“What kind of soldier?” Mrs. Gould asked, staring down at her through narrow little eyes like a lizard’s.
“He talks to the Bolo. And tells it to shoot its guns.”
“Did all of you hear that?” the teacher asked. “Yalena’s father is responsible for telling a huge, dangerous machine to shoot people. That machine shot millions and millions of people on a world far away from here. Does anyone know how many people it takes to make a million? There are ten million people on our whole planet. Seventeen million people died, on that other world. To kill seventeen million people, that machine would have to kill every man, every woman, and every baby on Jefferson. And then it would have to kill almost that many more. The Bolo is a terrible, evil machine. And Yalena’s father tells it to kill.”
“B-but—” she tried to say.
Mrs. Gould slammed both fists on her desk. “Don’t you dare talk back to me! Sit down this instant! No recess for a week!”
Yalena sat down. Her knees were shaking. Her eyes were hot.
Somebody hissed, “Lookit the crybaby!” and the whole class started jeering and laughing at her. That was the first day. Every day since then had been worse. A whole year of horrible, awful, worse days. During class, everything she said was wrong. Even if somebody else said the same thing, somehow it was wrong when she said it. If she tried not to talk at all, Mrs. Gould made her stand in a corner all by herself, for being secretive, dangerous, and sly.
Every morning, when her mother dropped her off for school, Yalena threw up in the bushes outside. At lunch, nobody would sit near her. At recess… The teachers wouldn’t let anybody actually hurt her, not badly enough to need the school nurse, but she usually came back into class with scraped knees, bruised shins, or mud in her hair. She hated recess more than she hated any other part of school.
And now it was time to start all over, again. The first day of first grade. And all the same kids who hated her and tripped her and shoved her off the swings and threw mudballs at the back of her head and spilled paint on her favorite clothes…
The only things that were different were the room and the teacher.
The room, at least, was nothing like Mrs. Gould’s kindergarten. The walls were a sunny yellow that lifted the spirits, just walking in through the door. There were wonderful pictures everywhere, pictures of places and animals and things Yalena wasn’t even sure had names, let alone what they might be used for. There were other pictures, too, that somebody had painted, rather than photographs of things, and they were all as sunny and cheerful as the yellow walls. It was a room Yalena wanted to love, at first sight, a room that made her want to cry, because she was going to spend a whole year being miserable and alone in it.
She wanted to sit in the farthest corner in the back, but there were cards folded like tents on each desk, with names on them. Yalena was the first person to arrive, not because she wanted to be there early, but because it would be less awful to sit down in a nearly empty room and watch everyone come in than it would be to arrive in a room full of people who hated her, glaring with every step she took trying to get to her desk. She looked at each desk and finally found her name, in the middle of the room.
It said Yalena.
But not Khrustinova. Nobody’s card had a last name on it. There were three Ann name cards, but they didn’t have last names, either, just Ann with a single initiaclass="underline" Ann T., Ann J., and Ann W. That was definitely different from Mrs. Gould’s class, where the boys were “Mr. Timmons” and “Mr. Johansen” and the girls were “Miss Miles” and “Miss Khrustinova,” which always came out sounding like somebody gargling with vinegar.
There was no sign of a teacher anywhere.
Puzzled by that strangeness, Yalena made her way to her new desk, carrying her book bag like a magic shield that would guard her until she was forced to put it down to start studying. Classmates she remembered arrived in noisy clusters, laughing and talking about things they had done together over the summer. Yalena had spent the summer on Nineveh Base with her father. It had not had been a fun summer. They had gone to some interesting places, like the museum in Madison and her grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ farm and fishing in lakes up in the mountains, a few times, but she didn’t like the farms very much. They were hot and smelled strange and the animals on them were huge and didn’t like little girls poking at them.
Nobody from school had called her to ask if she wanted to come over for a pool party or a sleep-over or anything else. So she had stayed in her room, mostly, reading her books and playing on the computer, which didn’t care who your father was or whether your mother was a jomo or any of the other reasons kids found to hate her. It was difficult, watching the others come into the classroom, laughing and having a wonderful time, and harder to watch them give her sneering looks and scoot their chairs as far away from hers as possible.
She opened her book bag and pretended to read the first-grade primer her father had bought for her, along with all her supplies. She was still pretending when a very pretty woman in the prettiest dress Yalena had ever seen sailed into the classroom, with a smile as bright as sunlight and a scent like the summer roses on her grandmother’s front porch, which was the only spot on the whole farm Yalena thought was pretty.
“Bon jour, bon jour, ma petites,” she said in a language Yalena had never heard, then she laughed and said in perfectly ordinary words, “Good morning my little ones, how lovely to see everyone!”
She sat down on the edge of the desk at the front of the room, rather than in the chair or standing over them like somebody’s mean dog. “I am Cadence Peverell, your teacher. I want everyone to call me Cadence. Does anyone know what Cadence means?”
Nobody did.
“A ‘cadence’ is a rhythm, like when you clap your hands and sing.” She clapped and sang a little song, also in words that Yalena couldn’t understand, although nobody else seemed to, either. Then Miss Peverell laughed. “That is a French song, of course, with French words, because a long time ago, my ancestors were French, back on Terra where humanity was born. Everyone’s name means something. Did you know that?”
Yalena certainly didn’t. Other kids were shaking their heads, too.
“Ah, but you shall see! Douglas,” she said, looking at a boy in the front row, “your name means ‘the boy who lives by the dark stream.’ And Wendell,” she pointed to a long, lanky boy who had spent kindergarten trying to climb over the play-yard fences, “means someone who wanders.”
Laughter broke out as Wendell grinned.
“And Frieda,” she addressed a girl in the back row, “means ‘peaceful.’ But you know,” the teacher said with a sound like warm butter and a gentle smile, “there is one name in this classroom that is the loveliest name I have ever heard.”
Miss Peverell was looking right at Yalena.
“Do you know what your name means, Yalena?”
The entire classroom went utterly silent.
She shook her head, waiting for the teacher to say something horrible.
“Yalena,” Miss Peverell said, “is a Russian name. It’s the Russian way of saying the name ‘Helen’ and that name means ‘light.’ Beautiful, clear light, like the sun in the sky.”
The silence continued. Yalena was staring at her teacher, confused and so scared she wanted to start crying. And strangely, the teacher seemed to understand. She slid down off the desk, crouched down at the end of the aisle, and said, “Would you come to see me, Yalena?”