“That’s not it,” Vladimir said. “Dakota, Cinnamon needs a lot of special tutoring,”
“You also knew she had little prior education, which you personally said was OK,” I said. “And I thought I explained to you we only just discovered she might have Tourette’s.”
“Oh, she’s almost certainly got it,” Vladimir said quietly. “I’ve suspected since she called me a clown in the entrance interview. She was immediately mortified and tried to distract us-”
“Or,” the Dean said, “she could be an uncouth, but clever little-”
“She was mortified,” Vladimir repeated. “Corprolalia-dirty speech, the symptom most famously and a bit exaggeratedly associated with Tourette’s-is not just cussing. It can be inappropriate comments which are hard to bottle in, but don’t reflect how she feels.”
“I’ve seen that,” Palmotti said suddenly. “I’ve almost certainly seen that.”
“I have too,” I said. Damnit. “At least twice earlier that day, in fact.”
“Taken from her home? School shopping? A death of a friend? The more stressful it is, the harder it will be for her to keep a lid on it,” Vladimir said. “But corprolalia often fades past the teens. Tourette’s is more than that-facial tics, for example. On that note, that steel collar of hers-can we lose it? Tight collars can worsen the tics, but I understand it’s locked on.”
“I’ll ask, but I suspect the answer is no,” I said. “It’s sort of her vampire visa.”
“ Vampire visa?” Fremont and Palmotti said in surprised, worried unison.
“Aha!” the Dean said, putting his hand to his head with an expression of disgust. “I knew I recognized that ‘S’ seal from somewhere. That’s a vampire passage token, isn’t it? House of Saffron, correct? The Vampire Queen of Little Five Points?”
“Why… yes,” I said. “How did you-”
“My apologies, Miss Frost,” he said. “If you’ll pardon the pun, young Cinnamon’s been bitten by vampire politics. One thing in her file that forced me to escalate this was a complaint from a parent-but that parent is in the Gentry, vampires in dispute with the House of Saffron. Lord Iadimus’s wife may have seen Cinnamon’s collar and decided to make trouble for her.”
“Charming,” I said. The last thing I’d expected was that the Dean was up on vampire politics-and if Cinnamon simply attending the same school as a child of the Gentry was causing problems, I couldn’t imagine what Saffron was having to deal with working with the Gentry face to face. “And the collar only protects from physical, not political assault.”
“Let’s not lose perspective,” Vladimir said gently. “The parental complaint was not the only thing in her already large file. And it isn’t just tics or cussing, it’s willful behavior. Her corprolalia, and I do agree she probably has it, only explains part of her smart mouth.”
“How can you tell?” I asked sharply.
“Cussing out of the blue might be a verbal tic,” Vladimir said, “but if it sounds like she meant it, she probably said it on purpose. But, honestly, our teachers are professionals. We can handle a few f-bombs. It’s the acting out. It isn’t fair to all the other students in her classes.”
“Well, we’re here,” I said. “What do you want of us?”
“You have to convince her to attend and to behave herself,” he said. “The Dean’s right. I’ve seen this a lot with special needs students-it isn’t that they’re not capable, it’s that they don’t see how school is relevant to them. Cinnamon can be… particularly colorful.”
I sighed. “All right,” I said. “I am more than willing to talk to her, but as I understand the court order, it will have to be here at school, supervised. After school she has to stay in the custody of the Palmottis, and I can’t imagine how hard this is on them.”
“Thank you,” Palmotti said, very quietly.
“I’ll go further,” the Dean said. “You have to convince her to take class seriously. We care about Cinnamon, we really do, but we have many hardworking students here-”
“All right, all right,” I said. “I’ll get her to show up, and at least be quiet in class. And I’ll lean on her-but in the end, I can’t force her to learn.”
“That’s not good enough,” the Dean said. “Our one-on-one and small group resources are limited. It isn’t fair to our special topics teachers if she’s blowing them off.”
“She’s that far behind?” Something was tickling my brain, something Vladimir said that I had missed. “But surely there’s time to catch up. She’s only been here a little over a week.”
“Yes, but that’s not the problem,” Vladimir said. “She’s got special educational needs above and beyond being a werekin.”
“Special needs?” I pressed. “Is she dyslexic, on top of the Tourette’s?”
“Maybe a little,” Vladimir admitted. “We’re doing more tests. But the real problem, if you can call it that, is her brain. Maybe it’s the werekin influence, maybe it’s just natural, whatever that means. Regardless, she learns differently than the rest of us.”
“Oh, God,” I said. She’d shown such promise, in so many ways, but I’d feared exactly something like this. With increasing horror, I realized what I’d missed was that, just minutes ago, Vladimir had called her a special needs student. “You’re saying she’s… mentally disabled? ”
“Quite the opposite,” Vladimir said. “Cinnamon’s a genius, on the level of Gauss. ”
Remedial Class
When Carl Frederich Gauss was ten, his teacher punished his class by making them add the numbers from one to a hundred. Before most of the other students had started, Gauss handed in his slate with the right answer. Mathematicians now think he started picking off pairs of numbers from each end of the sequence: one plus a hundred, two plus ninety nine, and so on-fifty pairs of numbers, each adding to a hundred and one: five thousand and fifty, bam!
Cinnamon was that fast.
After our meeting with the Dean, Vladimir had let Doug, Jack and I sit in on the math club. Six sets of problems were written on the whiteboards. I took a lot of math in college before I dropped out, but I recognized none of it other than the occasional sigma-for-sum or geometric symbol. Vladimir was before the board, lecturing to five of his star students sitting around him in a circle, all trying to pay attention to him… and to ignore Cinnamon.
And Cinnamon? My precious baby girl-who I’d missed so much, who I hadn’t seen in so long-barely reacted when she saw me, and focused instead entirely on the class, if focus you could call it. Cinnamon orbited the other students, bouncing around the room, sometimes leaning on the wall, sometimes squatting on chairs, watching like a cat-but most often standing by the window, staring outside, tail twitching, face spasming, occasionally cussing… all the time with one cat ear visibly cocked to Vladimir’s every word.
Vladimir was telling them how important this part of the ‘competition’ was; then he stepped aside and let the students attack problems written on the board. Cinnamon cursed and stomped up to the board, cocked her head at it, then grabbed a whiteboard marker in her fist and began scrawling answers before the other students had even started. She drew rectangles and arcs littered with symbols, and I understood her answers even less than the question.
“I thought this was a remedial class,” I murmured to Doug.
“For math PhDs, maybe,” Doug said. “No wonder her assignments looked so hard.”
Vladimir handed over the math club to one of the students and motioned us into his office. Unlike the spacious windowed affairs of the administrators, Vladimir’s office was apparently a converted storage closet-long, narrow, and surprisingly cozy.
“Keep your voices down; never underestimate werekin hearing,” Vladimir said, sitting on the corner of a desk facing a wall covered with photos of forests and clippings of math articles. “Cinnamon doesn’t understand. She thinks that because she’s in the special class, it must mean she’s stupid. The truth is the opposite-she’s so smart she’s not used to really having to work.”
I sighed. “Maybe this is too much too soon,” I said. “Maybe we need to track her back into a normal class, let her develop more stable peer relationships.”
