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was her counselor and
mentor, did not tolerate students walking in late. Despite her
being his star pupil, if she came in late, he would have an
aneurysm, and Prissi didn’t want her favorite teacher dead. Plus,
if she got one more gig during Winter Term, which was almost over,
she’d be over the limit and back on Skru Kru scraping plates and
ignoring sniggers.
    “Freeieekin stupid idiocracy.”
    Prissi yanked the bathroom door so hard, it
snapped back and caught the tip of her left wing. Making a sound
that was more expressive than any words could have been, Prissi
jerked her wing free. A half-dozen silver feathers fluttered to the
grimy floor as the re-energized and re-angered girl accelerated
down the hall toward class.
    Prissi Langue’s favorite subject at The
Dutton School was science. She liked Chinese—it slowed her mind
down, especially when she had to focus hard on the tonals. She
loved her English class—she had spent more time with books than
parents or peers growing up in Africa. But, she adored science.
Despite being on the verge of finishing her fifth term, Prissi was
still amazed at how good the science at Dutton was. While it had
been 2094 in the rest of the world, in a science classroom in
Bujumbura when she was a student there, it might just as well been
1994. To Prissi, science in Burundi was an overly-Christian white
woman droning. In contrast, sitting in Advanced Field Science,
Fi-Sci II, was like having a bag of popcorn going off in her
head—fifty minutes of thoughts careening and ricocheting around
inside her head.
    The teacher of Fi-Sci II, an exceedingly old
and horribly crippled man, a gnome with a slow smile but a fast
gnomic tongue, Dr. Smarkzy, seemed to know all science well and his
specialty, a combination of prionology and sub-molecular chemistry,
cold. Like some of the particles and strands he described, Smarkzy
himself could be volatile, maybe even a little unstable, but to
Prissi he was a god—Prometheus. An old arthritic Prometheus, except
Prissi guessed that Dr. Smarkzy didn’t feel that his time with
students was as bad as being chained to a rock—at least, most of
the time.
    As soon as she had walked into her first
Fi-Sci II class the previous September, Prissi had known it was
going to be a disaster. It was her last class of the first day of
her second year. All of her other classes that day had been had
been taught by young, energetic and, mostly, attractive teachers.
In contrast, the man standing at the front of the lecture portion
of the small auditorium looked to be more than a century old. He
was a tiny man, almost as short as Prissi, with a gargantuan head,
bald except for a few tufts of pure white hair springing out from
above his enormous, translucent ears. The ears were extraordinary.
Despite the many hours she had spent studying them since that first
day, they continued to have a kind of abhorrent attraction for
Prissi. Pink and gray with a blue-tinged rim, they reminded Prissi
of the shells of some kind of mollusk—a kind you wouldn’t want to
eat. When Dr. Smarkzy talked, the ears slowly waved like anemones
in a tidal pool. Going along with the old man’s ghastly ears, were
hands and legs so crippled that he shuffled and scuttled, like a
scorpion. That first day, when Dr. Smafrkzy pointed at Prissi to
take a perch in the first row behind the walkers’ chairs, all of
his fingers except for his pinky actually pointed back at
himself.
    Prissi slowed from a flog to a walk as she
spotted the Weiners, a old couple who were the heads in Mickelson
House and famous for giving out gigs for the least of infractions,
standing out in front of the Mu Datarium. The old furtz were going
to make her late. A second later she forgot her frustration when
she heard Nasty Nancy squeak, “Priscilla Langue, you are going to
be TARDEEEE.”
    When Prissi whipped around, she almost caught
her roommate with the edge of her wings.
    “All because of you. You ate my Snoogles and
my