She was pretty sure thirty-seven minus nineteen was eighteen, but the worksheet wanted something else. It wanted Mia to draw a number line, hop backward in groups of ten then ones, and land on the answer. The answer wasn’t the point. The hopping was the point.
“Why can’t I just do it in my head?” Mia said.
“You can. But you also have to show the number line.”
“The number line is stupid.”
“Mia.”
“It IS.”
It was, a little. Jen could subtract thirty-seven minus nineteen in her head in about one second and she’d never drawn a number line in her life. She’d also never been able to explain how she did it. She just did it. The numbers moved and there was an answer. This had been fine for thirty-eight years.
“OK. Let’s try. You start at thirty-seven.” She pointed at the blank line on the worksheet. “Draw a dot.”
Mia drew a dot. It was angry and dark. “Now what.”
“Now you hop back ten.”
“Where?”
“To twenty-seven.”
“I know it’s twenty-seven. I don’t know where twenty-seven IS.” She pointed at the blank line. It had no markings. She was supposed to construct them herself.
Jen stared at the line and felt the specific vertigo of being asked to explain something she’d never consciously understood. “I think you put the numbers underneath.”
“You THINK?”
“Let me look at the example.”
The example at the top showed fifty-two minus twenty-eight. The hops were drawn as rainbow arcs above the line, each one labeled. First a big arc from fifty-two to thirty-two, labeled “−20.” Then smaller arcs down to twenty-four: “−6,” “−2.” The answer was twenty-four.
She could see what it was doing. She could not explain why it was doing it this way instead of the way she’d always done it, which was to subtract twenty from thirty-seven (seventeen) then add back one (eighteen), which she realized, as she thought about it, was also not the “normal” way. There was no normal way. There was just the way her brain had wired itself at age nine and never revisited.
“So we take away ten first,” she said. “Then take away nine.”
“Why not just take away nineteen?”
“Because the number line wants you to break it into pieces.”
“Why?”
“Because —” She stopped. She didn’t have a reason. She had a worksheet that wanted arcs. “Because that’s what it says to do.”
Mia looked at her. It was the look children give when they catch an adult following orders instead of knowing things. Jen had been getting this look for about a year now. It had replaced the earlier look, the one that assumed she had answers.
Mia picked up her pencil. She drew a line. She put “37” at one end. She drew a big arc to the left and wrote “−10.” Under the landing spot she wrote “27.” Another arc: “−9.” Then “18.”
“Is that right?” she said.
The hops were right. The numbers were right. The arcs were messy and the line was crooked and the numbers looked like they’d been carved by someone who resented them, which they had.
“That’s right,” Jen said.
Mia moved to the next problem without asking. Jen watched. The hops were fast and irritated and correct. Mia could do the method. She’d always been able to do the method. The issue had never been ability. It was consent.
There were twelve problems. Mia did them in nine minutes. Each number line was correct and each one looked like a small act of protest. The arcs got bigger and more exaggerated as she went, as if the pencil were trying to leave the page.
“Done.” She pushed the worksheet across the table. “Can I have screen time?”
“After you check it.”
“I did check it.”
“Check it again.”
Mia pulled the worksheet back and stared at it with the hollow concentration of a person pretending to review something they had no intention of changing. She stared for exactly four seconds.
“It’s fine,” she said.
It was fine. Jen signed the bottom where it said “Parent/Guardian Signature,” which was supposed to confirm that Mia had completed the work at home. She signed it every night. She’d never been clear on what the signature was certifying — that the work was done, that she’d helped, that she’d been present. She’d been present. She wasn’t sure she’d helped.
“Screen time,” Mia said, and was gone.
Jen sat at the table with the signed worksheet and the chewed pencil Mia had left behind. Tomorrow there would be another one.