Eileen Gunn - Stable Strategies and Others

“Barbara! Earth to Barbara!” said Mr. Collins in a commanding voice.

“Um. Yes, Mr. Collins?” Oops. Keep the brick wall up. Maybe this guy was a TP.

“You gotta stay tuned in, Barbara! Entertain us!” He thought for a moment. “Here’s something easy! Separate the leaders from the sheep! Yes or No! Give me an answer: Do the inner electrons of an atom participate in chemical bonding?”

Barbara felt the class waiting for her to respond to the teacher’s challenge. Minerva probed her mind just a little, just a poke to get her attention. Carl glared. Barbara knew she could side with the new teacher or side with the class. She looked Mr. Collins right in the eye and said, “They get a little horny now and then, but that’s about it.”

Mr. Collins called on the new kid, T’Shawn, who answered, “No.”

“Lucky guess, Juan,” said Carl in a singsong voice.

That’s not his name, thought Barbara. I should call him by his real name. Fuck it, she thought, I might as well call myself Barbie and give up. Why fight it? If it sticks, it sticks. That was leadership ability. Good thing everybody didn’t have it.

Anyway, it wasn’t a guess, everyone knew the answer. Maybe that’s what Mr. C meant about separating the leaders from the sheep. She was curious about Juan, but every time she let down the brick wall to glance his way, she saw a fuzzy cloud form around his head, then start to disintegrate. If she continued to look, she would see something she didn’t want to know.

“Who wants to tell us about today’s reading assignment? Barbara?” He’d already picked up on the fact that she was interested in chemistry. This was not going to do her rep any good.

“I have no idea, Mr. Collins, but Minerva could probably tell you.”

Mr. Collins looked at Minerva. “Maureen?” he said.

Minerva recited in a bored voice. “Valence electrons are those electrons farthest from the nucleus, which are responsible for chemical bonding within the atom. I could go on, but I don’t really give a fuck.”

The rest of the class snickered. Mr. Collins looked confused. Barbara felt a little sorry for him, but then she thought of Mrs. R, dead and everything, and hardened her heart to this grotesque nerd. He didn’t even know most of the class could read his mind.

Juan — T’Shawn — spoke out of turn, but politely. “Mr. C, is this your first day of substitute teaching?”

“Nevermind,” Mr. Collins answered, smiling broadly. His cheeks puffed up and took on a ruddy tone. His beard somehow looked softer and whiter.

“Hey, it’s Santa,” said Carl. “Santa C.” The suckups snickered again.

Mr. C opened his mouth to speak, then seemed to change his mind. He shook his head and a wave of laughter shook its way up from his gut and burst out of him like the explosion in the sink. “Ho, ho, ho!” boomed Mr. C. “Ho! Ho! Ho!” Mr. C was starting to look scary rather than jolly, though he kept on laughing. Even the telepaths seemed a bit subdued. His beard looked scruffy now, and Barbara noticed that his ears were kind of pointy. Had they been that way before?

“What’s so funny?” she asked. Her voice quavered a little. It had been doing that a lot lately.

Mr. C’s laughter trailed off; he coughed a little and seemed more like a teacher than he had all morning. “Some of us need to get a handle on the real drama of chemistry,” he said. “It’s life and death stuff, guys. You’ve got to take it more seriously. Quiz tomorrow. I strongly recommend that you study sections twelve-nine through twelve-twelve: ‘Predicting Redox Reactions.’”

The bell rang, signaling second lunch. Second lunch was noisier than first lunch, and chances of getting physically damaged were somewhat higher than they were in the halls between classes, though certainly not as great as at the bus stop after school. Barbara usually brought a sandwich and ate it on the bench in front of the secretarial station, the safest place on campus.

“Macaroni and cheese, or beans and rice with a choice of condiments,” said Minerva, wrinkling her nose. “That’s all that’s left. They’re laughing at us right now in the cafeteria.” She eyed Barbara’s backpack. “Wish I could see into the future. I would have known to bring my lunch.”

Carl rushed to hold the door, watching to make sure no one told Mr. C that the telepaths would know the answers to any test. They’d probe Mr. C’s brain like fruit-salad jello, pulling out plump little facts and formulas. The telepaths would, anyway. Barbara and Juan and a few of the others would have to study. She tried to predict her grade, but she just couldn’t see it. If he graded on a curve, Barbara knew she’d be in trouble.

“Ace it,” whispered Minerva, reading her thoughts. “Look ahead and predict what I’m gonna write on my paper. I bet I’ll get an A.”

Barbara nodded. “Yeah, you will, but I can’t see the test. I can’t control when I premote.” That’s why the government wouldn’t give her a scholarship: no military applications, they said. You couldn’t count on it, but it thrust itself on you at the worst times.

“So why don’t you just copy off my test when I do it? Sit close, and I’ll let you see it. It’s retro, but it works.”

Barbie sighed. She hated having to explain this. “I can’t cheat,” she said. “I can see the consequences, or something.”

“Well, nevermind then,” said Minerva, with a toss of her shiny bald head. She stomped away to join Carl and the other telepaths. They walked down the hallway in a group, heading toward the cafeteria.

Barbie walked slowly down the hall in the other direction, toward her locker.

Here’s a formula for creating a teenager: take a negative charge, constrain it in time and space, add a catalyst, and get away. Get away, Barbara thought, and she started running down the empty hallway. Faster, she thought. Why not? Even the monitors had gone to lunch.

Then she heard footsteps following her, light as raindrops on a window. Startled, she stopped and turned, twisting her stun ring. She was ready to fight if she had to. It was Juan behind her. He braked to a halt about seven feet away, grinned, and shrugged his shoulders apologetically.

She kept her finger on the stun ring’s safety, but she wasn’t really afraid of this guy. At least he didn’t have pointy ears.

A vision flashed before her — of the principal, Mr. Madonna, nibbling Mr. C’s ears. She blinked and it went away. They do that? she thought. Jeeze. The things she didn’t want to know about.

“I heard what you said to Maureen,” Juan said. He licked the corner of his mouth. “I want you to know I don’t cheat either. At least not in any conventional sense of the term.”

Barbie started walking down the hall towards him, and towards the cafeteria. She could tell he wasn’t going to jack her or anything. He fell in step beside her.

“I’m sorry if what I did last night, like, made it worse for you,” he said. “I heard she was a spesh. I wanted to be in her class. When I thought she killed herself, I was really mad at her.”

Barbara didn’t want to talk about it. “So, who’d you kill, to end up at Cobain?” she asked.

“That’s rude,” said T’Shawn with a slight smile. He shrugged. “The principal at Dick Silly thought I’d be better off with a bunch of other young people who were troubled like myself. For my social development, of course.”

Dixie Lee Ray was the academic magnet school sponsored by Microsoft — IBM. There were hardly any speshes there, and certainly no telepaths, who usually developed “behavior problems” by the age of fourteen.

They stopped by Barbara’s locker, and she fumbled with the lock and opened it. As she put her chem book inside, T’Shawn held the door and leaned in to give her a kiss. She thought for a second — but only a second. She kissed him back.