NAUGHTY NUMBER NINE
I should have posted this yesterday, on 9/9.
NAUGHTY NUMBER NINE
Number Nine will put you on the spot.
Number Nine will tie you up, oh, in a knot.
When you’re tryin’
Multiplyin’ by nine,
You might give it everything you’ve got
And still be stopped.
If you don’t know some secret way you
can check on,
You’ll break your neck on
Naughty Number Nine.
Now the first thing to keep in mind
When you’re multiplyin’ by nine
Is that it’s one less than ten.
You see nine is the same as ten minus one.
So you could multiply your number by ten,
And then subtract the number from the result,
And you’d get the same product
As if you’d multiplied by nine
And you knew it.
I mean 8 x 9 is 80 minus 8,
And 7 x 9 is 70 minus 7, and 6 x 9 is 60 minus 6.
You could use those tricks.
‘Cause you must have some secret way you can beat it,
Or else you’ll meet it
With Naughty Number Nine…
“Naughty Number Nine”, Schoolhouse Rock
I didn’t like the way I looked in school yearbooks. My hair stuck out weird, or my face looked fat, or I had too many freckles. My eyebrows were too big. And I wore hand-me-downs from Mary’s mom, Star. They were slippery shirts from the seventies which were way too mature for a little girl to wear, and they fit clumsily on my thick little torso.
I hid my yearbooks from Mary. This was because I had a ranking system, and I’d utilized it on the yearbooks. If I brought them out, she’d find out who I liked, and she’d tell him. Or worse, she’d try to make him into her boyfriend.
In my ranking system, I circled the kids I liked and I crossed out the kids I didn’t like.
When I came to Rick, I not only crossed him off, but I drew a mustache and zits on his face. The paper tore from my vehemence. “BAD BOY,” I wrote. I was contemptuous of Rick because when he read out loud, he was too slow. I wanted to get to the next part of the story, and Rick held the class up. When he mispronounced a word, I corrected him. I didn’t realize how cruel this was. He probably teased me because I embarrassed him.
I decided I liked Alice, so I circled her picture. She was just so nice. She never teased me and sometimes she talked to me. I didn’t know what to say to a pretty and smart girl, though. I circled Alice even though I knew I was jealous. To cross her off would’ve been vindictive, I thought. I wanted to be the best, most truthful me I could be. And to circle her while having crossed off Rick felt like I’d exercised fair judgement.
Tom’s picture was between Alice’s and mine. I not only circled him, but I starred the space above his picture for accurate accounting. After I starred several other boys, I came back to Tom’s picture and gave him two more stars for good measure. Next to his name, I wrote “I WANT TO MARRY YOU.”
In second grade, we’d learned the multiplication tables all the way up to nine times nine. At that time, there was also a cool educational program on TV, Schoolhouse Rock. It helped me to really think about what the multiplication tables meant. One of the songs was “Naughty Number Nine,” sung by a cat who sounded like he had peanut butter stuck in his throat.
At the back of the classroom, we had shelving which housed numbered bins. The bins stored our school books and supplies. The was the number on my bin was nine. Tom’s was eight. I loved that my bin was naughty number nine. It seemed like some type of divine indication of my subversive specialness.
Alice was number seven. I didn’t like her bin so close to Tom’s. It felt like she was moving in on him. And she had the advantage. She went to Quest with Tom and the other gifted kids while I was stuck back in class. I was sure Tom liked her, but I was also sure he would really like me more once everyone found out I was gifted, too.
For days now I’d been dropping little drawings with stickers in bin number eight. But today I got a little more daring. I drew a note with a computer. On the monitor, I drew a heart pierced by an arrow. I wrote, “I love Tom” in the heart. I signed it, “Naughty Number Nine.”
“Did you put this in Tom’s bin?” James asked. James was a purely nice kid. He was tall, and chubby. He had freckles and black hair. I liked him a lot, but this felt like an “intervention.” I was guilty of covert activity.
“No.” My face turned hot. Of course they’d know it was me. It was obvious, wasn’t it? They could see my face and I couldn’t hide my expression.
The rest of the kids in class acted normal, but I was sure they all knew what I’d done. They knew how to make friends, how to be normal. I felt like I was a cool intelligence waiting to be discovered, but I was insecure as well. Someone forgot to give me the instruction manual for how to be a kid.