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Things customers have called a serpentine belt: the fan belt, the rubber band, the squealy thing, and, once, “the snake.”

I work weekends at an auto-parts store and keep a note on my phone called What They Call It. Sixty-three entries. A CV axle is “the part that goes click-click-click when I turn into Costco.” The catalytic converter has been called the catalytic convertible four times.

When I started, I corrected people. A man asked for a fan belt for his Silverado and I said, “You mean the serpentine belt,” like it was a quiz. He said, “That’s what I said.” He left without buying anything. My manager, Dale, told me, “Nobody drove here to get graded.”

I told Dale I was just being accurate. I was, but that wasn’t the reason. Every part name I know, I picked up on my own, in my uncle’s garage and out of repair manuals, and I was proud of that. Correcting the Silverado man was a way of showing I knew the real name, and it didn’t get him his belt.

So I started using their word first. “The squealy thing, yeah, that’s usually the belt.” People stayed longer. A lot of them did the noise their car makes. My favorite is a woman who said her brakes sounded like a goose, but sad.

The list on my phone started as a joke. Then I read it back. “Click-click-click when I turn” is a better description of a bad CV axle than “CV axle” is, because a bad one clicks when you turn. The customers were describing what the part did. I was naming what it was. Their words help you figure out what’s broken. Mine help you find the box on the shelf. Two different jobs, and I’d only been doing the second one.

In March a man asked for “the brake stuff.” His brakes were squeaking. I handed him brake fluid. He came back the next Saturday holding it: “This doesn’t spray.” He’d wanted brake cleaner, a spray can for the outside of the brakes. Brake fluid goes in a tank under the hood. Luckily he read the label first. I hadn’t asked one question. I heard something vague, guessed, and was wrong in a way that could have hurt his car.

What bothered me wasn’t the mistake. It was that I already knew how to do this. At home I’m the one who reads the forms. My parents hand me a letter and ask what it wants, and I never answer with the word on the page, because the word is what they’re stuck on. I ask what they’re trying to do and work backward. I’d been doing it at our kitchen table for years and never once at work, where I was the person with the words and had stopped noticing what it’s like to be the one without them.

Now I ask three questions before I go to the shelf. Where on the car is it? What’s it doing, or not doing? What are you going to do with it? “Spray it on” and “pour it in” are different aisles. Dale says everyone does the brake-fluid thing once. He did it in 1998.

I haven’t given up on exact names. Mr. Reyes, who fixed trucks for thirty years, asks for parts by number, and those are the easiest sales of the week, because we both already know what we mean, which is what a name is for. I still correct people in my head. I’ve just stopped doing it out loud, and that’s probably not what Dale was asking for.

Last Sunday a woman asked for “the part that makes the car go.” Her car clicked once when she turned the key. We tested her battery. It was the battery. She’s entry 64, and she wasn’t wrong. It is the part that makes the car go.

E.B. · Sample Essay · 649 words

Ethan is nine, and he’s the best negotiator I know. I’m including the teachers who run our student council.

I tutor him in math on Tuesdays, four to five, at his dining table. The first week, I opened his workbook to fractions, and he asked whether we could stop at 4:45 if he got five problems right.

I said yes. It seemed fair. We had just done incentives in Econ, and here was one, about to work.

He got five right in eleven minutes, the first five on the page, which are always the easy ones. Then he closed the workbook and asked if I wanted juice.

The next week I changed the rule: five right, but I pick the problems. He agreed right away. Then he went very slowly, and asked whether 3/4 was bigger than 2/3 “in real life, or just in math.” At 4:45 he had done four, and he asked whether four hard ones counted as five easy ones.

Week three, I tried points: one for an easy problem, three for a hard one, fifteen points to stop early. He did fifteen easy problems. I had written the rule myself, and he had read it more carefully than I had.

I was annoyed, mostly at myself. On Wednesday night I designed a system with a cap on easy problems and a bonus for showing work. It had a table.

By the time I was making a table, this had stopped being tutoring. I was writing rules against a child and losing, and I minded that more than I minded whether he could do fractions. I would not have admitted that to his mother. My textbook calls what Ethan was doing responding to incentives. It has no name for what I was doing.

The thing is, I’m Ethan. I read student council motions and exam questions the same way he read my rules, looking for the hole. I’d always counted that as clever. Watching him do it to me, it didn’t look clever. It looked like someone who had decided the rule was the game and the fractions were just the price of playing. I don’t like that description. It fits me anyway.

I’d been treating fairness as something you build into the rule in advance, because rules are what I’m good at. Every rule I wrote was fair to a boy who existed only in my head and wanted to learn fractions. I never asked the real one what he wanted. When I finally did, in week five, he said his cartoon starts at five and he needs time to get ready, which meant snacks. I had spent a month building incentive schemes against snacks. The question cost nothing, and I hadn’t thought to ask it, because a question is not a rule, and I don’t trust things I can’t write down.

What bothers me is that I’m not sure he lost anything by beating me. The “real life” question, the one he asked to run out the clock, took nine minutes and a drawing of two pizzas, and by the end he’d worked out on his own that three quarters is more than two thirds. He got that one right on his test, and 17 out of 20 overall. I told his mom it was the points system, which was maybe a third true. The stalling did more than my table did, and I didn’t design the stalling.

I still don’t know what the fair rule is. Now I write the week’s rule on a sticky note before I arrive, so I can’t change it when I’m losing. Ethan reads it first thing, slowly. Last week he found a hole, and I didn’t change the rule, and we stopped at 4:31. The sticky note is the only rule of mine he hasn’t argued with, probably because for once it’s a rule about me, not him.

D.K. · Sample Essay · 650 words