Word of the marching animal crackers spread through the Friendship School, and the children began to invent and circulate new accounts of similar miracles to heighten the lore of Norah Quinn. There were whispers that whenever she visited the library and passed the aquarium kept there, the little fishes would school and swim as one, following her movements from glass corner to glass corner. Another story asserted that she could divide a single peanut butter and jelly sandwich into enough portions to feed the entire student body. Rumors escalated: that she could walk upon the surface of the snow without leaving footprints, that in certain aspects of light a halo could be spied, that she bore on her back stubs of wings at the shoulder blades, that she had been seen flying over her rooftop in the moonlight, that you could put your hand right through her like a ghost, that she was no angel but a devil in disguise.
Gossip reached the teachers’ lounge after a few days, and her fellow faculty members mercilessly teased Mrs. Patterson about her student angel and the miracle of the completed homework. She had been watching closely since the Valentine's incident, and in class, at least, the girl was circumspect and attentive, a model student. Bonhomie guided Mrs. Patterson's initial reactions and she laughed with her colleagues, but as the talk persisted, she felt compelled to defend her newest pupil, for the teachers’ innuendo quickly became unseemly. Over bad coffee and stale doughnuts, arguments ensued, and she nearly came to harsh words with Miss Becker, and one morning she stubbed out a cigarette in Mr. Rocco's cherry Danish. In confidence she consulted with the principal in the dank and cluttered recesses of his office.
“You've heard the stories by now, Mr. Taylor. I'm afraid of it getting out of hand.”
He pulled tighter the knot of his tie. “These tall tales usually peter out on their own accord if we do nothing. Let us leave sleeping dogs lay. If it gets any worse, I'll have a talk, but for now, the best thing we can say is to be quiet.”
Shaking her head at his mangling of the language, Mrs. Patterson walked back to Room 9 more exasperated than when she had departed. The truth was that Norah did not belong in her class. The child smartly covered her tracks, but no amount of chicanery could hide the fact that she was too bright for her third-grade cohort. Mistakes were too obvious, of the kind that children usually do not make on tests and homework. On every assignment, she proffered exactly one wrong answer. An otherwise perfect math equation would be off by a single digit. A tightly constructed paragraph would be marred by misspellings of “nowledge” or “sosighity” Norah deliberately stumbled over pronunciations each time she read aloud—“inoxious” for “innocuous”—words that in other contexts Mrs. Patterson had heard her say quite precisely. The teacher had seen her kind a few times over the course of her career, the socially correcting child who, in an effort to appear normal and be accepted by the peer group, presented herself as less intelligent. But the girl could not fool her. She deserved to be skipped ahead, out of her class.