1
MARIANNE BLUME DIDN’T KNOW a lot, but she knew she was stupid.
And so did Mr. Garcia.
“Alright, Ms. Blume,” he said, serious as ever, giving her a look like this was her one last chance.
When the class heard him call on her, most of them tuned out, scribbling on worksheets until they could actually learn something again.
“Let’s give this one a try,” he went on.
Oh no. He wasn’t really going to make her do this, was he?
That afternoon she’d tried a couple of her usual strategies to get him to leave her be: sighing here and there like she was having outside-the-classroom troubles, and scribbling in her notebook so it looked like she was taking notes.
“Who, me?” She raised her eyebrows in the doe-eyed way she’d learned meant “I know nothing.”
Kylie Chen, seated in the chair next to her, snorted.
The class giggled at her snort.
Thanks, Kylie. Maybe Mr. Garcia would move on. Too much distraction.
Marianne heard Vi Cross mutter something to herself two desks over. She glanced back just in time to see Vi roll her eyes.
Marianne could see that Vi was annoyed, and she understood she’d already frustrated Mr. Garcia, but what she couldn’t wrap her head around was how in any world, in any version of any universe, she was supposed to figure out the value of X.
“Hmm. Sorry. I don’t know this one.” She threw Mr. Garcia a big smile. The more you smiled, the more people liked you. And man, did she want Mr. Garcia to like her.
“Let’s walk through it together,” Mr. Garcia went on, offering no sunshine in return.
Why was he doing this? He knew she didn’t—and wouldn’t—know the answer.
Ms. James, Marianne’s English and history teacher, would’ve let her off the hook. So would her math teacher from last year, Ms. Corwin, who made Marianne and a few other kids spend a couple of lunches a week in her classroom completing extra worksheets. Ms. Corwin loved to chat, so they spent most of the lunch hour gabbing with her about stuff like the best mystery shows on Netflix and what they’d do if they had a million dollars. Those teachers understood Marianne. They wouldn’t put her on the spot. Even Mr. Hedley from sixth grade, a famously grumpy science teacher, would’ve joked around with Marianne instead of embarrassing her. Marianne figured out early on that Mr. Hedley was like most cranky old grandpas—a softie. After a few post-class questions about his grandkids, they became the best of friends. She still stopped by Mr. Hedley’s room to see if his ski champion grandson was getting closer to the Olympics.
“Okay, let’s work through this together…” Mr. Garcia turned to the Smart Board, which was Marianne’s cue to shut off her brain. Like she always said, mostly just to herself: If you don’t listen, you can’t not know.
Her thoughts drifted to her best friend, Skyla, and what she might be doing in her science class across the hall right then.
Mr. Garcia kept talking.
Marianne put a finger to her temple and tried to send Skyla telepathic messages: Skylaaa, my mom will only buy me all-natural deodorant and it doesn’t work. Help meee.
He went on and on.
Marianne forced herself to think about the pair of red shoes she really wanted from the thrift store downtown. She thought of how she couldn’t wait for lilac season, when the whole town smelled like a perfume shop. She thought about how weird it was that killer whales were dolphins, not whales, and how she wished she could be a killer whale right then, splashing freely in the sea instead of stuck in an uncomfortable metal chair, bent over a desk, a bright overhead light making it impossible to hide the big pimple on the side of her nose and Mr. Garcia making it impossible to hide that she hadn’t taken in a single thing from his class all year.
Mr. Garcia inched closer to the end of his lecture, and she knew he’d ask her to say something soon.
She wouldn’t let him pull her in, wouldn’t let the class see her try to translate the numbers on the board when to her it was like trying to read a foreign language that she didn’t speak.
Please move on to someone else, please move on to someone else, she prayed. Please, Almighty Whoever in the Sky, send a tornado at this very moment.
“And so that tells us what?” he asked.
Marianne stared at the numbers and letters before her, scrawled in Mr. Garcia’s chicken-scratch handwriting.
Everyone around her knew the answer. Everyone.
She peered at Kylie’s notebook. They were two fellow C-or-lower kids placed together in the front, where they “had” to pay attention. Marianne saw that even Kylie had been following along for the most part, rows of numbers dutifully copied down.
Marianne’s paper contained a shimmering masterpiece of doodled pink stars.
“Well? What’s your first thought, Ms. Blume?”
Marianne stared blankly. Her first thought? That in order to figure out the answer she’d have to go back in time and hear what he’d said, but first she’d have to go back in time to five math books ago, and five years before that, and further and further back, to a time she hadn’t felt totally, entirely lost, and start there. And if she did have a time machine, she wouldn’t waste it on learning math. She’d ride a woolly mammoth.
“Um. My first thought? It’s … Why the letter X, anyway, huh?” She whipped her lip gloss out of her pocket and spread it onto her pouted lips. “It makes me think of poison labels or whatever. When they were making up algebra, why did they pick X and not L? Like love? Or—better yet—M?”
A couple of kids snickered.
Mr. Garcia glared in the direction of the misbehavior.
She was wasting his time again. Teachers hated wasting time. She hated wasting his time, but he was giving her no choice! She couldn’t learn this stuff. She really couldn’t.
Eventually he’d have to call on someone else. No one ever paid her too much mind for too long.
“Actually, Ms. Blume, that’s an interesting point. X is conventionally used to signify the unknown, but we could use any letter, really. Let’s change it to M. So. What’s the next step to get us to the value of M?”
“Cool. ‘The unknown,’” she said, stalling. Marianne pulled a hair tie off her wrist and twisted her long tresses into an elaborate messy bun.
She wished the class would misbehave or have conversations around her, but it was quiet. People would hear whatever she said. Her insides felt like clothes tumbling in a dryer. It was like her body remembered those years before she’d figured out how to slide by. Her cheeks remembered the heat that rose in them when she answered with the opposite of the correct answer because the question itself still perplexed her. Her shoulders remembered how high they’d risen as the other fourth and fifth graders watched her flail.
But nowadays she was a pro, bubbly and unbothered. She could get out of this.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and in so many ways she was, “but I didn’t hear that last part. Can you repeat it from back when you started writing?”
Mr. Garcia said nothing, but a couple of kids groaned.
“Sorry!” she said again, as sincerely as she could, though she knew that her singsongy voice probably sounded pretty fake. “I was putting on my lip gloss, and I remembered I’d left the other one at home and I started thinking of where I put it, and you know…”
“Yup,” a girl a few seats away said, and then conversations broke out.
Class was officially disrupted.
“Ha!” Lucas Hayes called out from the back of the classroom. “Yeah, you guys know how that is!” He put on an airy, girly voice and mimicked, “Lip gloss probs!”
Copyright © 2022 by Brigit Young