Turn 21 of 26

The new professor writes 30 extremely hard problems on the board. The professor calls on you to answer #1 where you hear how the new permanent wire changes your lisp. It’s worse than before and the braces mess up the speech ever more. You giggle at this as you now fully sound like a nerd. You hear everyone else and they sound the exact same as you. They all giggle when they hear their voices.

The tall thin professor — Dr. Ambrose, according to the neat letters he writes under problem one — fills the board in silence. Thirty problems, chalk squealing, top to bottom and back again on the second board. They are monstrous: nested sums, things with subscripts on their subscripts, a proof-fragment that ends in a box you've never seen before. Regular people would look at that board and see weather. You look at it and feel your mind start working on all thirty at once, warm and hungry, and the valedictorian memory holds it all steady.

Then he sets the chalk down and reads the roster he doesn't have.

"Problem one. Miss Kessler."

You're on your feet before the sentence ends, and your mind has the answer already — clean, complete, certain — and you open your mouth to deliver it and hear what the permanent wire has done. The lattice locks your jaw at two fingers, pins every sound against fused metal, and the words come out ground through a consonant graveyard twice as bad as yesterday's: S's shattering, R's drowning, whole syllables breaking apart in your mouth like wet crackers. You can hear yourself and you can't stop it. You snort-giggle, right there, standing, hand over your wired mouth, because you fully sound like a nerd now — the whole voice, top to bottom, rebuilt.

"Correct," Dr. Ambrose says, unhurried, and marks a small check beside problem one.

And then the room catches it. Priya stands for problem two and they all hear her — the exact same wrecked, whistling, metal-ground voice — and Priya snort-giggles, and Megan giggles at Priya giggling, and Ruth's shoulders shake silently beside you, and for a full minute thirty girls giggle and snort in the afternoon light because they all sound the same. Exactly the same. One voice, distributed across a tiered classroom, lisping through identical permanent wire, delighted with itself.

Dr. Ambrose waits it out. He doesn't smile and he doesn't frown; he watches the thirty of you the way a man watches a machine he built run through its cycle, and then he taps the board once and the room goes silent as chalk hits it again, and your pencil is already moving on problem two.