Calculating

Posted by bookncurls on April 17, 2008 · Leave a Comment 

His leg was doing the butterfly flutter in the upper right corner of the room, his knee occasionally bumping the table. “We still have ten minutes. They’ll walk in,” he said looking around at the near empty rows.

“And all swarming,” another guy added.

Underneath his textbook a used piece of scratch paper he hadn’t thrown away yet, lay halfway covered. He began tracing his textbook on to the paper right through some calculations that had nothing to do with the test he took the day before.

A few more students entered. Finally a guy with dark rich brown hair, sunglasses stuck to his head, a striped polo and khaki shorts walked in, his perked eyebrows lowered, his footing slowed, he wagged half of a smile. He slipped in next to a girl with a rock necklace to match her black fitted shirt and khaki green trousers.

He looked her up and down, “Good chance our kids are going to be dark and hairy.” She smiled and his eyes danced.

Seats away a British-American political team looked over their homework for questions to ask the teacher. Her back recovering from a recent surgery kept her in a chair next to an overhead projector. Her left hand held a blank transparency steady; her right hand tapped the projector pen on the lit glass. Her eyebrows arched awaiting a response to her request for problems to solve.

“#19,” a British accent finally called.

“Can’t we just do all of them,” the guy with the sun glasses bellowed, then his dimples deepened and his lips pursed toward the teacher.

Several other students called out numbers. “Alright,” the teacher grabbed her textbook and wrote numbers on the overhead.

“We can find ex plus why to the sixth without doing a single bit of multiplying.”

“C how I showed you. It’s the other way around.”

The guy in the corner stopped tracing his book and continued calculating the calculations that didn’t have anything to do with yesterday’s test.

“For your four five cross out fifty six. …We just hacked it.”

“Huh?” a round and balding guy looking up mumbled.

A girl in the back row looked through the phone numbers in her cell just below the table. A Deaf man looked intently at a girl sitting in a chair in the front turning equations and explanations into visible language.

I’m looking forward to your trickeration, the guy in the back thought to himself. He just finished his calculations.

Filed under Memoirs and Stories, Story starts · Tagged with ASL, calculating, Deaf, interpreting, math, pick up lines