“I do,” Kenzie said, perking up some as she caught wind of our conversation. “Or I might. I can try. What’s this for?”

“Making a first move, in a way that won’t give the lawyer headaches,” I said. “It’s not going to make us any friends though.”

“Seems to be an emerging pattern, that,” Rain said.

If we aren’t in a position to behead the snake, maybe we can de-fang it.

Shade 4.2

“Classify the following angles as obtuse, acute, or right,” Kenzie said. She sighed.

“You know this?” I asked.

She looked up from her homework and rolled her eyes. “Yes, I know this. I didn’t have the words to describe what I knew before taking the class but I get this.”

“Make it interesting,” I said. “Challenge yourself, try to answer as fast as you can, and try to get past where you’re having to think about it and get to where the knowledge is automatic.”

“Acute, acute, obtuse, right, acute, obtuse, acute, right, right,” she said. “I’m really tempted to sit down and make up my own questions to leave on the worksheet for the teacher, except I’d have to look things up to make sure some mathematician didn’t already give it a name. What’s it called when it’s a full circle? Three hundred and sixty degrees of angle?”

I frowned. “You’re asking me to think back about seven years right now. Complete, I think?”

“Full, complete, or perigon,” Chris said.

All heads craned around to look at him. He was sitting in a corner, a table to his left, with so many things piled up that the bag, costume, snacks and notebooks loomed well over the top of his head. He sat on a chair with his feet up on the seat, a comic and phone on his lap. He had his headphones on, but only one was covering an ear.

He realized people were looking and frowned. “What?”

“You actually have a brain?” Tristan asked.

“I studied it a few weeks ago,” Chris said, shrugging, turning his attention back to his comic.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t remember studying that when I was your age,” Tristan said.

“I self-study. There aren’t enough seats in schools so they gave us the option of doing these workbooks and handing them in. I’ve lost track of how far ahead I got,” Chris said. “It’s why I don’t have homework. My regular schoolwork is the homework and I get that done earlier in the day.”

“Perigon,” Kenzie said to herself, hunched over her worksheet and books, a pen in hand. “That one sounds best. Let’s call this one a… hyper-perigon angle.”

“More complete an angle than a circle?” I asked.