Then she was gone, and Imani was left with the phrase lodged under her ribs.
Productive struggle.
At lunch she sat at the end of a long table and ate half a sandwich she did not taste. Across the cafeteria, Mr. Ellery stood near the faculty table speaking with Dean Harriet Wexler, a tall woman with silver streaks in black hair and a habit of nodding before people finished sentences. Imani could not hear them. She could see Ellery's hands: open, explanatory, then briefly closed into fists that he remembered to release.
Cole slid into the seat across from her with a tray of pasta that looked boiled into submission. "My dad says if a teacher writes a hard problem, it's because he wants to see who panics."
"Your dad isn't in our class," Imani said.
"He went here," Cole said, as if that settled the epistemology of fear.
Rohan arrived late with an apple and a frown. "People are saying you embarrassed him."
"I corrected an equation."
"Same thing, in this building," Rohan muttered.
Imani wanted to be the kind of girl who shrugged. She was not. She cared too much about being exact, and exactness made enemies of people who preferred atmosphere. She also cared—more than she liked admitting—about being liked. That was her flaw, the one she could name: she wanted justice and belonging in the same hour, and Halberd rarely sold them as a pair.
After school she rode the bus with her forehead against the cool window. The city moved past in strips of brick and storefronts. She practiced what she would tell her mother and discarded every version that sounded either triumphant or afraid.
Rhea was home early for once, still in scrubs, hair wrapped, sitting at the kitchen table with a stack of continuing-education modules and a mug gone cold. She looked up when Imani came in and read her daughter's face the way she read charts: for what was written and for what was missing.
"What happened?" Rhea asked.
Imani set the purple backpack down carefully. "Mr. Ellery put a problem on the board that couldn't have a real solution the way he wrote it. I said so. He told me to prove it. I did."
Rhea's eyebrows rose. "And then?"
"And then he told us to open our books."
"That's not an and-then," Rhea said gently. "That's a delay."
Imani sat. She told the rest: the whisper, the oval, the gasp, the cafeteria conference of hands. Rhea listened without interrupting, which was one of her specialties. When Imani finished, Rhea rubbed her temples.
"Did you disrespect him?"
"I don't think so."
"Did you enjoy being right in front of everyone?"