Maps Read Online Free PDF Page B

times out of ten, it wasn’t.
    Lane shook his head. “I can’t do this. I’ll fail and look like an idiot.”
    “No, you won’t,” Maps tried to assure him, even though he was starting to believe that he might fail and look like an idiot. “This isn’t being graded. It’s just for. . .fun.”
    “Turn around, Mr. Wilson,” Mr. Rogers said from the front of the classroom. “You can chat with your friend later.”
    Maps looked down at the paper in front of him. It was fairly simply trig, really. A few calculus problems, a quadratic equation or two. Nothing that he didn’t already know from the year before.
    He picked up his pencil and worked out the problems. There wasn’t anything there he didn’t know how to do. He was flying through the exam when he started to become distracted by the sounds of heavy, panicked breathing coming from behind him.
    Maps imaged he had a puddle of sweat surrounding his desk. He couldn’t imagine what it was like struggling to understand something that you just couldn’t. Maps’ mother always said that some things were a little harder for some people, and Maps usually just ignored her. But now, Lane, the boy with the gapped front teeth sitting behind him, freaking his shit out . . .
    A pencil snapped. Maps glanced over his shoulder. Lane was staring down at the piece of paper on the desk like it had burned down his family farm. The broken pencil lay defeated and barely used on the corner of the desk.
    Maps sighed. He was an angel. He was better than an angel—he was an arch angel. He was a saint. He was going to get so much karma for this. Buddha was going to love him.
    Maps wrote Lane’s name in the name slot on his test. He was just about to turn around when he realized he didn’t know Lane’s last name. So, doing the only thing a great mind like his knew how to do—he improvised. He wrote Lane E. Bogs right at the top. That should do it.
    Subtly, when Mr. Rogers was facing the whiteboard, he reached back onto Lane’s desk without turning and swapped their papers.
    “What the—” Lane began.
    “Shhh!” Maps whispered. He turned around and looked at the paper in front of him.
    Oh god.
    There was a drawing of a cat for answer six, and not even a good cat at that. It was missing whiskers on one side of its face, the poor thing. And the answer for number eleven was just 5. No formula, no explanation—just 5. The poor kid really hadn’t been joking about how terrible he was at math.
    With a heavy sigh, Maps scratched out Lane’s name from the top of the paper and wrote his own. Just as Maps was about to begin crossing out Lane’s answers and filling in the correct ones for himself, the beeper on Mr. Rogers’ desk went off.
    “All right, everyone. That’s time. Everyone pass your tests up to the front,” Mr. Rogers said. Maps looked down at his paper with the ugly cat on it. He really was a martyr. He was going to drive a Rolls Royce in heaven.
    When everyone had passed their papers up and they’d all been collected, Mr. Rogers handed off the papers to his teacher’s assistant, a young woman they’d been instructed to refer to as Ms. Smithson.
    For the remainder of the class, Mr. Rogers babbled on at the front of the room, Benji doodled pictures on his notebook, Ms. Smithson dragged that red pen across one paper after another, and Maps tried his best not to turn around and look at Lane.
    Maps had planned to rush out of the classroom as fast as he could when the bell finally sounded, but Mr. Rogers apparently had another idea.
    “Matthew, Lane, may I see you two for a moment?” This was one of those times where Maps wished Mr. Rogers did wear a cardigan—he’d look a lot less threatening if he was yelling at them while wearing a cardigan. No one could look threatening wearing a cardigan.
    Maps absently looked down at the yellow cardigan he was wearing.
    Well, shit.
    Lane followed Maps up to the front of the classroom, both with their heads hung low. Mr. Rogers