trio settled into the front row, each saying “Hello” in turn to Mrs. Perez, who was greeting the returning students and welcoming the new ones, working on putting faces to the names on her class list. Angela sat with Fiona on her left. To her right, a new girl was busily working with pencil on a sketch pad. Angela leaned a little forward and over to look at the drawing and found herself staring at a caricature of Mrs. Perez. The girl looked up and smiled.
“That’s good!” said Angela.
“Thanks,” answered the girl.
“I’m Angela Fournier.”
“Hi, I’m Michaela Carmin.”
“How do you spell that?”
“Well, it sounds like ‘McKayla’ but it’s spelled like ‘Michael’ plus an ‘a’ at the end.”
“It’s pretty,” said Angela.
Michaela gave her a friendly and unselfconscious smile.
“That’s a good drawing,” Angela went on. “It has her personality down perfect. And it’s kind, even though it’s a caricature. How do you do it?”
Michaela smiled with a touch of embarrassment and a barely noticeable lifting of her left shoulder. “I draw what I see. She seems nice.”
Angela liked Michaela’s unaffected simplicity. We’ll get along, she thought.
Mrs. Perez called the class to attention after the bell rang, looking over the students with a mix of the stern disciplinarian and the understanding mentor. Every eye was on her and all the mouths were shut.
“Good morning,” she said, “and welcome to junior English, American literature. Since this is an honors class, don’t expect that we will be content just to read some books and write reports. We are going to explore the connection between the authors, the texts, and the social conditions in which the texts were produced. Fenimore Cooper, Hawthorne, and Poe may seem dated if you read their works in a vacuum; but those texts become rich when you consider the events, issues, and conditions of the time that they deal with. The same goes for the most recent literature and everything in between. We will also read a popular science fiction novel, maybe Jurassic Park, or maybe something by Le Guin. You will all write a ten-page paper this year on one work by an author you pick. Yves, take that defeatist look off your face. You will do it, you will do it well, and, even though you may not think so at this point, you will enjoy it.”
Angela turned and smiled at Yves, who became visibly calmer. He smiled back.
“Now, as this is an honors class, all I’ll need to do is point the way and coach you as we go along. We will discover a lot together. What I demand of you is to believe in your capabilities and to stay focused and on task.”
When the bell rang, Angela stood and said, “This is going to be work but I’m going to learn a lot! Like last year, only more so.”
Michaela smiled and nodded in agreement. “It’s gonna be good.”
***
On the way to trigonometry, the flowing mass of kids separated Angela from Benjie and Fiona momentarily. As Angela was about to make her way back to her friends, she felt an unfriendly tap on the shoulder. She turned and found herself facing Kitty with the Kats providing interference behind her so they would not get pushed.
“Running scared, Fournier? I would be if I were you,” Kitty challenged.
“Hello, Kitty,” retorted Angela, looking her directly in the eye. Don’t take the bait, she thought. Make her do all the work. Or maybe she’ll just go away!
Kitty insisted. “You better check out the competition. You are about to be dethroned.”
Angela merely looked at Kitty, saying nothing.
Kitty was getting frustrated. “There’s a new dancer now, Sonya Aleksandroff, and she’s had way better training than you have. She and her family immigrated. From Russia! They have the world’s best dance schools there. Sorry to burst your balloon.”
Fiona was now standing beside Angela. “Kitty!” she exclaimed. “How do you it? Come up with such, like, amazing phrases?”
Kitty tossed her head, turned toward her retinue, and began to walk off. “Just trying to be of service!” she called back to Fiona and Angela. “Whatever!” added Ashley and McKenzie together.
As they approached Logan’s room, Fiona told Angela not to pay any attention to Kitty, but Angela wasn’t listening. Her feelings were all jumbled up and she didn’t like it.
***
Mr. Logan took roll, looking, as always, at the students as though he had never seen them and was not sure what to make of them. Angela heard a breath being let out noisily and looked around to see Benjie smiling at her with an expression of resignation. Fiona patted him on the arm. Angela smiled back, feeling a surge of affection and forgetting the new dancer for the moment.
Logan started the lesson, addressing the back wall where it joined the ceiling. “Hello, class,” he said. Benjie turned to the back with an expression of sarcastic surprise and bewilderment. “What class?” he mouthed silently. Angela had to fight back the sniggers and she could hear Fiona making squeaky noises.
Logan ignored them and went on. “This is trigonometry. Trigonometry is really quite easy. It’s all based on measuring the angles of triangles. Imagine an angle with the vortex at the center of a circle. It’s called a central angle. When a central angle intercepts an arc with the same length as the radius of the circle, that angle is said to measure one radian.” He wrote “1 rad” on the chalkboard. “You can see that such an angle measures 1 rad regardless of how large the circle is.”
Angela heard Benjie whisper to Fiona, “Why in the world would we want to know that?”
Fiona said, “Shhh…” quietly.
“… the circumference of a circle having radius r is 2πr. As a result, a circle has the length of 2πr over r, which is 2π. Angles which measure a full rotation measure 2πrad. Now, as a full rotation, or 360º, equals 2πrad, 180º is πrad, and one degree equals π over 180 rad.” Logan managed a smile directed at his writing on the board, so taken was he with the beauty of it.
By then Angela’s head was spinning. She put her fingertips to her forehead. Fiona whispered, “You’ll get all this. I’ll explain in our study sessions if you need it.”
Logan was drawing on the board now. There was the sun directing its beams just left of vertical down on the Earth. He placed two dots on the surface, labeling one Syrene and the other Alexandria. He drew straight lines from those two cities to the exact center of the Earth. “In the first century BC, a Greek philosopher named Eratosthenes figured out by these angles and by the distance between Syrene and Alexandria in Egypt” (he wrote the distance on the board) “the circumference of the Earth, accurately to within five hundred miles. He also calculated the tilt of the Earth accurately and worked out the distance to the sun. Homework for tomorrow: take these values and calculate the circumference of the Earth. Any questions?”
In the apprehensive silence that followed, Michaela, looking at the board, exclaimed, “That’s pretty, Mr. Logan!”
***
“Did you see his face?” asked Benjie with glee when the three of them plus Michaela were in the hall going to the next class. “That was brilliant.”
Fiona added, “Logan didn’t know what to think. You overloaded his human interaction programming.”
“But I really meant it,” protested Michaela. “I’ll make a sketch, or maybe a painting and show you!”
“That’ll be cool,” said Angela. “We like what you said and we like you,” she went on, unable to suppress her most appealing smile.