His plan works like clockwork until fifth period—American literature, with Ms. Gilpin. The class is reading Steinbeck’s The Pearl. Neelay kind of likes the story, especially the part where the baby gets stung by the scorpion. Scorpions are outstanding creatures, especially giant ones.
Ms. Gilpin drones on about what the pearl symbolizes. To Neelay, it’s a pearl. He’s beating his head against a real problem: how to synchronize the dancing kite with the music. He flips through pages of printout when the solution jumps out at him: two nested loops. It’s like the gods draw it in bright chalk on his mind’s blackboard. He burbles to himself, “Oh, yeah!”
The class bursts out laughing. Ms. Gilpin has just asked, “No one wants to see the baby die, do they?”
Ms. Gilpin daggers everybody silent. “Neelay. What are you doing?” He knows not to say a word. “What’s in the notebook?”
“Computer homework.” Everyone laughs again at the insane idea.
“Are you taking a computer course?” He shakes his head. “Bring it here.”
Halfway through the journey up to her desk, he considers tripping and spraining his ankle. He hands over the notebook. She flips through it. Drawings, flowcharts, code. She frowns. “Sit down.”
He does. Ms. Gilpin returns to Steinbeck while he soaks in a pool of injustice and shame. After the bell, when the room clears, he returns to Ms. Gilpin’s desk. He knows why she hates him. His kind will drive hers extinct.
She opens the notebook to grids filled with images of blocky kites. “What is this?”
She has no idea of Uttarayan, or what it’s like to have a father like his. She’s blond, from Vallejo. Machines are her enemy. She thinks logic kills everything fine in the human soul. “Computer stuff.”
“You’re a smart boy, Neelay. What don’t you like about English? You’re so good at diagramming sentences.” She waits, but can’t outlast him. She taps the notebook. “Is this a game of some kind?”
“No.” Not the way she means it.
“Don’t you like to read?”
He feels sorry for her. If she only knew what reading could be. The Galactic Empire and its enemies are sweeping across the entire spiral of the Milky Way, waging wars that last for hundreds of thousands of years, and she’s worried about those three poor Mexicans.
“I thought you liked A Separate Peace.”
He liked it enough. It even punched him in the lungs, a little. But he can’t see what that has to do with getting his private property back.
“Doesn’t The Pearl interest you? It’s about racism, Neelay.”
He stands blinking, as at his first contact with alien intelligence. “Could I just get my notebook back, a little? I won’t bring it to class anymore.”
Her face crumples. Even he can see how he’s betrayed her. She thought he was in her camp, but he has slipped away from her over the weeks and turned enemy. She touches his notebook and frowns again. “I’m going to hold on to it for now. Until you and I are back on track.”
In a few years, students will shoot their teachers over less. He goes to her office at the end of the day. He fills his mind with sincere reform. “I’m very sorry about working in my notebook when you were teaching.”
“Working, Neelay? Is that what you were doing?”
She wants a confession. She wants him to thank her for saving him from the perils of playing games while all the rest of the class was hard at work extracting fiction’s pearls. Fifty hours of effort on his father’s kite lies four feet away, unreachable. She wants to humiliate him. Outrage boils over. “May I have my damn notebook back? Please?”
The word slaps her. Her eyes set and she goes to war. “That is a demerit. You swore at a teacher. What will your parents say?”
He freezes. His mother will fell him with one great blow, like so much jhatka meat.
Ms. Gilpin checks her watch. Too late to send him to the principal. Her boyfriend is picking her up in ten minutes. They’ll laugh together over the pigheadedness of this Indian boy with his notebook full of hieroglyphs. How he insisted that it wasn’t play. She turns into a pillar of authority. “I want you back at this desk tomorrow morning, before the first bell. Then we’ll talk about what you have coming to you.”
The boy’s blood hammers and his eyes burn.
“You may go.” Her eyebrows do a little push-up of command. “Until tomorrow. Seven a.m. sharp.”