I used to get teased in school because my name is Irv and the other kids said that’s a stupid old man’s name. Washington Irving Visser is a hard name and it took me a long time to learn how to spell it all out.

Mom told me that Washington Irving was a writer and then I learned about him last year in the fifth grade so I guess that’s OK but it’s funny because I don’t like to write. I like to do math, though. Well I did, until my teacher started making me show my work and I don’t like to show my work and so my grades got bad this year.

Mom got really mad though because she looked at all my homework and told me the answers were right and that my teacher shouldn’t fail me if I got the answers right even though I didn’t show all the steps I was supposed to show. So she went to the school and got me signed up for the gifted program, and it is pretty neat, because I get to be in a different classroom and the other kids are fun and I have a new math teacher.

Every day we get to spend a whole hour doing whatever kind of work we want and my new math teacher came over and asked me about the paper with all the numbers on it in my Trapper Keeper. It was the plain blue one that I keep my own junk in, not the Batman one that has my school papers in it. Anyway I told him that one night I was up late because mom let me stay up, and I was watching TV and then I found one channel that was all black but there was a song on a piano. It sounded really neat so I started writing it down. He asked what I meant by write it down so I told him that music sounds like numbers to me and I wrote down the numbers that the piano song was playing. He asked if he could borrow the paper and I said it was OK but to give it back when he’s done with it because I wanted to use the back side for other stuff.

I haven’t been back to school in a long time though because after my math teacher took my paper, the angry guys came to my house. They yelled at mom and went through all our stuff and mom cried and they kept shouting about codes and secrets and how I knew them and I don’t even know the Fibanachy or Fibowhatever guy they were talking about.

Then another guy came in and he was an army guy but he was really nice and he reminded me of grandpa because he smelled good and he smiled a lot. He talked to my mom for a long time and she stopped crying and then told me I needed to go with the man but just for a couple of days and then I could come home and go back to school.

I don’t know how far we drove but it felt like a whole day and I couldn’t see anything out the windows of the van but they let me bring my Nintendo with me so that made it OK.

I have a nice room here and they let me eat pizza and stuff, and the bed is a lot bigger than the one I have at home but it’s been longer than a couple of days. I sort of want to go home but I’m afraid to ask and the people are nice to me. The army guy comes to my room in the morning and plays different kinds of music to me and asks me to write down what I hear, so I write it all down in the numbers but it makes my hand hurt to write so much.

Before dinner the army guy takes me to see a doctor, but the doctor doesn’t do anything but ask me questions. He gives me math problems to do and I do them and he asks why I don’t show the work and I tell him every time that I can’t. He asks why and I tell him that I just know the answers, that’s all. He asks other silly questions about how I sleep and if I hear voices and have bad dreams. I don’t know why, because the doctor mom always takes me to just wants to look in my ears and puts that cold thing on my chest and tells me to breathe so I don’t know why the other doctor asks so many questions.

The army guy just brought me a cheeseburger and a Pepsi and it smells really good and I’m hungry, but my mom makes good cheeseburgers too. He told me tomorrow I’m getting a cat scanner or something. I don’t know what that is, but it reminded me of my cat, and I just want to go home to see her. I’m tired of writing down all the numbers.