Her friends skipped off. Melanie picked up her hoop and started for the open garage.

“Mom says it’s time to set the table,” her brother announced. He was feeding his pet hamster, who didn’t have a great life. Their mother wouldn’t allow a rodent in the house, so Skippy (named for his food dish, which was the overturned lid of a large peanut butter jar) seldom interacted with any mammals and tended to languish in his cage above the bike gear. In fact, Skippy would die of the ambient heat in another month, when Brad and everyone else in the family forgot about him in the hot garage.

“Okay. But guess what?” Brad looked up at her question and cocked his face to one side. “What?”

“I did the Hula Hoop a million times.”

“Liar.”

“No really. Didn’t you see me out there? I’ve been hooping all afternoon.”

“Not a million times!”

“Uh huh. What do you know? You can hardly even count.” Brad looked a little defeated. Melanie proceeded inside. She set the flatware down for each family member. She knew the knife and spoon went on the right side, and the right side was the hand she used for the Pledge at school. She would have put the big plates on the table too, but her mother was following her father’s advice and heating them in the oven. Melanie set small salad plates down on each foam-backed placemat.

A few minutes later the family took their seats. Her mom dished out the salad and her dad ground pepper onto his. Melanie picked out the cucumbers first because they were her favorites. Brad loved cukes too, but he saved his for last.

“How was your day?” Her dad always asked that, and he always asked Melanie first, because she was the oldest.

“Okay,” she said around cucumber. Then she remembered and swallowed her food before continuing. “Guess what? Today I did the Hula Hoop a million times.”

“Melanie…”

“No really, Dad! I did it!”

“Sweetheart. We need to talk.” Her father set his fork down so the tines were on the edge of his plate, aimed at peppered lettuce. “How long does it take you to count to one hundred?”

“Um… about a minute?”

“I doubt that. But let’s say you can. And let’s even say you can spin the Hula Hoop as fast as you can count. So one hundred spins a minute, huh?”

“Yeah…”

“Well there are ten thousand hundreds in a million.” He paused to scoop the rest of his salad into his mouth. “So at that super fast spinning speed it would take you ten thousand minutes to count to a million.”

Melanie’s mother got up to serve the main course. Melanie stacked the salad plates and brought them to the sink.

Her father continued. “Sixty times twenty-four,” he said half to himself. “Honey, there are less than fifteen hundred minutes in a whole day. It would take you about a week to count to a million.”

Melanie was good with arithmetic. They were doing the multiplication tables at school and they were then up to nines. She couldn’t run the calculation in her head but she comprehended what her father was telling her. She could grasp impossibility. She pondered.

That’s when her mom brought the heated plates to the table. She was wearing two oven mitts and she set one dish on the middle of each mat. In the quiet they all heard the slight sizzle.

“Ye gods,” exclaimed her father. “Do you realize what you did?” He started to lift his plate, reconsidered, pulled his napkin out of his lap to act as insolation, and raised the porcelain disk. It had burned a perfect circle into the coral colored plastic surface of the placemat.

Then her dad and Brad and even Melanie laughed. Her mom looked annoyed. Kitchen accidents were common in their household, and always caused by her mom’s impulsive energy.

The placemat incident put an end to the Hula Hoop conversation. Melanie alone kept considering the subject. She went to bed that night boggled that her friends and brother had stopped arguing with her, had acted like they gave up and made her think she’d gotten them to believe her, when that obviously was not the truth.