“A D,” Tammy said. “Show me the math.”
She had taken Savannah’s chair at Savannah’s desk, third row by the window, and her hand had gone into the cubby under the desktop the way a hand goes into a coat pocket, without being asked. Something cool and waxy was in there.
Rosa slid a laminated card across the table. The corner nearest Tammy had gone soft and furred from a season of being handed to parents.
Frank had folded into the chair beside her with his knees up somewhere near his chest. “It does say D,” he said. “I got that far.”
“It’s a composite now,” Rosa said. “The academic strand is forty percent. Savannah has a four out of four in it. She’s had a four since the second week of September.”
“And the rest?”
“Collaborative practice, thirty-five. Conduct toward others, twenty-five. She has ones in both.”
Tammy had the arithmetic before Rosa finished the sentence. Sixteen points out of a hundred available. “Sixty-five,” she said. “You built a scale where being right about everything is worth sixteen points.”
“The state built it. It came down in June with a webinar and a slide deck.”
“She has never been below an A minus. Four years at this school. Not once.”
“I know. I have her file.”
Frank shifted, and the little chair complained under him. “I’m going to ask this badly,” he said. “What is ‘holistic’ standing in for?”
Rosa took the softness out of her voice for it. “It’s standing in for the strand the middle schools want certified before they’ll take her. It travels with her; it’s on the transcript that goes up.” She looked at Tammy. “They can buy the rest of it. They’ve been able to buy it for years.”
“She’s ten.”
“The record opens at nine now.”
Behind Rosa the bulletin board had been a multiplication wall the year Savannah started here. It held photographs now, twenty-two of them, children handing things to each other.
Frank looked at it a while. “I ran eleven analysts,” he said. “There are two now. One of them is there to sign things.”
Tammy put her free hand flat on the desktop. “Give me one thing she did. One thing with a day attached to it.”
“Tuesday before last. Dov asked her for a pencil.” Rosa laid her hands on either side of the card. “She said no, and then she told him why. He’d borrowed one in October and never brought it back. She’d started the day with six and would finish it with five. The bin by the door had pencils in it and he was three steps closer to the bin than she was. And lending things to people who don’t return them makes it likelier they won’t return the next thing.”
The radiator came on under the window.
“She was right,” Rosa said. “All of it was right. She’s the most correct child I’ve taught.”
“Then what’s the problem.”
“She had her eyes on the pencil the whole time she was saying it. Dov was standing right there.” Rosa let that sit. “Nobody’s asked her for anything since. That’s what lands in the twenty-five.”
Tammy’s hand closed on the thing in the cubby and brought it out. A zippered case. She opened it flat on her knees: eleven pencils in a row by length, every point matched, none of them chewed. Savannah had sharpened them at the kitchen table on Sunday night, one at a time, holding each up to the light before she set it down, and Tammy had stood at the sink and been proud of her.
Frank came out of the chair and crouched, which put him at the height the furniture had been built for. He didn’t touch the case.
Tammy zipped it shut. She put it back in the dark of the desk and closed the desk.
“What do I do with her,” she said.
Rosa did not reach for the card.
“Stop sitting with her at night. She stopped needing that in September.” She stood. “Put her somewhere she has to want something at the same time as somebody else does. Let her lose it in front of them.”
Tammy waited.
"And send her with two pencils."