Crow Flight

by Susan Cunningham

  The bell rang, and Mr. Ryan turned around. He stood there, smiling at the class, not speaking. Seconds ticked by, and students shifted in their seats. The halls quieted. The clock above the door clicked as one minute passed and another.

  Students were starting to look at each other.

  But Mr. Ryan was completely at ease. He stretched slightly over one leg, out to the side, in a half-lunge. He was lean and muscled like a runner. And tall. He held a piece of chalk in one hand, rolling it between his fingers.

  Another silent minute flashed by, and Gin was seriously considering raising her hand and asking whether this was actually a class.

  Finally, Mr. Ryan spoke. “Welcome to Ancient Worldviews.” He looked around the room, making eye contact with each student. When his eyes met Gin’s, she had the distinct feeling he was looking for something. “There’s no syllabus. No guide to papers you must write or books you must read. There will be plenty of work, but maybe not the type of work you’re used to.”

  Students clapped and pumped their fists. But Gin felt her stomach tighten. The unknown was almost always worse than the known.

  “We will begin class the same way each day, with a moment of silence.” He leaned to the other side, another high lunge, chalk still in hand. “Don’t worry. It’s not a prayer or a meditation or any weird practice that your parents will want to write the school board about. Rather, it’s a moment without any noise. A moment for you to sit in your chair, and let the world stop around you. A moment when a door might open.”

  He hopped up on his desk, his feet dangling down to the floor. With his knit shirt and fraying jeans, he looked more like a student than a teacher.

  “We’re here to talk about what people thought thousands of years ago. And all of these cultures assumed the existence of something you won’t discuss in any other class. Something that’s impossible to measure, even with the strongest, most innovative, most technical instruments in the world. Something you might have to . . . feel.” With that word, he put one hand on his chest and paused. Then he jumped to his feet and started pacing. “Who can guess what that is?”

  The class was quiet for a second. Someone said, “God?”

  Mr. Ryan stopped his pacing and raised his chalk. “Good start. God. And yes, many cultures believed in some sort of higher power—a god or many gods. But I’m looking for another word. Something even more basic.”

  Other guesses were thrown out: soul, miracles, spirit. Mr. Ryan nodded at each. But none were exactly right.

  In a tapping flurry of yellow, he wrote two words on the board: material, immaterial.

  “Everything you will learn in school, or have learned in school, is most likely rooted in this world.” He circled ‘material’ several times, the chalk getting bolder each time around. “But for thousands and thousands of years, people have believed that there’s a whole other world, right here. Around us, with us, in us. The immaterial.”

  He paused, and the class was silent. Gin felt the muscles in her neck tighten.

  “This is a world that we can’t experience with our senses. So be prepared to learn not just with your head, but with your heart.” He put his hand on his chest again, leaving a faint yellow smear on his shirt.

  Worlds where you couldn’t measure anything sounded miserable. At the very least, it’d be harder to get a good grade. Worst-case scenario: Gin’s so-called easy class would wreck her chances at Harvard—the college she’d been working to get into since she was six. Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and Sasha Sandlin, the latter of whom she was finally about to meet, had all gone there. It’d be the best school for Gin—if she could get in.

  Mr. Ryan held up his hands. “Now don’t worry, your brain is important, too. You must reason and learn and weigh the facts. But from the start, to help understand what these ancient people thought, I want you to consider that there is more. More than the brain, more than electrical impulses we can measure.”

  He walked to the corner of the blackboard and wrote in small capital letters: “The need for the immaterial is the most deeply rooted of all needs. One must have bread; but before bread, one must have the ideal.”—Victor Hugo

  “This quote is from a writer whose work was turned into plays, films, and a long-running musical. And so, in the spirit of the first day of school, we’re going to begin with a movie. Les Misérables. Consider it a warm up.”

  Everyone murmured with excitement. Even Gin leaned back in her chair, relaxed. She could handle a movie. Maybe this class wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  By sixth period, Gin’s stomach felt knotted up so tightly it hurt. She had waited all day—all her life, really—for this class.

  Computer Simulations with Sasha Sandlin. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The biggest thing Monroe High had ever offered. Considering they were in Northern Virginia, in one of the wealthiest public school districts in the nation, that was pretty good.

  Sasha Sandlin had been creating computer simulations since age ten. By seventeen, she wrote a model predicting medical successes in developing countries and won the Warren Walsh Award. She did her undergrad at Harvard, got her PhD at MIT, and returned to Harvard to teach and do research. Her models were used for everything, from predicting the next hit pop song, to anticipating an opponent’s moves in war.

  Now she was in Washington, DC, completing a fellowship at Georgetown and teaching a class at Monroe High. And Gin was one of ten handpicked high school students who got to take her class.

  Outside the classroom, Gin wiped her sweaty hands on her pants and double-checked the time. Three minutes early. Perfect.

  She took another breath and walked in.

  The classroom was bright with afternoon light. There were none of the typical classroom accessories: bulletin boards, plants, bookcases. Just eight tables, the SmartScreen, a teacher’s desk at the front, and Ms. Sandlin, standing at the side of her desk, typing furiously on her phone. Compared to her online photos, she looked both younger and more intense.

  The bell rang, and Ms. Sandlin set down her phone and perused the class, her straight hair swinging. She wore a tight skirt, cream blouse, and heels. Gin was suddenly grateful for Outfitter’s recommendation.

  “Good afternoon, modelers.” Ms. Sandlin tapped her phone, and a syllabus appeared on the screen. “And welcome to Computer Simulations 101. This is a college-level course. So it goes without saying, I will expect a lot.”

  Gin bit her lip, hiding a grin. This was exactly what she wanted. A chance to learn from one of the best in the field. Not to mention the fact that the best modeler in the class would win a summer internship at Georgetown, overseen by Ms. Sandlin.

  Gin had to get it.

  There were plenty of things Gin couldn’t do: play sports, ease her way around a party, talk without oversharing extraneous information. But she could work with computers. And ever since she had written her first if-then statement, she knew that creating computer simulations was what she was meant to do. Lining up logic. Bringing order to an otherwise unpredictable world.

  No one else, except for maybe her dad, understood. Chloe rolled her eyes at Gin’s models, and her mom would tell her to have a little fun, to let life “happen.” But Gin knew better: this was work she was made for. And being an intern for Ms. Sandlin was the best possible way to get there.

  Ms. Sandlin tapped the screen to reveal lines of code. “Does anyone know what this does?” she asked.

  Gin thought it looked like a weather simulation, except there was an element of human behavior, too. She was studying the code, getting closer to the answer when the door opened and someone stepped in. And Gin’s focus cracked.

  It was the new boy—the same one from the hall and the cafeteria and the crows—standing there, in her modeling class.

  Ms. Sandlin paused, glancing at her class list. “Mr. Gartner, we’re glad you made it.”

  He threw his head back in greeting. “Sorry I’m late. They had my schedule confuse
d.”

  Gin stared at the screen, as “Mr. Gartner” sat in the back of the class. Her ability to think had evaporated and she pulled her hair forward to cover her ears, which were now flaming pink.

  “As you consider the model, I’m going to organize you in pairs, based on your varied strengths, modeling styles, and coding backgrounds. Table one, here on my left: Ms. Pine and Mr. Edwards. Table two, just behind, Ms. Smithson and Mr. Daniels.”

  As students shuffled their things into their new spots, Gin tried to determine the pattern Ms. Sandlin was using for the seating assignments. If there was one.

  “Table three, up front on my right—”

  That was Gin’s table. She put her papers on top of her laptop, ready to move.

  “Mr. Gartner and Ms. Hartson. Table four—”

  Gin didn’t hear anything else. She could stay at her table, in her same chair even. But the new boy was going to be sitting next to her. He was going to be her partner.

  Gin stared at her laptop, as though she barely noticed when he sat down. But she felt every movement he made.

  How he put a red spiral notebook on the table. How he eased back in his chair. How he pulled a pencil out from behind his ear, tapping it on the desk. Apparently, he didn’t even have a laptop.

  He leaned towards Gin, so close she noticed that he smelled like minty soap and the woods. Her eyes flickered to his, and he raised his eyebrows.

  “Close call in the hall, right? Glad you’re okay,” he whispered. Her face burned brighter. “So, you ready for this? I hear she’s a stickler.” He did this funny half-smile, half-grimace with his lips.

  It was very, very cute. But it was also awful. In no way did Gin plan on insulting Ms. Sandlin on her first day in class—or ever.

  She turned her attention back to the model on the screen. She’d been wrong about the wind coefficient. This model was definitely not for weather, but human behavior. People moving through an airport?

  “Now class, does anyone want to hazard a guess as to what this model is all about?”

  Gin narrowed her eyes, debating whether she had enough information to throw out a guess. The new boy—Mr. Gartner, crow boy—was writing something in his notebook, probably doodling. Then he stuck his pencil back behind his ear and tapped his fingers on his arm. Distracting.

  No one was guessing, and Ms. Sandlin finally clicked to the next image. A school cafeteria.

  “We’re going to work on models that may seem simple, but are incredibly complex,” Ms. Sandlin said. “And so, we’re going to begin by modeling concepts you intuitively know.”

  She tapped on her keyboard and a black square covered with colored dots appeared on the screen. The dots, which must have been students, were positioned around long rectangles, or tables. Three new dots entered from a corner: one green dot, one purple dot, one red dot.

  “This model predicts where students sit in the cafeteria. The green dot represents a football player, the purple dot is a student in band, and the red dot is a student who does not participate in extracurriculars.”

  The new dots waited in a line, as though getting food; a few seconds later, football player dot ended up at a table with a bunch of other green dots, while the band student dot made it to a table with a group of dots of all colors, including purple. The unclassified student dot lingered near an empty table, then squeezed in with the band student dot.

  “Model how a school cafeteria works, and I promise you’ll never eat a school lunch the same way again.” Ms. Sandlin flipped to the next image and launched into her lecture.

  The concepts were all ones Gin knew, but she took notes anyway. Mr. Gartner, unsurprisingly, wasn’t taking notes. After a while, Gin couldn’t help glancing at what he had written before. Small, messy letters, strung together to make two words: school cafeteria.

  At first she thought nothing of it. But then she realized he hadn’t even touched his pencil since the first few minutes of class, when Ms. Sandlin’s model was still a mystery. He must’ve known what it was before anyone else, even Gin.

  Her eyes drifted over to him, and for some reason, he glanced back. He smiled, playful. Her cheeks pinkened—again—and she turned back to the board.

  As the clock pushed closer and closer to the end of class, she told herself that the rest of the week would be easier. She’d know what to expect. And she’d be prepared.

  // Four

  By the end of the week, Gin had eaten takeout every night for dinner, had seen her mom awake exactly once, and had found out the new boy’s first name. Felix. His name meant lucky, the lucky one, a person favored by luck—and it was fitting. Everything about Felix seemed to be lucky. Like the way his hair curled perfectly over his ears. Or how he was instantly popular without seeming to care about popularity. Or how he knew every answer in modeling class even if he never volunteered one, instead preferring to write them in his spiral notebook.

  Another strange thing about his name—not that she’d been obsessing about it—was that it was basically the same in twelve languages. English, German, French, Czech, Romanian . . . He could go almost anywhere in the world, and people would be able to greet him.

  There were all sorts of Felixes in history, too. A bunch of saints, for instance. Like Felix the Hermit, Gin’s personal favorite. Maybe because he was an oddball one, not so lucky like his name was meant to suggest. As the legend went, he could never catch a fish, which was apparently very important in ninth-century Portugal, so his parents disowned him. He took to the hills, wandering out to a big mountain to live, alone. One dark night, he kept seeing this light on a hill and finally went out to follow it. And he found the body of some important saint—the first bishop of Barga—and he became famous himself.

  The craziest part was, years later, someone figured out that the actual body that Felix the Hermit found was not the saint. It was a nine-year-old child.

  Another reminder of the futility of following strange bright lights into the darkness. Which Gin definitely wasn’t heeding with her searches of Felix’s name.

  Hannah, true to her word, had found out a lot about him. Pretty much everything reinforced Gin’s initial appraisal—that Felix was exactly the sort of guy that every girl at school would like to date. He ran cross-country and windsurfed, was good at drama and newspaper and debate team, was smart without being weird. Somehow he didn’t have a girlfriend.

  But then, there were the strange things. First was the matter of the crows. When Gin had told Hannah what she saw, Hannah had narrowed her eyes and asked whether Gin hadn’t been hanging out in the pot smokers’ bathroom. But Hannah looked into it. All she had dug up so far was that Felix supposedly counted “bird watching” among his hobbies. Gin was doing her own research, stepping outside the school several times throughout the day to try to spot Felix with the birds, with no luck yet.

  Second was the fact that Felix had transferred to public school for his senior year. He’d been a prep school or homeschool student his whole life and suddenly enrolled in public school, seemingly without a clear reason.

  And the strangest of all was not even about Felix, but his dad. Because Felix’s dad, unlike every other dad in the greater DC area, wasn’t a government worker or lawyer or financial analyst. Rather, he was the uber-wealthy owner of Odin, Inc., one of the biggest high-tech companies around. Unsurprisingly, he had gone to Harvard.

  In another twist, Odin, Inc. owned dozens of companies, including the one where Gin’s dad worked. It was an annoying connection, because even though Streamliner had been such a hit, it had barely made a dent in the Hartson family mortgage. Since her dad created the program at work, he didn’t own the rights to it.

  Maybe Gin would let Felix know how his father had single-handedly screwed up her father’s life. An exaggeration, of course, but exaggerations could be useful when trying not to like someone.

  That’s when Gin realized it: she liked Felix Gartner. And of anyone to like this year, Felix Gartner
was definitely not a good choice for her. She pulled up Decider and entered the scenario: spend senior year pining over a cute but totally out-of-her-league boy, or focus on her studies. Decider’s answer popped up immediately.

  The clear course of action is to focus on your studies. It is most advantageous to your near and long-term future.

  Exactly what she’d been trying to tell herself.

  Near the end of class on Friday, Ms. Sandlin explained their first real assignment: model a predator-prey relationship between two groups of animals, such as wolves and sheep. The class had twenty minutes to start working. Gin took a deep breath and turned toward Felix, fingers poised over her laptop.

  “I’ve always been interested in mountain lions.” It was the most she’d said to him since the start of the school year. “It might be cool to see how they impact deer populations. And we could expand it to other prey, too. Or . . .” For a second, she wondered if crows had a predator—she still hadn’t found a way to bring the crows up to Felix, and this could be her chance. And her thoughts turned to cats. “How about a barn cat? And a barn full of mice? Smaller scale, but interesting—and useful, too.”

  He glanced up at the clock. “Yeah, that’s good.”

  “Okay.” She started typing notes, angling her laptop so he could see, feeling grateful that at least they had started. “We should begin with the data matrix. Life span, reproductive rates, different hunting abilities. Maybe we can use a k-means algorithm, then set up some differential equations.”

  Felix twirled his pencil. “That all sounds good. But, I’ve actually done something like this before. How about we work separately and combine our efforts?”

  Gin’s fingers froze as she searched for a response. Felix flashed a smile and slid out from behind the table. “Really sorry to do this, but I’ve got to check out a little early.”