Surviving the Applewhites Read Free Page A

report, not an art project, hadn’t made any difference to Randolph Applewhite. “ Real science demands creativity and individuality,” he had told the principal when he withdrew his three older kids from the school district the very next day. “Without creativity and individuality, there would be no scientific discovery. No Galileo, no Newton, no Einstein.”
    If her father had been safely off directing a play somewhere when the zebra issue came up, she and Cordelia and even Hal might still be going to school in Traybridge, to a regular school with schedules and organization and a great many normal people. Including Melissa, her best friend, whom she never got to see in person anymore.
    But Randolph hadn’t been off directing. He had been at home with time on his hands. Worse, a theater company that had hired him to direct a play for them had called only that morning, to tell him they haddecided not to do that play, so they didn’t need him after all. He had been feeling rejected. Artists were tricky enough to handle when their work was going extremely well. Rejected artists could be downright dangerous.
    Within a week the Creative Academy had been registered with the state department of education and was up and running. It had turned out to be quite easy to start a home school in North Carolina. All that was required was a guarantee that the teachers had high school diplomas. That was no problem. The academy teachers were the Applewhite adults, and all of them except Uncle Archie had finished college. Even Uncle Archie, who had dropped out of high school to travel the world on a tramp steamer, had eventually gotten a G.E.D. so that he could enroll in art school for a while.
    It hadn’t been necessary to file a curriculum with the state, which was a good thing, because the Applewhites didn’t believe in telling the children what to study and when. The Creative Academy wasn’t so much a home school as an un school. Its students were supposed to follow their own interests and create their own educational plans. Separately. Individually. Creatively. That meant that, except for E.D., nobody had any sort of educational plan at all. And, of course, nobody was ever doing the same thing as anybody else at the same time.
    Until now. Now Jake was to follow E.D.’s plan. She didn’t want him to. She had created her plan just for her. She had thought it up for herself and she wanted to accomplish it by herself. She might not have talent, she might not have a creative bone in her body, but she wasn’t half bad at learning. She had reminded the family about the academy’s philosophy. About individuality. The case against clumping. But she could have saved her breath. She and Jake Semple were to be a class.
    Part of the reason was math. Up till yesterday, she’d liked math.
    Nobody else in the family did. Two and two added up to four no matter who added them, and they went right on adding up to four month after month and year after year. It’s what E.D. had always liked about it. Everybody else found it boring. If home schooled kids didn’t have to take standardized tests once a year—tests that included math—E.D. felt sure there wouldn’t be any math learned at the academy at all. Since they did have to take those tests, they took math online. E.D. was exactly where Jake Semple’s last report card from the school he’d burned down said he was. Seventh grade. Geometric problem solving. Comparing percentiles and fractions.
    E.D. pulled another dry leaf from the dying bouquet. She had told them that she was willing to be clumped with Jake for math—just not everything else.But it hadn’t done any good. Jake Semple needed to do “cooperative learning” so he could become better socialized, they said, and she was the only genuinely cooperative member of the family. Besides, he wasn’t the sort of person—yet—who could be expected to come up with his own structure and organization. “He needs to begin, at least,