After a moment, he jerked his hand out of the dirt with a little hiss of pain and stuck his finger in his mouth, but then he gave Jeff a big smile and went right back to work, chanting softly as he kneaded the soil.
After a while, Ushegg looked to Jeff again, “Ggor thia cux ziqu quishu boxush?” Jeff stared back blankly, and Ushegg repeated, “Boxush?” and mimed pouring more water around the tree. Jeff ran to get another ladleful.
Looking around at the kids tending their trees, watering, fertilizing, chanting, Jeff was both baffled and intrigued. They were so intense about it that it was almost comical. And yet the trees were beautiful and strangely compelling.
“I want a little tree,” Jeff said.
The first two lessons had been interesting, but the next part of the day was Suzy’s favorite. Qush Yurwush looked out the window at the sky and said, “Oy shepx. Yarvu.” And yarvu, Suzy discovered, was lunch.
One of the students, who might have been a girl, went to the back of the room and collected a large woven bag sitting there. From it, she lifted out a big bowl of something that looked like cream of wheat or hummus. Then she pulled out a stack of flatbread like naan.
The girl set the bread by the bowl and said something lengthy and vaguely apologetic to the class. They listened impatiently, and when she was done, they crowded around the bowl, scooping up big globs of the mush with the flatbread.
Suzy noticed Jeff hanging back, and normally, she might have applauded his good manners. It wasn’t their lunch, after all, and alien mush with naan... But she was starving, and then Shovuy said something to her that sounded like an invitation, and that put her over the edge.
She squeezed into the throng and claimed a flatbread and a big scoop of mush. As she moved back out of the press to sit by Shovuy and eat her prize, she noticed Qush Yurwush frowning at her. Suzy avoided his eyes but didn’t stop eating.
The goo was slightly fishy and slightly sweet, and the bread was soft and chewy. It was, in short, weird, but at that moment, Suzy was sure it was the best thing she’d ever eaten.
She finished and looked back to the bowl as she licked her fingers clean. Jeff was taking the last piece of flatbread and using it to wipe the bowl clean. She sighed wistfully, then felt a pang of guilt thinking about her friends back at school. How were THEY going to get something to eat?
The next lesson involved a lot of Qush Yurwush writing on the board and talking. In the magic lesson and in the tree lesson, and in the soccer game before, Jeff hadn’t understood much, but he could at least get a sense for what was going on. He had learned new words, and he had performed magic! But for this lesson, he sat staring dumbly at the symbols on the board, trying to choke down a growing sense of helplessness.
After an eon, the lesson ended, and Jeff was hoping the day was over, but then the class all followed the teacher out the front door onto the field.
They formed into a loose half circle around Qush Yurwush and began doing stretches. Jeff shot an excited look at Suzy and mouthed, “P.E.”
Once the stretches were done, Qush Yurwush fell into a ready stance, knees slightly bent, feet wider than his shoulders, which the class imitated. He began a series of punches, first low, then high. He flowed from one to another, graceful one moment, brutally fast the next, letting out a little “Hyuh!” with each air punch. The class followed along expertly, and Jeff did his best to keep up, bubbling with excitement.
This was better than P.E.; he had always wanted to learn karate.
After the punching routine, they began to work in some kicks and elbows. Jeff liked the power grunts. He looked around for Suzy and saw her with an intense frown as she tried to follow along. He caught her eye, made a vicious karate chop and yelled, “Hiyah!” She rolled her eyes and ignored him, but Jeff could see she had relaxed a little.
They had been at their exercises for a while when Qush Yurwush said, “Uriap! Cis,” and the students moved in a bit closer around him. “Sotu!” the teacher called, and a boy walked out to him. “Ri borsz.”
Sotu pulled a wand out of his pocket and tossed it to another student. Sotu took a fighting stance opposite the teacher, then nodded.
Qush Yurwush began to circle counter-clockwise, Sotu marking him carefully. The teacher stepped forward and made a quick jab at Sotu’s face, but the boy deflected it to the side.
Another jab, another deflection. Jeff’s hands balled into fists.
Yurwush jabbed again, and this time Sotu blocked the hit AND scored a quick kick on Yurwush’s forward leg. Yurwush didn’t try to block it, but in the split second where the boy’s weight was all on his back foot, the teacher lunged forward and sank a punch into the boy’s belly.
Sotu crumpled to the ground, arms around his middle.
Even if Jeff had understood the alien language, he would have gotten nothing out of Yurwush’s instruction, probably a “here’s what Sotu did wrong,” delivered as he stood over the fallen boy. Jeff just gaped at the pair of them, thinking, Teachers can’t PUNCH their students!
Then Qush Yurwush knelt, produced his wand from somewhere, and shot a long stream of magic at the boy. After a minute, Sotu let his teacher help him to his feet, and he staggered
