulleys and a danger sign and an arrow pointing to the word friction . But I was so tired when I looked it up, and frustrated and impatient. And I couldn’t figure out what it meant. So I stuck my head into my sister’s room and asked her what it meant. She took my arm and rubbed it really fast, until it got hot and sore and I had to pull it away. Then she looked up at me. “That’s friction. Now go to bed.”
    Now I understood. If there was too much friction, or rubbing, the rope would get too hot and break.
    If it weren’t for the pictures, I wouldn’t have understood any of it. But I did. And now I felt ready to try it. Except I needed more pulleys and rope. And the only place where I knew I could get more was down the hill, from Mr. McLeary.

Chapter 13
    S tudying books was way more work than digging around a stone in a field. I was so tired I fell asleep with my clothes on. And that’s how I woke up in the morning. And I was late for school. My mother called up from the kitchen. “Hurry up, Eddie! You’re late! Your brother and sister already left.”
    I climbed out of bed a bit confused because I wasn’t completely awake yet. I came downstairs, washed my face and sat at the table for porridge. My mother looked at me with a worried face. “What’s with you lately, Eddie? You’ve been acting