When I woke everyone was up and moving around. Carla stood at the foot of her bed. Her hair wasn’t silvery in the daytime, but plain light brown. She was pulling a sweatshirt over her head, pushing her feet into sneakers and her hands into gloves. Other girls were grabbing running shoes and hats and scarves and gloves too, so I dug my sneakers out of my bag and put them on. I had gloves but no hat. I put my wool coat on.
A bell sounded and everyone hurried to line up at the other end of the long room. I stood behind Carla in line and said, I have to go to the bathroom.
There’s no time to go now, she said.
Everyone was moving out the far door and onto a snowy path between two hangars. A woman’s voice from the front said, Let’s go! Three laps! The group started running all at once and the thumping crunch of fifty girls’ feet filled the air. I was jostled and then shoved; I stumbled and ducked out of the way and was immediately left behind. Everyone headed for a track that circled the dormitory. I hurried in that direction, my hands held out in front of me as my feet slipped on the snowy ground. I tried to catch up but the mass of legs and feet and ponytails was already far away. Only a couple of kids straggled behind, one whose ankle was wrapped in a stretchy bandage and another large dark-haired girl with a red face.
A teacher with a puffy blue coat was waving to us from the side of the track—Let’s go, let’s go!—and I tried to propel my body forward. Ahead of me the horizon bumped and jerked. Beyond a narrow stretch of snowy field was another track, this one fully cleared of snow, with lanes marked in chalk. I slowed to watch a group of men and women in blue uniforms run past—like Simon they had the insignia of the NSP Explorer program on their sleeves. They were fast; I could barely make out their faces. In only a moment they were around the bend and gone, and I forced my legs to start moving again.
My breath came out in big clouds; my thick jacket rubbed against my neck and my underarms. My body turned from too cold to too hot. I took off my gloves and unbuttoned my coat. A sharp pain pressed at the underside of my rib cage, more insistent with each icy inhale. I still had to pee and the pressure in my bladder grew. I managed to pass the girl with the dark hair and red cheeks; the one with the ankle wrap was still ahead of me. Then I felt a trickle of wet down my leg. I stopped and stood perfectly still. I turned around—the teacher was waving at me. Go on! I backtracked slowly to where she stood.
I have to go to the bathroom, I said.
She frowned. All right.
I hurried to the toilets in the dormitory, and when I got back outside everyone was lining up again and moving into another building.
I found Carla in the middle of the line. It still hurt to breathe, and my stomach felt empty and raw. When’s breakfast? I asked her.
After math.
I’m starving.
You won’t be when you see the food.
Inside, girls split off in different directions and Carla pulled me along with her into a classroom that smelled like dust and dry-erase markers.
I was relieved to sit down at an empty desk, its surface cold under my hot hands. A teacher faced the board and wrote a math problem on a large whiteboard at the front of the room. She had a smooth brown ponytail and the kind of blue uniform Simon and the runners outside wore. She wrote fast with big loping numbers. Even still, girls started calling out before she was finished. None of them raised their hands—they just yelled things. A girl with red hair got up and started scribbling on the board below the equation.
The teacher faced the class—it was my uncle’s former student Theresa. I hadn’t seen her in at least a year and she was taller, her eyebrows sharper.
Another girl wearing a sports jersey got up from her desk: No, not like that. And she took the marker away from the girl at the board, erased what the first girl wrote, and started again.
I tried to follow what they wrote. I had thought all math was easy, but this was beyond anything I’d encountered at school. I tried to focus on each voice; they were talking over one another, and some of the words they used I didn’t understand. A girl with yellow tights jumped up to the board a lot. What she wrote almost always got erased, but she didn’t seem to care. The writing on the board grew. Carla drew a shape with numbers at each of its points and Theresa nodded, and it didn’t get erased. The next girl worked from what Carla wrote.
Soon a quarter of the board was filled with numbers and symbols. I was able to extrapolate, to some degree, from the math I already knew. I concentrated hard and began to understand Carla’s diagram. I even tried to call out an answer, but other girls shouted over me. My answer had been the right one, or one of the right ones, and it was exciting.
The board was nearly half full. The short equation had turned into a tumbling mass of branching lines, the numbers and symbols and diagrams reaching fast like limbs. The girls’ voices rushed and stretched too. They pushed against and alongside one another, asserting, correcting, expanding, rephrasing.
I followed the lines of thought for several more minutes. Then my mind snagged on something that had been posed early on but abandoned. I wondered if there was a quicker way—
Theresa took the marker back. She gestured to the board and said, with her slight accent, What do you have to add?
She was asking me.
All the heads turned, and the room went quiet.
I—
My face turned hot. I’m not sure.
She said, A wrong answer’s better than no answer at all. She waited, her eyebrows raised, expectant. Nothing?
All but one corner of the board was filled with numbers and diagrams. I could have said something ten minutes ago, even five minutes ago, but now they were past me. My throat tightened. Carla avoided my gaze. Finally she shook her head slightly as if to say, Do not cry.
Girls started calling out answers again, and the writing on the board blurred. I blinked; I looked straight ahead. In another minute the equation was complete. Everyone returned to her seat. Theresa wrote three problems on another board and gave the class directions to complete them on paper.
She approached my desk, put a blank piece of paper and a pencil in front of me. She said, not unkindly, Start at the beginning.
I touched my chest. I’m June, I said.
I know who you are. She tapped Carla on the shoulder and said, Check her work, and Carla shrugged. Okay. Then she walked to the board full of writing and erased everything below the first line.
I picked up the pencil, cold and smooth against my fingers. I wrote the equation at the top of the paper. Around the room everyone had her head down and was focused on her work. I put my head down too. I remembered a lot of what was on the board and started to write from memory. Then I stopped. There was more than one way to solve the problem. I’d solve it faster than the class had and would show Carla and Theresa, and they would be impressed.
I drew a diagram. Then I wrote the equation a different way. The next part came out of what I wrote, easily, and soon I had several lines of computations. But then I stopped. The way I was doing it would take too long and I erased it all. The bell sounded. The girls brought their papers to the front of the room and made a pile on Theresa’s desk. I stayed in my seat. Carla was supposed to check my work and my face burned because my page was blank. But she was talking to another girl, and she walked by me without saying a word.