“But you’re not making anything up,” Kenny said, climbing up into the cab beside her. “And he’s going to know you’re not making it up. It’s probably all over the Internet already. It’s at least on Channel 8.”
“When that kid died in the crash out in Middlebury last year, dozens of people skipped class and said they couldn’t face it because they knew him. You don’t do things like this. You don’t get it. I can’t make excuses. I can walk if you don’t want to take me. It’s all right. I’ve walked longer than it is from here.”
“Of course I want to take you,” Kenny said. “Don’t be an idiot. I’m just saying that you don’t have to do this. It’s all right to let it go just this once. And I don’t know what good you’re going to be in class in the shape you’re in. You’re not going to understand a thing.”
“I’ll be fine,” Haydee said.
This was true. She would be fine, one way or the other. She would sit still. She would face the professor. She would take notes. She was not really worried about having the wrong answers if she was called on in class. This was math class. She always had the wrong answers.
She wondered why that was. She could remember kids in high school, kids she had very few classes with, at the end. The ones who did AP everything. The ones who sat around at lunch, looking through thick college brochures of places with famous names. Harvard. Vassar. Yale. The University of Michigan. Notre Dame.
Some of those kids had not been much different than she was herself, but some of them had been very different. It didn’t matter what was said in class, they always understood it. It didn’t matter what question they were asked, they always knew the answer.
Haydee wondered what that would be like, to be like that, to just know it, all the time. It was not a matter of work. She worked as hard as anybody else in school, and probably harder. She couldn’t do that. She couldn’t get through algebra except by staying up nights until she was ready to fall over, and then she’d only managed a C. She’d had to nearly kill herself to pass geometry at all. She had no idea what went on in the heads of people who not only got A’s in algebra and geometry, but went all the way up to calculus and got A’s in that, too.
They were coming up to the intersection where the signs were. That’s how Haydee thought of it. For a long time there was a sign that read: MATTATUCK DESERVES WORKING POLICE RADIOS. Haydee looked. It was still there.
They were stopped at the light. Kenny looked at the sign and said, “Gives you a lot of confidence, doesn’t it? The Mattatuck police are coming to your rescue, but their radios don’t work, so if you’re out in the country somewhere, you’re screwed.”
“There was a referendum,” Haydee said. “The whole town voted about it. To have the system upgraded so that the radios would work all over town. But they didn’t vote it in.”
“I know,” Kenny said.
“I’m sorry,” Haydee said. “I’m feeling sort of distracted.”
“For God’s sake,” Kenny said. “Of course you’re feeling sort of distracted. Haydee, you’re not making any sense here. You’re really not. I ought to be taking you to the emergency room instead of to school. I think you’re in shock.”
“Do you ever think about smart people?” Haydee said.
“What?”
“Do you ever think about smart people?” Haydee repeated. “You know, those kids at school. They take AP classes and they go away to famous colleges. Except not all of them. Some of them are just like everybody else, but they work harder. Except not exactly. I worked as hard as I could and I couldn’t get into an AP class. And I couldn’t do math. Some of them were just smarter than me.”
“You’re plenty smart,” Kenny said. “And you’re dedicated, and you work hard.”
“But I’m not smart,” Haydee said. “I don’t just know things, like some of those people do. And I don’t just understand. Sometimes, you know, with stuff in Dr. London’s class, even, and that’s English. Narrative arcs. Mythic archetypes. Getting the stuff in, say, ‘The Second Coming.’ Do you remember that poem?”
“I remember it,” Kenny said. “I thought it was going to kill me.”
“Well, it’s like that poem,” Haydee said. “Some people just get it. They read it and understand it. And I don’t. And I talked to Dr. London about it, and she said it was ‘cultural context.’ Or maybe ‘cultural literacy.’ Anyway, she said there are all these things out there in the world to know about, and the more of them you do know about the easier it is to read, because writers are always just assuming that readers will know stuff. And if you don’t know it, then it won’t make any sense when you read it.”