As Gwynneth stared into her bowl of wheat checks, she thought how beautiful a sight it was—tiny little concentric squares that formed a netting of wheat, trapping sugared milk in just the right way. A mathematically perfect balance of cereal and milk.
The bowl was the contrast: round, with a deep blue rim and a floral pattern on the side. But the blue, against the golden brown of the cereal—that was beauty.
She felt a tap on the head and looked up to see her mother’s disappointed face.
“I told you to get your clothes on before breakfast,” Mom said. “And here you are, sitting and watching your cereal get soggy, and it’s about five minutes until the bus comes.”
“I’ll walk by myself right now,” Gwynneth said as usual.
“No, you won’t.”
“I promise I won’t stop.”
“You aren’t capable of not stopping, Gwyn. Put your cereal in the sink and get your clothes on, please.”
Gwynneth took her bowl to the sink and emptied it, feeling a stab of mourning at the site of so much beauty gone down the drain. She walked up the stairs (one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten-eleven-twelve) and down the hall (one, two, three doors) and into her room.
There they were, neatly laid out at the foot of her bed.
She slid her legs into the stretchy flowered leggings, put the jean skirt with the heart pockets on, slid on the light-blue T-shirt and the white hooded sweater over it. She walked past the mirror, keeping her gaze trained away from it, and got her shoes.
One loop, two loops, cross over, knot.
One loop, two loops, cross over, knot.
She walked back down the stairs (tweleve-eleven-ten-nine-eight-seven-six-five-four-three-two-one) and met her mother at the door.
“You don’t have to walk me,” Gwynneth said again, flicking a glance at her mother.
Her mother didn’t answer, just followed her down the sidewalk to the sign.
“All right,” Mother sighed finally, as the bus drove up. “Come right home, Gwyn. I don’t have time to pick you up this afternoon. Please don’t miss your bus.”
“OK,” Gwynn replied.
On the bus, trees flashed by. Fenceposts streamed by, too fast to count. She watched the fenceline buck and tumble along, rising and falling with the hills that ran along the road.
It was a long ride, to Skaggsvile Junior High. And there were plenty of thoughts to have; plenty of things to think about. One of the things Gwynneth thought about was the fact that she’d left her red Music binder on her bed. She felt her heart race, then slow. Oh well. There wasn’t much she could do about it, now.
Cows. Black and white. How many spots?
Sheep. White, with black legs.
Posters, posters, posters. Deanna Skaggs for city commissioner. Emily Helman for school superintendant. Marshal Lindstrom for sheriff… great blue and red letters on blinding white squares. So bright they almost seemed to wiggle in Gwynneth’s vision.
The bus slowed. Gwynn sat up in her seat and craned her neck, trying to see out of the bus’s broad windshield.
She could see there were people—people, with more of those blinding signs. They were marching across the road, in one big pack, like a herd of loose cows.
“What’s going on? Why’d we stop? What are all those people doing?” The kids started throwing out questions to the bus driver, who looked just as puzzled as anybody. She pulled the pump handle to open the door. There was a hiss of air as the door folded in, and the bus driver jumped to the ground.
The children watched as she talked to a few of the people, who each shook their heads. Then the driver shrugged and began walking toward the bus, pulling a cell phone out of her pocket.
“What’s going on?” A curly-haired boy behind Gwynneth demanded.
“I don’t know,” Gwynneth turned to reply.
The curly-haired boy stared at her. “I wasn’t asking you,” he said finally.
The doors hissed and folded open again, and the bus driver came tromping up the steps.
“We can’t go for a while,” she said. “I’ll call the school and let them know.”
“What is it?” The curly haired boy cupped his hands around his mouth so that he would be heard over the roar of chatter.
“Some kind of protest,” the bus driver said, then sat heavily in the seat.
“Political protest,” Gwynneth said quietly to herself.
She knew what those were. They talked about them a lot on the news lately. She liked the news—most of the kids her age liked cartoons. But the news was so much more quiet and calm. And planned. In a cartoon, any old thing could happen; crazy things that should never happen.
No, give Gwynneth the news any day over cartoons.
Gwynneth stood (even though it was against the rules), and poked her head and upper body out the window, leaning away from the bus so she could get a better look at some of the signs. On one of them she could make out the president’s name, but that was about it. She slid back into her seat.
“See anything?”
Gwynneth saw the curly-haired boy peering over the top of the seat. She shrugged.
“Hey, what’s your name?” He asked.
“Gwynneth.”
“You’re in special education, right?”
“I’m in the gifted program.”
Curly haired boy chuckled. “Right.”
Gwynneth frowned and turned back around in her seat.
“How long is this going to take?” Somebody whined from the back.
The bus driver turned around. “Don’t know,” she said. “Siddown.”
“Can we get out?”
“Nope.”
Gwynneth glanced at her digital watch. It had been twenty three minutes almost exactly since the bus had stopped.
“What time is it?” Curly haired boy asked, coming around the seat and sitting in the space next to her.
“Seven fifty-six.”
“You could’ve just said eight.”
“It’s not eight.”
“You’re weird.”
“Good for you, for figuring that out. You must be brilliant.” Gwynneth snapped.
Curly haired boy straightened up in the seat and grinned. “My mom thinks so.”
“Everyone’s
mom thinks they’re smart.”
Curly haired boy pursed his lips for a moment. “Whatever,” he said, finally.
There was a sudden rise in the volume of the voices outside. Gwynneth realized that the protesters were approaching the bus.
“What are they saying?” Someone in front of Gwynneth asked.
“No Bussing,” Gwynneth answered.
A pigtailed head appeared above the line of seats. “They don’t like busses?”
“No, it’s about how they change the school boundaries so that kids from all different places can go to school together. You know how we went to a new school this year, and drive a lot farther?”
“Yeah,” curly haired boy groaned.
“Well, I’m the last stop, and I go a lot farther than you,” Gwynneth said. “And because of the bussing thing I can go to the gifted. I’d have to go to Blueridge Elementary with Mrs. Eldridge and her counting cubes.”
The loudness of the protesters, as they streamed out on either side of the bus, suddenly made talking impossible. Gwynneth stood again and stuck her head out the window. This time, she looked down on several people, who stared up at her in surprise and stopped chanting for a moment.
“Hi,” Gwynneth said.
“Hello,” a lady wearing a red straw visor responded.
“When are you going to be done?”
The lady looked taken aback. “Well...” she stammered.
“We’re missing math.”
“I’m sorry about that.” The lady paused. “Maybe just think of it as a little holiday, you know? You’re missing school. I bet that doesn’t upset you all too much.”
“You’re wrong,” Gwynneth said, and pulled her head back into the window. She sat, slumped in her seat for a moment, glancing at her watch and feeling the anxiety rise. The chant resumed, and didn’t get any quieter—nobody was moving away.
It seemed that this bus was going to be the target of the protest.
Gwynneth looked at the giant mirror that hung over the bus-driver’s head. All around her, kids were throwing pieces of paper at each other, chattering, digging through their lunch sacks. The bus driver was balancing a paper-back book on the steering wheel, looking up occasionally to gripe about keeping the bus clean.
Gwynneth began to boil.
She stood up on the seat again, and stuck her head out the window. “All of you should just GO HOME!” She yelled.
“Hey!” The bus driver set her book down. “Siddown!”
Several people stopped, and stared up at her, open-mouthed.
“What is your problem, anyway?” Gwynneth continued. “Why do you care where our bus goes? Is it such a bad thing to have to watch a yellow bus drive by every day?"
“Siddown!” The bus driver repeated.
“You don’t understand, little girl,” said a man wearing a red, white and blue shirt with a picture of some guy's face on it. “It’s about the government telling us what to do. Don’t you hate it when people give you rules?”
“NO,” said Gwynneth. “And if you hate rules so much, how come you’re not marching around the school?”
“Beg your pardon?”
“Well, the government pays for the school. They give money and it’s a rule that every kid has to go to school. They do tests to make sure the rules are followed about what we learn. How come you’re here walking around our bus instead of walking around the school?”
The people who had stopped under Gwynneth’s window looked at her like she was crazy, which Gwynneth was used to. The bus driver was staring at her, too. But at least she had stopped yelling.
“Can you please just let us get going again so I don’t miss primary analogies?” Gwynneth pleaded. “And… write letters, or something?” She pulled her head inside the bus and shut her window. She pulled out her blue math binder and stared at it. She felt deflated. Like the whole world was collapsing in on her. No Math today.
There was no chance now, because everybody at school was putting away their math binders right now, and starting Primary Analogies. And then it would be music, which Gywnneth had accidentally left at home. Math was over.
Gwynneth’s fingers trembled as she clutched the straps of her backpack.
Maybe she could just look at the lesson. Maybe the numbers on the page would make things just a little bit better.
She pulled out her math workbook and turned to today’s lesson, which was about dividing fractions. She looked at the problems for a long time, thinking how they might be done. The textbook was at school, and of course, her teacher, too. She was surprised at the taste of salt—was she crying? How strange. How embarrassing.
“You flip them,” Curly Haired boy’s voice shattered Gwynneth’s thoughts.
She hastily wiped her cheek and glared at him.
“I did this math last year. I can show you.” He slid back into the space next to her and reached for her book.
She whipped it away from him. “You’re not my teacher.”
“So? If I know how to do it, and you don’t, and you want to know… why shouldn’t I show you how?”
“Why do you want to show me how? I bet you don’t even like math.”
“I’m kind of bored.”
“You’ll teach me wrong.”
Curly haired boy shook his head. “It’s the same, Gwynneth. You have to do the same thing to get the right answer… math doesn’t,” he shrugged. “It’s not like writing an essay or something where you can put any answer you want. There’s only one answer and there’s a best way of getting the answer, too. And I know it.”
Gwynneth stared at him, astonished. He knows, she thought. He knows about Math. One answer. Just one, for each problem, making the world such a safe place, where at least in one thing, nothing that shouldn't happen ever did.
“We’re not in class,” she ventured.
“Classrooms are just seats and desks and a big thing in front to write on. You’ve got a seat, and your binder can be like your desk, it’s hard enough to write on. And I don’t need a big thing to write on, I”ll just write on your page and I can erase it if you want me to.”
Gwynneth edged the workbook in his direction.
“Now who’s the genius?” He said, grinning at her.
“Just show me how to do it.” Gwynneth said. “Thanks,” she added quietly.
She watched him as he read through the directions, silently forming the words with his lips, an intense look of concentration on his face.
Outside the chant continued, but it slowly faded into the background for Gwynneth, as she began to focus on the beautiful symmetry of division and fractions. When she set her pencil to the paper she sighed, feeling the safeness of it all fill her, make her warm to her fingertips. It was beautiful.
Numbers were the same whether they were on the bus or in class, whether your teacher or a curly-haired boy taught them to you. The windows on the bus seemed, to Gwynneth, to expand until the whole world had opened up for her, letting her in, surrounding her vinyl bus-seat.
Kind of like God, Gwynneth thought, Math really is everywhere.
