Mariella decided that she wanted to count to two thousand. That day in school she had learned to count up to 100, and she felt that now her grasp on the number scale was strong enough for her to attempt a personal endeavour outside of school. Mariella had always enjoyed taking her education into her own hands when she found her regular lessons to be below her personal standards for academic achievement: for example, after her first day of kindergarten, Mariella rushed home to tell her mother all about her lessons, crafts, and how nicely the letters seemed to flow in alphabetical order. She demanded to see a dictionary, and while she was still unable to read words longer than two letters, she explained that by bedtime, she could easily have half the alphabet memorized. At the dinner table, Mariella was able to recite the entire alphabet up to W without the aid of the catchy jingle.
Her motivation in counting to two thousand was not only the sense of accomplishment she would feel, but more importantly, Mariella knew the feat would impress her friends at school. Her parents provided her with all the support and practice she could ask for, but embarking on this mental journey would demand a great deal or Mariella. Her goal was to reach the elusive number in one week’s time: that next Wednesday, Mariella’s teacher promised her students that they would be able to count to a thousand without any problem. Mariella would hardly be able to face herself in her pink hand mirror if she was to fall that close to the middle of the curve. And so, after a hearty meal of chicken fingers, potato wedges, and plain lettuce with cucumber and tomato (Mariella never cared much for salad dressing), she placed her plate neatly on the counter, and scurried off to her room to begin.
Her plan was simple enough to execute, but Mariella was concerned about her time restraints: she planned to write each number down individually, and hoped that the pattern would make itself clear once she reached a hundred, her current safe point. However, while Mariella considered her cognitive ability to be far superior to the average joe in her classroom, her penmanship was still lacking significantly. No matter how hard she tried, her fours always ended up looking like boxy y’s, and she could never start in the right spot for a six or a nine. She paid no attention to this deficit as she began her list, and dismissed it as a trivial distraction. She knew what she meant, even if the numbers didn’t look quite as elegant as they did when her teacher wrote them on the chalkboard. After nearly twenty minutes of solid writing, Mariella approached the 100 mark. She got to 100, and realized that the next hundred would be simple! She continued on with a 101, and wrote happily for another fifteen minutes. Occasionally she had to refer to her first hundred to remember whether seventy or eighty came first, but sure enough, Mariella reached 199. That’s when disaster struck. Mariella panicked. What came after 199? One hundred was the highest number she could envision, and suddenly her entire week ahead seemed like a foolish idea. What did two thousand even look like on paper? How would a number that sounded so silly suddenly reveal itself to her? Mariella considered crying, but her parents were already watching TV, and wouldn’t hear her sobs over the studio audience’s laughs and cheers.
The numbers sat in front of her in silent mockery. How dare they betray her like this! Mariella could manipulate them however she pleased – well, the first ten were in her addition and subtraction clutches, at any rate. She assumed that after the one thousand lesson, others would follow, but that lesson would be of no help until it was too late. Mariella needed inspiration badly, and had no idea where to find it. She began chewing on her pencil, but almost immediately whipped it out of her mouth: she considered chewing on one’s pencil a very bad habit, and had no desire to be a hypocrite. As the numbers continued to swim their enchanting dance, Mariella noticed the peculiar tooth marks on her pencil. Thanks to her developing jaw, only four teeth actually made contact with the pencil, two of which were close together, the other two being more distant along the same line. She pondered the odd formation, and started counting the holes. Two. One. One. When strung together, twooneone looked an awful lot like Onetwotwo, or 122 as she had written minutes earlier. In a spark in brilliance, Olivia achieved insight adults can only remember fondly – she felt like the most intelligent human being on the planet: two hundred followed 199! It was so simple; how had she not seen it instantly? A hundred may have introduced a third digit into the integral mix, but that didn’t exempt it from the exact same laws that applied to the ones and tens categories. And if two hundred was possible, then so was three hundred, four hundred, and so on.
When Mariella’s mother came to her door to send her to bed, Mariella had reached 387, and was exhausted. Her mother helped her change, brush her teeth, and prepare for bed, but the instant she turned the light off and shut the door, Mariella felt completely refreshed and ready to tackle another few hundred numbers. Turning the light on would alert her parents, so Mariella searched for her book and a pencil in the dark. Her eyes had even more trouble tracking her hand movements than they did in the light, so within sixteen numbers, she gave up and tried to get some sleep. As she dreamt, she pictured numbers that made no sense to her. Strings of digits flowed endlessly through her tired mind, but out of all of them, two thousand never made an appearance. She awoke the next morning feeling drained, and much less hopeful about fulfilling her goal than when she had gone to bed. At school, Mariella was a zombie. She could barely keep her eyes open long enough to see where she was hopscotching, and when it was time for show and tell, she realized that she had left her coin collection at home. In a desperate move, Mariella dug through her desk for an old craft she had made the week before. Although almost identical in appearance to the paper snowflakes the rest of her class had made, Mariella quickly set hers apart by adding coloured flecks with her crayon collection. She chose warm colours to create juxtaposition between the original creation, and its ehancements. It was a stretch, but when Mariella showed her summer snowflake to the class, it was as if she was presenting to a crowd of sedated chimpanzees. She cruised right through a hurried explanation of how pretty snowflakes would be in the summertime, and how much fun it would be to play with snow in the summer, dashing back to her seat the moment she was finished speaking. Her teacher called for a round of applause for Mariella’s creativity, and the sedative instantly turned into an opiate. Mariella had avoided embarrassment.
Mariella returned home that night with a headache and what she feared was the beginnings of a fever. A quick temperature check assured her she had nothing to fear, but when she climbed the staircase to her room, Mariella felt no relief in lying on her bed. The notebook cackled to her from across the bedroom, and the only way Mariella could silence it was by throwing it underneath her mattress. Her intense anger sent her into a rage, and without her conscious intent, Mariella began kicking at her bed. 403 jumped out from her mattress and began taunting her, escalating her fury to such a great wrath that she landed a punch directly on the wall next to her. The paint hardly chipped, but Mariella’s developing knuckles took a severe enough bruising to draw a surprised yelp out of her. Her father opened the door, expecting to see a masked intruder holding his daughter in one hand and a knife in the other, so he let out a sigh of relief when he realized that his daughter’s biggest threat was herself. He left the room to fetch an icepack, calmed the still-hysterical Mariella down, and discussed what brought about the uproar. He retrieved the notebook that Mariella noticed was silent again, and asked if he was allowed to help. Mariella was far too proud and far too stubborn to cheat like that, but she decided that hints were acceptable, so long as they didn’t give everything away too easily. Her father asked her what made 200 so different from one hundred, to which Mariella replied with the most obvious answer: the two numbers were separated by a hundred numbers in between them! Then he asked her if there was a shorter answer, and Mariella looked at 200 and 100 side by side. In another flash of genius, Mariella realized that counting by ones was a ridiculously inefficient way of going about her business when she could simply count by hundreds! From 400 Mariella jumped up to 900 in a fraction of her expected time of arrival. All the inspiration had tired her though, and Mariella decided to rest early that night.
After her Friday school day ended, Mariella was whisked off on her family’s weekend vacation to her grandparents’ house. She had forgotten this trip was planned, and didn’t think to pack her counting notebook with the rest of her things that morning. She wouldn’t return home until that Sunday night, leaving her with less than two days to finish her assignment! Starting over was out of the question: Mariella had started her quest in her Go Diego Go notebook, and she knew starting over on any other piece of paper – even with her giant head start – would give her no sense of worth. Mariella had her principles, and she was determined to stick to them, no matter how tempted she would be to count while visiting her grandparents in the country. Instead of counting, Mariella decided to take a break and pursue her other passions: her grandfather owned several racing horses, and Mariella often spent her visits tending to the horses in his stable, brushing the bottoms of their chests and telling her parents how much oats would be appropriate for them to eat. On this particular visit, Mariella learned that horses deeply enjoyed sugar, and so she spent an afternoon giving each of the horses sugar cubes straight from her palm. As they greedily licked up the crystalline goodness, Mariella kept a running tally of how many cubes she had grabbed. When she realized what she was doing, she tried to stop, but she couldn’t. When the horses were fed, Mariella began counting other things; she looked for any excuse to count by ones, and eventually by tens. She began counting by hundreds on the drive home, and imagined that for everyone one tree she could see, ninety-nine others stood behind it in a perfect row, making her scale of measurement more accurate. She got to ten hundred and eleven hundred, realized those were silly sounding numbers, and slowly drifted asleep.
All during school on Monday, Mariella wondered what ten hundred and eleven hundred meant. She considered asking her teacher, but being so close to the deadline, Mariella felt morally opposed to taking hints from the master of all number-related knowledge. Instead, she asked her parents for one more hint. It was more of an explanation, in her defense, and didn’t require them to do any thinking for her. All Mariella wanted to know was whether ten hundred meant a million or a billion, and how many zeroes were involved. When her parents asked her how many zeroes would make sense to be in ten hundred, Mariella almost instinctively knew that there were three. She couldn’t explain the exact logic, but if there were two zeroes in a hundred, then ten hundred would have to have on more. Her mother informed Mariella that there were three zeroes in a thousand, and with one last stroke of insight, Mariella knew she had won. Nearly wetting herself with excitement, she raced to her room, ripped the cover of her Hispanic-profiled notebook, and wrote two more numbers after 900 – 1000, and 2000.
Word count: 2,084
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