Kelly and the Number That Sounded Like Another

The ferry crossing was rough that evening. Spray came over the rail, the deck tilted, and the wind snatched every second word away. Kelly called anyway, brass key swinging on its cord, voice pitched to carry.

“Legs eleven!”

“Two little ducks — twenty-two!”

“Quack quack!” from the whole deck.

“Young and keen — fifteen!”

Near the stern, a man in a yellow raincoat put a counter on fifty.

Three balls later he called out “Line!” and held his card up, and Kelly, swaying with the boat, read his numbers back against her board.

“Fifty,” he said. “You called fifty.”

“Fifteen,” said Kelly. “Young and keen, fifteen.”

“I heard fifty,” said the man. He wasn’t angry exactly, but his face had gone tight, the way people’s faces go when they feel stupid in front of strangers. “In this wind, they sound the same. And I don’t know what ‘young and keen’ means. I’ve never played this before.”

A few people near him nodded. Ama saw a grandmother quietly lift a counter off her own card.

Kelly stood very still for a moment. Then she called a pause, which Ama had never seen her do, and came down from her box.

“You’re right,” she said to the man. “That’s my fault, not yours.”

At the break, she sat on the bench beside Ama and Tam with her chin in her hands.

“I’ve been calling for three years,” she said. “I thought my calls were perfect. Everybody quacks. Everybody whistles at legs eleven. I never thought about the people who don’t quack.”

“What went wrong?” asked Tam.

Kelly counted it off on her fingers. “Two things. The first is that some numbers sound alike, especially in English. Fifteen and fifty. Thirteen and thirty. Sixteen and sixty. In a loud room or a strong wind, the -teen and the -ty blur into each other. That’s a real problem with the words, not with anybody’s ears.”

“And the nicknames should fix that,” said Ama slowly.

“They should. A good nickname is supposed to make a number impossible to mistake. But ‘young and keen’ doesn’t help if you don’t already know it means fifteen. It’s a rhyme for people who already know the rhyme.”

“What’s the second thing?”

“The second thing is that nicknames are an inside joke.” Kelly turned the brass key over. “Inside jokes are lovely when you’re inside. They’re horrible when you’re not. That man heard a rhyme he didn’t know and a number he couldn’t hear. Of course he guessed wrong.”

Tam thought about her first night on the ferry, when everyone else had seemed to know what was coming and she hadn’t. She remembered the left-out feeling very clearly.

“So what do you do?” she asked. “Stop doing nicknames?”

“No!” Kelly looked horrified. “The nicknames are the best part. People love them. They make the room feel like a room.” She took a pencil and a scrap of paper and started writing. “I change how I call them.”

She wrote three rules.

One: always say the number after the nickname, every single time. The nickname is the fun. The number is the information.

Two: for the sound-alikes, say the digits as well. One-five, fifteen. Five-oh, fifty. The digits never sound alike.

Three: no two nicknames for numbers that sound alike should sound alike either.

“Why the third?” asked Ama.

Kelly grinned. “Because I call sixteen ‘sweet sixteen’ and sixty ‘three score’. That’s fine, they sound nothing like each other. But a caller I knew used ‘clean the screen’ for sixteen and ‘keen as mustard’ for sixty. In a wind, ‘clean’ and ‘keen’ are a disaster.”

When the game began again, Kelly’s calls were a little longer and, Ama thought, a little kinder.

“Young and keen — one-five — fifteen!”

“Half a century — five-oh — fifty!”

The man in the yellow raincoat didn’t miss a number. Near the end he caught Kelly’s eye across the deck and gave her a thumbs up.

Then the ball for eight came out, and Kelly called, “Snowman — number eight!” with a glance at Tam. “Brrr!” went the back row, the same people as last time, and a few new voices joined them. Because Kelly had said number eight straight after, the new passengers knew exactly what the joke was. Within two calls, they were saying “Brrr!” too.

Tam felt something warm settle in her chest. Her snowman wasn’t only an inside joke any more. Anyone could join it.

As the ferry slid into the harbour, Kelly helped them carry the cage down the gangplank.

“The best nickname,” she said, “is one a stranger can learn the first time they hear it. Tie it to the number, make it sound different from every other one, and say the number anyway. Then nobody’s outside.”

In the call book, Ama wrote: Housie, again. Fifteen and fifty sound alike. Say the digits: one-five, five-oh. Always say the number after the nickname. A nickname should let strangers in, not keep them out.