The Cinderella Theorem Read Online Free PDF

get the answer to make sense. When
did my life become so full of fairy tales?
    “Who
wrote fairy tales?! Why have they survived?! Why do we enjoy them so much?! These
are some of the questions we are going to answer!” Mrs. Fox continued on and
on. “Let’s go around the room and share our favorite fairy tales!”
    Panic.
Let me again point out: I do not know any fairy tales. After quickly examining
my options, I decided to just copy someone else’s answer.
    “Why
don’t we start with……” Mrs. Fox looked around the room for a victim, while her
sentence hung there waiting for its exclamation mark. “Lily!”
    I
should have known. Was it mathematically possible for Smythe’s SFL to be
working its magic against me even at school?
    Wait.
    There
could be no answer to that question because I had not yet proven that Smythe’s
SFL was mathematically possible. Therefore, the question of whether or not–
    “Lily?!”
(How is it possible to ask a question and make an exclamatory
statement?)
    “Uh….well….I….”
I hate fairy tales. They have turned me into incoherent mush. I tried to recall
anything my father might have said about a fairy tale last night. “Oh! I like
that King Midian guy.”
    A
few people in the class snickered.
    Mrs.
Fox looked puzzled for a moment, then, “Oh! You mean King Midas! An excellent tale!”
She raced to the board to write King Midas . (The woman even moved like
an exclamation.) “Becky! Tell us your favorite!”
    Becky pulled Rapunzel out of the air. Isn’t she the
one that slept for a hundred years?
    I
stopped paying attention shortly after this, and was in a happy state of
solving for x in my head, when Mrs. Fox exclaimed, “For your homework
over the weekend, I want you to read The Little Mermaid and write a few
sentences in your fairy tale journal about this wonderful tale! For extra credit,
tell why you think this tale made Anderson so famous!”
    Who
is Anderson? Was the Little Mermaid the one with the evil stepmother and the
poison apple? And what is a fairy tale journal? But, on the brighter side of
things, I now have something to talk to my father about while we portal to
worlds beyond the plumbing.
    The
rest of the day was an unmathematical event not worth remembering. The
substitute in history never found the lesson plans to give us an assignment. She
let us do whatever instead; I read about lovely Mr. Newton.
    No
one was home when I arrived. Normally, I would have thought this strange, since
Mom works at home, but my ideas about stangeness have shifted somewhat since
yesterday’s festivities. Figuring Mom and “Dad” were off gallivanting in the
Salt World, I got my pretzels and decided to do my biology homework. I had just
answered a question about DNA and its importance to all things living, when the
little brown man from the night before crashed onto the dining room table in
front of me.
    “Hi,
Your Highness!” he said, as a voice from above starting shouting:
    “You
weren’t supposed to let her see you!”
    I
looked up. The woman in all purple was sitting on the chandelier, where I
suppose the brown man had just been.
    “We’re
so sorry, Princess,” she continued, though she didn’t really sound sorry, as
she started in on Mr. Brown. “Geez, Peridiom, all you had to do was stay up
here, and she would never have known we were here.” She sighed, jumped and
landed on the table, also.
    “Um,
why were you up there?” I asked, very logically.
    “Her Majesty sent us through the tub to make sure
you had an afternoon snack. After we put in your pretzels for today, Peridiom
said,” she paused here and looked hard at poor Mr. Brown, “that he wanted to
climb up the light. Then, you came home, and we were stuck, and stupid Peridiom
fell on your homework.”
    “Oh,”
I said, as if tiny people dressed in one color, falling from my ceiling were an
everyday occurrence.
    “Did
you like the pretzels?” Peridiom asked.
    I smiled, nodded, and helped Peridiom