Learning to Swear in America (16 page)

In forty-five minutes, the asteroid would be 119,000 miles closer.

Mr. Reynolds wasn’t in the room yet, but his desk was at the front, beside a glass tank. The snake inside was black with irregular brown blotches, and bigger than Yuri had expected. It stared at him with black eyes as he walked past, and darted its forked tongue out. Yuri pulled a spare chair over and sat in the back corner. Dovie, Mary, and James leaned against a bookcase beside him. He glanced around the room, looking for Jake Bortell, his scooting nemesis, but didn’t see him.

“Mr. Reynolds always comes in late,” Mary explained. “He talks with the teacher next door.”

A kid in front of them turned around. “Hey, it’s Crash!” Several kids waved.

“Crash?” Yuri said.

“You already have a nickname,” Mary said, bouncing a pencil on her algebra text.

“Because of cymbals?” Yuri said.

“Okay, that sounds like a good story,” Mary said, “but no. It’s because of slamming Jake Bortell in gym class.”

“Ah.” His list of people to avoid was growing exponentially. “I’m clearly not genius at high school.”

“Nobody is,” Dovie said. “It’s not something you excel at; it’s just something you try to survive.”

That reminded Yuri. “In gym class, with scooters—they grade you on this?”

The girls pulled comically sad faces and nodded.

“But this is stupid. Scooting is not important skill. It has neither theoretical importance nor practical application.”

“
Where
did you get him?” James asked.

“Hold on there,” Mary said, twirling a pencil. “My great-grandfather was at Normandy. When the troops hit the beaches, they rode scooters in counterclockwise circles while keeping a ball in the air. If they hadn’t been able to do that, Hitler would have won.” Dovie snorted. Mary pointed the pencil at Yuri. “The price of liberty is eternal gym class.”

Mr. Reynolds walked in. He was a thick, solid man wearing a trace of a sneer. Yuri took an instant dislike to him. Dovie, Mary, and James scattered to their seats. The teacher saw Yuri.

“Hey, who are you?”

Yuri rose. “I’m just visiting.”

Mr. Reynolds stared at him for a moment. “They didn’t tell me anyone was coming.”

Yuri held his breath.

“Yeah, okay.” The teacher turned to the rest of the class and rubbed his palms together. “Today is Feed the Snake Day. If you don’t know your quadratic equations, you’re going to be responsible for killing one of the fuzz faces in the back.” The class was absolutely silent.

Yuri looked over and saw the dwarf hamster tank. He couldn’t
see the animals, but with his peripheral vision he saw Dovie stiffen.

“I hope you studied,” Mr. Reynolds said. He moved to the marker board and, working from a sheet of paper, wrote (1–
i
) (√–9). “Okay, Devon Ayres. Come up, simplify, and save a hamster.”

A tall guy with a mass of dark curls swung out of the first seat. He started working the problem, and got about halfway through before he seemed to be in trouble. It occurred to Yuri that maybe he could make a bet with the teacher—he would do all the problems, for all the hamsters. But the teacher might not go for it, and then Yuri would be on his radar. Devon gave a glance back at the class and Yuri held up three fingers, then pointed at his eye three times. Devon stared at him for a moment, then wrote 3 + 3
i
on the board. Mr. Reynolds looked disappointed as he dismissed him.

Ayisha Billingsley was doing fine finding the domain and range of the relation given for problem two, so Yuri watched the back of Dovie’s head.

A guy went up next, worked a problem, shrugged, and stepped away before Yuri could make contact. They should have let people know before class that he could help. Why hadn’t they done that? Mr. Reynolds gave it a long look but finally nodded and called up a girl who trembled as she picked up the marker.

x
²
+
5x
=
14
appeared on the board. “Solve for
x
,” Mr. Reynolds said. Yuri frowned. There were two answers:
x
equaled 2 and −7. Did she know that? Did she understand that there was more than one answer?

The girl wrote the equation in order of descending degrees, but when she tried to write the quadratic formula, substitute, and simplify, it went to pieces. She dropped the marker.

“A fuzz face is sweating back there,” Mr. Reynolds called. He still had the trace of a sneer, and Yuri wanted to write 2 on one fist, −7 on the other and give Mr. Reynolds the answers himself. The girl kicked the marker when she tried to pick it up, and when she finally grabbed it and stood, her face was blotched red and she had a tear track down her cheek. Dovie was next, and she was already starting to tremble. Yuri held up two fingers, but the girl didn’t understand. She turned back to the board with a soft moan.

Mr. Reynolds turned and saw Yuri with his fingers in the air. “Yes? You have a question?”

“Um, just stretching.”

Mr. Reynolds narrowed his eyes, then turned to the board. “Give up, Lupe? Ready to feed the snake?”

“She had answers up there,” Yuri said. “She wrote two and negative seven. Are those right?” Mr. Reynolds gave him a long look. Lupe took the opportunity to write the answers on the board. Mr. Reynolds stared at her work, then at Yuri. The teacher wasn’t, as it turned out, a fool.

“I think,” Mr. Reynolds said, “that you just cheated in my class.” He twirled the marker. “Why don’t you come up here and do a problem for us, if you know so many answers?”

“Sure,” Yuri said, trying not to smile. He walked to the front as slowly as he could. Dovie was next, and he needed to kill some
time. While Mr. Reynolds wrote a problem on the board, Yuri looked at the cage in the back. A hamster, all fuzz and tiny face, stood on its back legs and put its pink front toes against the glass. Dovie sat, arms across her chest, head down, tapping her foot. He caught her eye and smiled.

Mr. Reynolds grabbed a marker and attacked the board, his hasty scrawl leaving a faint chemical stink hovering in the air. He held the marker out. “There—I never caught your name.”

“They call me Crash.”

Yuri took the marker, glanced at the problem, −
x
²
−
2x
= −
4
, then wrote
x
= −
1
+
√5
≈
1.24
, and below it,
x = −1 − √5
≈
−3.24
. He capped the pen and laid it on the tray, and smiled at Dovie. In the back, the hamster raised a pink paw in salute.

“Wrong,” Mr. Reynolds said.

Yuri wheeled to look at his answers. He scanned them twice. “No, is right.”

“You didn’t show your work,” Mr. Reynolds said. “That’s a requirement. Therefore, the answers are wrong.”

The class groaned. Yuri stared at him.
You are the snake. Dovie is the hamster, and you are the snake.
Mr. Reynolds sneered and his trapdoor mouth opened. “Please go to the back of the room,
Crash
, and choose two hamsters, since you didn’t show your work for either answer. It’s time to feed the snake.”

Dovie stared at her desktop. Yuri walked back to the hamster cage. He watched them for a moment. They were the size of his pinkie finger and, well, pretty cute. When he got back to Moscow
he should get one as a pet. “I can’t decide,” he said. “Could next student make decision?”

Mr. Reynolds’s sneer widened. “Sure. Dovie Collum, go back there and help him choose.”

Dovie stood, her face ashen, staring at him.
Come on, Dovie. Trust me.
She walked to the back. He whispered “Lid is stuck” as she reached him. She put a hand on the cover and he laid his palm over her fingers, keeping her from lifting it. “Is stuck.”

“Oh,” she said. “Yes.” He wandered backward, away from the tank. “Mr. Reynolds?” she called. “The lid is stuck. I can’t get them out.”

The teacher exhaled in disgust and stalked to the back of the room. Yuri trotted forward and hefted the snake tank up. He’d calculated the volume and estimated its weight with the snake at under sixty pounds. Difficult, but not impossible. A guy he didn’t know stepped sideways to open the door for him and gave him a tight nod as Yuri crabbed sideways out of the classroom. Yuri nodded back and saw a dozen students rise, blocking the door—buying him time.

The best way to save a hamster was to get rid of the snake.

He struggled down the stairs, imagined falling, the glass tank shattering and the snake coiling around his neck. Expecting to be stopped. As soon as he was down the stairs, he trotted across the green and cream linoleum squares, pushed the school door open with the tank, and was at the edge of the road, breathing heavily with exertion and adrenaline, when the taxi pulled up.

Yuri paid the driver extra to take him back to his hotel so he
could change out of the borrowed jeans and red T-shirt, then gave him another twenty to take the snake to the Humane Society.

At JPL, Yuri went straight to his office and booted up his computer. He was working mostly by hand, but nothing looked as derelict as a black screen. He spread out yesterday’s work and by the time Karl Fletcher poked his head in the door, he not only looked like he was working, he actually was.

“You sick or something?”

“Hmm?” Yuri looked up, a pencil in his hand, his hair already crumpled from grabbing it with his fist. “Oh, maybe I was fighting something off.” Jake Bortell, prankster percussionists, and a python-wielding psychopath. “I’m here now.”

Fletcher gave him a long, cool look. “Right.” He turned to go, then paused. “Don’t do this again. My heartburn is already eating the backs of my eyeballs, without wondering if we lost Russia’s boy wonder.”

Yuri tried to look innocent, and then Fletcher was gone and he slumped in his chair. He hadn’t made it through a single day of high school. He hadn’t made it to lunch.

It was eleven days to impact.

Yuri went in early the next morning, making up time. He worked steadily through the morning, looking up the first time Karl Fletcher poked his head in without knocking, and ignoring him the second time. He was there, and he was working.

In the afternoon he went down to the cafeteria for an orange juice. Maybe this was why so many adults were overweight. You could take a break for food; you couldn’t take one to go for a walk. He shut his office door with a soft click and got back to work.

It was four o’clock when his phone rang. He expected Simons, maybe Pirkola, but it was Dovie.

“You need to come to our house for dinner.”

“Oh. Why?”

“Thank you for the invitation, Dovie. I’d be delighted, Dovie.”

“Yeah,” Yuri said. “But seriously, why?”

Dovie sighed audibly. “Lennon’s feeling down. Mom and I
think we should have some people around, so Dad’s going to grill. Mary’s coming over, and a couple of Lennon’s friends, and you should come, too. You ever eaten a hot dog? It’s not really dog—it’s pig lips and cow anus. You’ll love it. I’ll get you at the hotel in half an hour.”

The cow anus distracted him, and Dovie hung up before he could ask why Lennon was upset. Maybe he knew what was for dinner. Yuri took the car service back to the hotel, removed his tie, and unfastened his top button—a bold sartorial move. He grinned at himself in the mirror—he had been invited somewhere.

When Dovie bounced to a stop in the restaurant lot, her friend Mary was in the front seat, so Yuri climbed into the back.

“What happened to Lennon?” he asked, scrambling to fasten his seat belt as Dovie accelerated onto the road, one tire clipping the curb.

“There’s this hot YA librarian,” Dovie said. “He asked her out and she said no.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. He launched a monthlong charm offensive and asked her at the end of it. Now he’s really bummed.”

“So you’re having party because girl rejected him?”

Mary turned around and stared at him. She could do something with her eyes that was a little frightening.

“
No
,” she said. “We’re trying to
support
him.”

Yuri sat back in his seat and decided to be quiet for a while.

When they got to the Collums’ house, Dovie led them around to the backyard. Mr. Collum was standing at a little round grill,
wearing short pants. Mrs. Collum set ceramic plates on a picnic table to hold down a tablecloth stirred by the breeze, while Lennon sat between a couple of guys by a red cooler. One of the guys looked at them, tilted his chin up in greeting, and lifted the cooler lid with the side of his foot. Cool guy, cool move. Yuri made a mental note to use it sometime—possibly not while wearing dress shoes.