Among the privileges of the Free Learning Zone was that students could leave the classroom and visit the school library whenever they liked, and Meena and Lily took advantage of this opportunity frequently, becoming intimately familiar with the library’s collection of books, newspapers, periodicals, and reference materials.
Meena loved the way she might wander down an aisle, running her fingers over the spines of the books and choose one at random, any number of worlds opening up before her. She didn’t, however, like to think of all the other small worlds left on the shelves. It induced in her a sense of panic, the thought that it might not actually be possible to read all of the books in the world.
She loved, too, the library’s numerous sets of encyclopedias — Britannica, Columbia, New Standard. In them, she looked up Bombay, tried to imagine her parents’ previous lives, tried to imagine herself there. Her mother had taken her back to India twice. Both times she had been too young to remember anything of the trip, of the country, aside from the grandmothers who doted on her, stuffing her with a parade of sweets. And both times, her father had been unable (or unwilling, Meena was never quite sure) to tear himself away from his work to join them.
She looked up the Lab, which was described just as her father described it, as “housing the world’s premier particle accelerator facility, currently the most important tool for the study of subatomic physics.” It seemed important that the place where her own father worked appeared in the encyclopedia. She felt a sort of pride by association.
There, in the school’s library, the Free Learning Zone students sometimes encountered students from the regular classes whose teachers had arranged a visit to the library for some project or other, and on these days Meena and Lily sometimes caught glimpses of their old elementary-school classmates. They regarded each other curiously across the library as though eyeing a wild animal.
What were the other kids learning, Lily wondered? She had no sense of what she might talk about with them, were they to meet on the playground for recess or, as Ms Lessing called it, expressive play. Had they done the unit on Cubism yet? Would they know what a fractal was? How far separated had they become, she wondered. Tom Hebert made it sound like the regular kids now spent most of their time learning to fix automobile engines and give haircuts. Erick Jarvis, whose glasses turned from regular glasses into sunglasses and back again whenever he went into or out of the building, and who had a brother who was still in the regular classes, reported that, according to his source, it was all just exactly the same as before.
Among the regular kids, though, there had, it seemed, cropped up a collection of apocryphal legends about what had become of the gifted and talented kids who had been disappeared from their classes. One said he had heard that the gifted kids were all aliens who’d been identified by the government and had been shut up in the Free Learning Zone to undergo a series of top-secret experiments.
Tom Hebert said his next-door neighbor believed the gifted kids had been identified as “Commie spies” and had been sent to the Free Learning Zone for deprogramming. But the other Free Learning Zone students gave this theory little attention, having felt for some time that Tom was not really one of them. They had heard that he’d had to beg his way into the Free Learning Zone, a series of increasingly shrill phone calls from his parents until the principal had finally relented, shaking his head and thinking, Fine, kid. It’s your funeral.
Regarding the regular classes, many of the Free Learning Zone students had begun to develop a barely concealed contempt. Although the term regular might be more commonly understood to suggest “that which is normal, standard, or expected,” among the Free Learning Zone students there could be no greater insult than to be thought of as regular. Why be regular, normal, standard, when one could be exceptional, gifted, advanced?
In February, just as the citizens of Nicolet were beginning to tire of the grey slush of winter, the students of the Free Learning Zone began a unit titled “Our Changing Bodies.”
Meena and Lily could tell this was going to be something different from the way Ms Lessing colored when she began the first lesson, her voice going a little breathy, as though hoping not to be overheard by anyone who might be passing just then in the hallway. Gone was the self-directed learning. Ms Lessing insisted that all of the Free Learning Zone students take seats facing her. Suddenly, Ms Lessing was using the chalkboard, overheads, slides even, and strangest of all, reading from the book. She grasped it as she spoke as though it were a life preserver, the only thing keeping her afloat.
Lily paid careful attention. Ovaries, she lettered in her notebook in her slow, deliberate handwriting. Testes. She avoided looking at any of the boys in the class as she wrote.
Meena had propped up her health textbook on her desk so that it appeared as though she was following along as Ms Lessing lectured. But inside the textbook, she had secreted away her latest obsession, which she had discovered at the Friends of the Nicolet Public Library’s used book sale the previous weekend and had been carrying around since then — a strange, yellowed old book called The Secret Museum of Mankind. Turning the pages, her eyes on the grainy images and their captions, it was this book she read as Ms Lessing lectured.
There were photos of scantily clad men, earlobes stretched around clay disks; bare-breasted women in skirts of grass, naked babies resting on their hips; a boy hunter wielding a spear. In the background, she could hear Ms Lessing reading aloud from the textbook.
“You may begin to notice changes in your body.”
But Meena’s eyes were on the grainy photographs of The Secret Museum. She was nearing the end of the section titled “The Secret Album of Oceana,” in which the author noted, The shores are dotted with these careless children of nature, lightly clad.
From the front of the room, Ms Lessing had adopted what she hoped was a reassuring tone.
“These changes are part of what is called puberty.”
P-U-B-E-R-T-Y she spelled out carefully on the chalkboard in all capital letters.
Here, in a classroom that was a sea of white suburban faces, Meena pored over the images in The Secret Museum, all identified as “natives” or as “representative specimens of their race,” all of them dark-skinned, the images in the book and the lecture, going on in the background like a kind of soundtrack, becoming intimately connected as she half listened and half took in the photos and their captions. Kalinga girls are fond of this style in which the bodice ends early and the skirt begins late.