"Who are you?" asked Sammy The Square thoroughly confused. And believe me when I say "thoroughly confused" here that is definitely an understatement. He could barely remember anything about himself.

" I’m Pentamore Tagon," replied the figure in front of him, " but you can call me Pen, and I’m here to show you that math truly is everywhere in the world. I’m going to do this because I know you feel strongly that it is not true. On the other hand, another thing I know is, that it is completely and utterly the truth."

Well! Sammy didn’t know what to say to that, he would have yelled out " No! It’s not true!" but, Pen had taken the words right out of his mouth. He already knew how Sammy felt about math. So, he just sat there on the ground, dumbstruck for the moment.

" Come on, get up, we have a lot of work to do and little time to do it in." said Pen as he pulled the confused square off the ground. " We’ve got papers to deliver." Just then Sammy noticed a big bag in the creature’s hand filled to the brim with newspapers. Again he didn’t know what to do, so he decided that all he could do was get up and help this person deliver his papers. He assumed that’s what he always did, due to the fact that he really couldn’t remember much about his life other than the strong conviction that math was stupid and had nothing to do with real life. So, in his state of bewilderment, Sammy got up and followed Pen through his paper route.

" I need to go to every house on my route," he told Sammy, "but to cut down on time I don’t want to go through any road more than once. Can you figure out how to do that for me?"

"Sure, that’s easy." Said The Square as he started to give Pen his directions.

Half an hour later they had finished the route without passing through any of the roads more than once.

"Now, what did that have to do with math?" Sammy asked.

"It had everything to do with math," replied Pen, "Without Murphy’s law, a mathematical rule, and without networks that wouldn’t have been possible." He continued to tell him all about how to figure out whether a network is traversable, how if you square the matrix of a network you can figure out how to travel it with stopping twice at each point, instead of once and everything else there is to know about networks.

"Now, for lunch" said Pen. So they hopped into Pen’s car, which he proceeded to tell Sammy, would never have been able to work without math ,and headed to the local diner.

" I suppose you’re going to try to tell me that eating lunch has something to do with math now, aren’t you?" asked Sammy.

"Of course not, eating doesn’t have very much to do with math, but do you know what does?" he asked.

"Gee, I don’t know" Sammy snorted " Why don’t you tell me?" by this time he was starting to get quite sarcastic with Pen. He WAS undermining Sammy’s whole belief system, after all.

" Buying our breakfast, that’s what takes math. And you don’t have to be so snarky about it. I’m just trying to teach you the error of your ways." The two of them sat down to lunch in an angry silence. After a while they started to talk again and Sammy allowed Pen to explain to him all about taxes and percentages and how buying breakfast really did involve a lot of math. The truth is Sammy really was starting to understand what Pen had said about how math is everywhere and he actually found himself wanting to find out more about math in real life.

All of a sudden Sammy heard a loud beeping in his ear, he opened his eyes to realize that it was 7:00, time to get up and go to school. He also realized that his name wasn’t Sammy The Square, it really was Sam Squire, another thing he remembered was that yesterday he had had a really bad time in math class and had gotten mad at his teacher. He had and asked her why math was important, and said that he’d never need to use it in real life.

He got up, got ready for school, and as soon as he got to math class apologized to his teacher, explaining all about his dream and how she really was right, and that math actually was important after all.