“Very good, Albertina. Isn’t that good, class? I can see we’re going to have a group of real scientists this year. Let’s all clap for Albertina, shall we? Now, uh”—she looked down at her list again—“Charles Wallace. Are you called Charlie?”
“No,” he said. “Charles Wallace, please.”
“Your parents are scientists, aren’t they?” She did not wait for an answer. “Let’s see what you have to tell us.”
Charles Wallace (‘You should have known better!’ Meg scolded him that night) stood and said, “What I’m interested in right now are the farandolae and the mitochondria.”
“What was that, Charles? The mighty what?”
“Mitochondria. They and the farandolae come from the prokaryocytes—“
“The what?”
“Well, billions of years ago they probably swam into what eventually became our eukaryotic cells and they’ve just stayed there. They have their own DNA and RNA, which means they’re quite separate from us. They have a symbiotic relationship with us, and the amazing thing is that we’re completely dependent on them for our oxygen.”
“Now, Charles, suppose you stop making silly things up, and the next time I call on you, don’t try to show off. Now, George, you tell the class something . . .”
At the end of the second week of school, Charles Wallace paid Meg an evening visit in her attic bedroom.
“Charles,” she said, “can’t you just not say anything at all?”
Charles Wallace, in yellow footed pajamas, his fresh wounds band-aided, his small nose looking puffy and red, lay on the foot of Meg’s big brass bed, his head pillowed on the shiny black bulk of the dog, Fortinbras. He sounded weary, and lethargic, although she hadn’t noticed this at the time. “It doesn’t work. Nothing works. If I don’t talk, I’m sulking. If I talk I say something wrong. I’ve finished the workbook—the teacher said you must’ve helped me— and I know the reader by heart.”
Meg, circling her knees with her arms, looked down at boy and dog; Fortinbras was strictly not allowed on beds, but this rule was ignored in the attic. “Why don’t they move you up to second grade?”
“That would be even worse. They’re that much bigger than I.”
Yes. She knew that was true.
So she decided to go see Mr. Jenkins. She boarded the high-school bus as usual at seven o’clock, in the grey, uninviting light of an early morning brewing a nor’easter. The grade-school bus, which had not nearly so far to go, left an hour later. When the high-school bus made its first. stop in the village she slipped off, and then walked the two miles to the grade school. It was an old, inadequate building, painted the traditional red, overcrowded and understaffed. It certainly did need upgrading, and taxes were being raised for a new school.
She slipped through the side door which the custodian opened early. She could hear the buzz of his electric floor polisher in the front hall by the still-locked entrance doors, and under cover of its busy sound she ran across the hall and darted into a small broom closet and leaned, too noisily for comfort, against the hanging brooms and dry mops. The closet smelted musty and dusty and she hoped she could keep from sneezing until Mr. Jenkins was in his office and his secretary had brought him his ritual mug of coffee. She shifted position and leaned against the corner, where she could see the glass top of the door to Mr. Jenkins’s office through the narrow crack.
She was stuffy-nosed and cramp-legged when the light in the office finally went on. Then she waited for what seemed all day but was more like half an hour, while she listened to the click of the secretary’s heels on the polished tile floor, then the roar of children entering the school as the doors were unlocked. She thought of Charles Wallace being pushed along by the great wave of children, mostly much bigger than he was.
It’s like the mob after Julius Caesar, she thought,— only Charles isn’t much like Caesar. But I’ll bet life was simpler when all Gaul was divided in three parts.
The bell screamed for the beginning of classes. The secretary clicked along the corridor again. That would be with Mr. Jenkins’s coffee. The high heels receded. Meg waited for what she calculated was five minutes, then emerged, pressing her forefinger against her upper lip to stifle a sneeze. She crossed the corridor and knocked on Mr. Jenkins’s door, just as the sneeze burst out anyhow.
He seemed surprised to see her, as well he might, and not at all pleased, though his actual words were, “May I ask to what I owe this pleasure?”
“I need to see you, please, Mr. Jenkins.”
“Why aren’t you in school?”
“I am. This school.”
“Kindly don’t be rude, Meg. I see you haven’t changed any over the summer. I had hoped you would not be one of my problems this year. Have you informed anybody of your whereabouts?” The early morning light glinted off his spectacles, veiling his eyes. Meg pushed her own spectacles up her nose, but could not read his expression; as usual, she thought, he looked as though he smelled something unpleasant.
He sniffed. “I will have my secretary drive you to school. That will mean the loss of her services for a full half day.”
“I’ll hitchhike, thanks.”
“Compounding one misdemeanor with another? In this state, hitchhiking happens to be against the law.”
“Mr. Jenkins, I didn’t come to talk to you about hitchhiking, I came to talk to you about Charles Wallace.”
“I don’t appreciate your interference, Margaret.”
“The bigger boys are bullying him. They’ll really hurt him if you don’t stop them.”
“If anybody is dissatisfied with my handling of the situation and wishes to discuss it with me, I think it should be your parents.”
Meg tried to control herself, but her voice rose with frustrated anger. “Maybe they’re cleverer than I am and know it won’t do any good. Oh, please, please, Mr. Jenkins, I know people have thought Charles Wallace isn’t very bright, but he’s really—“
He cut across her words. “We’ve run IQ tests on all the first-graders. Your little brother’s IQ is quite satisfactory.”
“You know it’s more than that, Mr. Jenkins. My parents have run tests on him, too, all kinds of tests. His IQ is so high it’s untestable by normal standards.”
“His performance gives no indication of this.”
“Don’t you understand, he’s trying to hold back so the boys won’t beat him up? He doesn’t understand them, and they don’t understand him. How many first-graders know about farandolae?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Margaret. I do know that Charles Wallace does not seem to me to be very strong.”
“He’s perfectly all right!”
“He is extremely pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes.”
“How would you look if people punched you in the nose and kept giving you black eyes just because you know more than they do?”
“If he’s so bright”—Mr. Jenkins looked coldly at her through the magnifying lenses of his spectacles—“I wonder your parents bother to send him to school at all?”
“If there weren’t a law about it, they probably wouldn’t.”
Now, standing by Charles Wallace on the stone wall, looking at the two glacial rocks where no dragons lurked, Meg recalled Mr. Jenkins’s words about Charles Wallace’s pallor, and shivered.
Charles asked, “Why do people always mistrust people who are different? Am I really that different?”
Meg, moving the tip of her tongue over her teeth which had only recently lost their braces, looked at him affectionately and sadly. “Oh, Charles, I don’t know. I’m your sister. I’ve known you ever since you were born. I’m too close to you to know.” She sat on the stone wall, first carefully checking the rocks: a large, gentle, and completely harmless black snake lived in the stone wall. She was a special pet of the twins, and they had watched her grow from a small snakelet to her present flourishing size. She was named Louise, after Dr. Louise Colubra, because the twins had learned just enough Latin to pounce on the odd last name.
“Dr. Snake,” Dennys had said. “Weirdo.”
“It’s a nice name,” Sandy said. “We’ll name our snake after her. Louise the Larger.”
“Why the Larger?”
“Why not?”
“Does she have to be larger than anything?”
“She is.”
“She certainly isn’t larger than Dr. Louise.”
Dennys bristled. “Louise the Larger is very large for a snake who lives in a garden wall, and Dr. Louise is a very small doctor—I mean, she’s a tiny person. I suppose as a doctor she’s pretty mammoth.”
“Well, doctors don’t have to be any size. But you’re right, Den, she is tiny. And our snake is big.” The twins seldom disagreed about anything for long.
“The only trouble is, she’s more like a bird than a snake.”
“Didn’t snakes and birds, way back in evolution, didn’t they evolve originally from the same phylum, or whatever you call it? Anyhow, Louise is a very good name for our snake.”