"Do you trust him?"
"I trust the paper," Rhea said. "And I trust you. The rest we verify."
---
That night after the fit conference, sleep did not come when invited. Imani lay in her twin bed listening to the refrigerator cycle on and off. She replayed Dean Wexler's voice saying support, not sanction, and tried to decide whether the difference was real or cosmetic. She thought of Mr. Ellery saying filter and the way Dean Wexler's face had tightened, as if accuracy itself were a breach of professional manners.
She got up and drank water in the dark kitchen. Rhea appeared in the doorway, hair wrapped, eyes half open.
"Bad dreams or bad meetings?" Rhea asked.
"Both. Same source."
Rhea sat. The linoleum was cool under Imani's feet. "When I was your age," Rhea said, "a teacher told me I asked questions that 'derailed the lesson.' What she meant was I asked questions she couldn't answer without preparing. My mother told me to keep asking and to write the questions down so no one could pretend I hadn't. You're in a longer version of that story. I hate that for you. I also know you're built for it, which is not the same as deserving the burden."
Imani leaned against the counter. "Did you ever stop asking?"
"For a year in college," Rhea admitted. "I tried shrinking. Shrinking made me sick. Literally—stomach, sleep, the works. I went back to asking and got better at choosing audiences. That's not purity. That's survival with principles."
"Is that what we're doing? Surviving with principles?"
"Yes," Rhea said. "And insisting the school meet us with paper. Paper is boring. Boring protects children."
They sat until Imani's eyelids grew heavy. Rhea walked her back to bed and tugged the blanket up with a tenderness that had nothing to do with strategy. Imani slept finally, dreamless for once.
---
The week after the conference, Room 214 developed a new social weather. Some students treated Imani like a curiosity: asking her to check their homework with a mix of respect and testing. Others avoided her desk as if correctness were contagious. Elise—before the science lab of later months—offered her a mint at lunch with no speech attached, which Imani ranked among the better human behaviors.
Mr. Ellery taught with a careful neutrality that sometimes tipped into stiffness. He called on Imani at a normal rate. He called on Sutton more than usual, perhaps to rebalance some invisible scale. When Sutton got a factoring problem wrong, Mr. Ellery corrected him gently and without spectacle. Imani noticed. She also noticed that gentleness given after public sting could be growth or public relations. She logged observations without pretending she could see into his soul.
In the faculty lounge—though Imani was not there—rumor would later filter through Lila's brother that two teachers had argued about whether Ellery had been "undermined." Ms. Dane, according to the same rumor, had said, "If a sixth grader can undermine your pedagogy by reading your board, examine your board." Imani never confirmed the quote. She kept it anyway as a story that felt true enough to warm her hands.
Friday afternoon Rhea took Imani to the eye doctor because one hinge of the gold-rimmed glasses had loosened. The optician tightened it while talking about school sports. Imani stared at the eye chart and thought about clarity as a literal and figurative need. On the walk back to the bus stop, a woman selling secondhand books from a folding table called out prices. Rhea bought Imani a battered paperback of logic puzzles for two dollars.
"For fun," Rhea said. "Not for armor."
Imani solved three puzzles on the bus and failed a fourth and did not treat failure as prophecy. That, too, was practice.