Tiffany Tumbles: Book One of the Interim Fates (3 page)

“Does someone want to share with the class?” he asks.

Everyone looks down.

Then he turns back to me. “You realize you’ve enrolled two weeks late. You’re behind.”

“I know, sir,” I say.

“Sirs and fancy accents aren’t going to make it with me.” He’s not the only one who has mentioned my accent since I’ve moved to Eugene. Apparently I speak English with a combination Greek and upper-class British accent. And not modern Greek either, according to my mom, who actually studies this stuff. She’s a professor of Greek and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Oregon, which is the only way she can justify all those trips to Mount Olympus over the years.

“I expect my students to do the work.”

I had tuned him out for a second and it takes a moment to focus back in. “Okay,” I say cautiously.

“So you’ll have to catch up. Read the first forty pages of text by tomorrow, so that you’ll be able to participate in class.”

I swallow. Mom said this school was one of the better ones in the area, although she said the public schools leave something to be desired. So I really didn’t expect homework. I expected time to concentrate on learning weird stuff, like how to make my own breakfast, not on reading a moldy old book—which was too much like that job I had to do for my dad that got him in all the trouble.

Which reminds me. “I don’t have a book.”

“As if we have enough to just give them away,” Mr. McGuillicuty mutters. “They stuff my classroom with too many students, refuse to buy new textbooks, and expect me to cope.”

I know he didn’t say that for me, but still, he should’ve kept it to himself. I keep a lot of stuff to myself these days. Like the fact I still want to turn him into something. A rat, maybe.

“I can’t read the chapters,” I say, “unless I have a book.”

“That’s obvious, missy.” He turns around, opens a cabinet, and pulls out this mass of paper. He fumbles for a minute, then it becomes clear that what he’s holding is a book without the covers. He grabs sections and piles them on top of each other, and then hands the mess to me.

Not only does it lack a binding, it also has writing on every page. And I don’t mean
printing
. I mean writing, like doodles. Only some of them are so crude they make me blush.

Again.

I wish I had just enough magic to cast one last spell so that I’ll never blush again.

“That’s the best I can do, Ms. VanDerHoven,” he says. “I know in your private European school you probably got to read Voltaire in the original at the government’s expense, but here, you get to read a ten-year-old textbook that just might have all the pages.”

My stomach jumps a little. I promised Mom and Megan, my therapist, and vowed to myself that I’d do the best I could. I’d try, you know? Because if I didn’t, then I’d be just as bad as Dad, trying to get by on charm, and stuff.

But I just hit my first roadblock. How can I do my best if I don’t have the right tools?

“You may return to your seat, Ms. VanDerHoven.”

“But sir,” I say, knowing I’m probably digging my own grave. “What if it doesn’t have all the pages?”

Mr. McGuillicuty looks at me like I spoke Greek. The old kind my Dad loves, not the new stuff that Mom speaks.

Mr. McGuillicuty probably thinks I’m being snotty.

I’m just being scared.

“I’m sure you can figure out something, Ms. VanDerHoven,” he says, and waves his hand toward my desk.

I sit down and spend the next fifteen minutes putting the book in some kind of order. He’s writing on a blackboard, taking about French wars with Indians (I didn’t know the French went into India, and how come he’s talking about that in American History?) and the boy next me has actually fallen asleep.

No one is listening—not even the teacher, I think—and I’m short pages 39-55. But I don’t say anything because I don’t want this teacher to yell at me again.

Now I understand why everyone has all these backpacks because how do they carry the falling-apart books without them?

The bell rings, stopping Mr. McGuillicuty mid-sentence, and everybody stands and starts talking at once, except the sleeping kid next to me.

The girl who whispered to me stops beside me. She sticks out her hand. “I’m Jenna Foster.”

I juggle the papers into my free arm and take her hand, shaking it once. Weird habit, this one. “Tiffany VanDerHoven.”

“Where do you go next?”

I have to juggle some more to find the schedule. “Journalism.”

“Wow, cool. I don’t have cool classes like that one. You’re not on the total loser track.”

I frown at that, not sure exactly what she means. She looks at my schedule, then helps me get organized.

“Come on,” she says. “I’ll walk you there.”

I’m really, really relieved.

She takes me down this hallway, then says, “You don’t have to read those pages.”

There’s a million kids and they’re all scurrying from place to place or hanging by the water fountain and yakking or watching me walk by. Lots of the girls are just staring at me, and a few of the guys too. Only the guys make me wish I had on more than my t-shirt.

“Why not?” I ask.

“Because Mr. McGuillicuty just repeats stuff out of the book,” she says, “and then he tells us what’s going to be on the quizzes so that we get good grades.”

I actually stop in the middle of the hall because I’m so stunned. One kid bumps into me, mumbles an apology, and goes around, then so does everyone else.

Jenna stops after a second and looks back at me. “You okay?”

“Why would he do that?”

“Do what?” she asks.

“Mr. McGuillicuty.” I’m frowning. I can feel it. And Aphrodite, who likes to pretend she’s my aunt even though we don’t know who she’s really related to (except her son Cupid), says I should never frown because my face’ll get stuck that way. So I try to unfrown. “Why would he give us the answers?”

Not even my dad gave us the answers when Brittany, Crystal, and I were acting heads of magic. He made us use books and stuff (which meant I had to use books and stuff because Brit and Crystal refused to study). He wanted us to think for ourselves.

“Mr. McGuillicuty doesn’t like the new rules.” Jenna looks pointedly at her watch. “If I’m going to get you to the J room and then get to my class on time, we gotta hurry.”

“Okay.” I walk with her again. The other students no longer flow around us. “What new rules?”

“You know—oh, you probably don’t. Teachers get fired if their kids don’t do well these days. It’s that whole government Common Core Left Behind thing. Those are the only real tests we study for, at least in Mr. McG’s class.”

I’m confused. She says all this like I should know what it is, and I suppose if I was a real good American kid, I would, but I’m not, so I don’t.

“So I don’t have to study?” I ask.

“Just for Mr. McG.,” she says. “You got some toughies on your schedule.”

I put my schedule on top of the pile. “Like who?”

She bends over it, like we’re studying together, forgetting, I guess, that we’re in a hurry. She points at each class and gives me the rundown.

My math teacher’ll be tough, and so will science, but the social studies teachers—all three of them—are just “marking time to retirement,” whatever that is. Then there’s the English teacher who sometimes gets “a bug up her butt” and “makes people study” but sometimes doesn’t care, and the journalism teacher who thinks the world is going to end tomorrow and expects a lot from his kids.

Then she stops at P.E. and says, “Whoa, you have Mrs. Yates.”

“Yeah?”

“Get in shape, girl,” Jenna says. “She’s a drill sergeant.”

A bell rings, and Jenna curses. The halls are mostly empty.

“We’re late,” she says. “I gotta go that way.”

She points behind us.

“And you go three doors down. You can’t miss it.”

I thank her, head three doors down, and see two doors across the hall from each other. If one wasn’t labeled Journalism Lab, I would’ve missed it altogether. As it is, I have to shove the door open—late again—and everyone looks at me—again.

The man up front is skinny and he has glasses and he’s balding too. He takes my schedule slip without comment, and then he smiles at me, and except for Jenna, he’s the first person who makes me feel welcome.

“Well, this class’ll be quite the education for you, Ms. VanDerHoven. Does your family subscribe to a newspaper?”

I shrug. I don’t even know what one is.

“Do you have cable?”

I shrug again.

“Internet?”

“Yeah,” I say because I’m forbidden to be on the Internet without Mom around. I’m too naïve, she says.

“Okay, then. Find out about the other two. We’re studying how the mass media affects our perceptions of the world. I also need to know how well you write. So if you can write a short bio for me by tomorrow—”

“In English?” I ask. I’ve never written in English. I can read it, and stuff, but mostly I’ve been writing in Greek (and not modern Greek either).

“Yes,” he says, sounding surprised. “We do all our work in English here.”

I’m so screwed. I’m not sure I can do any of this stuff. And, I have a hunch, I can’t blow off the short bio like I supposedly can the forty pages.

“You can write in English, can’t you?” he asks.

“I dunno,” I say. “I’ve never done it.”

Everyone is staring at me. I mean, like I’m a thing that’s crawled out of the woodwork staring.

“Well, give it a shot,” he says. “We’ll see how it goes.”

“What’s short?” I ask.

For a minute, I think he’s going to give me a definition of the word, then he says, “A full page.”

I nod like I can do this.

I’m not sure I can do any of it.

And by the time I go through two more classes, I’m convinced I can’t.

THREE

HERE’RE MY ASSIGNMENTS
by the end of the day:

1) I have to read forty pages for American History, twenty pages for American Government, and a bunch of dumb poems by someone named Shakespeare.

2) I have to write a short bio for Journalism, a book report on those dumb poems (by the end of the week), and an analysis of the Greek government for Comparative World Studies.

3) I have to complete fifteen arithmetic problems by tomorrow and
show the work
so that the teacher knows I didn’t use a calculator (which I can’t use since I don’t know what one is).

4) I have to take pictures of the plants around my house and label them by the end of the week (Internet okay for this); this for my science class, which supposedly covers biology, chemistry, physics, and astronomy. I’m not sure what category this assignment falls under.

And I don’t even know what the drill sergeant who runs P.E. has in store for me tomorrow.

I tell all this to Mom when I get home, but I don’t tell her about lunch.

I can’t talk about lunch. Not yet anyway.

You see, I knew lunch would be an issue. Anyone who watches teen movies or teen TV knows that. Lunch has its own arcane rituals, like who sits where, and who gets what. And it’s no different here. Except that these arcane rituals somehow never made it into any sort of on-screen life.

Here, the kids with money go to the burger joints at the strip mall a block or two away from school property. (When I blushed at the word “strip,” someone else giggled and said, “Not that kind of strip.” I’m beginning to think that movies as a source for life in America aren’t always good.) I have money, but I did see
Supersize Me
, and I know better than to make a steady diet of fatty foods, especially now that I don’t have magic to counteract any weight gain.

Mom didn’t pack me a lunch—some kids have these brown bag things that look a little greasy by the middle of the day—so I had to buy food at the cafeteria. Food there is provided free for really poor kids (who show some kind of card) and everyone else pays by the item.

I’m beginning to figure out the rules behind buying stuff, which feels like real progress.

Anyway, I looked at all the food behind glass cases and the stuff that looked edible (which wasn’t a lot of it) seemed to have a lot of cheese and noodles and fatty stuff, so I didn’t order it. I could also get a slice of pizza reheated in the microwave (yeah, I know what those are) or someone could fry me a burger.

So I was right back at the burger conundrum.

I finally grabbed an apple, a banana, and a piece of cake, just because I was so stressed out. I took a bottle of water from the iced display and paid for everything, then sat down at the closest table.

All by myself.

I knew better than to sit at someone else’s table—every teen movie has that scene, and it’s always bad—and unlike in the movies, this lunchroom has lots of open tables. I brushed all the crumbs off mine, then sat down and thought about opening a book, but changed my mind.