I will not provoke Miss Eden.
I will not . . .
“Provoke me to what?” she asked.
“To anger? To despair?” He turned and set the chalk down with a grin. “You don’t assign sentences, do you?”
“Of course. But not that one.” Her eyes fell guiltily to the book on her desk. She should be studying, but Adam was once again interfering with her plans. “What do you propose?” She threw her shoulders back and braced herself for his suggestions. “I know the material. Studying doesn’t seem to be the answer.”
“We practice taking the test.”
She shook her head. “As long as I know it’s just practice, it’s not going to work. There has to be a consequence for it.”
“So you take a practice test, and if you fail, then something bad happens?” The corners of his mouth turned down as he thought it over.
“I don’t know what would cause the most anxiety.” She drummed her fingers against the desk. “I get anxious when I think of a flood wiping out our house, but since we live on a hill, that won’t happen, and it seems a steep penalty for failing a practice exam. Measles—I worry about getting those too.”
“I’m not going to give you measles. That’s out of the question.”
“Well, maybe I could pay you money if I fail. No, you probably wouldn’t accept. I could give some money to someone. If there was a needy family . . .”
“Your donation could go to paying the new teacher’s salary.” He held up his hands as she gaped. “Just pulling your leg. How about if you fail on this practice, you have to buy me a stick of peppermint candy?”
“A stick of candy?” Just thinking about failing was already making her skin feel clammy. Even the price of a stick of candy was enough to addle her. “Let’s do it. The subjects I’ll be tested on are spelling, arithmetic, geography, history, and English grammar.”
“Since we haven’t had any time to prepare, it sounds like spelling will be the easiest to start with.” He picked up the dictionary that Max had consulted earlier. “Twenty words. You need to get fifteen right. Does that sound reasonable?”
Bella swiped her tablet of paper off her desk and went to the back of the room, where the chairs were larger and more comfortable.
She stretched her hand, dismayed that she could already feel the sweat forming between her fingers. This is important. If I fail, I will lose my job, and everyone will know that I was unqualified from the beginning. Her pulse quickened as she looked at the formidable blank page. Five words. She could only miss five words. Five out of twenty. It sounded impossible.
Adam flipped through the dictionary until he found a suitable word, and at his pronouncement, it was like her head had turned to stew. “Expiation.”
How to spell that? As Bella slowed it down in her head, the syllables seemed to transform into something different. She sat up straight and took a deep breath. Write it fast, she told herself. Stop thinking about it and write it down.
Her fingers seemed to have the word already imprinted in their memory. Writing it felt good. It was the right thing. She relaxed. She could do this.
Adam read the next word—pyrotic. She knew what to do. Just let her fingers take control before she gave it too much consideration. But then something caught her eye. The first word she’d written didn’t look right. How could she have made that mistake? How could she have come so close to missing it? She scratched through the word and rewrote it, switching the a and i. That didn’t look any better, but she had to move on. Now, the second word, what was it again? She bit her lip, then wrote pyrotism just as Adam was reading the third word. Moving her mouth to form the second word, she had to admit that it didn’t sound right, but he couldn’t repeat it. Not now.
Her sinking stomach knew the results no matter how she tried to deny them. If Adam had thought she was exaggerating about her poor exam scores, he was about to find out that she spoke the truth.
Adam hadn’t planned on administering a spelling test today, but it was worth trying. And from the frantic scribbling and re-scribbling that Bella was doing on her paper, it was clear her teacher’s examination would be a disaster. By the time he’d made it through the list, she was pale, shaking, and continuing to edit words at the top of the paper.
“Time’s up,” Adam said.
“How much time do I get?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. You’ve had too much time already. You’ve turned that paper into an alphabet explosion.” He grimaced as he slid it out from beneath her hand and looked it over. “This is worse than I thought.”
“Well, don’t sugarcoat it,” she said with an eye roll.
“In every case . . .” He paused to flip through the dictionary and double-check. “Yep, in nearly every case you wrote the word correctly the first time. When you went back to fix it, that’s when you spelled it wrong.”
She dropped her head into her hands. “See what I mean? There’s no way I can pass that test before next Friday.”
The same day as her father’s challenge to his threshing machine. Would both she and her father be shamed? That had never been his intent.
Adam dropped to his knee next to her. “This is good news. If you had to learn how to spell, we’d be in trouble, but you don’t. You just have to learn to take a test. In this case, always go with your first answer. That’s going to be your rule for spelling.” He couldn’t tell if he was easing her trouble, but he’d keep trying. He had to keep trying.
He ripped the page of misspelled words off her tablet and started toward the trash bin.
“Don’t throw it in there,” she said. “I’d expire of embarrassment if my students saw it.”
Adam
