The Probability of Everything: List 1

“...the officers spent three hours trying to coax the cat down.”

Mom looked over her shoulder and firmly said, “No, we don’t eat the TV, Lo.”
We said some variation of that sentence more than twenty times a day.
“No, we don’t eat that vase, Lo.”
“No, we don’t eat the wall, Lo.”

A short man with twin tufts of white hair sprouting out of his ears pushed a pair of wiry glasses up his nose.

“It’s so cold,” I said, and my voice was hoarse the way it sometimes got when I’d gone hours without speaking.

There was an asteroid hurtling toward our planet, and I was so, so scared.

“Zoomer?” Mom repeated, with a slight smile on her face.

Her house had thousands of little decorations all around it, the kind you find in gift shops at places like Disney World. Trinkets and mugs and trophies.

The law of the conservation of energy says matter can change from one form to another, but it can never be created or destroyed.

Dia could be the name of a fashion brand, a logo on the tag of a fancy shirt.

After Mr. Gracen had explained it, I understood that zero was even because it was before one, which was an odd number. But before Friday, I had always just assumed zero was neither odd nor even because it was a special case.

An anomaly.
All the other numbers represented something, but zero was the absence of something.

Like always, the smell of my aunt’s thick perfume overwhelmed me.

“Where are Mom and Dad?” I asked, a sudden jolt of worry rushing over me.

“Can you imagine The Viola Davis just trying to fake cry for an important scene and someone interrupts her to say they don’t know how to style her hair? It’s sacrilege!”

As Grandma flittered around the living room, picking up crumpled tissues that were on the couch and the ottoman and the ground, she said something to Aunt Miriam who was standing near the front door still.

“Rice? Beans? Garri?” Grandma prodded now.

But right then, she looked willing to compromise.
“Anything,” she said.

I knew that the asteroid meant we would die. Or stop being alive, anyway. We would stop being us. But Aunt Miriam made it seem like we would die even before that happened. From the anticipation, the not-knowing, the sadness.

Aunt Miriam’s tears gave me a kick in the stomach, a determination.
We were not going to be the first ones to die from sadness.

Many scientists believe a huge asteroid collided with Earth millions of years ago. The immediate impact and the changes to the planet (floods, firestorms, weather changes, etc.) caused the extinction of lots of animals, including non-bird dinosaurs.

“It’s possible that I got a little too close to the skunk. Apparently skunks like their ‘personal space,’” he scoffed, making quotation marks around the last two words with his hands.

“Every team at my soccer tournament got a trophy and even though my team came second, so did everybody else. Even the ones who were dead last!”
“Wow, that’s...”
“Unfair? Heinous? Despicable?”

“Unfair? Heinous? Despicable?”
“I was going to say weird,” I said, “but sure to all the other words.”
“Thank you. I thought so too.”
Lucas continued on about what he called “the injustices of life.”

I could talk to her about the things I loved, like statistics and science, and she could talk to me about the things she loved, like fashion and candy and vintage clothes.

I could talk to her about the things I loved, like statistics and science, and she could talk to me about the things she loved, like fashion and candy and vintage clothes.

My dad called Tillie “sticky fingers” because she had a habit of collecting useless things from random places—old newspapers, a hairbrush without bristles, expired credit cards.

A few months ago, Aunt Miriam got sick of finding Tillie’s treasures all over the place, so she got an empty box and wrote MISCELLANEOUS THINGS on it. Miscellaneous things meant a mixture of random objects, but Tillie didn’t know what that meant, so she called it her box of “Miss Celina’s Things.”

Then I thought about it a little more and realized that it couldn’t be true that cars and electricity and Mars bars and even fedoras would be forgotten after the asteroid.

But then suddenly a different feeling came over me, a feeling like there had to be another way. I’d felt it before when I’d decided to raise the most money for the food bank in third grade. And when I’d tried to be the first kid to learn the times-table chart in second grade. I think this feeling was the thing that my father called grit.

Gritstone is a coarse sort of sandstone.

Sandstone is sedimentary rock made up of sand or rock grains. These grains are composed of minerals like quartz and feldspar.

Scientists believe Nigeria has one of the highest rates of twins in the world, particularly fraternal twins.

It felt like the whole world—the trees, the cars on the road, other houses—was slightly tinged with purple.

I felt exasperated, a feeling of too much air in my lungs. They were overreacting.

“This isn’t home,” I said before flouncing off back into Tillie’s room.

In the past, she’d ripped the corner off one of the posters in my room, thrown the clothes out of my laundry hamper and stomped on them, and we’d had a few close calls in terms of her eating my homework.

“I’m very busy, so you have to be good, okay?” I told her in a stern voice, but for some reason it only seemed to make her giggle.

I let Lo down to the ground and she made a beeline for Grandma, who was sitting at the dining table reading a book.

His blond hair and sweater vests made it hilarious when he did what he called his “white dad dance” to Grandma’s Nigerian music. His white dad dance included a lot of flailing, disco points, and raising-the-roof motions.

“Obviously we’ll need food.”
Grandma nodded solemnly as she fed Lo some pepper soup. She was always on top of the food.