4

Jane floated through science class and art. Then, in third-period math class, she came down to earth with a thud.

Mr. Putnam was a short, stocky man who always wore a bow tie and suspenders. He looked a little bit like an inflatable toy, held down by beanbag weights stuffed into his small, shiny black shoes.

"Boys and girls," he began, rocking slightly on his toes, "today we are going to start a new program called Peer-Teaching."

Jane looked over at Emily. She could tell that Emily didn't like the sound of it either.

"In Peer-Teaching, students work together in pairs as partners. Partners study together during class several times each week."

Jane met Emily's eyes again. They never worried about having to choose partners in class. They always chose each other.

"I worked out your Peer-teaching assignments over the weekend," Mr. Putnam went on. Jane began to feel uneasy. She didn't want Mr. Putnam picking her partner. She wanted to be partnered with her best friend.

Mr. Putnam picked up a paper from his desk and began to read. "Your Peer-Teaching assignments are Lucy Adam, Jane Waleski. Allan Wong, David Newton. Emily Zuckerman, Susan Webb..."

Jane sat stunned. Her partner was Lucy. The math teacher's pet. The poet who heard voices in her head.

Jane made herself look over at Lucy. Lucy's face was red. Was she as mad at being stuck with Jane as she was at being stuck with her? But Lucy didn't really seem mad. She almost seemed to be blushing. Now that she thought of it, Lucy had been giving her strange looks all morning, ever since she had stood up for her against the entire science class.

"All right, ladies and gents," Mr. Putman said. "We'll use the rest of the period to get started on Peer-Teaching. Move your desk next to your partner's desk, and begin working together on the problems for chapter twelve."

The others began shoving their desks around. Jane watched numbly as Emily and Susan pushed their desks together. At that moment, Jane was more of a loser than Emily. Emily hadn't been assigned Lucy Adams as her partner.

Mary, who was the snoopiest girl in the class and usually sat next to Lucy, pulled her desk over to Jane's side of the room.

"Jane," she said her name in a conspiratorial whisper. She waved a sheet of lined notebook paper in Jane's face. "I found this on the floor last period by Lucy's desk."

Mary handed the paper to Jane. She didn't want to read it, but Mary plainly wasn't going to budge until she did. Jane glanced down at the page and saw four lines of what had to be a dreadful poem. With Mary's eyes boring into her, Jane began to read:

For Jane, My Hero

Alas, the winter wind doth blow,

But yet my love doth brightly bloom.

However cold the falling snow,

I shall love thee till my doom.

Mary snatched the paper back. "Oh here she's coming!" She returned to her seat just as Lucy, still blushing, pushed her desk next to Jane's, so that their two chairs were almost touching.

Jane didn't need to make any more entries in the Unfair Life book. She had all the proof she needed to agree that her life sucked. Nothing like this had ever happened to her sister Caroline, or ever could. It could happen only to the vice president of Loser Club. She was in love with her science teacher, AKA Rapunzel.

And Lucy Adams, AKA the weirdo, was in love with her.

~*~

Jane stared down at her desk, unwilling to look at Lucy. She knew that Lucy was staring at her desk, too, unwilling to look at her. One of them had to break the ice. But Jane felt colder than the ice itself. And she had lost the power of speech altogether.

"Jane, Lucy," Mr. Putnam called over to them, "start working."

Jane opened her book to the problem set at the end of chapter twelve. Next to her, Lucy opened her book, too. She read the first problem silently.

"So..." Her voice came out a squeak. "So what do you think the answer is?"

"Well, we distribute 4x to the third through 3x plus one, think of 3x as 3x to the first..." she started working on her paper, "then we multiply our coefficients and adding the exponents we have 12x to the fourth plus 4x to the third..."

Jane wrote it down on her paper. At least Lucy was a math whiz. She was relieved that Lucy wasn't talking about poetry, or voices inside her head, or loving people till her doom.

"What about problem two?" Jane asked. Lucy told her the answer in her usual rapid-fire way.

"You're talking too fast," Jane said. Lucy repeated her answer, more slowly. It seemed ridiculous to go on this way, but Jane didn't know what else to do. "And what do you get for problem three?"

"I did the first two," Lucy said. "You do the problem three. Besides, we're not supposed to just do the problems. We're supposed to talk about them."

Jane's heart sank another notch downward. She didn't want to have conversation about math problems with anyone, let alone with Lucy, the weirdo.

"What's the answer to problem three?" Lucy asked.

Jane blinked then she decided to take a wild guess. "Twenty-five."

"Twenty-five? How did you get 25?"

Jane shrugged awkwardly. She had just made it up. "Well, if y is 17...wait a minute...which one is y?"

Lucy sighed and began to explain the problem to her.

"See?" she said when she was done. "The answer is 7. I still don't know how you could have gotten 25."

Jane blushed as she wrote down 7. Then her eyes wandered to the window.

"It's starting to snow," she said before she could catch herself. She had actually said a sentence to Lucy Adams that she didn't have to say.

Lucy looked toward the window, too.

"Oh!" she breathed, as if she had never seen snow before.

"The flakes look like feathers. But everyone always compares them to feathers. Maybe thistledown? Or wisps of cotton? But everyone always compares snow to cotton, too. Wisps is a good word, though. 'Wisps of cotton, floating down.'"

Lucy scribbled the line right on her math paper.

"'Falling gently o'er the town.'" She turned to Jane. "O'er is a poetic way of saying over."

Jane squirmed.

"Maybe we should get on to problem four?" she asked. With all her heart, she wished that third period were o'er soon.