Mathemagics Mathemagics
Chapter
I was just shoving a cart around the
supermarket, trying to figure out where the new manager had hidden the star anise and
Szechwan peppercorns, when he reared up in front of me: a big blond hulk with thews to die
for, piercing blue eyes, gleaming chest and shoulders bared to the blast of the Frozen
Foods section.
“Vordo!”
I dropped the package of Bagel Bites
I’d been considering as an after school snack for Salla. My right hand went to my
hip, automatically. But there wasn’t anything there except my blue jeans. Wallet in
front pocket, Swiss Army knife in hip pocket. Even granted that the last time I’d
seen him he had been running the other way, I wasn’t about to go up against Vordo
with nothing but a pocketknife.
Except, of course, it wasn’t Vordo.
In the flesh, that is. It was only a life-sized cardboard picture of him, propped up in
front of the magazine stand at the end of the isle. He was brandishing a short sword in
one hand and holding up a girl with more hair than clothes in the other hand--I mean, that
was the pictured pose.
And I felt like a damned fool. If I’d
been armed, I might have been startled into attacking a picture. As it was, I’d
already acted silly enough to get more attention than I wanted.
“Riva, what’s the matter with
you? You’ve gone absolutely white--well, as white as you can get,” tittered Vera
Boatright. I knew her slightly from school; her daughter Becky played with Salla whenever
she could get sprung from the family regime of homework, housework and Bible study.
“She’s found her ideal
man,” suggested someone else whom I vaguely remembered seeing at PTA meetings; a
perfect Junior League size four with one of those hundred- dollar sculpted haircuts, a
“jogging” suit that probably cost more than my monthly grocery bill, and bright
maroon lips pursed into an expression of permanent discontent. The pouting look was what
jogged my memory. She had to be that little pill Orrin’s mom. Louise, that was her
name.
“I know him,” I blurted out.
“What’s he doing here?”
Vera tittered. “He’s not here,
silly, that’s only a picture.”
“Of course you know him,” Louise
said, “he’s on half the covers in the romance section.”
“He’s the hottest male model for
romance covers since Fabio,” Vera put in. “Just having him on the cover doubles
the sales of a book, they say.”
“You must have seen his face every
time you walked past the paperback books,” Louise added.
“I never look at the romance
novels,” I said.
“Oh--well--neither do I, of
course,” Vera said immediately. Her face turned pink. “My husband--I mean, our
church doesn’t approve of all that filth.” She leaned towards me and whispered
confidentially, “You wouldn’t believe the sort of dirty stuff they print in
those books. Why, in the very first pages of Love’s Tender Promise--”
“I mean,” I interrupted Vera
without waiting to hear about the erotic promises of Love’s Tender Promise,
“I know him. From . . . a long time ago.” Two years. And that wasn’t nearly
long enough. What was Vordo doing on this planet?
“Oh, suure,” Louise drawled,
“and I suppose you used to date Vordo.”
“That’s his name.” I
nodded. “Vordo. Though if I were him, I’d have changed it, after the way he
behaved.”
Louise sighed and rolled her eyes upwards.
“Give me a break, Riva. Of course you know his name, I just told you. That
doesn’t prove anything. You’ve never seen him except on book covers, just like
the rest of us. You’ve got to learn to distinguish fantasy from reality.”
“It’s not as easy as you might
think,” I muttered as she wheeled her cart away. I put the Bagel Bites back.
September in Austin was too hot to risk putting frozen foods in the trunk of the car when
I had another stop to make on the way home. It shouldn’t take long to straighten out
this mistake at Salla’s school, but even ten minutes would be enough to turn the
Bagel Bites into Melted Cheese Slurps.
I had a bad feeling about this meeting at
the school as soon as the principal’s secretary requested me not to go to
Salla’s home room. “We prefer to conduct confidential meetings in here,”
she said, showing me into a cubicle slightly bigger than one of Duke Zolkir’s prison
cells.
“There’s nothing delicate about
it,” I said, waving the letter I’d received yesterday at her. “Somebody
made a mistake, that’s all, and I’m here to help you straighten it out. Probably
a computer error,” I added, remembering the magic words Dennis used whenever he
called the bank.
“Ms. Stankewitz will be with you
shortly,” the secretary said. “We’ve found that the services of a
professionally trained counselor are invaluable at stressful times like this.”
She closed the door before I could tell
her that the only stressful thing about this interview was having to wait in this little
box of a room while my groceries cooked by solar heat in the car trunk. It was a flimsy
door, too; in my home reality of Dazau I’d simply have put my foot through it, then
stood on the woman’s throat until she fixed what was probably her mistake in the
first place. But Dennis really liked me to conform to his people’s behavior
standards, and after the third time he’d had to bail me out I’d promised to act
like a Paper-Pusher woman unless Salla or he were in actual physical danger.
Getting a stupid letter from the
superintendent of schools and having to wait around to straighten it out probably
didn’t qualify.
With a sigh I smoothed the creases out of
the letter and read it again. I’d thought I was making progress in reading English,
but I couldn’t make any sense at all out of this-- probably because it had been
supposed to go to somebody else, somebody whose kid was in trouble.
“Dear Parent:
“This school district is required to
inform parents if their child has been determined to meet one or more criteria for being
at risk of dropping out of school. Some of these criteria are: failing the TAAS, not being
able to speak English fluently, emotional or psychological problems, engaging in
delinquent and/or rebellious behavior, and lack of family support.”
None of that applied to Salla. I’d
have been told if she’d flunked the TAAS; her English was better than mine, or at
least more fluent--I still tend to slip into ki-Dazau to enhance the limited range of
expressions available in English. As for family support, well! Here I’d been
commuting back and forth between my job on Dazau and a rent house on the Planet of the
Piss-Pot Paper-Pushers just so Salla could go to a good school in a good neighborhood. It
was only during the last couple of years, thanks to Dennis’s inspired negotiating
after Baron Rodograunnizo tried to have me offed by wizardly tricks, that I’d been
able to afford to stay here and study math while Salla went to school. And the money
he’d got from Rodograunnizo was running out. . . .
I yanked my mind away from my personal
problems and went back to reading and rereading the letter. The second paragraph was as
bad as the first.
“All Austin administrators and
teachers are dedicated to providing the support your child may need to stay in school and
be successful. Transfer to the Alternative Learning Center, in-school tutorial or
counseling sessions, or placement in an EBD classroom may be required. You are encouraged
to call the school counselor to learn what is available to help your child and what you
can do to help.
Sincerely,
[illegible scrawl]
Superintendent of Schools”
The door opened; a short, dark-haired
woman in a blue suit waddled in. “Ms. Konneva? I’m Erica Stankewitz. I’m so
glad you could find the time to visit us today.”
“I can only see one of you,” I
pointed out. “Are your colleagues invisible?” It was the sort of dirty trick
Vordo would have pulled, getting a wizard to disguise his buddies under a cloak of
invisibility so that he could claim to’ve beaten up an entire troop of brigands
singlehanded. But I didn’t think the Paper-Pushers knew how to do that. Besides, as
Dennis had explained and explained, they didn’t use physical force in most of their
combats.
A pity, that. I could have taken this
woman with both hands tied behind my back. I thought about that while she smiled and
explained that she was speaking for the School when she said “us.” “We
haven’t seen much of you here, Ms. Konneva,” she said. “You didn’t
come to the Back-to-School Parents’ Party, did you? Or drive on any of the field
trips this year?”
“I study during school hours,” I
told her.
“Oh,” she said. “How nice
for you. Still, most really concerned parents make some effort to appear for important
school functions.”
The field trip to the Nature Center. The
field trip to the antique shops of New Braunfels. The field trip to watch the Dallas
Cowboys practice . . . It was only the end of September, and already Salla’s class
had been on six field trips. I contemplated suggesting a minor change in school policy;
how about we switched roles, so they taught my kid Earth history and literature, and I
took her to the zoo? Wasn’t that the way it was supposed to work?
But it wasn’t what I was there about.
“Look,” I said, “we can
discuss the proper role of parents in the schools some other time, okay? What I really
came about was this.”
Ms. Stankewitz nodded and jotted something
down on her note pad as I handed the letter over. At last, I thought, we can get this
cleared up.
“It’s the standard form letter
sent to all parents of at-risk students, Ms. Konneva,” she said after a brief glance.
“I’m very glad that you’ve finally found some time to think about
Sally’s problems. Now, if you’ll just sign these simple forms, we can get
started on applying the test instruments.”
Applying the test instruments? Sounded
like something Duke Zolkir’s chief interrogator would have said while his flunkies
were greasing the test instruments and heating them up.
And the “simple” forms were a
stack at least three inches thick.
“She doesn’t have any problems
in school,” I said. “This letter was sent by mistake. You’ve got her mixed
up with some other kid. She’s in your Gifted and Talented program, for Nauzu’s
sake!”
“A placement error,” said the
pasty-faced Stankewitz, “which can be rectified as soon as you sign--”
“It. Is. Not. An. Error,” I
said. “This is the error.” I jabbed my thumb at the letter on top of her stack
of forms. “There is absolutely no reason why Salla should be considered at risk of
dropping out. Now just check your files and find out who should have received this letter,
and we’ll be done here.”
“Oh, she meets plenty of the district
criteria,” Ms. Stankewitz said, flipping through a manila folder full of papers.
“We’re talking about Sally Konneva, right? Sixth grade? Margaret Fishbeck’s
class?”
“That’s another thing I meant to
bring up, as long as I’m here,” I said. “What on earth is Ms. Fishbeck
doing in charge of the G& T class? We were told Cathy Harper would be teaching the
sixth grade G& T class this year.” Cathy was a friend of Dennis’s, as close
as this world got to a wizard-scholar. She’d written a dissertation on Central Texas
folklore and European mythology that was published as a popular book and earned, she said,
far more than she’d ever made teaching. Salla had been looking forward all summer to
taking Cathy’s special unit on myths and legends in world literature. She complained
that Ms. Fishbeck had watered the material down and narrowed the focus and--well, I
didn’t understand everything she said, not being any expert on this world’s
mythology, but Salla had not been happy.
“Here we are!” said Erica
Stankewitz triumphantly, delving into the depths of her manila folder and coming up with a
single typed sheet. “Sally qualifies for the Alternative Education Program under
District Codes GT–103A, SD–22, F–1, and F–33b. It’s really very
fortunate that we caught her problems in time, Ms. Konneva.”
“Would you mind telling me,” I
said as sweetly as I could, “exactly what those codes stand for?”
Erica Stankewitz looked down at her paper.
“GT–103A stands for Gifted and Talented, type 103, category A.”
“So you admit she’s a smart
kid.”
“Yes, indeed. That’s one of the
problems that alerted us,” she said earnestly. “A child who is so far ahead of
her class often becomes bored with school. She can be a disruptive influence in the
classroom; in fact, that problem has already been reported. SD–22: Rebellious
attitude toward authority figures.”
“You’re going to flunk her for
being smart and having the wrong attitudes?”
“We don’t ‘flunk’
children in this school, Ms. Konneva. We do feel it desirabe to adjust Sally’s
attitude.”
I was feeling a powerful urge to adjust
Ms. Stankewitz’s attitude. Kneeling in front of me while I prepared to behead her
would have been a good attitude. True, I’d left my sword at home, but I was prepared
to make some modifications to my usual procedure.
“According to Ms. Fishbeck, Sally has
been marking up her homework assignments with red ink--‘correcting’ her
teacher’s grammar and spelling.”
I couldn’t quite see the problem in
this. “So, were there mistakes in Ms. Fishbeck’s writing or not? And if there
were, isn’t she glad to have a student alert enough to catch them?”
“Moving on to the remaining at-risk
codes,” Erica Stankewitz said briskly, “F–1 is the code for a dysfunctional
family situation.”
“I’m functioning just fine,
thank you,” I assured her.
She raised her eyebrows. “According
to Sally’s file, you are unmarried, Ms. Konneva?”
“So?”
“And you were never married to
Sally’s father?”
“I should think not,” I said.
“Bad enough I let that sleazeball--well, never mind.”
Erica Stankewitz sighed. “And he does
not provide child support or communicate with his daughter in any way?”
“Just let him try!”
“You seem to be missing the
point.” She ticked off what she considered the relevant points on pudgy white
fingers. “Single-parent household, history of early promiscuity, no father
figure.”
She had a few of those facts wrong, but I
didn’t see any point in correcting her; it probably wouldn’t help Salla’s
situation to point out that in fact I was sharing a house with the eighth-grade math
teacher at this very school, and that Dennis was as much of a parent to Salla as I was.
“And,” said Erica Stankewitz,
swooping on her last point with a gleam of triumph in her beady little eyes, “parent
herself a dropout--there’s no record here that you finished high school or even
middle school, Ms. Konneva.”
They didn’t have high school where I
came from. But that probably wasn’t relevant either. I decided to go for the big
picture.
“This,” I said as clearly as I
could, “is a load of crap, Ms. Stankewitz. How dare you presume to judge my daughter
on the basis of what you think you know about our home life and what an incompetent
teacher says about her? Doesn’t her academic record have any place at all in this
discussion?”
“F–41A,” Stankewitz said,
jotting the code down on Salla’s file, “parents not educationally supportive of
their child’s teacher or administrators.”
“You’re dyvopto right I’m
not supportive,” I snarled.
“On the basis of Sally’s
emotional disturbance alone,” Stankewitz said, “I can recommend right now that
she be referred to an EBD class.”
Those initials had been used in the
letter. “Translation, please?”
“Emotionally and Behaviorally
Disturbed.”
“She is not emotionally
disturbed.”
“Just look at this picture!”
Erica Stankewitz flipped the folder open and shoved it towards me. “When Ms. Fishbeck
asked all the children to draw a picture of their home as the first six-weeks report on
the mythology unit, this is what your daughter came up with!”
I vaguely remembered Salla grousing, that
weekend, about how she wanted to write papers and do research, not play with crayons like
a little kid. Now, that seemed weird to me--as if school wasn’t enough trouble
without complaining when once in a while it was easy. Once I learned enough mathemagics to
apprentice to a wizard on Dazau, there was no way I was going to open another math book,
much less work problems or write papers.
Salla had chosen one of her favorite
places to illustrate--the Fall of Nauzu’s Blood, in the mountains of Zemauri near my
home village. She’d captured the splashing of the red- tinged water and the rounded
smiles of the great slow-boulders so well that I felt a prickle of nostalgia as I looked
at it. She’d even drawn in a cluster of chattering, three-legged krelyk winding
around the trees that overhung the waterfall.
“It looks fine to me,” I said.
“Okay, the colors are a little off and the perspective could have been better, but
what can you expect of a sixth-grader?”
“Colors!” Ms. Stankewitz
snorted. “Perspective! I’m talking about the subject matter, Ms. Konneva. That
place looks like nothing on Earth. A river of blood hurtling over a cliff, three-legged
snakes, rocks with faces? Your child is in serious trouble, and it’s about time you
admitted the fact!” Her pen jabbed at the paper before her with short, angry downward
strokes. “Code EB–4,” she announced. “Emotionally disturbed as a
result of dysfunctional home situation!”
A bell clanged in the wall over my head.
“That’s all,” Erica Stankewitz announced, standing up and collecting her
papers.
“Oh, no, it isn’t,” I said.
“We haven’t settled anything. I’m not satisfied that you understand Salla
at all.”
A smirk distorted Erica Stankewitz’s
pasty face. “On the contrary, Ms. Konneva. I’m afraid it’s you who
don’t understand. We don’t need your consent in a serious case like this, you
know. If you’d spent more time at the school earlier, volunteering like the other
mothers, perhaps your daughter wouldn’t be predelinquent now. Wild assertions to the
contrary won’t help your case.”
“In fact,” I said, “you
don’t consider yourself answerable to the parents at all, do you? You people will do
whatever you dyvopto please to my child and I’m not supposed to have anything to say
about it?”
“We consider ourselves advocates for
the child’s best interests. This file will convince anyone that Sally should be
referred for mandatory counseling, antidelinquent programming and an EBD classroom.”
“Fine,” I said, taking it from
her, “I’ll take it home and read it and see if it convinces me.”
“Wait a minute!”
Stankewitz’s voice rose to a pained squeak. “You can’t have that--it’s
school property!” She made an ineffectual grab for the folder. Somehow her nose
accidentally came into contact with my elbow.
“Abd the codtedts are
codfidedtial!” she squeaked while fishing out a handkerchief to stop the blood.
“I promise not to send it to the
local newspaper,” I said. Stankewitz edged around the desk and tried to block the
door. This was a mistake. I accidentally stepped on her fat little black foot and she
tripped and fell into the desk. I left her squealing about assault and battery and theft
of school property and went to see about my groceries, which were pretty thoroughly cooked
by this time.