The math class was incredibly basic. Ada had had a suspicion it would be, but it was so simple that it was actually interesting to watch, at least at first: Sister Margaret was spending time on the multiplication of fractions, teaching the class in a slow, methodical way, drawing Xs from top to bottom and bottom to top. Ada knew to do this, intuitively, but it had never been mapped out for her in that way, mechanically. Everything she knew of math was somehow more fluid, more instinctual, than the diagrams that Sister Margaret was putting on the board. It felt like someone telling her how to speak, or by what method to put together an intelligible sentence. It felt like someone telling her how to access a memory. How to breathe.
And yet, all around her, students were completing exercises given to them by Sister Margaret, using the same cross-hatching technique she was demonstrating at the front of the room. She wrote a list of equations on the board and then roamed the room silently as students put their heads down to work at the task. Ada put her briefcase atop her desk and carefully turned the dials into place and sprang the latches with a louder pop than she’d recalled. Several students around her turned to look, and it was then that she noticed the backpacks that were tucked neatly into baskets beneath each student’s seat: red and green and blue canvas bags with straps, the sort David called satchels. Instantly, her face colored, and she lifted and lowered the lid of her briefcase as quickly as she could, retrieving from it the pad of Steiner Laboratory stationery and the pen her father had tucked into place that morning. Then she pushed the briefcase under her desk.
She began to work. After a moment she felt a presence over her right shoulder, a shadow on the desk.
“In this class we use pencils,” said Sister Margaret, more loudly than Ada thought necessary. “And graphing paper.”
Ada looked up at her. She hovered there disapprovingly, her small mouth turned downward, her hands folded before her. How was I supposed to know this? Ada wanted to ask her. It was a question that had occurred to Ada perhaps ten times that day already. How was I supposed to know any of this? She felt anger toward her father and Liston in equal measure. Surely, Ada thought, they could have prepared her better than this.
A sharp bell signaled the end of the period, and Ada took out her paper schedule to see what was next. English, then history, then physical education, then lunch, then home economics, then something called general science. She wondered what it might be—what they might plan on teaching her in a science course with no specialization.
When she looked up again, she realized that every other student, including her ambassador, had left, and new students were coming into the classroom. She scurried out into the hallway and caught a glimpse, at the end of it, of Melanie McCarthy’s bright blond hair, her bright white knee socks as they disappeared around a corner. She ran to catch up, to follow the class to its next destination.
“No running!” came the reprimand from an unknown voice behind her, and she broke her gait, but felt a sort of panic rising inside her. She did not know where A-Hall was. Furthermore, she felt certain that she would cry if she had to ask anyone for help. She thought of her father, how easily he approached strangers, how little hesitation he had when it came to asking for what he needed. She wondered, for the first time, what he had been like in school. She had never once thought to ask him about it—perhaps because she had no experiences of her own to compare his to—but now she wished she had. Instinctively, she knew that it would be a mistake to talk to anyone.
She tucked her briefcase under her right arm and held it tightly there; it felt less conspicuous that way than it did while swinging in her hand. At last she reached the end of the hallway, and turned right. Thirty feet ahead, the rest of her class marched or skipped or slung arms familiarly about each other in a way that made her understand that they had moved through their entire education as one unit: that they knew each other’s parents, that they had gone to each other’s houses for sleepovers. That they played sports together, in and out of school. That they knew each other’s embarrassments and victories, and that they had come to terms with all of them, had settled comfortably into groups and clusters and strata that it would take Ada years and years to accurately map.
She was the last to arrive in her next class, and in all of her classes for the rest of the day. She gained a new textbook in every class, was instructed by every teacher to cover it in brown paper before the next day. They were bulky, these textbooks; she could fit only one in her briefcase. The rest she carried in the crook of one arm, wishing fruitlessly for the use of her other one.
At lunchtime she walked into the cafeteria and froze: it was then that she realized the extent of the stratification of the Lower School, the broad and awkward age range, from five-year-old kindergarteners to thirteen-year-old eighth-graders, some of whom looked as if they might as well be teachers. And within those ages, the boys and girls divided themselves; and within the two genders, they all seemed somehow divided by levels of attractiveness or confidence. She hovered for a moment and then plunged forward, as if into cold water. Briefly, wildly, she scanned the room and saw the angelic head of Melanie McCarthy, wondered if she should approach her, as the only other student she had formally met. But Melanie was surrounded by other girls sitting shoulder-to-shoulder on both long benches, as close and tight as matchsticks in a box.
Ada found the only empty table she could find, knowing somehow that it was not hers to take, that it belonged to a group that would very likely claim it in a moment. But she had no other options. She sat at the very end of it and took from her briefcase the paper bag that David had handed her that morning, its contents now squashed. After a few moments, the other half of the long table began to fill with boys who looked her age or slightly younger. None of them had been in her morning classes. Seventh-graders, maybe.
“Nice briefcase,” one of them said, with so much force that she imagined everyone in the cafeteria had heard. Ada glanced over quickly but could not determine which boy it had been. The little group bent forward and backward, felled by their own laughter. She was holding her sandwich halfway to her mouth, and she stiffened there, uncertain how to proceed. She felt endlessly observed. She lowered the sandwich and followed it with her eyes. She had never been so directly targeted before—once or twice she’d been shouted at by another child on a walk to or from the store, or while going someplace else in the neighborhood—but on those occasions there was always the possibility of disappearance, of walking quickly in the opposite direction, pretending she hadn’t heard. Here she was a stationary target, a sitting duck. She froze, still as a deer, keeping her eyes down, waiting for the tide of humiliation to wash over her and recede.
“Nice briefcase!” the boy shouted once more, having successfully elicited a laugh from his friends the first time, and Ada saw then that it was a ruddy, freckled boy, quite small for his age. He looked back at her. “Yeah, you!” he said. “I said I like your briefcase. Aren’t you gonna say thanks?”