Читать книгу Pick Your Poison - Lauren Child - Страница 21

‘RUBY!’ Her mother’s voice came through the house intercom, small, tinny, yet authoritative.

Ruby groped for her glasses and pushed them onto her nose; they sat there unhappily, bent out of shape. She peered at the alarm clock.

‘6.32,’ she muttered, ‘not even breakfast time.’ It was unlike her mother to shout through the intercom unless there was a matter of some urgency.

‘Is the house sinking, on fire, falling down?’ Ruby grumbled. Ruby fell from her bed, stumbled to her feet, staggered to the intercom and spoke into it. ‘Hello caller, please divulge the nature of your query?’

‘Have you forgotten about the mathlympics meet?’ said her mother.

Yes, she had actually.

‘Oh geez!’ she moaned. Why did her mom enter her for these lame loser geek-central dork fests? What was the point of it all? Did she want to waste a precious day of her life sitting in a school gym or on a theatre stage with a whole bunch of other kids who were good at math?

No, she did not.

She knew exactly how good at math she was and she didn’t need to stand on a box, finger on the buzzer, answering quiz questions to prove it. But this time there didn’t seem to be any way out. She was going and that was that. Her mother could be a very determined woman.

While she was brushing her teeth, she peered out of the window. Mrs Beesman was out in what looked to be a dressing gown and pushing her shopping cart down Cedarwood. There was one sneaker sitting in the middle of the road, possibly a man’s tennis shoe. She made a note of this in her yellow notebook and wondered how all these stray sneakers came to end up in the middle of roads; it was not by any means an unusual sight.

When she climbed into the car – her mother had already been sitting waiting for her for ‘fifteen minutes, for goodness sake’ – Sabina Redfort turned to her and said, ‘Really? You had to wear that T-shirt?’

Ruby’s T-shirt choice was one bearing the words: dorks beware.

‘And your glasses …?’ said Sabina. ‘What in the world of Twinford has happened to your glasses?’

Ruby shrugged. ‘OK, let’s get this over with.’

It was a long and testing day, not because the competition was especially tough, nor because the test questions were especially tricky, but because one of the candidates, one Dakota Lyme, was a royal pain in the butt.

Dakota Lyme was a girl Ruby had met twice before on the mathlympics field. Once when Ruby was four and once when she was eight. Dakota was one year and nine months older than Ruby and behaved like a child of that exact age.

She was a sore loser and, what was worse, she was an even sorer winner. On both previous occasions she had narrowly beaten Ruby in the final round and spent a lot of time afterwards crowing about it. Though what Dakota’s parents had not pointed out to their little prodigy was that Dakota had been coached in the advanced math that was at the competition’s heart and Ruby had just that day happened upon it.

This time things went a little differently.

They were equally matched right up until the final question, and the tension emanating from the parents could almost be touched.

‘OK, you two,’ said the compere, ‘draw the shape represented by this formula.’ Letters and numbers appeared on the screen:

Ruby frowned for a moment, then smiled. She glanced over at Dakota, who was looking panicked; it was obvious that nothing was coming to mind.

Ruby drew quickly. She had worked out in seconds that the formula represented a tesseract, or a 4-dimensional cube – a shape with 24 edges that was to the cube what the cube was to the square. She chose to render it as a kind of fake 3D image that she knew was called a Schlegel diagram:

Then Ruby hit her buzzer.

‘Redfort, you have the diagram?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Bring it to the podium for checking, please.’

She took her piece of paper over to the desk where the math checkers sat. They in turn checked it over and handed it on to the compere.

‘Correct!’ declared the compere. ‘We have our winner.’

Dakota Lyme glared at Ruby, one eye covered by her long dark hair. Her mouth was pinched like she had just eaten something sour, her arms folded tightly across her chest.

The photographer stepped up to take some pictures and Dakota and Ruby were asked to stand uncomfortably close.

‘If I could ask you to hold up your trophy Ruby, and Dakota, your runner-up prize.’

Ruby tried to force a smile, but it was hard because she hated this kind of dorky contest and even more than that she hated the dorky victory photographs. Dakota couldn’t force a smile because she was too sore about her defeat. So they stood there looking in some ways remarkably similar. They were the same height, same build, had the same long dark hair, they even sort of dressed alike, though Dakota’s T-shirt was pink and said Party Girl, and her sneakers had glitter detail and her jeans had a heart patch on the pocket. But their expressions weren’t so very different – even if Ruby managed to look coolly aloof and Dakota unattractively bitter.

It was in the parking lot that Dakota became even less attractive. Ruby and Sabina were just driving slowly towards the exit when Dakota Lyme shouted, ‘You’re a phoney, Redfort. You cheat, I know you cheat, and your clothes are ugly, you dress like a boy.’ Dakota stamped her foot.

Sabina Redfort reversed the car, wound down the window and said, ‘And you, pipsqueak, are a very unpleasant little madam who will never be attractive no matter what you wear!’ Then she put her foot down on the pedal and took off at more speed than was wise.

Ruby winked at her mother and said, ‘Nice going, Mom.’

And her mother said, ‘I simply can’t abide a sore loser.’