The Atomic Weight of Secrets or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black Read Free Page B

teacher, as it happens, had brought the box to show thestudents a puzzle that could not be done. The lot of them had ruined the lesson, and were to write lines to the effect that they would not ruin lessons in the future. Jasper’s ability to run came in handy that day as he raced around the classroom, deftly weaving around desks, avoiding chalk pelted at him by the three other boys.
    Jasper got extra lines for running in the classroom.
    At twelve years old, Jasper may very well have been small for his age, and may not have been able to lift a school desk above his head or pull the door out by its hinges, but he could run faster than anyone.
    Lucy was rather petite herself. She wore her hair long, and she had the most enormous brown eyes. She had a sweet round face and a crooked smile and delicate hands that were often busy creating something rather fabulous.
    And Lucy had a magical memory. She could remember anything and everything.
    But the fact that she was cute, and sweet, and a very good listener, and brilliant, plainly did not help her at school. She found that memorizing great swaths of text did not impress her teachers. Making clever things with her hands only made her classmates resent her. Pointing out that Napoleon became emperor in 1804 and not 1408 made her teacher furious, especially because the mistake was in the book itself and the book belonged to the teacher. A glare that shot daggers was her reward for informing her teacher, who was trying to translate from the French, that mouton meant sheep, not banana. And when Lucy showed her teacher the correct way to say “Kalamata,” while also explaining that it was not a species of tree frog but both an olive and a city inGreece, she earned herself time in the corner for her trouble, after being made to write lines such as “I will not be an ugly horrid little know-it-all,” or “Lucy Modest is not modest.”
    At the very least, Lucy’s cleverness made her teacher and her classmates uncomfortable. Once, a particularly nasty teacher stopped the whole class and said, to growls from the students, “If you’re so clever, why don’t you teach? The whole class is going to listen to Lucy. Oh, dear, she’ll have to stand on a chair because she’s too small for anyone to see. Oh, but that is against the rules, standing on chairs. Because of Lucy, the whole class is going to write ‘I will not stand on chairs,’ so you can thank her for that, class. And Lucy, you had better start remembering that you’re the child and I am the teacher. If you’re so clever, how come you didn’t figure that out, missy?” Tears had fallen on Lucy’s paper as she wrote, “I will not stand on chairs.”
    Eventually, teachers took to making her sit in the back of the room, and ignoring her when she raised her hand in class. It was easier for them and much less disruptive. One teacher went so far as to make Lucy sit in a corner and wear a gag over her mouth (which prevented the little girl from chewing on her charm bracelet, which she did when she was excited, anxious, or unhappy). The teacher made her don a dunce cap as well. Sometimes (and this, too, prevented the little girl from chewing her bracelet), the teacher would tie Lucy’s hands together to prevent any “unrequested and unwanted creativity” that might originate in that corner. On Lucy’s chair, the teacher placed a placard that read, “I am Lucy and I am not as clever as I think.” The other students found this quite entertaining. They thoroughly enjoyed anything that brought Lucy down a notch or two.
    But in general, they, like the teachers, usually ignored her—the exception being when they had something unfriendly to say.
    Lucy’s classmates had devised ugly little rhymes in her honor, such as, “Lucy Modest thinks she’s the cleverest / but she’s the shortest and makes us the boredest.” Fortunately, Lucy had the decency and foresight not to correct their grammar. Sometimes, the other children were