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Chapter 1

“Hey there, little girlfriend,” Roberta Simmons said to me as she came into the room. She looked at the array of books and papers and the laptop strewn over the dining room table, then at my high school class planner which sat on top of the pile of books. Glancing at the pad where I was making notes, she asked, “Hmm? What’re all those calcs for? You must have some strange homework—I didn’t think they covered partial differentials in high school.”

I looked at her and smiled as I pushed away the pad, laptop, and the pile of papers which sat in front of me.

“Not in my school. This isn’t school work. Even though it’s April, it’s like brass monkeys outside still and I was thinking of ways to keep warm, so then I began thinking of ways of storing energy, wasn’t I. Means storing electrons. So I did some maths work here and I think I’ve found a way to maintain persistent Cooper electron pairs in a conductor at room temps at a normal pressure.”

She gasped. “No kidding? Really?”

“Okay, please translate that for a mortal person,” Sally Iverson laughed; she had followed Roberta into the room. “I’m just a lowly engineer-in-training, not a glorified physics nerd like you two.”

“Emma’s talking about room-temperature superconductivity, Sal. They’ve been trying to find any materials to do this for over thirty years now. What did you figure out, Emma?”

I pulled my pad over to show her.

“I was working with the BCS theory here. The problem is how to keep the Cooper pairs associated at higher temps where the increased random molecular motion in the conducting material would unbind them, Robbie,” I began and she nodded. “So far they’ve discovered that hydride materials will work but only at extreme pressures and only up to maybe 13 to 14 degrees C.”

“Hey, that’d work here in Alaska,” Sally joked. “That’s um... 56 or 57 degrees. Summertime temps!”

Roberta shushed her. “Yeah, Emma, I know. That’s like the metallic hydrogen that forms at thousands of atmospheres.”

“Uh huh.” I went on. “So this thought came to me when I was messin’ around with the Josephson effect calcs ‘cause I thought of a way to dope a kind of hydride recipe...”

“Wait. So that’s why you’re using the Schrödinger equation?” Roberta interrupted, pointing. “You’re modeling quantum-mechanical systems?”

“Yeah. I was playing around with the eigenfunctions of the Hamiltonian operators using the eigenvalues of some elements and noticed a few materials that seemed that they could extend the possibility of superconductivity to higher temps. So I was just searching the literature and don’t find anything that suggests that anyone’s doing this line of research.”

Sally broke in, “Okay guys, you’ve really lost me. Right about when I walked in.”

“One sec, Sal,” Roberta said, chuckling. “Let me see what our genius here found. Then we’ll try to translate. So, my little genius, what did you find?”

“Oh please... just bog off...” I smiled at her. “I’m no genius, I just know some maths.”

“Sure, and I’m the queen of England,” Roberta laughed. “Now enlighten us.”

“It’s just here, see? I noticed how the properties of niobium and xenon seemed like they could stabilize Cooper pairs in a hydride substrate when constrained in something like a carbon nanotube structure,” I pointed out my calculations. “I was calculating the lattice vibrations in the substrate and it looks like this recipe can produce lattice coupling. See, here’re the electron donor atoms and here’s how they’re stabilized.”

“How’d you solve those many-body Schrödinger Hamiltonians? Those are some pretty gnarly equations. Do you have it programmed on your laptop?” Roberta pressed.

I blushed. “Erm... not really; mostly they’re estimates I can do in my head. It’s close enough.”

“Goddamn. I just don’t know about you, kid... Fourier transforms in your head, damn...” Roberta shook her head. “Okay, Sal, stop looking so pained. Rough translation: from what I see here, if this shit is right, Emma may have found a solution to room-temp superconductivity. My god, Sally, if she can show that this works in practice, it would definitely get her the physics Nobel—at what age? You’re thirteen, right, Emma?”

I shrugged. “Almost. In August.”

“Hell, you’re just scary smart, Emma,” Sally said, as she sat down next to me. “After you come back down to earth, maybe you can use a teeny bit of those smarts to give me a hand? I have this problem my prof gave me and it’s stumping me and Robbie too. Here.”

She slid over her work and I looked it over. Basically she was using an application of Maxwell’s equations.

“Let’s see what this is... ah, got it. Your application needs to calculate the production and interaction of electric and magnetic fields your circuit is generating. So this problem is to determine how the electric and magnetic fields of this transformer thingie here... erm... this induction device—act on the surrounding circuit currents?” I asked, pointing.

“Yeah. Essentially that. Except we get answers which can’t be physically real.”

I looked over her work. Then I spotted it.

“A-hah... I see. Look here. See this section where you did some partial differential calcs? You set the limits wrong when you did the surface... ah, the double integral here. See, try it this way.” I showed her the correction.

“Oh damn,” Roberta groaned. “She got it in a minute of looking it over and we’ve been at it for an hour, not to mention your time before that, Sal. Emma, how the hell do you do that? My prof jokes that you should be teaching physics, not taking classes in it. I don’t think he was joking.”

I stared at her and shook my head. “No... I need the classes to learn about this stuff in an organized way. I guess I can see how the maths are supposed to work; that’s a gift I have, but I need to learn how it all fits together. My thoughts are awfully disorganized. Like today. I thought of superconductivity when I was coming home from school ‘cause it was brass monkeys... erm, that means so bloody cold out—we never got this cold in England and it’s supposed to be spring, too! The thought popped into my head about how nice it would be to have an electric hand and body warmer right now but efficiently powering them is a problem and that led to thinking about storing energy and that led to electrons in high-energy states and then to ... oh well, you know, this rot,” I said, waving my hand at the papers littering the table.

The girls thanked me and after a few more joking comments about how smart I was, left me to mull over and refine my calculations. I wondered if there was a way to make an apparatus to test this idea. Well, I suppose I can spend a few days trying to see how these calcs can be turned into something practical. I suppose I can ask my prof when I see him.

My thoughts turned to how I got to be so smart—and me, a Londoner kid, wound up in Alaska, of all places.

~~~~

I’ve always been a loner, even when Mum was alive. It comes with being a bright kid, I guess. You learn to become invisible; that way the other kids don’t tease or make fun of you for being smarter than them. I learnt that the hard way—don’t correct the teacher when she’s wrong. Do that too many times and you get a rep—amongst the kids as a showoff and amongst the teachers as a troublemaker. Fortunately a few teachers noticed how advanced I was in school and that led to my mum having me jumped in grades several times. Damn, I still miss Mum.

Me? I’m Emma Elizabeth Clarke. Yes, I’m named after the Queen. That was Grandma’s idea; she loved the Queen. You know, she and Grandpa knew the Queen and were guests at Windsor Castle many times? I’m 12 now, 13 in August, and a hybrid of a high school kid and a college coed. Some coed I am—12 years old, 145 centimeters tall... oops, this is the U.S.—that’s only four feet nine inches tall (I know that some Brits use feet and inches for height, but I learnt to say it in metric in school. That’s how I think too. In metric.)—and I’m almost flat as a board. Mum said her boobs didn’t come in till she was 15 or so. I’m hoping that’ll happen for me too. Or could I hope for sooner? I have chestnut hair and green eyes. I hate team sports but like running and swimming and do both as much as I can.

That’s me. Oh, and I’m a maths prodigy, apparently. Maths comes easily—differential calculus, multivariable calculus, set and group theory, topology, tensor maths, number theory, whatever. I understand it all, like it’s there in my head all ready to use as I need it. If you can express it with numbers, then I can understand it completely. But I’m not socially inept, like a lot of other savants (I guess you could use that term for me). I’m not on the autism spectrum, like Asperger’s, ‘cause I can do just fine socially. But I don’t socialize much; I guess it’s ‘cause my mind is always running full tilt analyzing everything I see, so personal friendships with other kids my age are sort of difficult to maintain. They think I’m being all stuck up and ignoring them when I get lost in thought.

My memories turned to my childhood and recent past. What a bloody whirlwind it’s been! I guess my early childhood wasn’t entirely “normal,” whatever that means. I didn’t grow up in a father-mother kind of family. My family was just Mum, Grandma, Grandma’s devoted friend who had been her personal assistant before she retired, a live-in au pair for me, and me. Grandma was quite well off; with her husband, who died when I was a toddler, she owned a multinational corporation (actually she was the majority shareholder, owning 63 per cent of the shares). She had been the chief financial officer before she retired and was actually a U.S. citizen. Oh, right, so was Mum. Mum was born in the U.S. and she and my grandparents lived in New York City till Mum was one or two years old. When Mum was born, my grandparents got some kind of a citizenship affidavit for her—I have those papers in my London bank’s safe deposit box. I found them when we were settling Grandma’s affairs and I kept them because I think I may have a claim to U.S. citizenship, but I’ve never thought about pursuing that idea. Maybe in the future, if I need to...

Mum was a doctor—my dad too, they met in their medical training, but when I was still a baby, he was killed by an IED in Afghanistan where he was doing a tour as a field surgeon. Then when I was about eight, Mum was sent to Sierra Leone in Africa where she got one of those awful viruses—Marburg, Lassa, or Ebola, don’t remember which one, and they couldn’t get her home in time to get proper treatment. Grandma became my guardian then. By that time, I had been advanced to year seven—that’s secondary school, making me three or four years younger than my classmates. So I quickly learnt how to be invisible to avoid being bullied or getting on the wrong side of any other unpleasantness. My jumping another school year resulted in my beginning year ten when I was just ten years old.

Just after my eleventh birthday, Grandma’s increasing dementia put her in a nursing home and her friend joined her there, too frail to live independently herself, and Grandma’s solicitors were working on getting me a guardian. And then six months later, Grandma suffered a stroke and passed away. So now I truly needed a permanent legal guardian, and a situation to protect my inheritance. The executor of Mum’s and Grandma’s estates—he’s our family solicitor—located my only remaining relative, Dad’s younger brother, my uncle Scott Clarke. I didn’t remember him; I had never met him as he hadn’t visited our family after Dad was gone. That probably was because he had been working as geologist for an international energy company and worked strictly overseas; for his current work, he’s based out of Fairbanks, Alaska. Uncle Scott agreed to become my guardian, I think mainly because of the £50,000 annual stipend that the trust would pay him. No, that’s harsh. He did feel that becoming my guardian was his family duty and we did like each other when we met. Anyway, he’s an okay sort of bloke, I guess. He’s a bachelor and when I met him, I could see why. Maybe that’s why he spends so much time in the field; it keeps his contact with people at a minimum and he’s fine with that.

Since Uncle Scott traveled a lot, he kept just a small apartment in Fairbanks for when he wasn’t in the field. He told me that the apartment was too small for the two of us, not to mention the problem of my supervision when he was in the field. He came up with an interesting solution to the problem; he’d buy a house, one large enough to have renters, kind of like a boarding house, and get a live-in housekeeper to watch over me and the renters whilst he was in the field. The renters would be drawn from students at the local uni and they could provide “companionship” for me. Scott knew of a possible person for the job, a Mrs Ann Flannery, whom he had known fairly well through his company contacts, so he asked her if she was interested. She asked to meet me before she accepted; we found that we liked each other, so she agreed to take the position.

Uncle Scott found a suitable house near the uni—it’s University of Alaska Fairbanks, or UAF, in College, Alaska, actually, just outside the Fairbanks city limits—and he agreed with Mrs F that they’d only rent to graduate students. Mrs F had a daughter, Joyce, who was four years older than me and was currently a pupil at the high school I’d be attending. Uncle Scott arranged with his local attorney, a Mr Alan Jameson, to give Mrs Flannery a power of attorney for any permissions or care I might need when he couldn’t be reached. He and the attorney set me up with a spending account to allow me to draw money from my trust stipend. The trust I inherited contained all my mum’s and Grandma’s assets and it would pay me “HEMS”—health, education, maintenance, and support—each month until I was 18 years old or starting uni, whichever was first; then the payment amounts would be assessed to see if any changes were needed to support me when I went to uni. I’d get full control of the trust when I turned 25.

~~~~

After I had moved to Fairbanks, coming to the U.S. on an L-2 visa—it was last summer when I had just turned age 12—it took the school almost a month to get my status sorted. From my U.K. records, it looked like I should get sophomore status here; sophomore year in the States is roughly similar to years ten and eleven back in the U.K.—except in Scotland. They’re different in Scotland; schools too. Really.

During my first few weeks here last summer, I began to settle in. With some input from me, Uncle Scott and Mrs F found three graduate students to live with us; Roberta Simmons, who was a first-year PhD student in physics (she wanted to specialize in solid-state physics); Sally Iverson, who had a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering with a computer science minor and was going for an engineering doctorate; and Jennifer Rich, a third-year PhD candidate in geology. She was someone my uncle knew at UAF as he was an adjunct professor there, and like my uncle, spent time in the field, so I didn’t see her much.

Because of my age, I was put in freshman classes during the first week or two of my starting high school whilst they were still organizing my schedule and I was bloomin’ bored out of my mind. One class in particular got me really brassed off at the teacher. I had been parked in freshman English whilst my records were being sorted, you see. The teacher was a “Mrs Prissy” and everything had to be by her rules. She got on my wick after the very first assignment I had turned in, the standard “How I spent my summer vacation” essay. When I got it back, I found she had given it two marks: one for content and one for style. Both were failing marks.

On “Content,” she indicated that I hadn’t addressed the assigned topic, “How I spent my summer vacation.” On “Style,” she wrote that there were too many spelling errors and improper usages. She had marked all the words I had spelt with the English spelling as wrong, you know, words like colour, specialise, centre—words like that. That’s how I learnt them. She also had marked wrong all the common idiomatic phrases I had used, phrases used in most, if not all, British writing.

I went to her after the class and complained vehemently.

“What’s this about not writing about what I did this summer?” I asked with some heat.

“Miss, um, you’re whom again?”

I pointed to my name which was written on the top of the essay. She didn’t even bother looking at it.

“Emma Clarke.”

“Miss Clarke, I wanted you to write about vacation topics, to see how your writing expressed your emotion and your enjoyment when you did interesting things. You just wrote about,” she looked at the paper, “yes, about packing up a house, visiting offices, moving, and then looking for a house in Fairbanks. That’s not vacation material; I expect you to write about what I assign.”

“You assigned the topic, ‘How I spent my summer vacation.’ What I wrote about is precisely what I did during the summer. My grandmother had recently died; she was my guardian, and my uncle came from the U.S. to help me get her affairs in order, close up my home, and get me ready to move here. This was how I spent my entire summer; there was no quote enjoyment unquote involved. What I wrote was exactly what your topic called for. I wouldn’t have written about what I didn’t do, either.

“And why did you mark all these words wrong?” I pointed at some words; my temper was rising. “Every single one of those words is in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language,” I said, pointing to a copy on the classroom bookshelf. “That’s an English dictionary; this class is an English class. You wrote the class’s name on the board over there. It says ‘Mrs Oliver, Freshman English.’ How can you call those spelling errors? And how do you expect me to write about a topic if you don’t explain your expectations?”

“Miss Clarke, I’m teaching American English. I expect that everyone will use the proper spelling, not a foreign version. And I expect when students write about vacations, they’ll write about interesting things they did.”

I was gobsmacked at her attitude.

“I just can’t believe that you think every kid has a wonderful time when school’s not in session,” I snarled at her. “I refuse to accept that explanation. And on the spelling? Please don’t suggest that the English spelling I learnt is not proper. The school doesn’t call this class ‘American English,’ after all. Another thing... idioms are idioms. They’re words or phrases whose literal meaning doesn’t match their true meaning but are accepted as proper usage. You marked many of my idiomatic usages wrong. They’re common idioms.”

“That’s not how people talk here, miss. That may be common where you used to live but not here. So I marked them as improper usages.”

I was fuming. “So you’re not adjusting the grade?”

“No. I will expect you to learn to write properly.”

This was too much. I marched right down to Mr Smith, the assistant principal, over that row. Immediately. His office was just inside the reception door and the secretary didn’t see me come in; I’m short so from her seat she couldn’t see me over the counter so I was able to get to his office without being diverted. I was happy to see that he was in. I tapped on the door frame.

“Erm, Mr Smith? May I have a minute?” I asked quietly.

He looked up.

“Ah, yes; you’re, um, Miss... Clarke, is it? Come in.”

“Thank you, sir.”

My anger was threatening to boil over. I wouldn’t let it, I wouldn’t let what happened with Mrs Prissy get on my wick and get me all eppy over her being a nit. But it all came out anyway.

“Sir, that dozy cow, Mrs Oliver, gave me a bloody failing mark on my frikkin’ first essay and...” I fumed.

“Calm down, Miss Clarke; sit and let’s discuss it. Let me get your file, okay?”

I nodded, took a deep breath, and sat while he rang up someone and spoke for a minute.

“Okay, Emma, I’ll have it in a minute. You should know that we’ve had some problems trying to figure out how to place you; the British education system is quite different from ours. Now what did you want to tell me?”

“Yes sir. I won’t set foot in that dozy teacher’s room again...”

“Dozy?”

“Erm, stupid. Now, don’t tell me to be respectful, sir. She is stupid. First, when she set us the essay assignment, I asked her what writing style to use, the ones I learnt back home, expository and analytical or narrative, and got a blank look. She asked what I meant. Doesn’t she know about writing styles? There are others besides those three but they don’t apply for essays about biographical topics, do they. So she told us to ‘write normally.’” I made finger quotation marks. “I used a normal narrative style. Also she had a secret agenda about what she wanted in the essay. She wanted us to write about all the fun things we did during the summer. Well, my summer wasn’t at all fun.” I summarized my summer activities for him. “Here’s what I got back. She gave it failing marks; I’ve never gotten less than top marks in any subject.”

I put the essay on his desk and he glanced at it.

“Yes, I understand the spelling issue. Mrs Oliver is terribly inflexible...” he began but I interrupted.

“She had the Random House Dictionary of the English Language on her shelf. But she said that the English spelling of those English words wasn’t proper.”

He sighed. “Yes, I can see where you’re angry. But what’s with these phrases in your essay... ‘I engaged the removal company’; ‘we had to bin all of the old clothes’; ‘I rang up the solicitor’; ‘when I sat for my last exam’; ‘she was stood at the counter’; ‘when they finally sorted my records’ ...these phrases, others too, were all marked as improper usage?”

“Yep. Those are common usages in Britain; some are even standard in the language. It’s how everyone speaks and writes. As well, most of those idioms or word usages are proper in formal writing. But Oliver said that since she wasn’t familiar with those usages, then they were improper and...”

Just then someone came in with a folder.

“Thanks, Jessica,” Smith said. He opened it and turned to me. “Oh yes, this indecipherable exam record. The top paper in your file is a copy of your results from something called an eleven-plus exam taken in the U.K., but we didn’t know what to make of these scores.”

“That’s right; I had sat for the eleven-plus exam back in London when I was ten. They give that exam to eleven-year-olds for admission to selective grammar and independent schools. I was already in a selective school but I wanted to test out of lower levels of English and maths, so my headmaster recommended that I sit for this exam. I got high marks in the verbal and English subject areas, maths too.”

“The Language Arts Department doesn’t know how to interpret your score of 139-140.”

“Ah. Those are age-standardized marks; they never give out raw marks. I was three standard deviations above the mean, you see that in the report?”

“Yes.”

“So that would translate, I guess, to the 99.9 percentile in verbal, non-verbal, English, and maths performance. That score was matched and standardized to other ten-year-olds. You saw that in my last school year I was in year ten English?”

“Yes. Okay. And that’s equivalent to sophomore, as I understand the grade level.”

“Almost the same, for all practical matters,” I agreed. “So you can see why I was quite cross being parked in a freshman English class, but was really wigged out after being told that I didn’t read her mind about exactly what she wanted me to write about in my essay and that my use of the language wasn’t quote proper unquote. And then getting a failing mark. This is from a teacher who doesn’t know about the different writing styles, too?”

“I really can’t answer that, Emma. But, according to the note I see here in your file, it does look like, based on the writing samples you provided from essays you did back at your London school, we can put you into a junior English class. And of course your grade in this essay,” he waved the copy, “will be tossed out.”

After thanking him, I left; I was chuffed that the school had finally organized that part of my U.K. school record. By the next day, they had me in a junior English class: Modern English Literature. Now I’d be reading authors who wrote using the Queen’s English. Yep. Proper English.

But that English teacher wasn’t to be my only problem with the school’s personnel, I quickly learnt. Miss Williams, the school’s counselor, took a “special” interest in me. She felt that I shouldn’t be in high school at age 12, that I needed to be with my own age group for my “mental and social development.” She was afraid that my being in high school would endanger my safety—those nasty boys, you know. Crikey, you know it’s actually the girls you need to watch out for, don’t you. She maintained that my test scores didn’t adequately measure my knowledge of the subjects and that only by spending the year in that particular subject class, could I learn that subject. Me? I wasn’t impressed with her ideas. She had what credentials? A bachelor’s in education with a psych minor? Bleh. Fortunately wiser and more experienced heads made the placement decisions and prevailed.

I wound up in sophomore biology, world history, and health and phys ed; junior English and chemistry; and fourth year French (I was fluent after living years with my French au pairs); and had tested out of physics and maths, so I had some free time. They tried to push me into taking some electives but I had no interest in home economics, photography, art, music... whatever. So I got study hall, but within a month or so, I wound up using my study hall time tutoring a few kids who were having problems.

That’s about when I decided to stop at the Physics Department office at UAF—my high school is actually on the south edge of their campus—to speak to their chairman about taking advanced classes. When I tried to convince him that I was qualified (I told him to set me any physics problem of his choice at any level to solve—sounds conceited, right? I guess it does.), it looked like he was going to put me off and send me away; then I noticed a Newton’s cradle on a shelf in his office. (That’s the toy which has a series of five balls in a row, each touching the next, suspended by two strings in a frame. You pull one ball away from the others, let it go, and when it swings down and hits the adjacent ball, the one at the far end of the row flies up.)

“Oh, let me demonstrate something. See your Newton’s cradle?” He nodded, curious about what I was going to do. “It’s supposed to show the conservation of momentum and energy. The three center balls are supposed to remain stationary when the striking ball hits the row and only the ball at the opposite end should move. But that actually doesn’t happen, if you watch really carefully.”

“Well, I do notice that the other balls do move a tiny bit,” he agreed.

“Yep. The first collision breaks up the line of balls a bit; that’s because of their finite elastic response. So a fair amount of momentum conservation is actually lost. Eventually the movement of all the balls gets in phase and that happens because of the viscoelastic dissipation in the impacts. The balls appear to interact as points of mass that are connected by Hertzian springs and the system decay can be modeled by a linear dependence on the velocity—the Stokes law. I’ll show you what I mean.”

I took down the toy and showed him how the intermediate balls did not remain still while the end ones did fly out as expected. He had a white board in his office, so I took a marker and began to write out the equations of motion which could describe the behavior of those three center balls, which included an application of the second-order velocity Verlet algorithm, Poisson’s ratio, and Young’s modulus.

He was kinda speechless when I finished (giggle). That’s when he shook his head, picked up his phone, and arranged an interview for me with some physics and maths profs.

“I guess you know your classical mechanics, Miss Clarke. We’ll see about some other areas, okay?”

Two days later, I met with four faculty members who spoke to me for a while and then they set me a bunch of problems to solve. The problems were taken from some prior years’ finals for various junior and senior undergrad maths courses like calculus, statistics, and linear algebra, plus some corresponding physics courses too—mainly the uni’s classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics/statistical mechanics, and electromagnetism courses.

They had me stand at a whiteboard and show my solutions whilst I explained my reasoning. I noticed that my approach to some of the problems, particularly in the advanced maths topics, produced a significant reaction among the maths faculty members. Apparently my approach was unique—of course, I had never gotten formal training in the “traditional” approach to solving these problems so I had simply devised my own approaches. So I stopped simply working my way through the problems they gave me and I began discussing various possible approaches to solving the problems, comparing their traditional methods to the ones I used; that’s when the “examination” they had started giving me turned into a conference session.

I pretty much aced all of the problems they posed for me and voila, I was told that I could be admitted as a non-matriculating student until my status and level could be sorted. They recommended that I enroll in graduate level physics and maths courses because I had essentially tested out of the undergrad ones. As I was leaving, I got a chuckle when I overheard them begin to argue over which department would get me. So I began sitting in on several graduate physics and maths classes that autumn and got to know several of the profs in both departments.

~~~~

My high school classes were, well, classes. After the initial shock that the older kids got when they noticed a prepubescent kid roaming the high school halls—and my hearing calls like, “Look out! Lost kindergarten kid!” ... “Hey, it’s Young Sheldon!” and “No, not Young Sheldon, it’s Young Shelly!”—I began to become invisible again. That is, except for the needy kids. I had noticed that in some of my classes, I could easily identify those kids who needed help. So I approached them after class or in the café. I guess my tiny stature and big smile disarmed them, but after a couple of months, I had about twenty loyal—no, fiercely loyal—kids whom I helped in study hall or in the café. The teachers were happy about their pupils’ improved grades and the assistant principal was overjoyed at getting an unpaid, well, I was a teacher. I really was, in a way, I guess. He even assigned us a classroom to use when it was empty.

A number of the kids I helped were native Alaskans, members of the Athabascans and Inupiaqs, and they told me of the taunting they got in school and how their families still experienced some discrimination in the community. Some of their family members, cousins or siblings, were at risk, from either drugs or bad associations or both. I got to talk to the ones who were in my school. It’s amazing—since I wasn’t their age, I wasn’t a peer, so I wasn’t a threat to them socially. I was able, through contacts my uncle or Mrs F had (she knew everyone in Fairbanks, it seemed), to find opportunities for them for jobs or other help. I made a particular effort to try to pair pupils who needed help with other kids who could be their study partners to provide encouragement and support. And I was able to keep any news of my help to these kids fairly private; I told the kids I helped that they wouldn’t like it getting around that a little kid helped them, would they?

So I guess I became a hero to everyone except to that spacky Miss Williams, the school’s counselor. She’d been meeting with me frequently during this term, trying to convince me to socialize and get involved with school activities.

“Why don’t you date?” she would ask me. Like, at almost every session.

“Date who?” I would retort. “Look at me. I’m 12 years old and way less than five feet tall. Unafflicted by puberty. I should get dates with high school boys? What high school boy would want to be seen taking me out?”

“You should be doing team sports or join clubs. That way you’ll meet other kids.”

“Compete in team sports?” I’d reply. “Against kids two to six years older? What sport do you suggest, surely not basketball? In volleyball I can barely reach the bottom of the net. (Yeah, that was an exaggeration.) I run and swim, but those team practices take way too much time before or after school. And there isn’t any club that I’d be interested in.”

“But you’re missing out on your childhood,” she would sigh.

I had lived my childhood. I’m glad it’s over. The woman’s a bloody berk.

The reason that the club scene is not for me is because it’s, well, charitably, it’s filled with either nerds or kids who tend to be single-minded types. I’m not a nerd. Nor a swot. Absolutely not single-minded, either; I have lots of non-technical interests, like a love for good literature and a fascination with history. There’s no one in school who’s truly my peer. I like Joyce and she’s in my grade for some classes but she’s, well, a high school girl, fashion and boy conscious. I have no interest in fashion or boys. Clothes are clothes... well, in the winter in the middle of Alaska, the more you wear, the better. And the boys in high school? Don’t tempt me to say what I really think of most of them. But I do like my housemates, a lot. They’re smart and funny. But they have this, well... hunger, I guess. A hunger to study, to learn, to make a career, and sometimes that’s a bit overpowering for me. I suppose that’s a wee bit of childhood left in me, innit.

My own hunger to learn comes from a curiosity about things. How numbers work. How nature works. How to solve interesting puzzles. I suppose I’ll think about a career when I need to, but now, it’s all about learning stuff and enjoying using the new knowledge.

~~~~

In early April, I had been reading one of my English lit assignments—Jane Austen’s Emma—how ace was that? ...and was marveling at how much the fictional Emma Woodhouse, a brilliant heiress, and I had in common, not in matchmaking for marriage, but in helping my classmates with their classes and matching them up with suitable study partners. I was jolted out of my reverie—wool-gathering, Grandma called it—when I heard the door slam and Joyce calling, “I’m home!”

Joyce had been at some kind of school-spirit program; I don’t pay much attention to non-academic school activities so I couldn’t recall exactly what that program was.

School programs—oh yes, how could I forget? Last week I had heard a rumor which had just begun circulating in my school about some kind of school program that had started up in number of high schools in the lower 48. The rumor said that high-school kids there were being made to attend school whilst naked. Now, talk to me about some really spacky ideas; this one goes way beyond that. But those rumors turned out to be actual fact, unfortunately. We soon began to hear these stories about a new social “curriculum-enhancement” program that all U.S. high schools would eventually be required to adopt. To make kids less modest and more “in tune” with their sexual development, a mandatory nudity program for high school pupils had been developed and was now being introduced in selected U.S. high schools and was planned to become a national high-school requirement. Well, if you listened to my classmates’ comments about this weirdness, such a program would never be possible to have here in Fairbanks.

My classmates were incredulous at just the suggestion that a federal program like this could ever come to Alaska. Making Alaskan kids just go to school here whilst starkers? Compete in school sports whilst naked? Hello, do those dingbats in Washington know that it gets cold here? Like, really cold? Our big sports are Nordic and Alpine skiing. Tobogganing. They play U.S. football here too. In the autumn when it’s cold out. (Real football is called “soccer” in the States. Yanks are strange. They like to rename things for no good reason.) Do they play football whilst naked? I’d think you’d have to be an idiot to play U.S. football whilst naked—it’s like rugby but more violent. And playing indoor sports like basketball or volleyball in our gym whilst naked would give you frostbite.

Our buildings are kinda old. They can’t get the gym to be much over 15 degrees—you know, that’s about 60 in Fahrenheit. Even then, that temperature only happens when the sun is beating on the roof all day. Otherwise the gym’s colder. And the sun’s only out in the summer—not for much of the winter.

I need to point out that Fairbanks is just shy of being 200 kilometers from the Arctic Circle—converting the distance, that’s only about 120 miles away. So in the late autumn, winter, and early spring, there’s just about no sun to be seen. On the equinoxes, the sun only gets about 25 degrees above the horizon at noon—that’s just a bit more than two fists’ breadth when held at arm’s length. Between mid-September and mid-March, the sun is lower than that, which means it never gets much above the horizon. So, yes, in the winter it’s cold. (“Cold” could be said about the entire school year, actually. The average temperature here over the 8½-month school year is about negative 12 degrees C—that’s 10 degrees F.)

The classrooms are pretty chilly too, usually around 18–19C (64–66F). People usually wear sweaters in class. Sitting still, it can get chilly even with layers of clothing on because of the draft from the ventilation system. Also our school has passageways which connect its building sections together; they’re covered and they’re screened to keep the blowing snow out, but still, they aren’t heated like the interior hallways. Naked kids would have to walk through these passageways to get from one building section to another. True, people who grow up here are used to the cold. But that’s because they can always put on a clothing layer or two more! Forced nudity here? Not happening here, my classmates proclaimed.

I didn’t agree with my classmates. Never underestimate the power of stupidity.

---

Next: Good news and bad news. Emma’s physics discovery gets a rousing reception at her university and then Emma gets some really bad news. Then that Naked in School rumor turns into a reality as many details are revealed.

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