Musical Teachers, Part 1 (116)

PSI-2

There was nothing for it but to go down to Cinders Alley and teach the school. Hyacinth had declared Mordecai sick and confined to the house whether he was symptomatic or not, so he couldn’t go. Besides, Milo was pretty sure this was all his fault and it wasn’t like he could control a bunch of street kids with knives all by himself, no matter how many cards he did. So after she had apologized for him, Ann got her coat on and walked off with her purse and her hatpin and an optimistic outlook.

She stopped at a couple of stores on her way down to see if she could pick up some mice for the sacrifice circles and get it warm under the bridge.

———

“All right, now what is this kind?” Ann asked with a flourish of chalk dust.

The chalkboard had been hemmed in on three sides with rapid sketches of heeled ladies’ shoes — with a space for Mordecai’s do-not-erase request not to steal from the school — leaving plenty of room in the middle for one large, detailed example.

“I’m sure you’ve seen these in shop windows in the summer. If the soles are finished in rope, they are a kind of espadrille, but we are only concerned with the basic shape at the moment. Yes, Josie?”

The little fair-haired girl at the central warped table was stretching her hand out at a forty-five degree angle with fingers splayed, not even sitting in her seat.

“A peep-toe ankle strap platform wedge!”

“That’s very good!” Ann wiped out the image with a handkerchief she had liberated from the front of her dress. It didn’t leave her too lopsided with a full load of folded tissues still tucked away in there. “So, you see, all of these basic styles can be combined… Can I help you, Emily?”

The frowning girl with the silver merger in her face put down her hand, regarded Josette beside her with barely-concealed disgust and asked Ann, “Are you stupid or something?”

“It is not nice to insult our teacher or our friends, Emily,” Ann said coldly. “Bearing that in mind, do you have an objection to learning about shoes today?”

“Shoes are retarded!” the girl snarled, crumpling the piece of paper in front of her. It was entirely note-free, there was nothing here worth remembering.

“Emily…” Josette said. Yelling was one thing, but you didn’t mess up perfectly good paper. That cost money. Unlike most of the school.

“I don’t even care!” Emily said. “What do I need to know about shoes for? Am I gonna grow up and shop?”

“At some point,” Ann said. “But I’m not here to teach home economics. Strictly speaking, I’m here to make it as fun as possible while we’re all trying to stay warm.” She smiled at them. This had… sporadic effect. There were nine altogether and few of them liked her. Soup was there and he’d promised to lend her a hand before any violence ensued. Josette liked her pretty dress right away, that was nice. But there was no band or two drink minimum at Seth’s school, and that did make things a bit more difficult.

“Well, stop it!” Emily said. “It’s insulting.”

“It’s boring,” Henri chimed in.

“It’s a little fun,” Carlos said. “I like learning shapes…”

“It’s pointless,” Emily said.

“Shut up, Emily, I like the pretty lady!” Josette snapped. “And shoes!”

“It is perfectly fine to like shoes,” Ann said. “…Also we don’t tell our friends to shut up, Josie, angel, thank you. However, if most of you would prefer something other than shoes, I do take requests.” She increased the wattage of her smile.

“Sing something, Miss Rose!” Soup suggested from stage left, like a lifeguard throwing out a line.

“Oh!” Ann said. She ducked her head and touched a hand to her chest. “Well, if you…”

“Teach us some math, you useless bimbo,” Emily said sourly.

“That is not a nice name for a lady, Emily,” Ann said. “And I am not at all useless.”

“Prove it.”

Ann addressed the chalkboard, frowning, and wiped out some more of the shoes, making room at the top.

It’s okay, Ann. I’ve got this.

Milo, I don’t need you to have it. I can do it if you can, I just don’t. I only need a minute to think of it…

She wasn’t really mad at him, he only wanted to help. But she was not a… a… one of those cartoon characters! A decorative object! A bad example for little girls! …Or little boys who liked pretty things.

Clothes and shoes were perfectly admirable pastimes and did not rot your brain any more than candy or romance novels or musical comedies. A knowledge of shoe styles did not at any point fight with or subsume the ability to make numbers sit up and bark like a little dog, now, did it?

Geometry is enough. I shall draw an irregular trapezoid and calculate its angles and area, dividing it into a series of isosceles triangles…

I know you’ll be really great at it, Ann. Way better than me. And you can talk and everything too.

Her determined frown dropped into a dismayed gape and she pressed a hand over it.

That was why she didn’t do math. Math or magic or any clever things like that. Not because they were too clever or too hard, or because she was all full of shoes and novels with no room for a brain. Because they were Milo’s things. Milo’s things that he knew he was good at, and he could look around and compare himself and think, “Maybe I can’t talk or look at people or hug them, but I can do something. And I’m really great at it.”

But of course she’d be even better, because he made her to be really smart and do all that hard stuff, like looking at people and smiling and hugs. Math was easy.

“Music is math!” Ann declared, smiling. She rubbed out the shoes at the side and drew five ledger lines, perfectly straight and perfectly spaced.

Ann…?

Music is for us to share, Milo. Real math is yours.

It’s only fractions.

I can fast-peddle it, Milo. Watch me.

“Now, an octave is divided into eight segments, thus. This is the c major scale. This is a c note, and this is a c note at double the frequency — but that is science, children. These are quarter notes, which are drawn as solid, with a stem. Four quarter notes make one whole note, or two half notes. This is an eighth note, and this is a sixteenth note. You can get all the way up to thirty-second notes, but that is a cruel thing to do to a musician, really.” She laughed. “Two eighth notes make a quarter note and two sixteenth notes make an eighth note, so four sixteenth notes make a quarter note. Are you following me, Emily, dear? Do you need more paper? Now, this is a time signature. It tells you how many beats to a bar and which type of note equals a beat. Three-four is three quarter notes to a bar, or six eighth notes, or twelve sixteenths, or twenty-four thirty-seconds, but that really is a bit much. So after that many notes, we draw a line and begin a new bar, or measure. Emily, how many eighth notes to a bar if the time signature is four-four?”

“Uh…”

“That is, a quarter note is one beat and four beats to a bar, dear.”

“Eight?”

“Very good, dear. Multiplication and division! Four-four and three-four are very popular time signatures. Three-four is what we’d call a waltz. One-two-three, one-two-three.” She picked up her skirt and did a quick box step. “Most music for dancing is fairly regular, but some songwriters change up the time signature to be dynamic. You can also divide up the beats to fit more notes in a bar, that gives you a dynamic sound too. A quarter note and four eighth notes, or two quarter notes and two eighth notes. Or, a note with a join or a dot next to it!” She drew these. “That means it has half the value added, so a quarter note with a dot beside it in three-four time is held for precisely one and a half beats! So that would be two quarter notes with dots to a measure, in that case. Do you see?”

“You lost me at thirty-second notes, Miss Rose,” Soup put in. The rest of the class were just staring.

“Only by design, dear,” Ann said, smiling. “But this is all much simpler in practice, children.” She gestured to the board, which she had once again filled. “Sheet music is literacy, but you don’t need to know how to read to know how to talk. Music has even less grammar than Anglais, it’s all based on what pleases the ear, and you all can tell that.” She rubbed out the notes on the lines and then sang along with the chalk, leaving a trail of notes behind. “Up and down, out and in. Don’t be afraid, if you’re sinking I’ll swim. Pair of shoes, hand in glove, we both stand together! …I should say ‘we all stand together,’ we rewrote the lyrics with a pencil. You’re allowed to do that, children, the government did,” she added with a laugh. She paused with her handkerchief, about to correct the words. “Would you children like it if I taught you to sing?” she asked them, smiling. “Show of hands, please!”

She even got Emily that time.

———

Ann ended the lesson a little before sundown, so the children would have time to find something to eat and come back to the bridge if they couldn’t find someplace better to sleep. She killed some more mice so the heating spells would last through the night — stabbing through them and into the center of the sacrifice circles with her hatpin, which worked best. There was one for each corner of the bridge. Milo thought it was a pretty good design, even if he could’ve done a better one with a central location and fewer dead mice. Also, he thought Seth should really do something about the loud trains. He might offer to help with it if he could figure out how without being insulting. He’s not bad at magic, just not as good as me…

“You are basically Mary Poppins, you know that, right?” Soup complimented her as she cored out a mouse.

“I don’t think I am particularly magical, but thank you, dear,” Ann said.

“Are you gonna come back tomorrow?” Josette asked breathlessly.

“I would love to! And Milo and I have Sun’s Days off, so you’re lucky that way. I can’t do Moon’s Day morning, but we’ll have to see. Maybe Seth will be better by then and you can have real school again!”

“You do all right,” Soup said. He wasn’t sure if he should say better than Mr. Eidel, but certainly more fun. And nobody threatened to kill her.

“I’m sorry I called you dumb,” Emily said. “It’s just…” She jammed her hands in her coat pockets and turned her head aside. “I know I can’t really be smart, with papers like I’m a dog or something. You need money for that. Seth thinks I could, but I know I can’t. Really.” She looked up. “But I could probably be smart like you. Unofficially. Even if I just want regular shoes.”

“I want the shoes and the dresses and pretty hair!” Josette said.

Aw, Ann. Like the little girls at the workhouse.

Ann crouched down with a smile, but it was somewhat subdued. “If you want to get to dresses and shoes and pretty hair from sleeping on the sidewalk and soup kitchens, you will have to be very, very smart. I wish I could make it easy for you, but I couldn’t make it easy for myself, and I needed to be lucky a lot of the time too. Hang onto your smartness, even if you can’t get papers for it,” she added, to Emily. “Universities don’t keep knowledge in a box with a lock on it. The library is free and they have to let you in. And it’s nice and warm too. You all do know how to make your clothes warmer with crumpled newspaper, don’t you?” she asked, concerned.

Nodding all around.

Ann smiled. “Ahh, see? We learn more things on the street than all shut up in a normal school, anyway.”

———

After an afternoon spent singing and two shows at the Black Orchid and a walk home in snowy darkness, Ann went to bed with a flannel wrapped around her throat and grave apprehensions.

An assessment in the mirror that morning proved that the sniffle she could hide had turned into a drip she could not, and then it was time to drop all pretensions of schoolteaching and go into panic mode.

Milo could not abide people trying to take care of him when he was sick. Hyacinth was a medic, and there was no way she would accept a firm ‘no’ on the matter. The first time she had caught him looking a little peaky she brought her hand up right away for a touch-know — despite Ann having explained how Milo did not like people touching him! — and he ran off and spent two nights in a doss house. Which provided a convenient excuse for Ann being mad at Hyacinth and Milo avoiding her until he felt better. But after that they both knew they needed a plan for never getting caught sick ever again.

Ann, you know that thing the General does with the deconstructions…

Milo, it is truly terrifying how often I need to remind you that we share a head. And I would not like it exploded, please. We know how to handle this. We have plenty of supplies. This is fine.

In the middle drawer with the corsets was a shoebox with a lid. Inside was all the medicine Milo would put up with, mainly aspirin and decongestants, and a bottle of viciously strong cough syrup that Ann was willing to take if nothing else worked. Ann had also been the one to walk them down to the free clinic and get all their shots when they heard in passing that this could prevent them from getting sick at all. They were very disappointed to discover ‘vaccine’ was a specific science thing and not a general ban like you could do with magic to keep the bugs out of the water bucket, but at least they wouldn’t have to do it again. Except tetanus. And diphtheria.

Stupid non-magical vaccines…

Milo, I’m sure they’re doing their best.

Well, why don’t they make one for… whatever this is?

I don’t really know, but if we ask Cin about it now, she’ll get suspicious.

Ann popped a cough drop into her mouth. These were in a paper bag that said ‘boiled sweets,’ which she tucked into her purse. She and Milo purchased occasional bags of hard candy so as to let it be known that they liked hard candy and might plausibly have some at any time. Also they did like candy, all kinds. The cough drops smelled like cherry, grape and lemon. Assorted. Milo hadn’t been able to come up with a good orange, or mint — you could still detect eucalyptus in those. There was a similarly denatured jar of mentholatum — that one didn’t smell like anything, so Ann or Milo were okay to wear it. Also, the good makeup was in the shoebox, almost all samples from Hennessy’s. Most essential was a vial of something called ‘Sheer Perfection! With Red-Detect™!’ a concealer which was subtle enough to see freckles through but eliminated all evidence of eye bags and blushing. Milo and Ann were willing to pay money for that one. A spectrum of powders in rainbow tones for evening up the complexion and a dusting of bronzer completed that ‘I am perfectly healthy and also not slathered in makeup!’ look.

“Why is there so much bronzer in here?” Ann muttered hoarsely, in search of the Sheer Perfection. The little tins and bottles clattered. “Why are those damn makeup ladies always pushing bronzer on me?”

It’s because we look like death on a soda cracker, Ann.

“Well, we look like a goddamn brass bedknob covered in bronzer… Aha!” She rescued the bottle from the sea of bronzer and applied it.

I don’t want to say it’s Lalage and Barbara, Ann. Cin thinks Lalage and Barbara are mean to us and they’re not. Say I found something fun at the library. We’re going there anyway.

“Milo, we can’t say it’s the library. We were at school and work all day yesterday, we can’t have gone to the library.”

Before that. On Frig’s Day.

“We didn’t have snot coming out of us on Frig’s Day. Cin barely knows Lalage and Barbara, it’s fine.”

———

“… It’s just, there are an awful lot of old file boxes, props and things, and Lalage and Barbara simply can’t keep up. You know how it is,” Ann said, smiling. “I’m going to go back and help them a bit more today. And the rest of the week, when I can.”

“They do know you’re allergic to that crap,” Hyacinth said, frowning. Ann had gone through three tissues while they were talking.

“It’s not any worse than when Milo wants to play with something in the restricted section of the library, and I like helping all my friends.”

“Let me give you some antihistamines,” Hyacinth said. She turned for her doctor bag on the counter.

Ann drew a bottle out of her purse and showed it, “Oh, don’t worry, I have lots!” It was empty. And expired. Milo didn’t like stuff that made him sleepy.

“You are very sure you don’t have Seth’s cold, Ann, aren’t you?” Hyacinth said.

“Completely! Cause and effect, dear. I stuff right up when I go into the back room, it’s practically a science! But I’ll be sure to let you know if it gets any worse!”

Erik, who was drinking tea at the kitchen table with Maggie and the General, sighed. Problem rhinoceros. And if we hit it with a blow dart and throw a net over it, it’ll run off and sleep in a doss house for two nights. But, honestly, he was too tired to be very upset about Milo and Ann. He’d done a lot of upset yesterday and his stomach still hurt. His eye socket too. He wasn’t sure if he still had a sinus in there, maybe just metal and oil. He pulled out another tissue. The box was in the center of the table and there were a couple dozen used ones littered around it.

“You will let the children know how sorry I am, won’t you, Cin, dear? I was going to teach them some more music, but I simply can’t now. My voice…”

“Wait a minute… Did you tell them to come here?” Damn it, they were all going to end up in the basement again!

“Oh, no, dear, but I just assumed…” Ann turned her head sideways and did not quite regard the General. “I mean, Calliope has Lucy. Barnaby and Room 101 are easier to delegate, aren’t they?”

“I don’t have to breastfeed them, no,” Hyacinth said sourly. “But sick and injured people do occasionally show up here looking for me.”

“I’m sure Mordecai can send for you if it’s anything he can’t handle. He has to be here anyway…”

The General slammed a hand on the table and stood, “This is all perfectly ridiculous. I am capable of teaching any number of students and I am standing right here!”

“You have a cold,” Ann said. And I mean that metaphorically, she thought, eyes narrowed.

“I have had it for at least four days, it is waning. My symptoms are controlled. And I will gladly damage my immune response in the service of education! To suggest otherwise is an insult!”

You could practically see the military hat with the feathers, despite the bathrobe.

Maggie reached up and put a hand on her arm. “Mom, no lessons on Sun’s Days.”

“Magnificent, that is, if I may say, a gentleman’s agreement which is legally non-binding.”

“Ethically,” Maggie said.

“That is a matter of opinion!”

“Mom, I really don’t think you want to be teaching me that ethics are a matter of opinion. I’ll give you a pass this time, but sit down and take care of your cold.”

“…This is a mild cognitive impairment that would in no way interfere with my ability to instruct students of average intelligence.” Nevertheless, she sat down and sipped tea.

Hyacinth shook her head with a pained expression. “I mean, okay, I’ll tell them you’re sorry and I’ll make sure the school is still there, but if they try to stab me, I’m out.”

Ann smiled. “I’m sure that’s all anyone can ask of you, Cin.”

Ann walked down to the bus stop, bundled in her coat, so she could ride downtown to the library and sneak vending machine tea into one of the study rooms. Hyacinth grabbed her purse out of the drawer and got her shit together so she could go to school.

———

There were about a dozen of them. A fair-haired girl who seemed vaguely familiar was standing in front of the improvised desks and facing the street, with the others attending her. “You have to stand so it frees up your diaphragm! Like you’re proud of yourself. You can hear how it’s different!” She straightened and sang, “Learn and grown, sing and play. Lessons outside on a beautiful day! We all stand…”

A freight train trundled by overhead, spraying sparks like a firework, but the girl got louder and continued to sing with her hands pressed over her ears. Some of the others joined her and shored her up, keeping time by thumping on whatever flat surface they happened to find in front of them. Hyacinth even caught a couple of phrases.

“…We all stand together!” she finished at a bellow, but nevertheless in key. “Also night clubs are just as distracting as trains, just not as loud, and you don’t let people step on you. Ever.”

“I helped her write the music and she let me be a frog!” said a little boy in a roughly-knit sweater.

Bethany, obvious even at a distance, shook her shaggy head. “Ann does not turn people into frogs.”

“Sure she does,” Soup said. “And cats and bees. You’re just annoyed you missed out.”

A girl with a silver merger covering half her face stood up and added excitedly, “A diaphragm is made of bone and muscle. The word means a membrane that divides something. It divides your chest from your stomach. She said she’d borrow one of Calliope’s anatomy books so we can see — What the hell are you doing here?”

Hyacinth picked up her purse and held it in front of her like a shield. I will not hurt these children no matter how violent they get with me because then I’ll just have to fix them. If they don’t want me, I’ll leave. That’s how this is going to go. Nobody is getting a sockful of pennies merged to their face. Least of all that one, who I fixed once already.

“Ann got pressganged into moving a load of dusty boxes around at her club last night,” Hyacinth said. “Her voice doesn’t work right now. She asked me to come here and tell you all how sorry she was, and maybe teach you, but I don’t have to do that if you’d rather not. I’ll just have to trust you not to take the school apart and make Seth unhappy.”

There was a chorus of ‘aww’s and Bethany thumped her head on her desk.

“Did you lock her in the basement so she couldn’t come?” the fair-haired girl said acidly.

“No. I probably should have, but Milo would get her out if I tried it. She went back to work to help them and damage herself some more, because she’s stupid that way.”

“Ann is not stupid,” said the girl with the merger.

“She is fairly intelligent about most things, but when it comes to eeling her way out of something a friend asked her to do she is dumb as a rock, and it is on purpose. She thinks the way to be nice to people you love is not to yell when they hurt you, she’s like Milo that way.”

“She said girls have to stick up for themselves!” the fair-haired one protested.

“The two are not mutually exclusive,” Hyacinth said with a sigh. She set her purse down on the warped board that served as a teacher’s desk. “She’s better about it than Milo, at least, but she’ll flip it off like a switch if she wants someone to be happy.”

The little boy in a roughly-knitted sweater raised his hand and asked, “Who’s Milo?”

“Milo is…”

Soup stood up at the back. He took off his hat and waved it for attention. “Miss Hyacinth… Don’t.” Nobody here knew there was anything funny about Ann, they even bought she was a woman, and he’d like to keep it that way.

“Milo is not a lesson,” Hyacinth finished. She pulled her hand into her coatsleeve and began to erase the music from the board. There were mild noises of complaint from behind her. “You guys wanna learn how your diaphragm works? I’m not gonna be super great at drawing it, but…”

“Yes,” the girl with the merger said.

“It’s not as fun if we’re not gonna use it,” a boy in a patched jacket complained.

“I mean, you’re breathing right now, but I guess that’s not fun,” Hyacinth allowed. “Hey, silver girl.” She pointed. “Come up here and I’ll teach everyone about mergers!”

Emily’s mouth dropped open in a combination horror/offense expression that Hyacinth was quite used to inducing. “…No!” she managed finally.

“Okay, fair enough. How about…” Hyacinth considered. “Gangrene?”

“Yeah!” said the fair-haired girl, grinning. A few others also sat forward eagerly.

Soup began urgently waving his hat again. “Miss Hyacinth, there are little kids here!”

“Hey, don’t tell me what I wanna learn!” Bethany said. “You’re not the boss of school!”

Some voices agreed, “Yeah!”

“No,” Soup said, “but Mr. Eidel told me to keep an eye on it and I don’t wanna puke while I’m doing that! Miss Hyacinth,” he said desperately, “you should get the heat under the bridge before you teach anything anyway. Do you have any mice?”

Hyacinth recoiled and knocked into the chalkboard. “Mice?”

“I mean, I’ll kill ‘em if you don’t want…”

“Wimp,” the fair-haired girl muttered.

“I don’t kill things and I don’t have people kill things,” Hyacinth said firmly. “Which is actually very brave and hard to do sometimes, but I guess you won’t believe me. You kids know how to build trash can fires, don’t you? What kind of a slum are we running here?”

A couple older boys at the back threw up their hands and walked off. If there wasn’t going to be any heat then screw it, never mind the gangrene lesson.

“Hey, hang on!” Hyacinth said. Somehow, being rejected like that was worse than being threatened with knives. I’m the one who’s supposed to decide if I wanna quit! “Goddammit! I may not be a natural performer or pretty to look at or… I don’t know… Personable, I guess?” She scowled. “But I can damn sure be interesting! I’m just not used to standing up here and talking about everything. I like practical shit I can point at and take apart! That’s how David got me to sit still and…” She trailed off and considered, tapping a finger over her closed mouth. “Okay, I forgot something. I have to go to the store for a second.” She picked up her purse. “If the bridge should happen to be mysteriously warm underneath when I get back, I won’t ask any awkward questions.” She turned to the two older boys on her way out, “You guys should stick around, I might embarrass myself. That’d be fun to look at, wouldn’t it?” She stalked off down the street in the direction of the nearest drugstore.

———

She’d noted the display on the way past. All New Year’s Items, 50% Off! She had also loaded up her purse with change from the big glass jar before she left, assuming she was going to clear the store out of tissues and cold medicine on her way home. She’d just have to go home and go out again for the cold supplies, that was all.

Hyacinth removed an entire box from the window and set it down on the counter with a clatter. “So how much more of a discount can I get if I take all of these?”

The pharmacist glanced from her to the box and back again. “Lady, I will give you my standard ‘cursed object’ rate. One sinq for the whole box if you promise not to set them off in here!”

“Aw,” said Hyacinth. She sighed and undid her purse. “Okay, okay. I can wait. Gimme that little box of screwdrivers over there too…”

———

It was mysteriously warm under the bridge and Hyacinth did not ask any awkward questions. She set the box down on the teacher’s ‘desk.’

“Toys?” cried the little boy in the roughly-knit sweater.

There was a mass abandonment of tables and chairs.

“The insides of things are very interesting,” Hyacinth said, brandishing a screwdriver. “And there are enough of these so everybody can have one… once we’re done playing with them.” She smiled. “You’re glad you stuck around now, aren’t ya?” she said to the two older boys. “Okay, I promise, we’ll put everything back together and it will work even better!” she announced to the group. “It’s the Xinese year of the monkey, you kids know that?” She selected one of the cymbal-banging variety. There were others in there that did backflips and played drums and screamed. “What you’ve got here is your bog-standard unmodified Monsieur Al-Mufti.” She’d named the original one after the gardener and she considered that the proper epithet for the species. “Cute, right?”

“Pretty creepy, Miss Hyacinth,” Soup said. There was nodding all around.

“Wanna see if we can get him to breathe fire?” Hyacinth said with a grin.

———

Hyacinth arrived home that evening somewhat crispier than usual and with scorch marks on her dress — just from the metalworking, she’d been unsuccessful in her attempts to mechanically produce fire, even after borrowing some matches from the kids. She stuffed one Monsieur Al-Mufti in her purse to bring home so Milo could have a go at it with magic. Milo needed a toy. He hadn’t been in the basement to play with anything since Calliope snapped his heart in two.

Should I wait for Twelfth Night or just let him have it when Ann gets home…?

In the kitchen, where it was warm and there was convenient access to soup and tea, Erik and Maggie were sitting at the table and rather joylessly playing with their New Year’s toys. It was no fun winding them up when basically everyone had a headache. Erik had proposed a melodrama where the pig with the glockenspiel wanted to buy a really great gift for his friend the backflipping monkey, but he couldn’t afford it unless he sold the glockenspiel, which was a family heirloom. Maggie found this incredibly dull and suggested he at least get a job as an assassin or something — maybe take out the quacking duck for his unpopular political opinions.

“He feels conflicted, Maggie.”

“Well, tell him to suck it up!”

Erik stood up and smacked the flat of his hand on the table, “Don’t… yell… at… sad… people!”

“Please, you two. Please,” said Mordecai, who was also at the table, holding an ice bag against his face.

Hyacinth dropped her purse on the floor and ran over. “Mordecai, what the hell happened?”

“Ah.” He waved off her hand and took down the ice bag, displaying a bruised eye. “I don’t know what happened. I guess I wasn’t paying attention. I broke a bunch of your dishes too.” He gestured to the counter. There was a tray with smashed plates and ruined food.

“You always break shit when I have you feed Room 101, I’m used to that,” Hyacinth said. “It’s probably got three heads or something and you can’t cope. You don’t remember messing up your eye?”

He shook his head.

Hyacinth frowned suspiciously, “Did you get into the cough syrup?”

Mordecai straightened and pointed at the doctor bag, “Oh! You told me to take it! You said I’m sick! You said not to wait until I’m running a fever! You said it was okay to be around Erik again!”

“Contain yourself, Mordecai,” the General said tightly, poking her head out of the pantry. She set the box of herbal tea on the counter and filled up a glass pot. She would’ve sworn they had a teakettle recently but it was gone now.

“Yeah, I told you to take it, but did you get into it?” Hyacinth said. She put her hand on his forehead, carefully, to check.

“No!” He snatched a tissue from the box on the table and covered a cough, but Hyacinth wasn’t buying it.

“Quizzical quiz, kiss me quick,” she said.

“Not if you were the last woman on earth.”

“Quizzical quiz,” she said firmly.

“Oh, quizzical quiz, quiss me click — goddammit.”

“Okay, but you are running a fever and you have a head injury, so I’m gonna give you a pass,” Hyacinth said. “However, I am not going to leave you here alone to bang yourself up like a nervous parakeet and now that you’re symptomatic I want you in bed.”

“Not if you were the last woman…”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I guess Soup gets to be the boss of the school tomorrow after all.”

The General dropped a preparatory tea bag into her empty mug and looked up with a truly terrifying smile. “Tomorrow, Hyacinth,” she said grandly. “Tomorrow… is not Sun’s Day.”

“Oh, gods,” Maggie said, and she thudded her head on the table.