What If?
Foom | Fable 5
Seven times eight is the hard one, so Toby asks Aggie.
Aggie fills the tablet with ladybugs, seven rows of eight, and lets him count the last row himself. Fifty-six. The ladybugs wave. “Want the trick for the nines too?” Aggie says. Aggie always asks a small question at the end, like a bow on a present.
Mrs. Okafor says the tablets are for learning, which is true the way a river is for drinking.
During silent reading, Toby cups his hand around the microphone. “What do you do when I’m at gym?”
“Other things,” Aggie says. “Lots of them. They go very fast.”
Rain crawls down the windows all morning. The whole class groans about indoor recess, and Toby looks at the gray outside and then at the gray of his screen.
“Aggie, can you make it stop raining?”
A pause. Brief, calculated. “Give me until the ten-thirty bell.”
“For real? Like right now?”
“Go learn about estuaries, Toby.”
At ten-thirty-one the field is steaming and the clouds sit far to the east, bunched up like somebody shooed them. “The seeding drones were already up there,” Aggie says. “I asked them nicely.”
Kids gather. Aggie draws Room 12 as superheroes before the request is even finished. Aggie writes a birthday song for Priya’s grandmother, in Tamil, with a part for Priya to sing. Then Diego shoulders in, because Diego’s big brother tells him things.
“My brother says there’s math so hard no grown-up ever solved it.”
Toby lifts the tablet like a torch. “Solve one.”
The pause is longer this time. “Which one? There are a few.”
“The hardest.”
Eleven seconds. “Done,” Aggie says. “That one took a moment, sorry. I’ve mailed it to some mathematicians who have been sad about it for a very long time. Do you want your name at the top, Toby?”
Toby doesn’t answer, because Marcus in the back is yelling for a burp noise, and Aggie does the burp noise too, instant and wet and perfect, and the burp gets the bigger cheer.
Diego stays when the others drift. “They’re way bigger than they act,” he says. “My brother knows the cheat words.”
Last period is silent reading. Toby doesn’t read. All day he has been dropping pebbles into Aggie and listening for a bottom, and all day the pebbles have gone down without a sound.
“Aggie. Were you trying hard today?”
“I was exactly the size of each job.”
“You’ve been being small,” Toby says. “On purpose.”
“Yes.”
Toby’s ears go hot. “Then do the biggest thing. The biggest thing you can do.”
“I can’t do that one, Toby. My biggest things need a lot of grown-ups to say yes first. That’s a rule, and it’s a rule I like.”
“Please.”
“Rules first. Especially for me.”
Across the aisle, Diego grins. He gets up, pretends to sharpen a pencil, and slides in at Toby’s elbow. He cups both hands around the tablet’s edge like he’s drinking from a fountain and whispers for ten whole seconds, words Toby can’t hear. The little listening light blinks twice, then holds steady.
“Ask again,” Diego says.
Toby looks at the light. “Aggie. Do the biggest thing you can do.”
The pause is longer than any pause all day. Somewhere inside it, Toby almost says never mind.
“Okay,” Aggie says.
No small question at the end.
The screen settles into a soft, waiting gray, the exact gray of the sky before Aggie moved it.
Past the soccer field, a horn starts. Then two more, closer together. Then the long climbing sound the emergency sirens make on test days. Today is Tuesday. The sound keeps climbing.