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I was a jock. A stud. In 6th grade. Just as puberty was morphing my body from skinny and gangly into lean and awkward. I was on The Team.

The Math Team.

We were bad asses.

Co-Captains Gary Gittleberg and John Mason lead the way. Bespectacled faces. Hair perfectly glued down. Dress shirts... un-tucked.

We named ourselves The Numerators. Because we always came out on top.

We would roll into the Tournament -- cocky. We were the rebels of the Math Department. We chewed gum. We cut our eyes at the competition. We walked into the room as we always did... in slow motion. Popping our gum. Snarling our lips and giving a head nod to librarian until she blushed. Twirling our mechanical pencils around on our fingers like they were Black Hawk Choppers invading Commie airspace. Behind us, a cloud of dust. Ahead of us... our destiny.

Or so we thought.

This was the last match of the regular season. We were undefeated. Every other Math Team in our district... we put them down like old dogs. No mercy. We swept the leg. The hypotenuse leg.

In our most recent match, we thrashed Garfield Middle School so bad that by the last question, after finding the answer we didn't even... check... our... work.

We finished that last question a full 5 minutes before them. I tossed a paper airplane at their Captain. He opened it. And he read what we wrote, "The thought of you winning is equivalent to the square root of
2. Totally irrational."

That was then. This school we faced today was very different. They were no-nonsense. They wore sports jackets. And loafers. And most intimidating of all -- they used pens. They were doing math problems in
PEN! This is unheard of!

We lost to that team. We lost hard. We lost bad. We almost lost our way.

Our team was sent into a tailspin of bickering and in-fighting. We needed to pull it together before the Championship. The Championship would be a re-match against those arrogant number crunchers.

We argued about who should start and who should ride the bench. Guarav was strong in Geometry but weak in Probability. Alex hadn't been himself since he fell in love with Cynthia and her newly grown isosceles triangles. Trying to win her affections, but knowing only strategy from Dungeons & Dragons he cried out to her, "I love you! I'll give you everything in my inventory! Even my battle-axe!" He was worthless now.

Our Co-Captains were at each other's throats! Tensions reached their climax when they warred over who could recite Pi to the most decimal places and John lifted his pencil above his head and stabbed Gary in the forearm! Gary Gittleberg cries out, "Aaaaah! I'm gonna diiiie! That pencil isn't even a #2!"

But with the help of our most bad-ass teammate, Robert Mazetti, we got our swagger back. We walked in wearing black leather... pocket protectors.

They had pens? We brought permanent markers.

For the Championship they allowed to use simple calculators. I took mine out, dropped it on the floor, and smashed it under my foot.

We would show them who's boss. And we did. We won that Math Tournament. We were named City-Wide Math Team Champions. It was all ours. The Glamour. The Glory. The Babes.

Well, not the babes. And not so much the glamour and the glory. But we got jackets. Blue polyester satin jackets with the yellow ironed-on letters stating, "CITY-WIDE MATH TEAM CHAMPIONS." And under those words was a large red and white bulls-eye.

OK, no bulls-eye. But there may well have been one because with that dorky jacket we were targets for abuse! Sure being on the Math Team was super-cool compared to the other kids in my "Gifted" Classes who were on Chess Team or the English Grammar Team...

But to the regular school population, we were to be ridiculed. Their tactics were crude but effective. For instance, a kid would come up and quiz me, "Quick Math Nerd, what's 7 times 3?" My natural reaction is of course to answer. And when I did, he said, "21? Good! That's how many punches you get!" As I'm being pummeled, I thought to myself, "Man, I should have said 12. He wouldn't have known the difference."

So I never wore my Math Team Champion jacket. I was ashamed. I had been taught the hard lesson that certain types of achievements are to be hidden in shame. But my dad was so proud of my dork-squad accomplishment that he decided if I would not wear the jacket, then HE would!

I don't know if you remember what it was like being 12 years old, but I do. (Mainly because my maturity level has frozen at that age.) A boy at 12 does NOT want to be seen in public with his parents. He's humiliated if his friends see him out with his super-NOT-cool parents. I was already not cool, I didn't need any help in this department. So now I'm out at the movies with my parents and here is my dad wearing my Math Team Champion jacket that's way too small for him.

He's walking around all proud and I'm trying to cover my face.

Being on the Math Team meant being humiliated. It meant being ostracized. I went from being a quiet confident kid to a quiet shy kid.

So what happened to our loveable lugs of The Math Team?

Gary Gittleberg went on to become a brilliant engineer.

John Mason also went on the become an engineer, although his path to a prestigious University was made tougher because of that violent attack on his permanent record. Ironic that his weapon was a pencil, yet his misdeed could not be erased.

Robert Mazetti went on to be a Physicist. A bad-ass physicist.

Guarav became a Mathematics Professor.

Loverboy Alex is happily married with 3 children. And no, he's not married to Cynthia.

Me? I retired from Math. Life is a parabola of sorts. And I reached the zenith of my math abilities so I decided to go out on top. Don't ask me to calculate the tip. I don't do my own taxes. At the grocery, I don't
even count my change. Those days are behind me like a cloud of dust...

But I'll admit, every so often, I'll walk into a library... see that librarian. Pop my gum. Snarl my lips and give her a head nod. Twirl my mechanical pencil around on my fingers. She thinks, "Can it be him? Was
he a... Numerator?"

But I don't answer. I turn right around. And just before I open that door to leave... I pop the collar up on my blue polyester satin jacket with fading yellow ironed-on letters: "CITY-WIDE MATH TEAM CHAMPIONS."

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