Never Underestimate Girl Math novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Farm Girl
Lou is accused of cheating in front of her class and proves herself on the board; a letter puts her scholarship under review.
I still had straw in my braid when I walked into Probability and Statistics.
I had been picking in the Stephens Farm fields since four thirty that morning.
Then I rode the bus forty minutes, ran across the quad, and slid into my seat with soil still under my nails.
The row behind me went quiet.
Then a girl laughed.
"Do you smell that?" Peyton Whitaker said, loud enough for the whole lecture hall. "It's like a barn in here."
Her friends laughed with her.
Peyton sat in the third row in a white wool coat that cost more than my father made in a season.
Her family's name was on the building we were sitting in.
I took out my notebook and said nothing.
My father had taught me that.
You do not answer people who have never worked a day in their lives.
Preston Lund, her boyfriend, leaned over my desk and picked a piece of straw out of my braid.
He held it up between two fingers.
"Hey, Farm Girl," he said. "You dropped some of your lunch."
The row behind him howled.
I looked at the front of the room.
The professor came in with a stack of graded midterms and set it on the podium.
He did not look happy.
"I'll hand these back by seat," he said. "Before I do, one announcement. The top score in this class was a perfect hundred."
He paused.
"The lowest of the top five was a sixty-one."
Peyton's smile slipped a little.
He read names in order.
"Lou Brandvold," he said last.
I went up and took mine.
A hundred, circled in red, with a note that said, See me about the Cup.
I turned the paper over and slid it into my notebook.
Peyton's paper hit her desk, and I watched her look at the number.
Sixty-one.
She stood up so fast her chair scraped.
"This is wrong," she said. "Somebody cheated."
The professor frowned.
"Ms. Whitaker, sit down."
"No." She pointed at me without looking at me.
"She's on a scholarship and she works in a field."
"She can't have a hundred on a test that I sat up all night for."
The whole room turned.
Heat climbed my neck.
Every instinct I had said to shrink and say it was nothing.
I did not.
I stood up and pushed my chair in.
"Then give me another test," I said.
Peyton blinked.
"Now. Here. Your hardest problem, on the board, in front of everyone."
The professor looked at me for a long moment.
Then he picked up a piece of chalk and held it out.
"Question six was the one that sank most of you," he said. "Ms. Brandvold. Show them."
I walked down the aisle with my boots clumping on the steps.
Somebody snickered.
I took the chalk.
The problem was about expected loss across a set of correlated risks, which the book solved with a page of matrix work.
I looked at it for a moment.
Then I wrote one line.
I wrote a second line under it.
I did it the way I count crates at the end of a shift, by grouping them and not by listing them.
At the third line, nobody in the room made a sound.
At the fifth line, I wrote the answer, drew a box around it, and turned around.
"It's two point three one," I said. "You can check it with the matrix if you want. That's the long way."
The professor checked it.
He did not say anything for a long moment.
"It's correct," he said at last. "It's also a method I have never seen in a textbook."
Then somebody in the back clapped.
Then somebody else.
Peyton's face went from pink to white.
She grabbed her bag and walked out, and Preston went after her.
On the way past me he leaned close.
"You just made a huge mistake," he said quietly.
I wiped the chalk off my hands on my jeans.
After class, the professor stopped me at the door and handed me a cream envelope with the Whitaker Foundation seal.
"This came to my office this morning," he said. "I think it was meant for you."
I opened it in the hallway.
It was one paragraph, signed by Peyton's father.
My full scholarship was under review.
Effective immediately, the Foundation would be reconsidering the terms of my award.
I read it twice.
I stood in the hall with the paper shaking in my hand.
The scholarship was the only reason I was in this building at all.
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