Zoe Versus the Sparkles

Zoey was late for school. Again. She hurried along, the book bag over her shoulder bouncing against her hip, but kept a careful eye on the sidewalk in front of her. One encounter with a sparkle had cost her twenty minutes. Who knew how long a second would set her back?

At last, the walkway to the main doors of Bethel Public High School came into view; not one student anywhere to be seen outside. She ran the last dozen steps to fling the door open and charge into the deserted hallways. The attendance office was the second door on the left, past the main office, and Mrs. Pearson stood behind the counter, fussing with stacks of forms and notes. She looked up when Zoey entered and rolled her eyes.

“Miss Solis,” she said, crossing her arms and scowling. “Tardy again, I see. What happened this time?”

“I was …” Zoey leaned a hand against the counter and took a few deep breaths, preparing to deliver the story she’d concocted on the long walk to school. “I tried a new … way to school." Zoey wiped at her forehead. "Through the woods. I guess I got turned around.”

“Lost?” Mrs. Pearson replied, her scowl deepening. “You’ve been coming to this school for nearly seven weeks. If you haven’t learned your way here by now, I have little hope for your eventual graduation.”

“Yes, Mrs. Pearson.” Zoey lowered her gaze to the floor.

“I’ll have to inform your parents.” Mrs. Pearson turned to her computer and pecked away at the keyboard. “This is your fourth time being tardy …”

Hope fluttered in Zoey’s chest. That was a lot less than she’d thought.

“This month,” Mrs. Pearson finished, and Zoey’s head sagged as the growing hope melted away. “You know what that means?”

“Yes, Mrs. Pearson,” Zoey answered. 

“Detention.”

“To be served this afternoon. I’ll inform your parents of this as well,” Mrs. Pearson continued. “You know where to go?”

“Room 105.”

Mrs. Pearson brushed at her green sweater as she studied Zoey through her thick glasses for a few moments in silence.

“Miss Solis. I’m not one of your guardians, but I am worried about you. It appears you have little regard for your education and are prone to distraction and flights of fancy.”

“I strongly suggest,” Mrs. Pearson scratched on a pad of yellow paper as she spoke. “That you focus your attention on your learning. It will determine the path of the rest of your life.”

“Yes, Mrs. Pearson.” Zoey took the completed late slip and tucked it into her jacket pocket. “Can I go to class now?”

“You may indeed.” Mrs. Pearson turned back to her computer.

Zoey’s pace and mood were subdued as she walked through the halls of the school towards her first class. Detention was so boring here. In her former school, before her family had moved to Bethel, she’d had plenty of detention but hadn’t minded it all that much. There, the students in detention could work on just about anything they wanted, so she almost always finished her homework and had the rest of the day to herself. But here, students in detention had to write a report on why they were there, what had caused it and what they were going to do so that it didn’t happen again. This was Zoey’s seventh time in detention this school year, and she’d run out of ways to stop being late.

Zoey stepped into the classroom, checked the clock and found herself almost a half hour late.

“Zoey Solis,” Mr. Berger said from his spot at the blackboard. “We’re pleased you decided to join us today.”

“Sorry, Mr. Berger,” Zoey mumbled, dumping her bag on her chair and digging out the blue binder while her classmates whispered and stared at her. She busied herself with flipping through her notes as her teacher turned back to the problem on the board.

“As we were saying,” Mr. Berger spoke from the front of the room, tapping at a rough drawing on the blackboard. “Rail King train 724 departs Boston heading west towards Sandusky, seven hundred miles away, at eighty miles per hour. At the same time, SuperTranspo train CCY departs Sandusky, heading east towards Boston at sixty miles per hour.”

The distance-rate-time triangle again. We’ve been over this again and again, yet half of them still can’t pick out the important information. And really, that’s all it is, finding the important bits and shoving them together in the right way.

“Your assignment is to find two values for each train when they pass each other. First is how much time has elapsed since they’ve left the station and second is how far they’ve traveled. You have five minutes.”

A soft groan sounded from the desk behind Zoey, and she couldn’t help but smile. Julia Burrows would spend every second of her time on this project scribbling away, yet produce nothing valuable. There were several other students in the class who had trouble with word problems, but none were as hopeless as Julia. She’ll have a hard time understanding that if the two trains left their stations at the same time, the elapsed time when they met would be the same for both of them. It just had to be because … well, it did.

Let’s see. Seven hundred miles, combined speed of one hundred and forty miles … that’s five hours.

The answer was so simple that she took the time to write it out to make sure it was correct. Usually they wound up with long, repeating decimals and had to tap away at their calculator apps to finish. To have a whole number was something they hadn’t seen since the very first few times they’d done word problems last week, as it made the rest of the work easy.

She didn’t bother to go through the rest of the calculations, just set her pencil down on her desk and looked around the room. Most of her classmates were nose down and scribbling away while a few just stared at the blackboard and read the problem repeatedly without writing a single thing down. Nobody else looked to have finished yet.

She looked over at Mr. Berger and found him watching her carefully and tapping a fingertip on his desktop.

He’s going to call on me for the answers. Whether it’s for being late or being done quickly, I don’t know. But it’s going to be me.

Math, as her grades reflected, wasn’t her best subject by a long way. When work had started on the distance, rate, time triangle problems, they’d immediately made sense to her and she’d scored perfect on the quiz, surprising both Mr. Berger and herself. Even the complicated ones, the ones where it seems like they’re not giving you enough information, weren’t all that hard to figure out. She only needed to use her phone when there were long decimals. If she could leave things as fractions, she could have done them on paper, or sometimes just in her head.

“Pencils down,” Mr. Berger said as he rose, and Julia groaned even louder.

“Miss Solis,” Mr. Berger went on. “I notice you wrote only a few numbers down and didn’t use a calculator. Please explain.”

“I figured the time out in my head, but it didn’t seem right,” Zoey began and felt half the class turning to look at her. “We haven’t seen whole numbers in a while, so I divided seven hundred by one hundred and forty on paper to make sure it was correct.”

The teacher continued to stare at her, and Zoey tried to think of what else he could want.

“It’s five.” She said eventually.

“Yes, it is.” Mr. Berger gave a gentle nod of his head. “But that wasn’t the assignment and is very basic mathematics.”

“But it is the assignment, Mr. Berger,” Zoey said quickly. “The combined speed is one hundred forty miles per hour. And they left at the same time, so the elapsed time is the same. They both traveled for five hours. The first train went eighty miles an hour for five hours, so that’s four hundred miles. The second one went sixty miles an hour for five hours, so that’s three hundred miles.”

“That’s not the method I've taught for solving these problems.” His tone had Zoey wanting to squirm in her seat.

“But … it’s easier,” she pressed on. “I know it only works when they leave at the same time, but they did in this one. It doesn’t make sense to do all the extra work if you don’t have to, does it?”

“You took a holistic approach,” her teacher answered with a little smile. “Which is exactly why your time value was a whole number and is the lesson for the day.”

“I took a whole …” Zoey trailed off.

“Holistic,” Mr. Berger replied. “It means you looked at the entire problem rather than at just the parts.”

“So,” Mr. Berger addressed the class again. “As Miss Solis has demonstrated, it’s not always necessary to determine each value independently. There are some instances where we can identify a common value and reduce the steps needed to solve the problem.”

Zoey tried to pay attention to the lesson but found it just a rerun of what she’d already figured out and delivered in far too much detail. In only moments, she found her thoughts drifting.

Normally, they would have drifted to the sparkles and the mysteries she just couldn’t crack. Today, however, possibly triggered by Julia’s huge and frustrated sighs, her fellow students were on her mind. Not individually, as she didn’t know any of them all that well, but as an enormous mass; a body that saw her as strange. Having had the same reaction at her last school in Boulder, Colorado, she was used to being avoided and teased; used to spending a lot of time alone.

Really, it was much easier this way. She had to come up with fewer excuses when the sparkles messed with her life and she missed appointments or was late or just vanished from an event. At least here she could just be the strange girl from the beginning and not have to go through all the business of dropping out of soccer, leaving the volleyball team, quitting gymnastics and getting out of her volunteer duties in the library.

She missed those things, of course, but had learned long ago that a life dealing with the sparkles was not a normal one. The sparkles interfered with everything, every day. She had to be careful where she stepped and what she touched, always vigilant to avoid them wherever they turned up. Because how and where they would appear was a mystery Zoey couldn't solve.

The rest of the morning was slightly more interesting than the math lesson. Macbeth, once she’d dug through the words to figure out what was being said and what it meant, was a good story even if she didn’t get all the deeper meanings Mrs. Perez explained. They’d finished George Orwell’s Animal Farm a couple of weeks ago and she’d liked that story a lot better. The morals in that book had been a lot easier to understand, and it was simpler to see how they related to the world.

Zoey spent lunch at a table surrounded by the group she thought of as the Familiar Strangers. Boys and girls of varying ages who didn’t fit in with those in their grade, who ate in silence until the bell rang and they could go outside.

Once allowed out, Zoey sat against a tree and thumbed through a book she’d picked up from her father’s collection on the bookshelves. It was an old science-fiction story about robots in the future and it was only just okay. Sci-fi wasn’t her favourite genre by a long shot, but something about the cover of this one had appealed to her. It was an image of two men, one holding up an arm that had the flesh pulled back to reveal a robot arm and the other man with a shocked expression on his face. What could it be about? Were the robots hiding amongst the humans? Were they servants? Why was that guy’s arm exposed? Was it a war? There were so many unanswered questions that she just had to read it.

Checking her watch, she found she had fifteen minutes to get to her next class. No rush at all, but Zoey needed to stop at the washroom. She packed the novel into her book bag, patted herself down to make sure she had all her belongings and reached out one hand to push herself up.

She didn’t notice the sparkle on the ground and put her palm square on it.

Chapter the Second