Should she answer for real?

“The intercepts,” Marianne mumbled.

If people were surprised she’d actually answered something, she didn’t want to know it. She kept her eyes on Mr. Garcia’s pen, though she felt her face flush pink.

He went on to yadda-yadda his way through finding the X intercept, letting Y equal 0, and solving for X. But he’d already lost her. She couldn’t remember what to do next.

“Now if we divide both sides by negative one…” he went on, and then he motioned for her to come up front to write it out.

The classroom’s overhead light felt brighter suddenly.

“Could you draw the graph for us then, Ms. Blume?”

She remained seated. What would she draw? She didn’t understand where the intercepts should go. She didn’t know which quadrants or which numbers or, most of all, why this mattered. Yes, they’d done the fish tank example. But in real life, couldn’t you eyeball the fish tank? Couldn’t you find someone else to help you with it?

“I…” she said. “I really don’t know, Mr. Garcia.”

He was unfazed. “Okay. Let’s pinpoint where exactly you’re losing the thread here, because I bet a lot of your fellow scholars are in the same boat.”

He always called the other kids “scholars,” and they made so much fun of it, but when he said it that day, she felt bad for ever mocking it.

“I don’t…” She took a breath. How did you put into words what you didn’t understand when you didn’t understand it? “The part I don’t get is how it goes from an equation to a graph.”

Lucas Hayes whispered from the back: “Yeah, that’s the whole thing we’re doing … So the part you don’t get is … the whole thing … Ha.”

Someone else added a “Neeeeigh.”

Marianne didn’t laugh along. She had to pass. She couldn’t distract or let herself get distracted.

She had the sensation of a hamster running on a wheel in her gut.

“Can you offer any more specificity?” Mr. Garcia asked.

“Um…” Her spacey voice took over. “I dunno?”

“Okay.” Mr. Garcia thought for a second. “We’re taking an equation and transforming it into a graph, right? Like a magician turning a rabbit into a scarf. Except useful.”

Was he trying to be funny? His joke didn’t really make sense, but she tried to show him she appreciated his effort.

“Ha! Math magic,” she chirped.

The hamster in her tummy slowed down a little.

“Exactly!”

And in the back, Lucas and a few other kids made some noise: “Hee hee hee math magic,” she heard one of them say. Someone whispered something about Quiz Quest, but she couldn’t hear it.

Marianne closed her eyes for a second, forced herself not to turn around, not to give a thumbs-up or a giggle, and she opened them again to see Mr. Garcia as still as stone.

“Excuse me?” He spoke toward the last rows. “What was that?”

“What?” Lucas said.

“You all had some commentary back there. Would you like to share?”