Not If I See You First(21)

“Scott,” Ms. McClain says. “Molly’s not here today. Can you help Parker this period?”

My next heartbeat is painfully fierce and my mouth opens to deflect this request but someone beats me to it.

“I’ll do it!” D.B. says, sounding way too eager, but I’m desperate so I’ll take it.

“I don’t know…” Ms. McClain says. Is she trying but failing to keep the dubious tone from her voice, or is she deliberately injecting it?

“I’m already sitting right here,” D.B. says.

“It’s okay,” Scott says, his voice like a wink. “It’s not like he has to teach Parker anything. He just has to tell her what’s on the board. He’s smart enough to do that much.”

D.B. laughs. It sounds genuine. Either this is okay trash talk or D.B. doesn’t know an insult when he hears it.

“Do I have a say in this?” I ask, invoking a variation of Rule Six.

“I’ll leave it to you, Parker,” Ms. McClain says and starts talking to someone else up in the front of the class.

I point toward Scott, then D.B., and back again. “Eeny meeny miny moe, catch a douchebag by his toe, if he… whines then let him go, eeny meeny miny moe.”

My finger is pointing to D.B., as planned. When doing Eeny Meeny with only two choices, always point to the one you don’t want first.

“Cool,” D.B. says. “I’ll move to Molly’s seat so I don’t have to twist around.” He executes this maneuver with an amazing amount of clatter, like a one-man band changing seats on a bus. The bell rings.

Ms. McClain talks for a while. Then the squeak of marker on the board tells me she’s writing.

“She’s drawing a circle,” D.B. whispers loud enough they can probably hear it across the hall. People giggle.

“I can’t see,” I whisper, in an actual whisper, “but my hearing is excellent.”

“Uhhh… Oh, am I too loud?” More giggles. Ms. McClain ignores it.

“Well, louder than I need, anyway.”

“Sorry,” he whispers, just as loudly. “Now she’s drawing lines from the middle to the… circle part… I don’t know how to tell you where the lines are going… They’re like spokes on a bike tire.”

“Wheel.”

“What?”

“On a wheel, not a tire. Never mind. Just think of a clock. Where are the lines going?”

“Huh?”

“Like, twelve o’clock, three o’clock?”

“Oh yeah. Twelve, one, two, three… like all the numbers, pretty much. Wait, more than twelve… like…” He mumbles some, then, “Fifteen or sixteen.”

“So… she’s drawing a unit circle?”

“What’s that? She’s putting those numbers around the outside like she did last week, like square root of two and stuff. Is that right?”

I resist the urge to remind him that I can’t verify anything he’s describing. “Sounds right to me,” I whisper, even quieter than last time to see if I can bring his voice down.

“Why’s it called that?” he asks, a bit louder, like he’s trying to bring my voice up.

“Well, it’s just a circle with a radius of one. It doesn’t matter whether it’s one inch or one mile, it’s just one whatever unit, so they call it a unit circle.”

“Yeah but so what?”

“Well, she’s writing angles on it, right? And how long the lines are? It’s just like in geometry with those special triangles, like a 45-45-90 triangle has a hypotenuse that’s the length of a side times the square root of two. Except if the radius of the circle was two, all those numbers would need a two in front of them but that’s not the point. It’s like reducing a fraction; you divide out the common factors and you’re left with… well, a unit circle.”

“Okaaay… but so what? What’s it for?”

At that moment I realize the room is dead quiet. No talking, no squeaking.

“That’s probably what she’s about to tell us,” I whisper.

“Correct on all counts, Parker,” Ms. McClain says. “Have you taken any trigonometry before?”

“No. When Molly and I do homework we look ahead to see what’s coming. It makes it easier to follow what’s going on in class.”

“That’s something you all should be doing,” she says. “Especially those of you who can see the board but can’t seem to keep your eyes open this early.”

Clunk shuffle clatter. “Hey!” Laughter.

I guess she kicked some guy’s chair to wake him up—I don’t know the voice—there are lots of voices I don’t know yet.

Luckily what follows is twenty minutes of talking without much writing on the board. Then she passes out worksheets for us to collaborate on and then it’s D.B. reading to me. He’s better at describing triangles than circles: “It has a little square in the corner, and the small side is a one, and the slanty side is a two, and the angle is between the little side and the slanty side, and they want to know what the sine is…” I pretty much know the answers right away, but he doesn’t, so I walk him through it all. I get him to say sine instead of sin but I can’t get him to say hypotenuse at all. I think he’s afraid it conflicts with his masculinity, like saying chartreuse or armoire.