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---

 

James is still grumbling at me as we pull into Brighton’s student parking lot. The bulk of his bitching is out of his system though. For the last half mile, he’s been having an angry conversation all by himself.

“Don’t know why we put up with his shit,” he says.

“Cuz he’s got a car,” alter ego James replies.

“We don’t know anyone else with a car?” James v1.0 asks in a desperate whisper.

Back and forth he goes. Greta laughs, which snaps James out of his psychotic rambling. He flushes and runs a hand across the stubble on his cheek. “What? You know it’s a valid question.”

“True,” she says, her eyebrows pulling down low as she studies me.

“I said I was sorry,” I say, pulling into the first open spot in the lot.

Greta laughs again, but it doesn’t sound so nice anymore, like she’s laughing to cover her urge to punch me in the face. “No, you didn’t,” she says.

“He reckons he doesn’t need to,” James says. “God of numbers shouldn’t have to apologize to anyone.” He does a little mock bow with his head.

The god of numbers wouldn’t have crashed in the first place because the god of numbers wouldn’t have been trying to block out visions of a certain long-legged girl’s hips and how the skin there might feel under his fingertips. I scrub at my burning eyes, wiping away my exhaustion.

Screw James and his whiny bullshit. It was an accident. No one intends to drive over a foul-mouthed octogenarian’s prize-winning rose garden. No one wants to spend time sweating his balls off under the glaring eye of a demented grandmother, no matter what those Hallmark Channel movies say. Frustrated, I snarl, “Shut up, James. You think you’re Mr. Perfect? You can’t even piss off an English teacher.”

“My stuff is working.” James leans forward between the seats. “You couldn’t do any better.”

“Can too.”

“Can not.”

“Can—”

The car shakes with the force of the door slamming. “I’m the god of numbers, and I demand an apology!” Red hair dull against the morning light, Greta storms through the parking lot saluting us with both middle fingers.

James swears under his breath, grabbing his bag and following.

“James,” I call out after him, but he doesn’t turn around.

 


2.1

 

“Mr. Hanson?” The sound is muffled, like I’m swimming. “Mr. Hanson, can you rank these acids from strongest to weakest?”

I blink and shake my head vigorously to wake myself. “Uh, twelve?”

“Mr. Hanson, what class do you think you’re in?”

I squint at the teacher. “Um…yours?” The class chuckles, and I smile at them like I know what they’re laughing about.

“I’ll see you for lunch detention, young man,” the teacher says.

“But, sir,” I give my head another shake to clear it, “uh, Mr. Browning, I already have lunch detention for Mrs. Keele.”

“Hanson, what is wrong with you today?”

Sleep deprivation brought on by the hypnotic dancing of the English teacher’s sister. I shrug instead of answering.

“Tomorrow. Lunch. Here.” He points at my desk before moving back to his.

Two lunch detentions? Who the hell am I today? This is all Charlotte’s fault. My brain is fried, and I blame the girl who’s taken up residence there. Serotonin is such a pain in the ass. Maybe if I help James, Ms. Finch will quit and move herself and her sister far, far away. But as soon as I have that thought, my traitorous brain riots.

I’m exhausted.

Before lunch, Greta catches up to me in the hall on my way to Mrs. Keele’s.

“Hey, derelict.”

“Huh?” I look at her, rubbing my eyes to clear them, balancing my Styrofoam lunch tray in one hand.

“Heard you got detention.”

I nod. “Look, Gret. About this morning, I didn’t sleep well last night and—”

“Wait,” Greta says, reaching in her pocket for her phone. “I want to record this.”

“What?”

“Well, aren’t you about to apologize? They’re such a rare species, your apologies. I’d like to have it on record.”

My ears instantly burn and my jaw locks. I’ve got no way to unlock it and let the words come out.

Greta notices. “Maybe next time,” she says, putting her phone away.

“I have apologized for stuff before. Remember the squid?” In freshman biology, I accidentally pierced the ink sack of the squid we were dissecting and sprayed Greta in the face. I’m trying not to laugh at the memory. “I said I was sorry then, didn’t I?”

Greta raises a brow.

“Didn’t I?” I thought I had. At least, I thought I had after I’d laughed my ass off. Greta’s lips are pressed into a firm line. “Look, I’m just not usually wrong about things,” I say with a grin, hoping she’ll smile back.

With a huff, she rolls her eyes and finally allows for a small smile. “Anyway,” she drawls, “I know it was an accident, and I felt a little bad about being kind of bitchy, so I brought you something.” She reaches into her Mary Poppins bag and pulls out two cans of Mountain Dew. “These are to show you that I’m sorry for overreacting,” she says, carefully depositing them on the tray in my hands.

Mountain Dew: defibrillator in a can. “Thanks, Gret.”

She nods. “See, how easy that was?”

I look blankly at her.

“I apologized and yet the universe didn’t implode.”

“Right. Sorry.”

She pretends to catch her balance. “Whoa, did you feel that? No? Me neither,” she says, looking unimpressed. “Now, you’d better get going. You don’t want to be ‘tardy.’” She makes her usual air quotes around James’s favorite word.

On my way to detention, I pound back both sodas and feel revived…and twitchy. I make it through advanced physics with Greta and molecular biology, but by the time I get to English class, I’m feeling a Dew crash of epic proportions.

I’m nauseated and sweaty, can’t stop bouncing my knee, and Greta has smacked me twice now to stop my fingers from drumming the table.

As soon as Ms. Finch walks in, everything goes into hyper-drive. It’s like I’m seeing into the future. Given a decade, this is what Charlotte may look like.

My brain starts screaming at itself to shut up. I don’t care what Charlotte will look like in ten years. I don’t care what Charlotte looks like now. Charlotte’s appearance will not get me into MIT. Her full lips will not get me a spot as one of Dr. Bell’s research interns. Her long, lean legs will not win me a Nobel Prize.

A wave of nausea crashes over me. I lean forward and put my head on the cool desktop. Closing my eyes, I let the waves roll over me, waves the color of Charlotte’s eyes.

“You okay, Chuck?” Greta whispers.

“Is there something wrong with Mr. Hanson?” Ms. Finch asks from the front of the room.

I sit up. “No. I’m fine,” I manage to say, but the room is spinning, which doubles the vomit-y feeling. I make fists and worm my knuckles into the muscles of my thighs, hoping to distract myself.

“In that case, shut your traps—”

Oh, how I wish I could. Just then, I feel the horrible burning sensation of Mountain Dew going the wrong way in my esophagus. There’s not much I can do. It’s coming up. It knows it, and I know it.

I spring from my seat and sprint up the aisle with one hand clamped over my mouth. Please don’t let me barf in front of everyone. I’m almost to the hallway. Jenna, sitting in the front row, pales as she watches me. Something about the terror in her eyes, like a mirror of my own, distracts me, and I trip over her bag in the aisle. Flailing through the air, I take my hands away from my mouth to brace for a fall, and all hell breaks loose. Mountain Dew and cafeteria corn dog go flying in every direction as I tumble to the ground.

The class erupts into a chorus of disgust. I roll myself up and notice I’ve landed right next to a pair of black pointy-toed heels. Well, they were black. My eyes run up the long legs attached and stop at Ms. Finch’s face, contorted with revulsion.

“Well,” she says, “that’s one way to get out of a pop quiz.” She bends over and offers me a hand. My braced arm slips in some puke and I crumple at her feet.

“Mr. Thomas. Please come help Mr. Hanson to the bathroom.” Ms. Finch steps away from me as James tries to figure out the best way to help me up without getting covered in nastiness.

“We’re finally doing this,” James whispers as he drags me out the door, “together.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” I say, but my voice is too loud in my head, so I shut up.

“There’s no recovering from that. It’ll take the custodian the rest of class to clean up your mess. Everyone is all shaken up. And Ms. Finch is covered in your gastrointestinal fluids. I knew you’d come through for me.” James finishes with a fist pump. The motion shakes me. I feel my stomach twist again and for a second, consider letting loose right on James. The thought exhausts me, though. I hang my head and allow myself to be led away.

 


2.2

 

That afternoon, Dimwit takes one look at me and swears, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Charles. How are you supposed to work if you can’t even stand up straight?”

I shrug, regaining my balance by clinging to the porch railing.

“Go the hell home.”

So I do.

I climb into bed fully clothed. Everything about me feels thick like wool. I want to slip away and sleep, but the strange sense that I’m not alone is holding me back.

I prop myself up on one elbow, blinking in the dim light, and see someone silhouetted in the doorway. It’s Charlotte.

“What are you doing here?”

“Congratulating you,” Charlotte says, maneuvering around piles of clothes, papers, and miscellaneous crap. She moves a stack of science journals and pulls my desk chair closer.

“Oh.” I’m confused by her presence, the smell of her skin, and whatever it is she just said. “For what?”

She laughs, and I relax into the sound of it. “You annihilated my sister.” She shows me a text with a picture of Ms. Finch’s boots. “Those were her favorite shoes. Can you make yourself puke on command, or did you just decide to take advantage of a great situation?”

“I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“But it did happen.” Charlotte digs the toe of her shoe into the carpet between us.

“Is there a universe in which anything you say makes sense?” I ask, rubbing the back of my hand across my mouth to get rid of any drool.

“She knew what she was getting into when she took the job. Everyone warned her, said Brighton kids are a pain in the ass. Said y’all wouldn’t listen to her.” Charlotte is leaning forward on her knees, a gleeful look in her eyes. “I had the best summer in, like, six years because she was so intent on creating lesson plans that would intrigue you guys and make her some freaking local hero. The English teacher that tamed the dorks or something.”

My head feels like it’s being stretched between opposing forces, and I’m struggling to pull it back into shape. “Why does she care?” I lie back on my bed and cover my face with my pillow.

“She likes being the best. At her last school there was weeping in the streets when she left.”

I lift the pillow so I can see her. “Weeping?”

Charlotte fakes big sniffles, grabbing my pillow and pretending to use the corner of it as a tissue. Her charcoal pencil-stained fingers leave tiny fingerprints.

“Why’d she leave then?”

She tosses my pillow back to me. “Small town. Better opportunities here, ones she feels we can’t pass up.”

I try to ignore the inviting smell of Charlotte’s perfume all over my pillow. “Like?”

“Well,” Charlotte draws the word out. “Better pay, cultural diversity, proximity to the university,” she declares in a voice that sounds like a recording of Ms. Finch.

“That where you want to go?”

Charlotte wrinkles her nose. “No, I’ll be taking a year off from school when I graduate.”

True sign of a geek: my heart just stuttered at the idea of taking time away from school. My face must have blanched as well because Charlotte chuckles.

“You going to be sick again?”

I shake my head. Charlotte sits back in the chair, propping her feet up on the side of my bed. “Haven’t you ever just wanted to take time off from your life? There’s so much clutter. I’d like time to live my way—with no interruptions. ”

“What would you do?”

Charlotte shrugs. “See stuff. There’s plenty I haven’t seen yet, like the Grand Canyon.”

“The Grand Canyon isn’t going anywhere.”

“No,” Charlotte says, her voice dark like the shadows in the corners of my room. “It isn’t.”

So this is what it means to be possibly useful. “You want us to drive your sister nuts so that she quits her job at Brighton and you can go see a giant hole in the ground?”

She shakes her head and bites on the bottom corner of her lip. “No, not so she quits, but some stuff has come up, and Jo’s turning more and more of her attention back to me. I want all her attention on you.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Charlotte arches a brow. “Personal stuff. Trust me, a distraction would be good.”

She’s a mystery to me. Why would I trust her? “Distractions are bad, Charlotte.”

She sits forward. “Depends on your perspective. The more she’s focused on you geniuses, the less she worries about me. It’d be a kindness to give her a break from me. I mean, she’s my sister, not my mother.”

I didn’t think it was possible, but I’m more confused than ever. This girl’s universe operates under an entirely different set of rules. I have so many questions for her, and end up surprising myself by asking, “Why didn’t you tell her that you know me?”

“You’re the only person I’ve met so far that goes to Brighton and has access to her. Plus, I’ve got a certain kind of feeling about you.”

“Nausea?”

Charlotte laughs. The sound relaxes my busy mind. “What?” she asks.

“I’ve been told that before. You know, by girls.”

“When? In the third grade, back when boys had cooties? I think you may want to take a look at yourself sometime, Longshanks. A girl would be lucky to go out with a smart guy like you.” She stands behind the chair, her long fingers tracing the frayed stitching. When she looks up at me again, the iron mask is back in place. “Get some sleep, Charlie,” she says, business-like. “And thanks.”

Charlotte fades to shadow as the dim light from the hallway engulfs her.

Thanks? Thanks for ruining her sister’s favorite pair of boots? And did Charlotte just hint that I was hot? Well, maybe not hot. But she did say I don’t have cooties. And I have long shanks. Whatever that means.

I can’t take on too much. Asking Charlotte out would open up a whole new world of worries—worries that would distract me from my work, and not in a good way. I can’t risk another breakdown this close to the finish line. When I close my eyes and imagine it, I can almost feel my MIT acceptance letter in my hands. My hands are replaced though by a second pair with charcoal-smudged fingers that press against my chest as I pull Charlotte closer to me.

I need to get it together.

 


2.3

 

Ms. Finch is already in the classroom when I arrive the next day. I fuss with the strap on my bag to avoid looking at her as I walk down the aisle to my desk. Next to my seat sits one of the jumbo cafeteria trashcans, the kind on wheels. I drop my bag at my feet, my ears instantly flushing. Greta and James are looking like they may explode with laughter.

I punch James’s shoulder. “Idiot,” I say under my breath.

James doubles over snickering. “Man, it wasn’t me.”

“Don’t even go there,” Greta says when I look at her.

Ms. Finch, standing with one hand on the trashcan, says, “I can only afford so many pairs of boots on my teacher’s salary.” I peek at her feet to see if she’s wearing slippers or something because how the heck did she sneak up on me? She nudges the can in-between us, its wheels squeaking.

Striding back up the aisle, she tells us to shut our traps and begins the day’s reading. Seated, I can’t see over the giant trashcan.

When she’s finished reading, Ms. Finch grabs a marker and writes on the white board behind her.

Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.

 

“Anyone know who said this?” she asks, capping the pen and tapping it on her right palm. No one has an answer. “Really? After all I’ve heard about the intellectual superiority of Brighton students, I thought someone would be able to answer.”

I’m sure she’s looking right at me.

“I’m guessing, then, most of you are unaware of the ways in which mathematics and literature intersect.”

More silence.

“Here’s your first big assignment from me,” Ms. Finch says amidst the sound of shuffling papers. I lean sideways and see the class passing back packets of papers. Waiting for them to reach me feels like standing rooted to one place while a tsunami approaches.

“This quarter, you’ll work in groups and research one mathematical or scientific idea represented in literature.”

I glance around and almost laugh at the expressions on the faces around me. Shock, horror, and physical pain are predominant.

“For example, you could look into the ways in which the meter of some poetry can be found in Pascal’s Triangle, or similarities between mathematical and literary paradoxes, or even the ways in which Lewis Carroll wove algebraic formulas into his greatest works. Oh! And, did you know one of the inventors of computer programming was the daughter of a famous poet?”

Ms. Finch’s smile is so big it crinkles her eyes at the corners. She thinks we’re going to be excited about this. Obviously, she isn’t as smart as she thinks. Or, we aren’t. I’m not sure which, but I know what I’m going to choose to believe.

“Why even Einstein,” she says, pointing to the quote on the board, “had an appreciation for literature.”

Einstein has forsaken us.

Ms. Finch ignores the hushed disbelief building around her and draws two intersecting circles on the board, labeling one “Math/Science” and the other “Literature.” With the rest of the class time, we’re expected to fill in the Venn diagram. It becomes plain when the literature side stays blank that we’ve got a lot to learn. Judging by the satisfied look on Ms. Finch’s face, she’s ticking this off as a victory for her, proving we need her more than she needs us.

---

 

When I arrive at Dimwit’s house, she’s rocking on her porch while a tall glass of iced tea perspires on the table beside her, and staring out at the garbage heap of her garden. The garden used to be a kidney-shaped island of color in the midst of her immaculately trimmed lawn. The rose bushes varied from miniature versions to tall, climbing vines, and everything in-between. Now the tall vines hang limply from a smashed trellis and the miniature red rose bushes look like roadkill.

I stop at the bottom step and shift my weight from foot to foot. Sweat runs down my spine, pooling at my waistband. I clear my throat.

“I know you’re there. I see you.”

“Oh. Well…what should I do?”

Mrs. Dunwitty fixes me with what can only be described as an evil-ass stare. “Fix the mess you’ve made.” She takes a swig of tea, making the ice cubes clink against the glass.

When she stands, her rocker smacks into the siding of the house. Not proud of this, but the sound makes me jump. “It’s too damn hot out here for me,” she says, holding her cool tea glass up to her cheek. She’s stood too fast and steadies herself by holding onto the doorframe. Once she’s regained her composure, she steps inside and slams her pink door in my face.

I wait for more detailed instructions, but the door stays shut. How the hell am I supposed to fix this mess? I scan the yard and notice tools upright in a garbage bin next to the garage door.

Heaving a big sigh, I grab a shovel and start pulling out the broken stalks of roses to stuff into the garbage, trying—and failing—to avoid the thorns. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Dimwit didn’t leave gardening gloves for me.

As the sun is setting, Mrs. Dunwitty comes outside to inspect my work. “Tell me, son,” she says, plucking a damaged rose from the garbage, rubbing one of the petals with her desert dry fingers. “How did this happen?”

My hands are blistered and the skin on my forearms looks like I got into a brawl with Greta’s cat. I’m in no mood to explain the suckdom of my life to the ornery old bag. “Well, see, the car was moving at a velocity of—”

“You think you’re some kind of smarty britches.”

“No,” I sigh, wiping my dirt-stained hands on my T-shirt. “It’s Greta’s fault.”

“She was driving?”

“No, but—”

“Then how do you figure it’s her fault?” Mrs. Dunwitty looks at me like I’m a garden pest.

I shrug. It wasn’t Greta’s fault. It was Charlotte’s—Charlotte and those stupid sexy hips of hers.

“Know what you need to do?”

I shake my head.

“Man up.” Dunwitty slaps me on the back like my little league coach after he told me to stop crying and hit the stupid ball. I only had to play one season before my parents decided “socialization” was not the answer. For the record, I wasn’t crying.

“Same time tomorrow,” Mrs. Dunwitty calls as she walks back to her porch, the remains of a fat orange rose in her withered fingers. “Oh, and take that broken angel away. I can’t stand to see her all busted like that.”

I heft the small angel into the trunk of my car and slam the lid.

 


2.4

 

The footsteps bounding down the stairs can only belong to Charlotte. Becca does not bound. Becca drifts.

I run my fingers through my fine hair, still wet from my shower, willing it to look all casual messy-like. There was a bed-headed guy in one of the movies Becca and Charlotte watched over the weekend, and Charlotte kept saying she’d love to run her fingers through his mane. I’m not sure I can achieve his look, though, since my hair feels more like yellow duckling feathers.

Giving up, I grab my pencil and hunch over my notebook. I’d probably pass out and split my skull on the hardwood floor if her fingers were tangled in my hair anyway. I hate Hollywood.

“There you are,” Charlotte says, leaping from the bottom step into the kitchen.

“Me?”

Charlotte’s smile is teasing, and even though I know I’m alone in the kitchen, I glance over my shoulder to be sure she wasn’t talking to someone else.

“Yes, you.” She comes closer and plops down in the chair beside me. “Becca says you have a compass.”

I narrow my eyes at her.

“You know. The stabby-end thing I can make perfect circles with. It’s called a compass, right?”

I nod, eyes still narrow.

Charlotte squints back at me, her face a mirrored mockery of mine. “Don’t look so skeptical. I need to borrow it.”

“For math?”

She wrinkles her nose and her bow-shaped lips pucker with the movement. “Not for math. Obviously, I’m planning on murdering someone with it.” I snort, and the sound seems to delight Charlotte, even though my ears are now volcanic. She chuckles and smacks at my shoulder. “I’m drawing something and my circles are seriously shitty.”

I erase a stray mark on the page, trying to keep my mind on the numbers before me, not the image that just flashed through my mind of me running my fingers through Charlotte’s wild curls and pulling those bow lips toward mine, teasing them open with my tongue.

Holy crap. Numbers.

Numbers = good. Hard-on in front of Charlotte = bad.

Charlotte leans closer, her shoulder pressing against mine, her perfume of sweet vanilla making the math in front of me blur. “What’re you working on so intently that you’re just going to ignore me?” My breathing has gone shallow and I may pass out when she breathes the word, “Dude,” along my neck. “What the hell is this?”

“Calculus.”

“Nuh-uh. I’ve seen calculus. I’m in calculus. This is—I don’t know what this is.”

“Really advanced calculus.”

Charlotte studies the formula I’m working with. I allow my eyes to flick toward her face for just a fraction of a second, taking in the way her brow pinches together making brackets along her forehead.

“It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?” she asks.

“Yes.”

She smiles at me, a sunrise.

“You understand it?”

“Hell no.” She does the nose wrinkle thing again and I have to turn back to the page in front of me. “But I don’t have to get it to get it. You know?”

I shift away from her, running a sweaty palm down the thigh of my pants. “No.”

Charlotte holds one finger up, a gesture for me to wait, before she scurries up the stairs. I copy a new problem into my notebook. I could work solely on the computer, but I like the way the paper feels under my palm as I work through the numbers, finding the solutions I need. I’m a quarter of the way through when she reappears, clutching her sketchpad.

She opens it and holds it out for me. “Do you understand this?”

The page is covered with oranges, reds, greens, and yellows. It’s like smudges of each color, bleeding together in a multitude of shapes. It doesn’t look like anything at all.

“What’s to understand?”

Charlotte doesn’t respond. She simply holds the picture steady for me to study. The more I look at it, the more I can see, though. Suddenly, it isn’t just colors, but fall leaves in the mountains.

“Is it leaves?”

One of her brows lifts and she tilts the page to examine it. “Perhaps.”

But when she shows it to me again, it’s no longer leaves, but fish in a pond, like the Koi in the lobby of that hotel I stayed in once. When I blink, I see Mrs. Dunwitty’s rose garden at its peak.

And suddenly, I get it.

It’s a million problems all in one, and every way I work it I get a new solution. It’s beautiful.

“May I?” I ask, reaching for the sketchpad.

She captures the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth as she considers. After handing it to me, she sits and begins fidgeting, her fingers tapping softly against the underside of the table as I turn through the pages. Without thinking, I grab her restless fingers, tangling them with mine like the colors in her sketch. Her hands relax, but her whole body goes rigid beside me.

“Sorry,” I say letting go of her hand, ignoring the stuttering of my pulse. What was I doing? I’ve spoken to this girl a handful of times and here I am trying to hold her damn hand in my kitchen.

Now that I’ve let go, she starts to wriggle again.

“Am I making you nervous?” I meant looking at her sketchbook, but the way she blinks like I’ve snapped at her makes me wonder what she thinks I could have meant.

Charlotte takes a deep breath that hitches as it travels up her spine like it’s catching on snags along the way. “I’m not used to sharing. It’s always been easiest to keep things close.”

I want to know what things she’s keeping so close. I want her to unpack them from inside herself, perhaps making room for…what? For me? This is ludicrous. I should hand her back her sketches and walk away.

I push my own notebook toward her instead. “It’s only fair.”

She chuckles and glances down at the open page. “What’s this?” Her voice is soft beside me. She’s pointing at the problem I was working on moments ago. In it, I’ve had to use the symbol for infinity, but I drew her tattoo instead. I didn’t even realize I’d done it.

“Trying to figure me out, Mr. Hanson? Think you’ll get extra credit?”

“I—” I’ve got nothing to say. I stare at the symbol I’ve drawn with the word hope bound up in its endlessness. There are many ideas in mathematics that we know are true, even if we’ll never be able to solve them. Too many. They’re the paradoxes that make math so beautiful.

Charlotte feels like that. Like a problem I’ll never really figure out, but that I know is just right for me.

She leans her shoulder into mine. “You and me, Charlie, we’re on the same team—both artists. We just work with different mediums.”

Now it’s my fingers that can’t be still. Charlotte eyes them as I drag one hand up and down the metal spiral binding of her sketchbook and simultaneously tap a rhythm against my thigh with the other hand. She reaches for the one tapping between us, clasping it lightly in her own. Without another word, she begins flipping through my notebook, her eyes skimming the formulas. I wonder what kinds of things she’s seeing in them.

I wonder what she sees in me.

 


2.5

 

Ms. Finch is on time the next day. She leans against the blackboard and waits for the tardy bell, flinching when it finally pierces our ears.

“Shut your traps and listen up.” She sets down her coffee, opens up the book, and reads. When she’s finished, she turns on the projector and today’s notes appear on the screen behind her.

Paradox is…

 

She’s about to launch into her lecture when a hand juts into the air near the front of the class. Jenna Barker has a question.

Ms. Finch nods at her, and Jenna’s reedy voice whispers, “Should we be taking notes while you’re reading?”




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