“Mr. Merkel is fine,” the man said as he shook her hand.
Sal was very good at telling what people were thinking. His mother used to say that as a baby, he’d touch her face when she was sad, and he’d have a look of knowing, as if he were older than the oldest man. Now he watched Dee Pratzer flutter her eyelashes, and he knew she was flirting, but not in the sexy-sexy way his mom used to flirt with her customers at the bar. Dee Pratzer was impressed by this man, and wanted him to like her. Sal gave the man—Mr. Merkel—a good look for the first time. He was short, with thinning gray hair combed over his head. Even though the temperature would be over ninety by noon, he wore a brown tweed jacket over a crisp white dress shirt. He wasn’t wearing a tie, but he looked as though he wished he were. As though, that morning, he’d started to put on a tie, then decided against it.
Dee Pratzer turned back to Sal. She was still annoyed with him but didn’t want Mr. Merkel to see. “Didn’t your mother give you your schedule, sweetie?”
“My mom’s dead,” Sal said, and waited to see what she did. People’s reactions to this statement said a lot about them, he’d found. Some people didn’t know what to say, so they stammered and looked away. These people Sal liked. The ones who popped right out with their pity didn’t mean a word of it, and they weren’t to be trusted. He had a good idea which type Dee Pratzer would be.
She puckered her lips and said, “You poor dear.” Sal looked down so she wouldn’t see his satisfaction.
“Do you have a copy of his schedule?” Mr. Merkel asked, and Sal realized he hadn’t checked to see what he thought of his mom being dead.
Dee Pratzer printed out a sheet of paper like the ones the other kids had and handed it to Mr. Merkel. He turned to Sal and smiled a twinkly, generous smile. “You’re in my class for first period. How about I show you where it is?”
Mr. Merkel’s first-period class had twenty-three sixth graders, and the other twenty-two were there when Sal and Mr. Merkel arrived. In fact, Sal and Mr. Merkel were late, and the students were chasing one another around, swinging their backpacks, and rummaging through the boxes of rulers lined up on the air conditioner. The noise they made was joyful and animalistic and loud, and Sal found it harrowing.
Mr. Merkel, too, seemed taken aback. He stood in the doorway, his black leather briefcase hanging from one hand. Then he stepped inside and pulled the door shut. This small gesture had the effect of reducing the decibel level by half. A dozen of the children looked stricken, as though caught in very bad behavior, while the remainder merely looked disappointed.
“Take your seats, please,” Mr. Merkel said in his soft voice, but that filament of sound thrummed just enough to nudge twenty-two summer children into fall. Sal watched them sort themselves according to a hierarchy they must have established in elementary school. Six pretty, white girls sat at one table. They’d glued sparkly beads on their sneakers, so their feet glittered as they bounced their thin legs on the plastic seats. Eight brown kids crowded around another table, Paiute and Latino, their handed-down backpacks faded and frayed. Three kids with the hangdog look of misfits took a third table. Five boys sat at a table in the back, the ones whose shoulders had begun to spread just a little and who wore their athleticism like invisible capes. Sal sighed. The Marzen elementary school had been the same, only smaller.
When everyone was seated one chair was left, with the boys at the back table. Sal sidled along the wall and sat in it, trying to look as though he belonged there. He might not have athletic shoulders or the crisp, white, back-to-school Nikes they wore, but at least he was wearing basketball shorts like theirs. The five boys looked him over, first with curiosity and then, when they’d scanned him from his unruly hair to his ragged sneakers, dismissal. Sal’s face warmed. He wouldn’t be sitting there tomorrow, he knew. His chair would mysteriously migrate to the misfits’ table, as it had in Marzen.
Mr. Merkel pulled a sheaf of paper from his briefcase and stood beside his desk. He smiled, but it wasn’t the twinkly smile he’d given Sal in the office. This smile was thin and didn’t reach his eyes, and it made Sal uneasy. Mr. Merkel looked a little like Sal had felt when he got off the bus.
“I thought I’d start by telling you about myself,” he said. “My name is Dr.—Mr. Merkel. I moved from Reno to teach here.” He set the papers on his desk. He drummed his index fingers together, then picked up the papers again. “I was a professor at the University of Nevada, in the mathematics department. Number theory, mostly. Though I taught calculus, too, and statistics.” He ruffled the edges of the papers with his thumb. “You’re probably wondering why I’d leave that job to come here.”
Sal didn’t think anybody was wondering this except for him, but the frenzy of the early minutes had been smothered by the hum of the fluorescent lights, so they were listening, at least.
“I wanted to get back to the beginning,” Mr. Merkel said. “Back to when kids first get excited about math. When they start to see it’s more than multiplication tables and long division and realize it explains everything. Why the sky is blue. Why your chair holds you up. Why the wind blows from the west. It explains these things whether you speak English, Chinese, or Spanish. Two plus two is four no matter where you live, and the circumference of a circle is its diameter times pi no matter your religion. Our ability to understand these things is what separates us from the rest of the animals, and binds us together as a species.” He had an energy about him now, sparking and electric. “Math,” he said, “is the one true language of humanity.”
One of the pretty girls smacked her gum, but the girl next to her watched Mr. Merkel without blinking. Sal glanced around at the boys at his table. Two were bewildered. Another two were intrigued, but Sal could tell that the flush on Mr. Merkel’s cheeks made them uncomfortable. The fifth, a lanky boy with straight dark hair, watched Mr. Merkel with curiosity, spinning a pencil between his thumb and forefinger. Sal looked back to Mr. Merkel, waiting for the next verse of the poetry that had sprung so unexpectedly from this unassuming man.
But Mr. Merkel had lost his way. He cleared his throat and looked at his papers. In the silence he seemed to shrivel. The air in the room deflated as students shifted in their seats, some in disappointment, others in relief that the odd little speech was over.
Mr. Merkel handed the papers to the nearest student, a girl with black hair in a high ponytail. “Take one and pass them around.”
When the papers made their way to Sal he read the title: “Sixth Grade Math Topics and Expectations of Students.” A single-spaced outline filled both sides of the page, with headings like “Ratios and Proportional Relationships,” “Number Systems and Fractional Equations,” and “Prime Numbers and Prime Factorization.” Nowhere did it mention the color of the sky or the direction of the wind.
“We will start with ratios and proportional relationships.” Mr. Merkel turned to the whiteboard. His back in his brown tweed jacket was rounded like a shell.
The lanky boy at Sal’s table leaned forward, a smirk lifting one side of his mouth. “He looks like a turtle,” he said, and the other boys laughed.