Turn 24 of 26

Rejoin the group as ruth gets called, Then Peggy and finally, Penelope. You four then talk about math stuff and how excited you are for class tomorrow as the giggle-snorts happen while you guys speak. The guy comes over to you 4 and says come to the back. You 4 follow him and see Dr. Ambrose. You 4 sit down and Dr. Ambrose tells you 4 that you got the internship. You all say thank you.

You rejoin the girls, and Ruth is called next. Through the table you watch her answer in the identical metal-ground voice, snort-giggling twice, while Holloway fills his page without caring. Then Peggy — 'the good group,' she whistles on her way up — then Penelope, whose pigtails bob over every answer. Between calls, the four of you huddle and talk math: the hanging problem from room 201, the nested sums on Ambrose's board, which of tomorrow's lectures will be hardest. 'I can't wait for clath,' Peggy lisps, and the snort sets the others off, and the four of you giggle-snort in a little wave while professionals in blazers glance over without interest.

Then Holloway caps his pen, crosses the reception room to your group, and says only, "Come to the back, please. All four."

You follow him through a door behind the punch table, down a short quiet hallway, into a small conference room — and Dr. Ambrose is there. Sitting at the head of the table in his bow tie, hands folded, waiting, exactly the way he watched the classroom run through its cycle.

"Sit down, girls," he says.

You sit. Four chairs, one side of the table, in a row. Ruth beside you, then Peggy, then Penelope, knee socks and cardigans under fluorescent light, and Ambrose looks down the row of you the way he looked at the board — satisfied, unhurried, certain.

"You've been placed," he says. "All four of you, together, as a unit. The internship is yours. You start Monday. You'll be working on the kind of mathematics most people never touch, and you'll be doing it together, because that's how you work best." A pause, thin as a chalk line.

"Congratulations."

"Thank you," the four of you say — in the same voice, at the same time, through the same wire — and the words come out of your mouth without anyone deciding to say them, four identical thank-yous overlapping into one.

The knocking thing under the warmth doesn't hammer this time. It goes very, very still.