Read the first chapter of The Election Calculation

Catherine Duchesne took a deep breath as she stood on the sidewalk in front of Tyler Middle School. It was easily three times the size of McNair Elementary, where she had gone since kindergarten.

“You ready for this?” came a voice from behind her. Catherine jumped and quickly turned around to see Stephanie Lewis, her best friend.

“I guess,” Catherine replied with a little uncertainty in her voice.

“It’s going to be weird being in different classes,” Stephanie said.

Rather than having the same teacher all day as they had had at McNair, they would now be switching between different classes for each subject. The two girls had gotten their schedules mailed to them over the weekend and had quickly compared them. They were disappointed to learn they would only have two classes in common when school started in a couple of weeks.

“Well, at least we’ll be in math class together,” Catherine said.

“Yeah, I checked with the guys and they’re also in that class,” Stephanie said, “so the Math Kids will still see each other every day.”

The Math Kids was a club that Stephanie, Jordan Waters, and Justin Grant had formed in fourth grade. The original intent was to solve math puzzles, but they had also used their math skills to solve real world problems like robberies. Working as a team, they’d even assisted the FBI and Scotland Yard.

“Speaking of the guys, there they are,” Catherine said, pointing to a car pulling up to the curb in front of the school.

Jordan and Justin hopped out of the car and joined Catherine and Stephanie on the sidewalk.

“I guess this is going to be our home for the next three years,” Jordan said.

“I guess,” Catherine said.

“That didn’t sound very positive,” Justin said. “Personally, I can’t wait. You know they have a math team, don’t you? They went to the state championship last year. They didn’t win, but then again, they didn’t have us.”

“What if we’re not good enough to make the team?” Catherine asked.

“Not make the team?” Justin asked incredulously. “They’ll be begging us to be on the team once they see what we can do!”

“I hope so,” Jordan said. “Linda said they have lots of other clubs too. She said everyone has to join at least two clubs in sixth grade.” He said this with a touch of doubt. His sister Linda was a few years older than him and loved to tease her younger brother, so he didn’t always believe everything she said.

“I heard they have a gaming club!” Justin said. “I bet they have all the coolest new video games and consoles.” If there was anything Justin liked almost as much as math, it was playing video games.

“Do you think they have a robotics club?” Catherine asked. “I loved the robotics camp I did this summer.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Jordan said. He pointed at a sign near the entrance that read Club Exhibition: Come find a club that’s just right for you!

“Then I guess we should go in and see what they have,” Catherine said.

They entered the school and followed signs leading them to the gymnasium. Inside, they found dozens of tables where students were answering questions about their club.

“Wow! Look at this!” Stephanie exclaimed. “Judo club. Cooking club. Anime club. It looks like they’ve got something for everyone.”

Justin spotted a large video screen that had a car careening left and right across a road while the driver tried to avoid falling boulders. “I think I found my people,” he said as he walked quickly in that direction.

“You’re not going with him?” Catherine asked Jordan.

“Nah, I’ll never be as good as him in video games. I’m going to look around to see what else I can find.”

“I’m going to see if they have a soccer club,” Stephanie said. She headed toward the far wall, scanning the club names as she went.

That left Catherine all by herself. She walked slowly in the opposite direction. She took her time reading a brief description of each club and sometimes engaging one of the club members to learn more. The robotics club looked very interesting. Their table display showed several completed robots they had made the previous year. One of them was designed to solve a Rubik’s cube puzzle and Catherine spent a few minutes scrambling the cube and watching the robot undo her moves.

The photography club had a book of pictures the members had taken over the past several years. She didn’t know much about photography, but she pored over landscapes, action shots of athletes taken with a telephoto lens, and a really cool close-up of a spider spinning a web.

“I took that one,” a girl in a brightly colored t-shirt said. “I used a macro lens at f/2.8 and a shutter speed of 1/125th of a second.”

Catherine didn’t know what any of that meant, which intrigued her. She took a handout for the club so she could read more about it later.

There were clubs for all kinds of games—board games, card games, role-playing games, chess, checkers, and several games Catherine had never heard of. There were half a dozen music clubs, both singing and playing instruments, and one whose description said, “we just hang out and listen to music.”

A lot of the clubs looked interesting, and Catherine was gathering a stack of handouts for clubs she might want to check out further. As she rounded the corner to walk down the final row of tables, she saw a tall thin boy with round glasses sitting alone at one of the tables. The sign on the table said Geocaching: The world’s biggest treasure hunt. Catherine was immediately intrigued.

“What’s geocaching?” she asked the boy.

“It’s a kind of treasure hunt where you look for hidden caches of objects,” he replied. “You can think of it as a hide-and-seek game. The hiders provide online clues for the seekers. The seekers—that’s us—use global positioning system devices to find the hidden caches.”

“And you can do that around here?”

“You bet!” he said, his voice rising a little in his excitement. “I’ve now found more than forty caches, and I’ve only been doing it for a year.”

As he described the process for seeking out a cache, Catherine found herself getting hooked on the idea of hunting for hidden treasure.

“It’s not like you’re going to find gold or anything,” he said.

“Been there, done that,” Catherine responded, thinking back to the treasure in gold she and her friends had found in a dark tunnel under the old Maynard mansion.

The boy gave her a strange look but continued. “Once you find the cache, you write your name and the date in the logbook, so they know you were there. Then you take some swag and leave some of your own.”

“What’s swag?” Catherine asked.

The boy laughed. “It stands for ‘stuff we all get,’” he said. “Here’s some of the stuff I got over the past year.”

He opened the lid on a plastic container and proudly displayed his collection of swag. Catherine smiled broadly when she saw what he had amassed.

“How many people are in the club?” she asked.

“Just me so far,” he admitted, his face turning a bright red. “But I hope I can get some people to join me.”

“Well, I think maybe your club just doubled in size,” Catherine said. “It sounds like fun.”

With her mind made up on her second club selection, it was time to find the rest of her friends so they could go check out the math club. She found Stephanie in a discussion with a group of girls at the student newspaper table. Jordan joined them a few minutes later. After a few attempts, the three were able to drag Justin away from the gaming club table, where he was engaged with another boy in battle for bragging rights in an auto race game.

“You just barely beat me,” Justin called back to the boy. “I’ll be back.”

The boy gave a half-hearted wave and returned to playing the game.

“I was right,” Justin said excitedly, “they do have all the latest games. That’s definitely my club pick.”

“Did you even look at any of the other clubs?” Jordan asked.

“Well, no, but why bother?”

Jordan shook his head. “But now on to the real reason we’re here. Where’s the math club?”

“Over in that corner,” Stephanie replied, pointing to a table near a rolling cart filled with basketballs.

The four friends were walking toward the table when Justin abruptly stopped in his tracks. Catherine, unable to stop, ran into him.

“What’s up with you?” Catherine asked. “Why’d you stop?”

“Look who’s at the table,” Justin replied.

Catherine looked and immediately understood why her friend had stopped.

Just a month earlier, Justin had been accused of stealing comic books from a store in the mall. Sitting behind the math club table were the two boys who had really stolen the comics and framed him.

Buzz Aquino, the bigger of the two boys, looked up from the table and recognized Justin and his friends. He elbowed Kenny Hanley in the side.

“Ow! What was that for?” Kenny asked.

“It’s those kids from the mall,” Buzz answered.

Kenny’s face reddened and he clenched his fists.

“Hey, loser,” he called out to Justin. “You and your friends got us kicked out of the mall.”

“You got yourself kicked out when you stole those comics,” Stephanie responded firmly.

“Oh yeah?” Buzz shot back. “It never would have happened if you had just minded your own business. We ought to pound you into the ground.”

Buzz took a step forward but stopped when Kenny grabbed his arm. He whispered a few words into his ear and Buzz smirked.

“There’s a rumor going around that you four are pretty good at math,” Kenny said.

“That’s not a rumor,” Stephanie said defiantly. “It’s a fact.”

“That’s too bad. You see, we have a really good math team,” Buzz said. “I’m not so sure that pretty good quite meets our standards for making the team.”

“And who are you to make that call?” Catherine asked.

“As it so happens, I’m the president of the math club,” Kenny said with a cool grin. “And as president, one of my duties is to make the final choice on who competes for the team.”

“That’s not fair!” Catherine cried out in frustration.

“Nobody said life was fair,” Kenny said with a shrug of his shoulders. “It looks like your math competition days are over, at least as long as I’m in charge.”

As Kenny turned away, Justin whispered to his friends. “It looks like we have to find a way to elect a new president.”