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wouldn't be too hard to pull apart the glued ones and rearrange them. We haven't gotten too far on building anyway, he says—and that's the truth.
    So that's how I start turning the project around. Trust me, Barbecue Face Williams never would have thought of this rainbow idea, if he was still being Prez.
    Every day, I stay later and later at school, trying to keep everybody doing what they're supposed to do and not messing up the colors. Afterwards, I ride home on the bus, still trying to peel the dried glue off my fingers. Sometimes I don't get back to my uncle's apartment until way past 4:00. Come dragging in, half-starved, and find DJ and his friends hanging out in the living room, with their cans and cigarette butts lying around everywhere. Don't know why they can't pick up nothing.
    “Hey, Math Boy,” they call out, “go out and find us something to eat.”
    I'm not sure what's up with DJ these days, but he's getting a real attitude. Like he's turning into somebody I don't even know. We always used to look out for each other. When we first came to our uncle's, I remember the two of us sitting on the beds in the apartment and my brother saying that even though it was just the two of us now, I could always count on him as my family. He was serious, too, which he almost never is. Then he told me the story for the hundredth time about how he was the one who carried me up three flights of stairs by himself when I was about four or five and fell on the sidewalk outside the apartment where we lived back then and cut open my forehead.
    These days, I figure he'd probably just leave me facedown on the cement.
    I think that's why I keep spending more and more time with the math club. Because DJ isn't acting like anybody I'd call family—or anybody I'd even call related to me—and I'm tired of getting ordered around by him and all his friends.
    Or maybe I just like being Prez and telling everybody else what to do.

RHONDELL
    Quiescent.
I saved that word from a poem we read in English class, and although it was used to describe caterpillars curled up in their cocoons, I liked it. I sometimes feel like a caterpillar hidden inside a cocoon, even though my Aunt Asia often tells me I need to consider changing how I am around people. Aunt Asia is my mom's younger sister. She works as a stylist at the Style R Us hair salon, and she's the kind of person who doesn't mind talking to anybody and everybody. I think she probably wishes my mom and I were more like her, but I believe that being quiet and hidden means you sometimes notice things that other people don't.
    One of the things I've noticed after coming to Mr. Collins’ math club since the end of September is how people are different than they seemed at first. For instance, I've worked with Sharice since the first day, but I've learned that she is somebody who has some very odd beliefs and superstitions about things, which you don't realize until you spend time with her.
    “Purple—now that's my good luck color,” she always says when we're working together, folding and gluing the little tetrahedrons. “Hand me all the purple.” The first time she said it, I asked her why purple was her good luck color and she gave me an annoyed look and said, “What's wrong with having a favorite color, Rhondell? Don't you?”
    There are other colors she won't touch. I have to fold all of the yellow and blue, for example. “Get that paper away from me, Rhondell,” she'll tell me, pushing a stack across the desk. “Those colors are bad luck for me. Real bad luck. Don't even let me look at them.”
    But how could certain colors be good luck or bad luck to somebody? I wonder. And why?
    Marcel is different than I expected, too. Even though everybody always thinks he's good-looking and smooth, if you really watch him, you'll notice that he acts like he's nervous deep down. His brown eyes flicker around the room when he's talking to you, and his foot taps up and down, and he never sits anywhere