Remedial Class

When Carl Frederich Gauss was ten, his teacher punished his class by making them add the numbers from one to a hundred. Before most of the other students had started, Gauss handed in his slate with the right answer. Mathematicians now think he started picking off pairs of numbers from each end of the sequence: one plus a hundred, two plus ninety nine, and so on—fifty pairs of numbers, each adding to a hundred and one: five thousand and fifty, bam!

Cinnamon was that fast.

After our meeting with the Dean, Vladimir had let Doug, Jack and I sit in on the math club. Six sets of problems were written on the whiteboards. I took a lot of math in college before I dropped out, but I recognized none of it other than the occasional sigma-for-sum or geometric symbol. Vladimir was before the board, lecturing to five of his star students sitting around him in a circle, all trying to pay attention to him … and to ignore Cinnamon.

And Cinnamon? My precious baby girl—who I’d missed so much, who I hadn’t seen in so long—barely reacted when she saw me, and focused instead entirely on the class, if focus you could call it. Cinnamon orbited the other students, bouncing around the room, sometimes leaning on the wall, sometimes squatting on chairs, watching like a cat—but most often standing by the window, staring outside, tail twitching, face spasming, occasionally cussing … all the time with one cat ear visibly cocked to Vladimir’s every word.

Vladimir was telling them how important this part of the ‘competition’ was; then he stepped aside and let the students attack problems written on the board. Cinnamon cursed and stomped up to the board, cocked her head at it, then grabbed a whiteboard marker in her fist and began scrawling answers before the other students had even started. She drew rectangles and arcs littered with symbols, and I understood her answers even less than the question.

“I thought this was a remedial class,” I murmured to Doug.

“For math PhDs, maybe,” Doug said. “No wonder her assignments looked so hard.”

Vladimir handed over the math club to one of the students and motioned us into his office. Unlike the spacious windowed affairs of the administrators, Vladimir’s office was apparently a converted storage closet—long, narrow, and surprisingly cozy.

“Keep your voices down; never underestimate werekin hearing,” Vladimir said, sitting on the corner of a desk facing a wall covered with photos of forests and clippings of math articles. “Cinnamon doesn’t understand. She thinks that because she’s in the special class, it must mean she’s stupid. The truth is the opposite—she’s so smart she’s not used to really having to work.”

I sighed. “Maybe this is too much too soon,” I said. “Maybe we need to track her back into a normal class, let her develop more stable peer relationships.”

Vladimir raised an eyebrow at me. “Your mother was a teacher, I recall? Your intuitions are good, but she’s bored out of her gourd in normal classes and gets very disruptive. You see what she’s like when she’s interested. We need to push her, hard, just to keep her engaged.”

“Well, maybe it’s the after-school tutoring,” I said. “Perhaps tutor her during hours—”

“Actually, the math club is one of the few things she’s almost guaranteed to show for,” Vladimir said. “Every single day this week, in fact, even on days she ditched school entirely.”

Doug was looking at some of Cinnamon’s homework. “I find myself agreeing with Dakota,” he said. “Doctor Vladimir, the physics of magic requires a lot of math, but I have to confess, speaking as her tutor, some of these assignments gave me a headache. I can see pushing her, but if you challenge her so hard she can never succeed, of course she’ll feel stupid.”

He held up the paper. The answers Cinnamon had written were scrawled so badly it looked like she’d been writing with crayons. Half the numbers were upside down, backwards, even rotated, and the answers seemed wrong. I was no expert, but it looked like dyslexia.

“Ah,” Vladimir said, taking the paper gently and staring at it like it was a treasure. “This was my ‘aha’ experience. You don’t take points off for a right answer just because it’s in nonstandard notation. Join me at the board, let’s see how she’s doing.”

In the classroom, Cinnamon was staring at the last problem. She’d scrawled several numbers down—a three, a backwards five, what looked like an upside down seven, and the number eight in a box with an arrow beneath it pointing to the left.

“Very good, Cinnamon,” he said. “But you can’t write it the way you came up with it.”

“Your way is square,” she said, eye flickering back at me, catlike. “Uff!”

“My way people will recognize,” he said. “Now, the three is already right. What about the others? How do we write the bass-acwards? What’s the right way to write upsy-downs? And do you really want to put an eight in the box? What’s the smallest box you gots?”

She scowled, then wrote -5 on the board, followed by 7i. After squinting at the eight, she wrote -√8 = -2√2. “Satisfied?” she said, head snapping aside in her sneezy tic. “Hah.”

“Holy cow,” I said. “She came up with her own notation for imaginary numbers?”

“It gets better,” Vladimir said. “Cinnamon, show us the path of the swirling brickies.”

“Sure,” she said, shrugging. She raised the marker, and then paused, her pupil nailing me out of the corner of her eye, triangular, so like the eye of the tiger I’d seen in the cage. “Mom, for the love, don’t hover. Fuck! You makes me nervous.”

I stepped back from the board. “Sorry.”

Cinnamon drew a rectangle on the board, tall but not too narrow, like a squat door. Then she divided it in two with a line across its middle. That left a square on its top … and another door-shaped rectangle at bottom, same shape as its parent, but smaller and turned on its side. She divided the new door with a new line, making an even smaller square and smaller rectangle—and kept repeating it, smaller and smaller each time, a brick road curling in.

“That’s the golden spiral,” Doug said, leaning forward suddenly.

“Isn’t it pretty?” Cinnamon said, drawing an arc curling in through each square that looked like the turns of a nautilus shell. “The brickies goes rounds and rounds, and the path swirls through them, all the way downs—”

“I know this,” I said. “No wonder it looked like a door—that’s the golden ratio. Artists use it to make their compositions look pleasing. It goes all the way back to the Greeks—”

“And as far as I can tell,” Vladimir said, “she reinvented it herself. Cinnamon, do you mind if I show your mother some of your notes?”

“Sure, I guesses,” she said, shrugging. “They’re stupid. Why would you want to?”

Vladimir took the three of us back into his office. After some digging, he found a folder, filled with page after page of photocopies of painfully scrawled notes in Cinnamon’s hand. “Her answers looked wrong, but consistently wrong,” he said, pointing out flipped and tilted numbers in her notes. “She was writing backwards for minus and upside down for imaginary—”

“Doc,” Cinnamon said, “you makes me look bad.”

“No, Cinnamon, this is amazing,” I said, taking the folder and paging through her notes, which went from painfully scrawled to largely incomprehensible as she incorporated more and more traditional math. “We’ve got to jump on this right away if she really is this smart.”

“Fuck,” Cinnamon said. “You just wants to give me more work!”

“Cinnamon,” I said, touching her shoulder. “I know schoolwork sucks. I hated it too. But even when I fell in love with tattooing, I had to work at it, hard. I don’t recognize half of this, but, if I’m reading these equations right … you must enjoy the heck out of math.”

She grinned despite herself, and so did I.

“I’m so glad you’re enjoying math, but I have to be straight with you, Cinnamon. The Dean called us all down here because you’ve been skipping your other classes,” I said. Her ears folded back, and she looked away. “We’ve talked it over, and they’ve agreed not to kick you out, for now, but you’re going to have to do your part. You’re going to have to show up—”

She hissed, twisting her head, pulling at her collar. “The other classes suck.”

“I wish I could tell you that it gets better, but it doesn’t,” I said. “And I know it seems like math is easy to you now, Cinnamon, but it’s going to get harder, too, and you need to learn to deal with it now. You’re going to have to learn to work at things. It doesn’t matter what you want to do, Cinnamon. If you want it … you’ll have to … work at it … ”

I trailed off, staring at the notes. Then I stood up. I was wrong. I did recognize this.

“Mom?” Cinnamon asked uncertainly.

“What’s this?” I asked, pointing at a diagram showing a rectangle—and a pentagram.

“It’s nothing,” she said defensively. “I was just looking for more paths of the brickies.”

“The golden ratio shows up in many figures,” Vladimir said sharply. He looked as defensive as Cinnamon. “Including the pentagram. There’s nothing demonic about it.”

“I never said that there was,” I said, showing the folder to Doug. “Look familiar?”

“Yeah,” he said, taking the sheets. “This a lot like graphomancy. In fact, this set of golden rectangles is very similar to what’s used by the tagger.”

“And this shows a one-to-one mapping to a pentagram,” I said. “Nothing demonic, but there’s a reason white magic uses circles and black magic uses pentagrams. In graphomancy, a circle is a shield to keep things out, whereas a pentagram is a receiver to draw things in.”

“Meaning?” Vladimir asked, still looking a bit defensive.

“Cinnamon has figured out,” I said, “how a pentagram maps onto a pattern of golden section rectangles. And our friend the graffiti tagger uses similar patterns in his magic. I’m guessing that’s how his graffiti gets so much power. It’s built like a magical receiver.”

“Uh … can I get a photocopy of this?” Doug said, turning the sheet back and forth. “I’m working on a similar problem with Dakota and this … this might help me.”

The door opened, and Jack Palmotti gestured to us. He’d gotten a call a few minutes earlier and had walked out to take it. “Miss Frost,” he said, “Can I see you outside?”

“Wait here, honey,” I said, and followed Palmotti out into the hall. “What is it now?”

“I hate to be the bearer of bad news,” he said, “but that was Margaret Burnham. She called to let me know about some developments in the case, and it slipped out that you were here, trying to do the right thing by Cinnamon,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

“No good deed goes unpunished,” I said. “Technically, I’m not in custody of Cinnamon, but the court order doesn’t say I can’t be in the same—tell me there’s not a new court order.”

“There wasn’t until just now,” Palmotti said. “When you were arrested, it was apparently all over the news. The prosecutor saw it, and asked the judge to issue a restraining order.”

—

“They’ve barred you from seeing Cinnamon at all until the case is resolved.”