finished.
'Yes, Miss Stricken,' Nell said.
'What are you girls looking at?' blurted Mrs. Disher, who was running the class today. 'Turn around and pay attention!' And with that it was all over. Nell sat in her desk for the rest of the hour as if carved from a solid block of gypsum.
Her interview with Miss Stricken at the end of the day was short and businesslike, no violence or even histrionics. Nell was informed that her performance in the Joy phase of the curriculum was so deficient that it placed her in danger of failing and being expelled from the school altogether, and that her only hope was to come in each Saturday for eight hours of supplementary study.
Nell wished more than anything that she could refuse. Saturday was the only day of the week when she did not have to attend school at all. She always spent the day reading the Primer, exploring the fields and forests around Dovetail, or visiting Harv down in the Leased Territories.
She felt that, through her own mistakes, she had ruined her life at Miss Matheson's Academy. Until recently, Miss Stricken's classes had been nothing more than a routine annoyance-an ordeal that she had to sit through in order to experience the fun parts of the curriculum. She could look back on a time only a couple of months ago when she would come home with her mind aglow from all the things she had learned in Brilliance, and when the Joy part was just an indistinct smudge around the edge. But in recent weeks, Miss Stricken had, for some reason, loomed larger and larger in her view of the place. And somehow, Miss Stricken had read Nell's mind and had chosen just the right moment to step up her campaign of harassment. She had timed today's events perfectly. She had brought Nell's most deeply hidden feelings out into the open, like a master butcher exposing the innards with one or two deft strokes of the knife. And now everything was ruined. Now Miss Matheson's Academy had vanished and become Miss Stricken's House of Pain, and there was no way for Nell to escape from that house without giving up, which her friends in the Primer had taught her she must never do.
Nell's name went up on a board at the front of the classroom labeled, in heavy brass letters,
Each Saturday, Nell, Fiona, and Elizabeth would arrive at the school at seven o'clock, enter the room, and sit down in the front row in adjacent desks. This was part of Miss Stricken's fiendish plan. A less subtle tormentor would have placed the girls as far apart as possible to prevent them from talking to each other, but Miss Stricken wanted them right next to each other so that they would be more tempted to visit and pass notes.
There was no teacher in the room at any time. They assumed that they were being monitored, but they never really knew. When they entered, each one of them had a pile of books on her desk-old books bound in chafed leather. Their job was to copy the books out by hand and leave the pages neatly stacked on Miss Stricken's desk before they went home. Usually, the books were transcripts of debates from the House of Lords, from the nineteenth century.
During their seventh Saturday in Supplementary Curriculum, Elizabeth Finkle-McGraw suddenly dropped her pen, slammed her book shut, and threw it against the wall.
Nell and Fiona could not keep themselves from laughing. But Elizabeth did not convey the impression of being in a very lighthearted mood. The old book had scarcely come to rest on the floor before Elizabeth had run over to it and begun kicking at it.
With each blow a furious grunt escaped from her gorge. The book absorbed this violence impassively, driving Elizabeth into a higher rage; she dropped to her knees, flung the cover open, and began to rip out pages by the fistful.
Nell and Fiona looked at each other, suddenly serious. The kicking had been funny, but something about the tearing of pages disturbed them both. 'Elizabeth! Stop it!' Nell said, but Elizabeth gave no signs of having heard her. Nell ran up to Elizabeth and hugged her from behind. Fiona scurried in a moment later and picked up the book.
'God damn it!' Elizabeth bellowed, 'I don't care about any of the goddamn books, and I don't care about the Primer either!'
The door banged open. Miss Stricken stomped in, dislodged Nell with a simple body check, got both arms around Elizabeth's shoulders, and manhandled her out the door.
A few days later, Elizabeth left on a lengthy vacation with her parents, jumping from one New Atlantis clave to another in the family's private airship, working their way across the Pacific and North America and finally to London itself, where they settled in for several months. In the first few days, Nell received one letter from her, and Fiona received two. After that they received no response to their letters and eventually stopped trying. Elizabeth's name was removed from the Supplementary Curriculum plaque.
Nell and Fiona soldiered on. Nell had reached the point where she could transcribe the old books all day long without actually absorbing a single word. During her first weeks in Supplementary Curriculum she had been frightened; in fact, she had been surprised at the level of her own fear and had come to realize that Authority, even when it refrained from violence, could be as disturbing a specter as anything she had seen in her earlier years. After the incident with Elizabeth, she became bored for many months, then furious for quite a while until she realized, in conversations with Duck and Purple, that her anger was eating her up inside. So with a conscious effort, she went back to being bored again.
The reason she'd been furious was that copying out those books was such an unforgivably stupid waste of time. There was no end to what she could have learned reading the Primer for those eight hours. For that matter, the normal curriculum at Miss Matheson's Academy would have been perfectly fine as well. She was tormented by the irrationality of this place.
One day, when she returned from a trip to the washroom, she was startled to notice that Fiona had hardly copied out a single page, though they had been there for hours.
After this, Nell made it a practice to look at Fiona from time to time. She noticed that Fiona never stopped writing, but she was not paying attention to the old books. As she finished each page, she folded it up and placed it in her reticule. From time to time, she would stop and stare dreamily out the window for a few minutes, and then resume; or she might place both hands over her face and rock back and forth silently in her chair for a while before giving herself over to a long burst of ardent writing that might cover several pages in as many minutes.
Miss Stricken cruised into the room late one afternoon, took the stack of completed pages from Nell's desk, flipped through them, and allowed her chin to decline by a few minutes of arc. This nearly imperceptible vestige of a nod was her way of saying that Nell was dismissed for the day. Nell had come to understand that one way for Miss Stricken to emphasize her power over the girls was for her to make her wishes known through the subtlest possible signs, so that her charges were forced to watch her anxiously at all times. Nell took her leave; but after proceeding a few steps down the corridor, she turned and stole back to the door and peeked through the window into the classroom.
Miss Stricken had gotten the folded-up pages out of Fiona's bag and was perusing them, strolling back and forth across the front of the room like the slow swing of a pendulum, a devastatingly ponderous motion. Fiona sat in her chair, her head bowed and her shoulders drawn together protectively.
After reading the papers for an eternity or two, Miss Stricken dropped them on her desk and made some kind of brief statement, shaking her head in hopeless disbelief. Then she turned and walked out of the room.
When Nell reached her, Fiona's shoulders were still shaking silently. Nell put her arms around Fiona, who finally began to draw in sobbing breaths. During the next few minutes she gradually moved on to that stage of crying where the body seems to swell up and poach in its own fluids.
Nell suppressed the urge to be impatient. She well knew, as did all of the other girls, that Fiona's father had disappeared several years ago and never come back. He was rumored to be on an honorable and official mission; but as years went by this belief was gradually supplanted by the suspicion that something disgraceful had taken place. It would be easy enough for Nell to make the point that she had been through much worse. But seeing the depth of Fiona's unhappiness, she had to consider the possibility that Fiona was in a worse situation now.
When Fiona's mother came by in a little half-lane car to pick her up, and saw her daughter's red and ruinous face, an expression of black rage came over her own visage and she drove Fiona away without so much as
