Imani slept after that, fever doing its dull work. When she woke, the paperback of logic puzzles had fallen open on the floor to a page about false premises. She smiled without humor and closed it.
---
Returning to school after the fever day, she found a sticky note on her locker, unsigned: Sorry people suck. Keep being scary at math. The handwriting looked like Lila's. Or like someone imitating Lila. Imani kept the note in her folder. Kindness without a name was still kindness; she simply did not build her house on it.
In Algebra, Mr. Ellery handed back a problem set. At the top of Imani's he had written: Clear structure. Watch arithmetic in line 3. No smiley faces. No inflation. Respect, of a sort.
She corrected line 3 before the period ended, not for him, for the integrity of her own page.
---
Over the weekend the apartment filled with ordinary sounds that felt newly precious: the washing machine's uneven thump, a neighbor arguing cheerfully with a sports broadcast, Rhea humming an old highlife tune while she chopped onions. Imani worked through an algebra packet and then, because her brain would not stop replaying the oval on the board, she wrote a one-page explanation of why intentionally insolvable items, undisclosed, functioned as sorting mechanisms. She did not use the word racism. She did not need to for the logic to stand; she also knew that race lived in the hallway rumors about aid and in the way "climate" had arrived so quickly after her hand went up. She kept the page in her notebook. Rhea read it and said, "Save that. Not for them yet. For you."
Saturday afternoon Cole texted—Rhea had allowed a school-group thread after vetting privacy settings with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for unlabeled medication.
Cole: my dad says Ellery is a legend and you shouldn't have called him out
Cole: also my dad is kind of a jerk sometimes
Cole: sorry
Imani stared at the messages until the words blurred.
Imani: I called out an equation
Imani: if your dad wants to debate signs he can come to class
Rohan joined:
Rohan: Cole's dad donated a scoreboard once. He thinks that makes him faculty.
Rohan: for the record I told my parents what happened. My dad said "good" and my mom said "careful." Both can be true.
Lila:
Lila: enrichment offer is a classic soft exit. refuse the exile framing. take the math if you want the math.
Imani felt less alone and also more exposed. Friendship as group chat was a net with holes. Still, nets mattered.