(Peggy is narrating)
The light vanished and the red lines began fading. I scribbled them down, as they were like nothing I saw before in my life!
Imagine a perspective drawing where width was x and height was y, with my original curve plotted there. Draw a vertical mirror image of that on the xy plane. Add a third axis, along the length dimension, forming a ‘floor’ with the x axis. Rotate the mirrored curve at right angles, into the third axis. The two dots where the rotated mirrored curve touches this floor at y equals zero, are my answers.
Oops, I wasn’t paying attention! Dr. DuQuesne was standing beside my desk. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
My current foster mother says the truth never hurts. “Just doodling. I got the first four examples, but I couldn’t tackle the fifth, so I started day dreaming. I’m very sorry! What’s that floor with the ‘x’ axis I just drew, anyway?”
I heard his dry erase marker clatter on the wood floor by our feet. He muttered in shock, “You’re using the imaginary axis!”
“What’s that, sir?” I was scared he might yell at me.
He knelt to recover his marker, held my sheet of paper in his trembling hands, then spoke just loud enough for me to hear. “You drew this, and you don’t even know imaginary numbers yet?”
“No, sir. Am I in trouble?”
“Anything but. Reinventing the graphical method to find complex roots of a binomial… this is game breaking!”
I sighed. “How did the others do?”
He shrugged. “They all got the other four.”
Now recess was the thing I hated most about going to school. I tried to look invisible but there were always people waiting who would laugh and point at my roundness.
Standing in my path today was Perkins. I despised him! He wasn’t just an all around jerk, he was a total creep. He chased me
to the baseball outfield, then reached towards me. “You’ve got nice ones, Piggy,” he grinned. “I want to see what they feel like again.”
He snuck up from behind and felt me through the front of my shirt, back in the final days of sixth grade. Today, first day of fall, my face flushed in rage. As he closed in I slapped him, hard. Perkin’s face turned livid. “I’ll make you wish you hadn’t done that!”
Another boy’s voice intervened. “Try, and I’ll make you wish you hadn’t been born.” I turned to see Martin Crane, a taller classmate with curled yellow hair, a square jaw, dark green eyes, and a body made mostly of limbs, elbows, and knees.
Martin frowned. “I don’t like how you play with girls.”
“What’s it to you, queer?” Perkins taunted. “Betcha can’t get it up for her! Stay out of my way, Martian, or I’ll kick your nuts off!”
If you enjoyed this, buy me a coffee? If you really enjoyed this, buy the book?