Wipeout at Zero
Somewhere around fifth grade, math starts lying to you by omission. The letter x used to mean "a group of something." Now it means "the thing you don't know yet" — and nobody tells you the symbol changed jobs. Division just quietly disappears from your homework one year, replaced by "multiply by the reciprocal," and no one explains where it went or why. You're handed tricks — keep, change, flip; carry the one. You told to follow the rules. Nobody tells you why. So you memorize. And it doesn't stick, because it was never yours to begin with.
That's the whole town of Greatness, if you squint. It's a seaside place where math walks around wearing human faces — where Zero is the person everyone's a little afraid of and nobody bothers to understand, and Pi runs the local pizza place, forever rounding his prices to $3.14 because he is, quite literally, incapable of landing on an exact number and has made a very loud peace with that. Pi is funny, loud, impossible to shut up — and also the book's quiet answer key. He never fakes precision. He never pretends to be something he's not just to make people comfortable. Everyone in town thinks his instability is a flaw. It's the only honest thing about him.
Into this town comes Shifty — a kid whose whole gift is noticing what other people miss, and he feels invisible because nobody notices him back. When his work-study class reunites him with Allos, his childhood best friend turned near-stranger, he hopes it's a second chance. Instead, she still moves too fast, and he spends the whole book quietly fixing what she breaks, getting none of the credit. He also watches a surfer named Primus chase an actual, literal quest to reach infinity and somehow still come home.
The secret project the whole crew builds happens in The Junk Drawer, a shop stuffed with old tools whose instructions rotted off years ago — the town's actual, physical version of every math trick you ever memorized and never understood. And when everything finally goes wrong, right at the one place in Greatness called the origin, Shifty has the answer everyone needs. He also has the choice not to be the one who gets to say it out loud.
Wipeout at Zero is show you the difference between understanding and just doing.