Blood Rock (36 page)

“Miss Frost,” Dean Belloson said, taking off his glasses and rubbing his forehead, “it isn’t that simple. This isn’t a warehouse, and we’re not storing Cinnamon for a monthly fee. She’s a person, and a student, but not your typical student. Handling her takes extra effort.”

“You knew when you took her she was an extraordinary needs student,” I said. “Are you or are you not equipped to deal with werekin?”

“That’s not it,” Vladimir said. “Dakota, Cinnamon needs a
lot
of special tutoring,”

“You also knew she had little prior education, which you personally said was OK,” I said. “And I thought I explained to you we only just discovered she might have Tourette’s.”

“Oh, she’s almost certainly got it,” Vladimir said quietly. “I’ve suspected since she called me a clown in the entrance interview. She was immediately mortified and tried to distract us—”

“Or,” the Dean said, “she could be an uncouth, but clever little—”

“She was mortified,” Vladimir repeated. “Corprolalia—dirty speech, the symptom most famously and a bit exaggeratedly associated with Tourette’s—is not just cussing. It can be inappropriate comments which are hard to bottle in, but don’t reflect how she feels.”

“I’ve seen that,” Palmotti said suddenly. “I’ve almost certainly seen that.”

“I have too,” I said.
Damnit.
“At least twice earlier that day, in fact.”

“Taken from her home? School shopping? A death of a friend? The more stressful it is, the harder it will be for her to keep a lid on it,” Vladimir said. “But corprolalia often fades past the teens. Tourette’s is more than that—facial tics, for example. On that note, that steel collar of hers—can we lose it? Tight collars can worsen the tics, but I understand it’s locked on.”

“I’ll ask, but I suspect the answer is no,” I said. “It’s sort of her vampire visa.”

“
Vampire
visa?” Fremont and Palmotti said in surprised, worried unison.

“Aha!” the Dean said, putting his hand to his head with an expression of disgust. “I
knew
I recognized that ‘S’ seal from somewhere. That’s a vampire passage token, isn’t it? House of Saffron, correct? The Vampire Queen of Little Five Points?”

“Why … yes,” I said. “How did you—”

“My apologies, Miss Frost,” he said. “If you’ll pardon the pun, young Cinnamon’s been bitten by vampire politics. One thing in her file that forced me to escalate this was a complaint from a parent—but that parent is in the Gentry, vampires in dispute with the House of Saffron. Lord Iadimus’s wife may have seen Cinnamon’s collar and decided to make trouble for her.”

“Charming,” I said. The last thing I’d expected was that the Dean was up on vampire politics—and if Cinnamon simply attending the same school as a child of the Gentry was causing problems, I couldn’t imagine what Saffron was having to deal with working with the Gentry face to face. “And the collar only protects from physical, not political assault.”

“Let’s not lose perspective,” Vladimir said gently. “The parental complaint was
not
the only thing in her already large file. And it isn’t just tics or cussing, it’s willful behavior. Her corprolalia, and I do agree she probably has it, only explains part of her smart mouth.”

“How can you tell?” I asked sharply.

“Cussing out of the blue
might
be a verbal tic,” Vladimir said, “but if it sounds like she meant it, she probably said it on purpose. But, honestly, our teachers are professionals. We can handle a few f-bombs. It’s the acting out. It isn’t fair to all the other students in her classes.”

“Well, we’re here,” I said. “What do you want of us?”

“You have to convince her to attend and to behave herself,” he said. “The Dean’s right. I’ve seen this a lot with special needs students—it isn’t that they’re not capable, it’s that they don’t see how school is relevant to them. Cinnamon can be …
particularly
colorful.”

I sighed. “All right,” I said. “I
am more than willing to talk to her, but as I understand the court order, it will have to be here at school, supervised. After school she has to stay in the custody of the Palmottis, and I can’t
imagine
how hard this is on them.”

“Thank you,” Palmotti said, very quietly.

“I’ll go further,” the Dean said. “You have to convince her to take class seriously. We care about Cinnamon, we really do, but we have
many
hardworking students here—”

“All right, all
right
,” I said. “I’ll get her to show up, and at least be quiet in class. And I’ll lean on her—but in the end, I can’t force her to learn.”

“That’s not good enough,” the Dean said. “Our one-on-one and small group resources are limited. It isn’t fair to our special topics teachers if she’s blowing them off.”

“She’s that far behind?” Something was tickling my brain, something Vladimir said that I had missed. “But surely there’s time to catch up. She’s only been here a little over a week.”

“Yes, but that’s not the problem,” Vladimir said. “She’s got special educational needs above and beyond being a werekin.”

“Special needs?” I pressed. “Is she dyslexic, on top of the Tourette’s?”

“Maybe a little,” Vladimir admitted. “We’re doing more tests. But the real problem, if you can call it that, is her brain. Maybe it’s the werekin influence, maybe it’s just natural, whatever that means. Regardless, she learns differently than the rest of us.”

“Oh, God,” I said. She’d shown such promise, in so many ways, but I’d feared exactly something like this. With increasing horror, I realized what I’d missed was that, just minutes ago, Vladimir had called her a
special needs student
. “You’re saying she’s …
mentally disabled?
”

—

“Quite the opposite,” Vladimir said. “Cinnamon’s a genius, on the level of
Gauss.
”

When Carl Frederich Gauss was ten, his teacher punished his class by making them add the numbers from one to a hundred. Before most of the other students had started, Gauss handed in his slate with the right answer. Mathematicians now think he started picking off pairs of numbers from each end of the sequence: one plus a hundred, two plus ninety nine, and so on—fifty pairs of numbers, each adding to a hundred and one: five thousand and fifty,
bam!

Cinnamon was
that
fast.

After our meeting with the Dean, Vladimir had let Doug, Jack and I sit in on the math club. Six sets of problems were written on the whiteboards. I took a lot of math in college before I dropped out, but I recognized none of it other than the occasional sigma-for-sum or geometric symbol. Vladimir was before the board, lecturing to five of his star students sitting around him in a circle, all trying to pay attention to him … and to ignore Cinnamon.

And Cinnamon? My precious baby girl—who I’d missed so much, who I hadn’t seen in so long—barely
reacted
when she saw me, and focused instead entirely on the class, if focus you could call it. Cinnamon
orbited
the other students, bouncing around the room, sometimes leaning on the wall, sometimes squatting on chairs, watching like a cat—but most often standing by the window, staring outside, tail twitching, face spasming, occasionally cussing … all the time with one cat ear visibly cocked to Vladimir’s every word.

Vladimir was telling them how important this part of the ‘competition’ was; then he stepped aside and let the students attack problems written on the board. Cinnamon cursed and stomped up to the board, cocked her head at it, then grabbed a whiteboard marker in her fist and began scrawling answers before the other students had even started. She drew rectangles and arcs littered with symbols, and I understood her answers even less than the question.

“I thought this was a remedial class,” I murmured to Doug.

“For math PhDs, maybe,” Doug said. “No wonder her assignments looked so hard.”

Vladimir handed over the math club to one of the students and motioned us into his office. Unlike the spacious windowed affairs of the administrators, Vladimir’s office was apparently a converted storage closet—long, narrow, and surprisingly cozy.

“Keep your voices down; never underestimate werekin hearing,” Vladimir said, sitting on the corner of a desk facing a wall covered with photos of forests and clippings of math articles. “Cinnamon doesn’t understand. She thinks that because she’s in the special class, it must mean she’s stupid. The truth is the opposite—she’s so smart she’s not used to really having to work.”

I sighed. “Maybe this is too much too soon,” I said. “Maybe we need to track her back into a normal class, let her develop more stable peer relationships.”

Vladimir raised an eyebrow at me. “Your mother was a teacher, I recall? Your intuitions are good, but she’s bored out of her gourd in normal classes and gets
very
disruptive. You see what she’s like when she’s interested. We need to push her, hard, just to keep her engaged.”

“Well, maybe it’s the after-school tutoring,” I said. “Perhaps tutor her during hours—”

“Actually, the math club is one of the few things she’s almost guaranteed to show for,” Vladimir said. “Every single day this week, in fact, even on days she ditched school entirely.”

Doug was looking at some of Cinnamon’s homework. “I find myself agreeing with Dakota,” he said. “Doctor Vladimir, the physics of magic requires a lot of math, but I have to confess, speaking as her tutor, some of these assignments gave
me
a headache. I can see pushing her, but if you challenge her so hard she can never succeed, of course she’ll feel stupid.”

He held up the paper. The answers Cinnamon had written were scrawled so badly it looked like she’d been writing with crayons. Half the numbers were upside down, backwards, even rotated, and the answers seemed wrong. I was no expert, but it looked like dyslexia.

“Ah,” Vladimir said, taking the paper gently and staring at it like it was a treasure. “This was my ‘aha’ experience. You don’t take points off for a right answer just because it’s in nonstandard notation. Join me at the board, let’s see how she’s doing.”

In the classroom, Cinnamon was staring at the last problem. She’d scrawled several numbers down—a three, a backwards five, what looked like an upside down seven, and the number eight in a box with an arrow beneath it pointing to the left.

“Very good, Cinnamon,” he said. “But you can’t write it the way you came up with it.”

“
Your
way is square,” she said, eye flickering back at me, catlike. “
Uff!
”

“My way people will recognize,” he said. “Now, the three is already right. What about the others? How do we write the bass-acwards? What’s the right way to write upsy-downs? And do you really want to put an eight in the box? What’s the smallest box you gots?”

She scowled, then wrote
-5
on the board, followed by
7i
. After squinting at the eight, she wrote
-√8
=
-2√2
. “Satisfied?” she said, head snapping aside in her sneezy tic. “Hah.”

“Holy cow,” I said. “She came up with her
own notation
for imaginary numbers
?
”

“It gets better,” Vladimir said. “Cinnamon, show us the path of the swirling brickies.”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging. She raised the marker, and then paused, her pupil nailing me out of the corner of her eye, triangular, so like the eye of the tiger I’d seen in the cage. “
Mom
, for the love, don’t hover. Fuck! You makes me nervous.”

I stepped back from the board. “Sorry.”

Cinnamon drew a rectangle on the board, tall but not too narrow, like a squat door. Then she divided it in two with a line across its middle. That left a square on its top … and another door-shaped rectangle at bottom, same shape as its parent, but smaller and turned on its side. She divided the new door with a new line, making an even smaller square and smaller rectangle—and kept repeating it, smaller and smaller each time, a brick road curling in.

“That’s the
golden spiral,
” Doug said, leaning forward suddenly.

“Isn’t it pretty?” Cinnamon said, drawing an arc curling in through each square that looked like the turns of a nautilus shell. “The brickies goes rounds and rounds, and the path swirls through them, all the way downs—”

“I
know
this,” I said. “No wonder it looked like a door—that’s the
golden ratio
. Artists use it to make their compositions look pleasing. It goes all the way back to the Greeks—”

“And as far as I can tell,” Vladimir said, “she reinvented it
herself.
Cinnamon, do you mind if I show your mother some of your notes?”

“Sure, I guesses,” she said, shrugging. “They’re stupid. Why would you want to?”

Vladimir took the three of us back into his office. After some digging, he found a folder, filled with page after page of photocopies of painfully scrawled notes in Cinnamon’s hand. “Her answers looked wrong, but
consistently
wrong,” he said, pointing out flipped and tilted numbers in her notes. “She was writing backwards for minus and upside down for imaginary—”