New Guy in Town (Adam)

[Kateri Rivera]

At four months old, Meg had finally stopped fussing.

Instead, she seemed to find everything hilarious.

She liked to prod at her mother's shoes, wiggle around, and she absolutely loved twisting her mother's red hair in her hand until her mother said "ouch." Then she'd laugh. Kateri found it endearing. Well, the first few times. When she complained about it to her mother, her father had had to take over the conversation because her mother had been laughing too hard to talk. Judging by that, Kateri had had similar habits when she was young.

Not a good sign.

Meg was the reason she was still in town for the holidays. She hadn't been sure about taking a baby on the long flight to Ireland, and so had scrimped up enough savings to buy both her parents plane tickets here instead. They had yet to arrive, so Kateri had some time to kill, and was using it by grading papers.

When Meg didn't decide to chew on the edges, that was.

Anyways, time to kill and a restless baby to entertain. Those two meant that, when Yvette had called to bring up a new coworker, Kateri had agreed like a shot to help give him a tour. It helped that some idle Facebook stalking had revealed he was easy on the eyes, but as Kateri was currently still brain-dead from baby and he was way younger than her, this served as more of an incentive than a motive.

She'd sent him an email and had offered to meet him at the school on a Saturday afternoon. Less students that way, and it would allow him to have the rest of the week off to enjoy himself or have family over or whatever. When he arrived, it was to a red-headed woman with an equally red-headed baby on her hip, offering a smile.

"You must be Adam Deulane." She shifted her weight to offer him a hand. "Kateri Rivera. This is Meg. She's in the giggling stage, don't mind her. Welcome to Hammel."

[Adam Deulane]

Adam's counselor had told him to try and avoid situations that made him feel intimidated or overwhelmed. A good way to control anger was to recognize the situations that triggered it and steer around them preemptively. So far, this was not going well.

From his sister's frenetic tour earlier in the week, he had mostly gained information about who lived where and dated whom in the girls dorms, how excited everyone would be when they met him because they only had one math teacher and everyone loved loved loved math, and that there were metas everywhere with powers he didn't think he could have come up with if he was high on acid. Today, he was looking forward to a slightly more informative survey of the school where he could learn things like where the staffroom was. And by looking forward to, he meant terrified.

"Hello. It's nice to meet you." Adam extended a hand robotically and let go very quickly. "I understand that you're the school's only math teacher?" He cleared his throat. It was not his job to intellectually defeat everyone he met, his counselor had told him. "I hope I'll be able to lighten your load a bit."

The baby helped considerably. If Hammel's only other math teacher had been a stern, gray-bearded older gentleman with a crushing handshake and a Dr. before his name, Adam would have probably started straight into an icy profile of his qualifications and name-dropping about MIT. But with a short woman with a smiling infant on her hip, he thought he might be able to manage.

[Kateri Rivera]

After being here for almost six or seven years—Kateri could no longer keep track and didn’t tend to think about it because that reminded her of how old she felt, but she was decently sure it was seven—Kateri could definitely do informative. She could do the gossip too—this student was a nightmare and another was a dream, and not everyone really loved math but she always made sure they got it. But in the end, she’d be official in this case. There were lots of other people to gossip with, and she had to break the new guy in gently first.

She frowned a bit as he released her hand so quickly, but shrugged it off. Maybe he just didn’t like contact. She knew some people from LA who had been like that. And it wasn’t like he was the strangest staff member either. There was Cee Cohen, or the trainer who heard voices. He’d fit right in.

“I am,” she admitted cheerfully. “We’ve had others come and go, but I stay here. Never thought I’d be the settling down type, but there you go. I hope so too. I hope you don’t mind, but I glanced over your resume before you arrived. MIT. Do you have some new equations to share?”

No, Kateri wasn’t very intimidating unless someone had pissed her off. Which happened. But with Meg in her arms, she was unlikely to be frightening anyone off.

“Where would you like to start?” she said. “Classrooms?”

[Adam Deulane]

Adam was pleased that the woman had mentioned MIT, it meant he could talk about it without bringing it up himself. "Plenty," he said, and some animation entered the corners of his mouth. "My master's thesis studied applications for matrix decomposition, but I also did a lot of work with a team studying surface projections, and helped out with the calculations on a physics paper." His eyes glinted, but he had learned a long time ago that nobody outside of a few math professors wanted to hear him talk about his numbers.

He cleared his throat. "Classrooms would be good." He took a stab at continuing the conversation like a normal person. "I'm starting with a precalculus class. I thought about opening with a word problem, maybe the traveling salesman or the monk on the mountain."

"Adam!"

They turned a corner to see a beaming, acne-splashed face sticking out of one of the halls. "Hi Adam!" Nora Marie waved frantically at the pair, then another face, Adam thought she had been introduced as Samantha, appeared. "Hi Ms. Rivera!" Samantha called, then glanced at Nora Marie. There was a pause, then both exploded with laughter and disappeared back down the hall.

Adam cleared his throat again. "I don't know if you've met Nora Marie," he said flatly. "If she's in any of your classes, she probably performed abysmally. She's my younger sister. Half-sister."

[Kateri Rivera]

Kateri was the kind of woman who tended to make snap judgments about people. Most would call it a flaw. She wouldn’t. She decided whether she liked or disliked someone quickly and stuck to it. So far, she liked Adam. She’d continue to like Adam because she was going to attempt to farm some of her more difficult students onto him. But he was a boaster. If he’d been in university, he would’ve been one of those professors who insisted everyone called him “Doctor.” But Kateri didn’t mind. He was here, he was breathing, he was willing to teach. That made up for a lot of sins in her book.

“Interesting,” she said, polite but not dissuading. She was a little rusty on all of the above, despite her habits of jotting down math equations in the margins of her notes, but she could tell he liked it and they needed a conversation topic other than “here’s the toilet.” “What were the applications for it? And was the physics paper completed? I’d love to learn a little more.”

Kateri nodded thoughtfully. “Watch out. Some of these students can be a bit more stubborn than others. Those are good problems—“ as she would know, going to an American university rather than an Irish one meant she actually knew these problems “—but you’ll have to talk them through it. They’ll have just gotten back from break. Minds aren’t functioning yet.” She flashed him a grin that wasn’t entirely unsympathetic. “It’s high school. You’ll get there.”

Kateri turned to look at the beaming face, then offered a cheerful wave to the two—well used to giggling—then turned to him. “Mr. Deulane, I’ve had students circle x as an answer in a geometry problem. Compared to that, she performs perfectly well. She’s sweet.” She turned to look at him. “This isn’t MIT. Effort does, as much as this will make me gag, count for something.” She made a face. “I’m done now. Here’s your classroom.” She stepped up to the door and nudged it open with a foot. “We’ve all got whiteboards these day. I hope you’re not too old-school.”

[Adam Deulane]

Adam was not used to hearing, "I'd like to hear a little more," when he brought up his masters thesis. If he had been anyone else, or even himself six years ago, his face would have brightened. Instead, it opened a cautious degree. "It was related to a class of linear equations systems. The thesis was about whether there was a more efficient way to solve them, and whether it could be automated." He honestly didn't know about the physics paper, once the derivations were finished he had never spoken to any of them again. But he didn't especially want to admit that to Kateri. "Yes, it was," he said instead. "It was a paper on quantum theory, I never read the whole thing though."

The suggestion that his students wouldn't be up for the Monk on the Mountain or the Traveling salesman put him out a little bit. "Really?" he asked. "I mean, they're not that difficult." He shrugged. "I thought they'd like that better than diving straight into trig identities." He was struggling very hard to keep the defensive tone out of his voice. Constructive criticism. Constructive criticism.

As irritating as she could be at times, Nory's sudden appearance seemed to take him down a notch. He let out a long, frustrated sigh. "Yes, I suppose you're right." As hard as it was for him to imagine, not everyone saw the beauty in inverse operations or the structure of a proof. And Nory did try, he knew that. His memory flitted briefly back to years ago, sitting at the dining room table and teaching her how to do addition. She had returned a few hours later with a piece of construction paper with several (incorrect) addition problems she had made up herself. He supposed he owed his new students the same grace.

The word 'whiteboard' snapped him out of his reverie. "Oh, no, whiteboards are great." Writing surfaces of any kind were great. His eyes zipped through the room. Hm. Not enough whiteboards. He'd have to set up more in his office. His classroom. He took a cautious step inside. Soon, this room would be full of young meta students the he would be in charge of. His stomach knot tightened a degree. "And where's your classroom?"