Excerpt from Too Shattered for Mending by Peter Brown Hoffmeister, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But the worst was always math. Math is a trick they play on you when you're a kid. You'll never win. Grade school, I'd be in class wondering why the teacher made up problems for us.

High school's supposed to be different, but it isn't. Without Mr. Polchowski— my Room 2 teacher during study hall— I wouldn't have passed a single math class in all of high school. To be honest, I wouldn't have passed science either. Science has math in it, among other things. Last week, in science class, I asked a kid what a word was in our textbook, and he said, "That's Latin, man."

Latin, I thought. I don't think there's even a country where they still speak Latin, so what's it doing in my textbook?

Today in study hall, Mr. Polchowski says, "Listen to me. You've got to make time for your homework at home, you know?"

I don't tell him how hard I tried to do my math home-work last night because it doesn't look like I tried at all. I sat down and wrote out all 13 problems but only answered one of them, number 6. The others didn't make any sense to me.

"Okay," I say.

"Okay?" Mr. Polchowski adjusts his ponytail. "You always say 'Okay,' but then you don't do it. Look," he says, "I understand that math isn't your favorite subject. But that's why you have to do your homework. It only gets harder if you don't do it. If you put something off, it makes a thing worse."

"Okay," I say again. I know I should've come after school yesterday to get more help, but I always want to go right home, just get away, and so most of the time I do.

Mr. Polchowski taps the desktop. "Let's get your home-work out and see how much we can get done during this study hall period. All right?"

"All right."

I have a see- through red plastic sheet that I cover my page with, and it helps the problems come into focus underneath, so I use that. Together, Mr. Polchowski and I work on math for the next 45 minutes. We don't get to all the problems, but we get most of them done, and I feel a little bit better about things when the bell goes off.

girl from the north country

The first time I saw Rowan was last year. She was a sopho-more at Timberline and I was a freshman. I was in her math class at the start of the year because the school people had gotten something mixed up, and somehow they'd placed me in Advanced Algebra instead of Remedial Algebra Skills. I didn't understand any of the concepts the teacher talked about, and they transferred me down two levels after that, but that was three weeks later. Until I was moved down, I sat next to Rowan.

Timberline High School sits between our two towns, Pierce and Weippe, and since Rowan was from Weippe and I was from Pierce, I'd never seen her before. She was thin in a sort of underfed way, and her clothes were loose, cheap hand-me-downs from someone three or four sizes bigger than her, but she had a real pretty face, and the way she moved was sort of like a long- limbed cat. It's hard to describe, but people noticed her. She wore thick black mascara and black eyeliner too, and it made me think of Queen Cleopatra in the book Mrs. Q read to us in fourth grade when we were learning about the Egyptians. Rowan painted eyeliner in sharp little lines to the outsides of her eyes, and all that black eyeliner made the green in her eyes brighter than it already was. I thought she looked perfect like that, and I had a hard time taking my eyes off her.

Math was never good for me, but in the advanced class everyone was speaking a language I didn't know a single word of. I was just over six foot four last year, in a room full of freshmen and sophomores, and I felt like a grizzly shifting his weight through a crowded lunchroom, knocking cafeteria trays and spilling milk. My chair made a loud screeching sound every time I moved in my seat, and the whole class would look at me whenever I did anything.

Excerpt copyright © 2017 by Peter Brown Hoffmeister. Published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children's Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.