The Wrinkle in Time Quintet

by Madeleine L'engle

  The morning that Charles Wallace set off for first grade, Meg was far more nervous than he was. She could not concentrate during her last classes, and when school was finally over and she climbed the hill to the house and found him with a puffed and bleeding upper lip and a scrape across his cheek, she had a sinking feeling of inevitability combined with a burning rage. Charles Wallace had always been thought of by the villagers as peculiar, and probably not quite all there. Meg, picking up mail at the post office, or eggs at the store, overheard snatches of conversations: “That littlest Murry kid is a weird one.” “I hear clever people often have dumb kids.” “They say he can’t even talk.”

  It would have been easier if Charles Wallace had actually been stupid. But he wasn’t, and he wasn’t very good at pretending that he didn’t know more than the other six-year-olds in his class. His vocabulary itself was against him; he had, in fact, not started talking until late, but then it was in complete sentences, with none of the baby preliminaries. In front of strangers he still seldom spoke at all—one of the reasons he was thought dumb; and suddenly there he was in first grade and talking like—like his parents, or his sister. Sandy and Dennys got along with everybody. It wasn’t surprising that Charles was resented; everybody expected him to be backward, and he talked like a dictionary.

  “Now, children”—the first-grade teacher smiled brightly at the gaggle of new first-graders staring at her that first morning—“I want each one of you to tell me something about yourselves.” She looked at her list. “Let’s start with Mary Agnes. Which one is Mary Agnes?”

  A small girl with one missing front tooth, and straw-colored hair pulled tightly into pigtails, announced that she lived on a farm and that she had her own chickens; that morning there had been seventeen eggs.

  “Very good, Mary Agnes. Now, let’s see, how about you, Richard—are you called Dicky?”

  A fat little boy stood up, bobbing and grinning.

  “What have you got to tell us?”

  “Boys ain’t like girls,” Dicky said. “Boys is made different, see, like—”

  “That’s fine, Dicky, just fine. We’ll learn more about that later. Now, Albertina, suppose you tell us something.”

  Albertina was repeating first grade. She stood up, almost a head taller than the others, and announced proudly, “Our bodies are made up of bones and skinses and muskle and blood cells and stuff like that.”

  “Very good, Albertina. Isn’t that good, class? I can see we’re going to have a group of real scientists this year. Let’s all clap for Albertina, shall we? Now, uh”—she looked down at her list again—“Charles Wallace. Are you called Charlie?”

  “No,” he said. “Charles Wallace, please.”

  “Your parents are scientists, aren’t they?” She did not wait for an answer. “Let’s see what you have to tell us.”

  Charles Wallace (“You should have known better!” Meg scolded him that night) stood and said, “What I’m interested in right now are the farandolae and the mitochondria.”

  “What was that, Charles? The mighty what?”

  “Mitochondria. They and the farandolae come from the prokaryocytes—”

  “The what?”

  “Well, billions of years ago they probably swam into what eventually became our eukaryotic cells and they’ve just stayed there. They have their own DNA and RNA, which means they’re quite separate from us. They have a symbiotic relationship with us, and the amazing thing is that we’re completely dependent on them for our oxygen.”

  “Now, Charles, suppose you stop making silly things up, and the next time I call on you, don’t try to show off. Now, George, you tell the class something …”

  At the end of the second week of school, Charles Wallace paid Meg an evening visit in her attic bedroom.

  “Charles,” she said, “can’t you just not say anything at all?”

  Charles Wallace, in yellow footed pajamas, his fresh wounds Band-Aided, his small nose looking puffy and red, lay on the foot of Meg’s big brass bed, his head pillowed on the shiny black bulk of the dog, Fortinbras. He sounded weary, and lethargic, although she hadn’t noticed this at the time. “It doesn’t work. Nothing works. If I don’t talk, I’m sulking. If I talk I say something wrong. I’ve finished the workbook—the teacher said you must’ve helped me—and I know the reader by heart.”

  Meg, circling her knees with her arms, looked down at boy and dog; Fortinbras was strictly not allowed on beds, but this rule was ignored in the attic. “Why don’t they move you up to second grade?”

  “That would be even worse. They’re that much bigger than I.”

  Yes. She knew that was true.

  So she decided to go see Mr. Jenkins. She boarded the high-school bus as usual at seven o’clock, in the grey, uninviting light of an early morning brewing a nor’easter. The grade-school bus, which had not nearly so far to go, left an hour later. When the high-school bus made its first stop in the village she slipped off, and then walked the two miles to the grade school. It was an old, inadequate building, painted the traditional red, overcrowded and understaffed. It certainly did need upgrading, and taxes were being raised for a new school.

  She slipped through the side door which the custodian opened early. She could hear the buzz of his electric floor polisher in the front hall by the still-locked entrance doors, and under cover of its busy sound she ran across the hall and darted into a small broom closet and leaned, too noisily for comfort, against the hanging brooms and dry mops. The closet smelled musty and dusty and she hoped she could keep from sneezing until Mr. Jenkins was in his office and his secretary had brought him his ritual mug of coffee. She shifted position and leaned against the corner, where she could see the glass top of the door to Mr. Jenkins’s office through the narrow crack.

  She was stuffy-nosed and cramp-legged when the light in the office finally went on. Then she waited for what seemed all day but was more like half an hour, while she listened to the click of the secretary’s heels on the polished tile floor, then the roar of children entering the school as the doors were unlocked. She thought of Charles Wallace being pushed along by the great wave of children, mostly much bigger than he was.

  —It’s like the mob after Julius Caesar, she thought,—only Charles isn’t much like Caesar. But I’ll bet life was simpler when all Gaul was divided in three parts.

  The bell screamed for the beginning of classes. The secretary clicked along the corridor again. That would be with Mr. Jenkins’s coffee. The high heels receded. Meg waited for what she calculated was five minutes, then emerged, pressing her forefinger against her upper lip to stifle a sneeze. She crossed the corridor and knocked on Mr. Jenkins’s door, just as the sneeze burst out anyhow.

  He seemed surprised to see her, as well he might, and not at all pleased, though his actual words were, “May I ask to what I owe this pleasure?”

  “I need to see you, please, Mr. Jenkins.”

  “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “I am. This school.”

  “Kindly don’t be rude, Meg. I see you haven’t changed any over the summer. I had hoped you would not be one of my problems this year. Have you informed anybody of your whereabouts?” The early morning light glinted off his spectacles, veiling his eyes. Meg pushed her own spectacles up her nose, but could not read his expression; as usual, she thought, he looked as though he smelled something unpleasant.

  He sniffed. “I will have my secretary drive you to school. That will mean the loss of her services for a full half day.”

  “I’ll hitchhike, thanks.”

  “Compounding one misdemeanor with another? In this state, hitchhiking happens to be against the law.”

  “Mr. Jenkins, I didn’t come to talk to you about hitchhiking, I came to talk to you about Charles Wallace.”

  “I don’t appreciate your interference, Margaret.”

  “The bigger boys are bullying him. They’ll really hurt him if you don’t stop them.”

  “If anybody is
dissatisfied with my handling of the situation and wishes to discuss it with me, I think it should be your parents.”

  Meg tried to control herself, but her voice rose with frustrated anger. “Maybe they’re cleverer than I am and know it won’t do any good. Oh, please, please, Mr. Jenkins, I know people have thought Charles Wallace isn’t very bright, but he’s really—”

  He cut across her words. “We’ve run IQ tests on all the first-graders. Your little brother’s IQ is quite satisfactory.”

  “You know it’s more than that, Mr. Jenkins. My parents have run tests on him, too, all kinds of tests. His IQ is so high it’s untestable by normal standards.”

  “His performance gives no indication of this.”

  “Don’t you understand, he’s trying to hold back so the boys won’t beat him up? He doesn’t understand them, and they don’t understand him. How many first-graders know about farandolae?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Margaret. I do know that Charles Wallace does not seem to me to be very strong.”

  “He’s perfectly all right!”

  “He is extremely pale, and there are dark circles under his eyes.”

  “How would you look if people punched you in the nose and kept giving you black eyes just because you know more than they do?”

  “If he’s so bright”—Mr. Jenkins looked coldly at her through the magnifying lenses of his spectacles—“I wonder your parents bother to send him to school at all?”

  “If there weren’t a law about it, they probably wouldn’t.”

  Now, standing by Charles Wallace on the stone wall, looking at the two glacial rocks where no dragons lurked, Meg recalled Mr. Jenkins’s words about Charles Wallace’s pallor, and shivered.

  Charles asked, “Why do people always mistrust people who are different? Am I really that different?”

  Meg, moving the tip of her tongue over her teeth which had only recently lost their braces, looked at him affectionately and sadly. “Oh, Charles, I don’t know. I’m your sister. I’ve known you ever since you were born. I’m too close to you to know.” She sat on the stone wall, first carefully checking the rocks: a large, gentle, and completely harmless black snake lived in the stone wall. She was a special pet of the twins, and they had watched her grow from a small snakelet to her present flourishing size. She was named Louise, after Dr. Louise Colubra, because the twins had learned just enough Latin to pounce on the odd last name.

  “Dr. Snake,” Dennys had said. “Weirdo.”

  “It’s a nice name,” Sandy said. “We’ll name our snake after her. Louise the Larger.”

  “Why the Larger?”

  “Why not?”

  “Does she have to be larger than anything?”

  “She is.”

  “She certainly isn’t larger than Dr. Louise.”

  Dennys bristled. “Louise the Larger is very large for a snake who lives in a garden wall, and Dr. Louise is a very small doctor—I mean, she’s a tiny person. I suppose as a doctor she’s pretty mammoth.”

  “Well, doctors don’t have to be any size. But you’re right, Den, she is tiny. And our snake is big.” The twins seldom disagreed about anything for long.

  “The only trouble is, she’s more like a bird than a snake.”

  “Didn’t snakes and birds, way back in evolution, didn’t they evolve originally from the same phylum, or whatever you call it? Anyhow, Louise is a very good name for our snake.”

  Dr. Louise, fortunately, was highly amused. Snakes were misunderstood creatures, she told the twins, and she was honored to have such a handsome one named after her. And snakes, she added, were on the caduceus, which is the emblem for doctors, so it was all most appropriate.

  Louise the Larger had grown considerably since her baptism, and Meg, though not actively afraid of her, was always careful to look for Louise before she sat. Louise, at this moment, was nowhere to be seen, so Meg relaxed and turned her thoughts again to Charles Wallace. “You’re a lot brighter than the twins, but the twins are far from dumb. How do they manage?”

  Charles Wallace said, “I wish they’d tell me.”

  “They don’t talk at school the way they do at home, for one thing.”

  “I thought if I was interested in mitochondria and farandolae, other people would be, too.”

  “You were wrong.”

  “I really am interested in them. Why is that so peculiar?”

  “I don’t suppose it is so peculiar for the son of a physicist and a biologist.”

  “Most people aren’t. Interested, I mean.”

  “They aren’t children of two scientists, either. Our parents provide us with all kinds of disadvantages. I’ll never be as beautiful as Mother.”

  Charles Wallace was tired of reassuring Meg. “And the incredible thing about farandolae is their size.”

  Meg was thinking about her hair, the ordinary straight brown of a field mouse, as against her mother’s auburn waves. “What about it?”

  “They’re so small that all anyone can do is postulate them; even the most powerful micro-electron microscope can’t show them. But they’re important to us—we’d die if we didn’t have farandolae. But nobody at school is remotely interested. Our teacher has the mind of a grasshopper. As you were saying, it’s not an advantage having famous parents.”

  “If they weren’t famous—you bet everybody knows when L.A. calls, or Father makes a trip to the White House—they’d be in for it, too. We’re all different, our family. Except the twins. They do all right. Maybe because they’re normal. Or know how to act it. But then I wonder what normal is, anyhow, or isn’t? Why are you so interested in farandolae?”

  “Mother’s working on them.”

  “She’s worked on lots of things and you haven’t been this interested.”

  “If she really proves their existence, she’ll probably get the Nobel Prize.”

  “So? That’s not what’s bugging you about them.”

  “Meg, if something happens to our farandolae—well, it would be disastrous.”

  “Why?” Meg shivered, suddenly cold, and buttoned her cardigan. Clouds were scudding across the sky, and with them a rising wind.

  “I mentioned mitochondria, didn’t I?”

  “You did. What about them?”

  “Mitochondria are tiny little organisms living in our cells. That gives you an idea of how tiny they are, doesn’t it?”

  “Enough.”

  “A human being is a whole world to a mitochondrion, just the way our planet is to us. But we’re much more dependent on our mitochondria than the earth is on us. The earth could get along perfectly well without people, but if anything happened to our mitochondria, we’d die.”

  “Why should anything happen to them?”

  Charles Wallace gave a small shrug. In the darkening light he looked very pale. “Accidents happen to people. Or diseases. Things can happen to anything. But what I’ve sort of picked up from Mother is that quite a lot of mitochondria are in some kind of trouble because of their farandolae.”

  “Has Mother actually told you all this?”

  “Some of it. The rest I’ve just—gathered.”

  Charles Wallace did gather things out of his mother’s mind, out of Meg’s mind, as another child might gather daisies in a field. “What are farandolae, then?” She shifted position on the hard rocks of the wall.

  “Farandolae live in a mitochondrion sort of the same way a mitochondrion lives in a human cell. They’re genetically independent of their mitochondria, just as mitochondria are of us. And if anything happens to the farandolae in a mitochondrion, the mitochondrion gets—gets sick. And probably dies.”

  A dry leaf separated from its stem and drifted past Meg’s cheek. “Why should anything happen to them?” she repeated.

  Charles Wallace repeated, too, “Accidents happen to people, don’t they? And disease. And people killing each other in wars.”

  “Yes, but that’s people. Why are you going on so about mitochondria a
nd farandolae?”

  “Meg, Mother’s been working in her lab, night and day, almost literally, for several weeks now. You’ve noticed that.”

  “She often does when she’s on to something.”

  “She’s on to farandolae. She thinks she’s proved their existence by studying some mitochondria, mitochondria which are dying.”

  “You’re not talking about all this stuff at school, are you?”

  “I do learn some things, Meg. You aren’t really listening to me.”

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Then listen. The reason Mother’s been in her lab so much trying to find the effect of farandolae on mitochondria is that she thinks there’s something wrong with my mitochondria.”

  “What?” Meg jumped down from the stone wall and swung around to face her brother.

  He spoke very quietly, so that she had to bend down to hear. “If my mitochondria get sick, then so do I.”

  All the fear which Meg had been trying to hold back threatened to break loose. “How serious is it? Can Mother give you something for it?”

  “I don’t know. She won’t talk to me. I’m only guessing. She’s trying to shut me out till she knows more, and I can only get in through the chinks. Maybe it’s not really serious. Maybe it’s all just school; I really do get punched or knocked down almost every day. It’s enough to make me feel—Hey—look at Louise!”

  Meg turned, following his gaze. Louise the Larger was slithering along the stones of the wall towards them, moving rapidly, sinuously, her black curves shimmering purple and silver in the autumn light. Meg cried, “Charles! Quick!”

  He did not move. “She won’t hurt us.”

  “Charles, run! She’s going to attack!”

  But Louise stopped her advance, just a few feet from Charles Wallace, and raised herself up, uncoiling until she stood, barely on the last few inches of her length, rearing up and looking around expectantly.