A Wizard of Mars, New Millennium Edition (2 page)

“Uh. Nothing,” Kit said.

“Nice to see that you realize that, Mr. Rodriguez,” Mr. Mack said, wandering back up to his desk and dropping the notebook on it. “So maybe you’ll exculpate yourself by filling us in on the continuing significance of the thirty-eighth parallel...”

Kit swallowed hard. This kind of thing was so much easier to do on paper: the shufflings and mutterings and under-the-breath comments of his classmates routinely filled him with more dread than being locked in a closet with the Lone Power. “It’s the border between North and South Korea,” he said. “Both sides have it heavily fortified. It’s also one of the few land borders you can see from space, because there’s normal city light on the southern side of the line, and it’s almost pitch-black on the north...”

Slowly his throat got less dry. Kit went on for a minute or two more about famines and political tensions, trying to remember some of the really good stuff that would have been just a couple of pages back in the notebook right in front of him if he hadn’t been drawing in it. Finally Mr. Mack held up a hand.

“Enough,” he said. “Ms. Simmons, maybe you’d pick up where the artistic Mr. Rodriguez left off. What effect is the UN’s food-aid effort likely to have on the North in view of the present political situation?”

 “Uh—”

Kit had little amusement to spare for poor Delinda Simmons’s ensuing struggle to find an answer. Between doing the spell, trying to hide it, and then having to try to recall notes he’d taken two weeks before, he was now stressed to breathlessness. He concentrated on acting like he was paying attention, while being grateful Mr. Mack had let him off the hook so soon— he’d seen some of his classmates go through scenes of torment that had lasted a lot longer.

At last Mr. Machiavelli held up a hand, with just a glance at the clock. Kit glanced at it, too. Somehow it was still only two thirty. 
Boy, you don’t need wizardry to get time to run slow, sometimes
...“All right,” Mr. Machiavelli said. “Were this an ordinary day, you’d all have to sit here and suffer through me doing a recap of what the work required for next Friday was going to be. But, lucky you, for you there 
is
 no next Friday! Where you’ll all be by then, since classes end on Tuesday, I neither know nor care. Me, I’ll be up on the North Fork, wearing a really beat-up straw hat and helping an old friend prune her grapevines— not that any of 
you
 will care. What you 
will
 care about, of course, are your final grades.”

A great stillness settled over the classroom, broken only by the sighing of cool air from the vent. Mr. Mack turned toward his desk, flipped his briefcase up onto it, and opened it. “These exams,” he said, “as you know, are sixty percent of your final grade. As usual, there’ll probably be questions and comments from some of your parents.” Mr. Mack drew himself up as tall as was possible for him: maybe five feet two. “But you, and they, should know by now that there aren’t going to be any changes. Whatever you’ve got, you’ve brought on yourselves. So, those of you who have recourse to inhalers, get them out now...”

He brought out a pile of papers stapled together in six-sheet bundles, and started to work his way up and down the aisles, starting from the leftmost row. Kit sat there with his palms sweating, grateful that at least Mr. Mack wasn’t one of those sadists who called you up to the desk in front of everybody to get the bad news.

In the first row, subdued mutters of “Yes!” or “Oh, no...” were already going up. A couple of seats behind Kit and to the left, his buddy Raoul Eschemeling got his paper and looked at the back page, where Mr. Mack usually wrote the grade. Then he raised his eyebrows at Kit, grinned at him, at the same time making an “OK, not bad ...!” gesture with one hand.

Kit swallowed as Mr. Mack came to his row, gave Gracie Mackintosh her paper, gave Tim Walenczak, in front of Kit, his... and then glanced down at Kit, shook his head slightly, and walked on by. “I’ll see you after class,” Mr. Mack said.

The sweat all over Kit went cold in a flash. Some kids in the class broke out in either a low moan of “Uh-oh...” or some really nasty laughs that were badly smothered, on purpose. Kit went hot again at the laughter. There were some junior boys and a senior in here who resented being tracked into this class with the smart younger kids; these guys were constantly ragging Kit about his grades being too good.

As if something like that’s possible where my folks are concerned!
 Kit thought. But nonetheless, he could just hear them: 
He’s a geek, just a nerd, it comes naturally, he can’t help it.
Or else: 
teacher’s pet, little brownnoser, who knows what he’s doing to Mack to get grades like this
... They were just the normal jeers that Kit had long ago learned to expect, and it didn’t take mind reading or any other kind of wizardry to hear them going through those kids’ brains right now.

Kit could do nothing now but sit there as students all around him got their papers while his own desk remained terrifyingly empty. 
Oh, no. Oh, no. What’s going on? What have I done now?
 And the tragedy was that he had no idea. He racked his brain for anything that made any kind of sense, as the last papers in the right-hand row went out.

Mr. Mack made his way back to his desk. “Not a brilliant result, all told,” Mr. Mack said as he closed his briefcase and put it aside. “Workmanlike, in many cases. Dull, in a lot of others. You people need to get it through your heads that spitting a teacher’s exact words back at him in an essay, or adding material that’s plainly been plagiarized from encyclopedias and online sources, won’t cut it... with me, or the much tougher teachers to follow, who’ll get
really
offended at you insulting their intelligence with such lackluster output. None of your result exactly shone, and none of your results were utter disasters. With a very few exceptions.”

The silence was nearly as profound as the one that had leaned in around Kit earlier, but this one was far more unnerving. Kit felt eyes all around the room resting on him in scared or amused conjecture.

He glanced over his shoulder. Raoul hunched his tall, blond, gangly self down against his desk and rolled his eyes at the others’ reaction. The look he threw Kit was sympathetic. Raoul, too, had had a grade slump earlier in the year, and his own dad and mom had taken turns tearing strips off him about it ever since, invoking not getting into college and “a ruined résumé” and other dire threats if he didn’t shape up. Ever since, he and Kit had been studying together, and they’d both thought they had the course material down pat. 
Well, one of us did, anyway...

Mr. Mack glanced at the clock. It suddenly said two forty-three, and now Kit found himself wishing desperately that time would slow down again. “Well,” Mr. Mack said, “I’m sure you’re all thinking we’ve all seen enough of each other for one year. For the moment, I’m inclined to agree with you. So all of you just get yourselves the heck out of here!”

This invitation was immediately followed by a muted cheer and the concerted shriek of chairs being pushed back as the bell went. Everybody who hadn’t already leapt to his feet did so now and plunged toward the door: the classroom emptied as if it had been turned upside down and shaken. Kit stood there and watched everyone go... then finished stuffing his manual and other books into his book bag and went up to Mr. Mack’s desk.

“Well,” Mr. Mack said, glancing up from Kit’s notebook. “Any thoughts?”

This gambit was one of the Mack’s favorite ways to get a student to say something dumb, allowing him scope to verbally torture the unfortunate victim for many minutes thereafter. Kit was determined not to let this happen. “Okay, I shouldn’t have been drawing,” he said. “I should have been paying attention.”

Mr. Mack put his eyebrows up as if resigned at so quick a surrender. Kit had seen this maneuver, too, and what came of it: he refused to rise to the bait. For a few moments there was silence as each of them concentrated on outwaiting the other.

Then Mr. Mack glanced at the notebook. “It’s a thoat, isn’t it,” he said.

Kit followed his glance, surprised. “Uh, yeah.”

“Not a lot of people still read those books,” Mr. Mack said. “Burroughs’s style has to seem antiquated these days. But you can’t fault his imagination.” He looked down at Kit’s sketch of what had to be a very large creature, to gauge by the scale of the humanoid being standing next to it. “What made him decide to put so many legs on these things, I can’t imagine. I could never assemble a clear picture of a thoat in my head no matter how I tried.”

“If you sort of divide the legs into two sets—” Kit said.

“Six and two, huh?” Mr. Mack said, studying the drawing. “With the six in the back grouped for better traction? You may have a point.” Mr. Mack glanced up at him again. “But it’s possibly still an effort that might better have been saved for your art class.”

“Uh, yeah.”

He glanced across the page. “And that would be the calot, I guess. Another nice solution for the multiple legs. Nice tusks, too. You wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of that thing. And as for her…” Mr. Mack said, glancing down at the sketch again with a critical eye. “Well, you’ve put more clothes on her than Burroughs did. This rendition owes more to Victoria’s Secret than the descriptions in the original... so let’s let the inappropriateness issue ride for the moment.”

Kit blushed fiercely. “Now about your test,” Mr. Mack said. “You and Mr. Eschemeling have been working together. Pretty hard, I believe. So I was curious about... let’s call it a discrepancy in your performance on the final.”

What have I done to deserve this?
 Kit thought in despair. 
I worked so hard! I really studied for this, it should have been all right, I should at
 least 
have passed—

“Especially since there’s nothing wrong with your ability to discuss the material, even in front of your admittedly unsympathetic classmates,” Mr. Mack said. “That was a nice touch, by the way— that bit about being able to see the border from space. Saw that picture myself, some months back. It brings you up short.”

Kit didn’t feel inclined to mention that he hadn’t seen the image as a picture: the difference was clearly visible from the surface of the Moon when the weather on Earth was right. “The light on one side, and the darkness on the other...” Mr. Mack said. “A striking image. Too bad things aren’t usually quite so simple, especially over there. Anyway, no question that your work’s improved the last couple of months. You’ve been trying a whole lot harder than you were before.”

And this was true... which was why Kit couldn’t understand why he was standing here alone without a test paper in his hand. 
Mama’s going to go so ballistic with me, we’ll be able to use her to launch satellites! I can’t
 believe 
I—

“The problem might lie in the way your concentration comes and goes without warning, kind of like it did just then,” Mr. Mack said. “But we’ll chalk that up to end-of-term antsies, huh?” Then he grinned— an expression that Kit had rarely seen on Mr. Mack’s face before. Kit didn’t know if this was cause for alarm, but he was alarmed enough already. “Now, then—”

Mr. Mack popped his briefcase open and pulled out one last test paper. Kit instantly recognized his own handwriting on it.

“I thought I’d spare you the embarrassment of dealing with this in front of the class...” Mr. Mack said softly. “Don’t think I haven’t noticed that some of our older participants have issues.”

If Kit thought he’d been sweating before, he now found that his pores had been holding out on him. Mr. Mack looked at him with a thoughtful expression.

“And so,” he said, “because for all I know you may see some of them socially, I didn’t really want to give them a chance to make your life uncomfortable all summer because of—” and he held up the test paper— “this.”

Kit gulped and reached for the paper, shaking slightly. At the bottom of the front page, circled, was a number: 
99%.

Kit’s eyes went wide. “Ninety-nine?” he said.
“Ninety-nine!”

“Best mark in the class,” Mr. Mack said. “Congratulations.”

Then it hit Kit. “Ninety-nine??” he said, flipping the pages to look at them one after another. “
Why not a hundred!?”

Mr. Mack looked at his watch. “Possibly one of the shortest bursts of gratitude on record,” he said. “Kit, I had no choice. You misspelled ‘Pyongyang.’”

Kit was so torn between relief and completely unreasonable disappointment that all he could do was say “Oh.”

“One ‘o,’ one ‘a,’” Mr. Mack said. “I checked. Sorry about that. But your essay was terrific. Best I’ve seen in a long while. You’re showing at least a few of the warning signs of falling in love with history.”

Kit said nothing, partly from embarrassment at being praised, and partly because he suspected Mr. Mack was right, and he didn’t know what to make of that.

“So you can tell your mother, who I know was giving you grief,” Mr. Mack said, “that whatever else you’ve done in your other subjects this spring, you’ve passed history with flying colors, and I’m really pleased with you. She should be, too. Tell her to get in touch if she wants any more details.”

“She will,” Kit said.

Mr. Mack smiled slightly. “So did mine,” he said. “Mothers. What can you do?... Go on, get out of here. And enjoy your summer.”