The Zanna Function

by Daniel Wheatley

  Daniel Wheatley

  Mendota Heights, Minnesota

  The Zanna Function © 2018 by Daniel Wheatley. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Jolly Fish Press, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First Edition

  First Printing, 2018

  Book design by Sarah Winkler

  Cover design by Jake Nordby

  Cover images by v_alex/iStockphoto; the-lightwriter/iStockphoto; KathyGold/Shutterstock

  Jolly Fish Press, an imprint of North Star Editions, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (pending)

  978-1-63163-168-9

  Jolly Fish Press

  North Star Editions, Inc.

  2297 Waters Drive

  Mendota Heights, MN 55120

  www.jollyfishpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  For all my teachers.

  Chapter One

  “I have a new puzzle book for you.”

  Zanna Mayfield swallowed her cereal in a single gulp. “Really?”

  Across the table, her Pops nodded and pushed a newspaper-

  wrapped package over to her with his trembling, wrinkled hands. She forgot all about breakfast and snatched it up at once, tearing away the wrapping.

  Her face fell. “Pops, I already have this one.”

  “Oh?”

  She turned the book over. It was worn and battered, its spine only held together by some hastily applied tape. “In fact, this is my book.”

  “Is it now?”

  “Yeah.” She flipped open the cover. In the corner of the inside page, a young girl with dreadful penmanship had written Mine! “You just snatched this from my bookshelf!”

  “Now that’s quite a serious accusation,” Pops said, clearing away the discarded newspaper wrappings with a grin. “Would I do such a thing?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Well then,” he said, letting out a small groan as he leaned over to pick up something else hidden beneath the kitchen table. “It’s a good thing I have a spare.”

  He put another newspaper-wrapped book on the table and slid it across to her. Warily, and far less enthusiastic than before, Zanna opened it. But there was no trickery this time. Inside was a brand-new book of puzzles that still smelled of bookstores and printer ink. She flipped through it and then jumped up from the table. “It’s new!” She skipped around to hug her grandfather.

  “Happy first day of school, my little scamper,” Pops said as she threw her arms around his neck. “Don’t solve them all at once.”

  “Not at all once,” Zanna said, pulling away. “Two days.”

  Her grandfather laughed and mussed her unruly snarl of short black hair. “Finish your cereal. Come on, buses don’t wait for the likes of you and me.”

  She wolfed down the rest of her breakfast and bounced up to the bathroom to take a shower. In her bedroom, she had already laid out the uniform for St. Pommeroy’s School for Gifted Children. A black shapeless skirt that reached down to her mid-calves, a powdery blue blouse with knee-length socks of the same color, patent leather shoes, and a black tie embroidered with the school’s triangular crest. It had been a challenge at first to tie the Windsor knot, but Zanna had practiced it every day until she could do it after only three failed attempts.

  The last piece was her favorite—a soft, round, and floppy bonnet made out of black velvet—the kind that Zanna saw professors and scholars wearing with their official academic robes during graduation ceremonies. The whole uniform was woefully out of touch with modern style, and Zanna loved it for that. She pinned the bonnet a bit back on her head and made sure it was perfect.

  Zanna had turned fourteen over the summer, and it had done her no favors. Her blue eyes bulged like she was trying to push them out of her skull. Like her five uncles, she had thick black hair that frightened even the most hardened of barbers. Her solution was to stand in front of the bathroom mirror every month or so and hack at it with a pair of razor-sharp scissors until it was shorter than most boys’ hair at her school. It wasn’t pretty, but it worked, which Zanna would take any day.

  Pops was packing up her lunch when she came down. “Don’t think you’re going to get away with this,” he said, handing her the brown paper bag. “You’re going to have to pack your own lunch after today. This is a one-time deal.”

  “A one-time deal,” Zanna repeated. She jumped up onto her tiptoes to kiss his whiskery cheek. “Thanks, Pops.”

  “Don’t forget your books either, silly mouse . . .”

  “I haven’t!” When he raised an eyebrow at the fact that she wasn’t carrying her backpack, she scowled in reply. “They’re over by the door. I put them there last night!”

  Suddenly, he took her by both shoulders and stooped so their foreheads touched, even though the effort was probably murder on his poor arthritic back. “I’m so proud of you,” he said. “And your father is, as well.”

  She squirmed a bit, as she always did when Pops talked about her father. “Buses don’t wait for the likes of you and me.”

  “No, they don’t,” Pops said, kissing her messy hair and sending her on her way. “Don’t make too much trouble.”

  Zanna and her grandfather lived at 808 Three Pines Drive in the Twin Brooks neighborhood in Seven Corners, Virginia—a comfortable, if slightly mathematically confused, brick townhouse. The streetlights still glowed in the early September morning. Children of all ages trudged sleepily down the drive to where it intersected the main boulevard, a march Zanna remembered well from previous years. But Zanna wasn’t heading off to J. Clemons Public High like the rest of them. She stopped at her mailbox and put down her backpack, fishing around inside it for the acceptance letter just to make sure she remembered the directions correctly. Please wait outside your residence for transportation to arrive, it instructed.

  The letter had appeared with no fanfare whatsoever. A week after school let out, Pops came into the kitchen with the mail and tossed an overstuffed envelope down in front of her. Congratulations, Zanna Mayfield, on your acceptance to St. Pommeroy’s School for Gifted Children. At first, Zanna was convinced that the entire thing was a hoax. They hadn’t even bothered getting decent stationery—the letter was printed on graph paper. But after some digging on the Internet, she found some answers on their website. St. Pommeroy’s was an exclusive high school academy, notable for its extremely rigorous curriculum and for not having an application process like every other private school. Intrigued, Zanna accepted their offer. When books and supplies and uniforms began to appear at her doorstep, all perfectly wrapped in silver paper, Zanna knew it wasn’t a hoax. She was really going.

  It wasn’t that she was surprised by the offer. Even back in elementary school, Zanna had known that she outpaced the other children in her class. Schoolwork had been a breeze but making friends had not. Nobody wanted to be friends with a girl who had a knack for multiplying numbers faster in her head than they could with the calculator on their phone. Nobody wanted to be friends with a girl who asked for more homework, since she had finished all the problems in her algebra textbook within the first week.

  Down at the end of Three Pines Drive, she heard the rumble of a diesel engine, but it was
just the bus for public school. Parents who had gone down to see their children off came back up the road, a few waving at her as they passed. She was about to pull out the acceptance letter again to make sure she hadn’t made a mistake when another bus rumbled up the street.

  It was disappointing, to say the least. Going by the school’s website and the uniforms and books they had sent her, Zanna was expecting—well, nothing precisely, but certainly not the wheezing, sputtering contraption that stopped in front of her with a dilapidated hiss of brakes. The paint was old yellow, with a beaten ST. POMMEROY’S written down the side.

  “Zanna Mayfield?” the driver asked with a mouth of missing teeth. He had the angry, unkempt beard of a hermit and squinty bird eyes.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come on then,” he said, gesturing for her to climb aboard. “Burning daylight here.”

  He started up the engine as soon as Zanna was onboard, nearly knocking her over with the lurch of movement, and she grabbed the closest open seat she could find. As first impressions went, it was hardly encouraging.

  “Hey, firstie!”

  A boy was shouting at her. She looked up and saw him leaning over the seat, his tie in a sloppy knot and his scholar’s bonnet nowhere in sight. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  “Me? Nothing,” Zanna replied. “Just sitting here.”

  The boy chewed a wad of gum so big it made his cheek bulge. “Gimme your hat.”

  Instinctively, her hands clamped down over the soft velvet bonnet. “No! Don’t you have your own?”

  “Yeah, but I want yours.”

  “No! It’s mine!”

  She didn’t notice the other boy creeping up behind her until it was too late. He yanked her hat from between her fingers, ripping out a clump of hair with it.

  “Give it back!”

  They threw it back and forth, laughing. Both were older and tall enough to easily keep it out of her reach. One shouted, “Heads up!” and tossed Zanna’s hat to a third boy, who tossed it to a fourth. On back through the bus Zanna’s hat went, tossed from one set of cruel hands to the next. At the very back, a girl with a thin mouth wrung the poor thing like a damp cloth and stomped on it. Zanna rushed to scoop it up. Face burning, she slunk back to her seat and saw that while she had been occupied, the boys had emptied her backpack and dumped out all her books and papers.

  “Welcome to St. Pommeroy’s, firstie,” the boy cackled as Zanna gathered up her belongings with what feeble dignity she had left. So there were bullies here, as well. She had dealt with bullies before.

  Thankfully, she was left alone for the rest of the bus ride. But when they pulled into the school parking lot, what Zanna saw outside the grimy bus window made her heart sink. For a place called St. Pommeroy’s School for Gifted Children, it looked neither gifted nor fit for children. In fact, it barely looked like a school at all. Weeds grew over broken concrete and cracked windows. The yard was a mess of old soda cups and burger wrappers and plastic bags blowing in the wind.

  “Out,” the driver muttered, stopping the bus with a hiss. “All of you, get out.”

  The boys laughed as they passed Zanna, a couple of them shoving her back down into her seat every time she tried to stand up. She was the last one off the bus. Behind her, the doors snapped shut, and the bus drove off in a cloud of black smoke.

  Zanna adjusted her backpack and squared her shoulders. It didn’t matter what the school looked like or that it was full of jerks—as long as she could learn. With determined steps, she crossed the littered yard and went inside.

  It sounded like a battle was going on in the cafeteria. Students screamed at each other, desperate to make themselves heard over the noise. Zanna had to put her hands over her ears to keep from going deaf. A boy came careening through the crowd, laughing with something pink in his hand as a girl gave chase, and he slammed hard into Zanna, scattering the contents of her backpack for the second time that morning. She knelt to collect everything again and had just picked up the new puzzle book from Pops when the bell rang. The cafeteria turned into a stampede. It was all she could do to avoid getting run over in the rush. She hugged the puzzle book tight to her chest, helplessly watching the rest of her books get trampled.

  It took a while to collect her belongings, and so she was late to her first class, Advanced Mathematics. The teacher, a shriveled woman who looked like she had lemon juice for blood, snapped her fingers at her as Zanna took the last remaining seat at the very front of the room. “Detention. One week.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am—”

  “Talking without raising a hand first,” she snapped again. “An additional week of detention.”

  Zanna scowled, but she didn’t say anything else.

  “You may call me Mrs. Vivi, and this is Advanced Mathematics,” her teacher said, writing her name on the board with a horrific squeak of chalk that set Zanna’s teeth on edge. “Advanced. I have no doubt many of you believe you are exceptionally clever. Many of you believe this class will be too simple for you. It is my job to break you of that assumption. The concepts we will discuss are typically reserved for college-graduate-level studies. If you cannot keep up, see yourself out of my classroom. I accept no excuses. I take great pleasure in failing my students. Do not test me.”

  Finally. Zanna felt a smile beginning to spread across her face. This was what she was here for. All the bullying on the bus, the dismay at the school’s appearance, the sad state of her books from the stampede, even the prospect of two weeks’ detention seemed like nothing now. She was going to learn.

  “We begin with arithmetic,” Mrs. Vivi said. The chalk let out another ear-splitting screech. “Consider this number. It is a two. And consider this number. It is also the number two. Through the process of addition, I can combine them into the number five.”

  Zanna’s heart dropped. Her mouth fell open in stunned amazement. Arithmetic? And it wasn’t even right! She told herself it was just a mistake and her teacher had misspoken, but then Mrs. Vivi wrote the entire thing on the blackboard with that horrible squeaking chalk, and there was no mistaking it then. Two and two equaled five.

  Zanna glanced behind her. Everyone was nodding, their notebooks out and pencils working furiously. When she turned back, Mrs. Vivi was staring right at her.

  “I advise you to write this down,” she said coldly. “I do not repeat myself.”

  “But—”

  “Talking without raising a hand first,” she snapped. “Another week of detention.”

  A growl built in Zanna’s throat, but she swallowed it and raised her hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Two and two is four,” Zanna said, pointing at the board. “Not five.”

  A giggle ran through her classmates. Her teacher, however, didn’t seem amused. “No. Two plus two is five.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Talking without raising a hand first,” Mrs. Vivi said. “That makes one month of detention for you.”

  It was harder to subdue the growl this time. Zanna raised her hand, but Mrs. Vivi had already turned back to the blackboard. “We shall be devoting the first month of study to arithmetic. Now, consider this number. It is the number three.”

  The next hour was agony. By the end of it, Zanna could barely prop her head up. She didn’t know what was worse: the fact that the blackboard had been filled, erased, and refilled with astoundingly incorrect arithmetic, or that none of her classmates seemed to realize it. At the bell, she jumped up from her seat. Her next class was Advanced Physics, and it had to be better. Statistically speaking, it had to be better.

  Within the first five minutes, however, she saw how wrong she had been. Her teacher was a fat man by the name of Mr. Oddenben, who sounded like he was speaking through a patchy megaphone and told the class that the world was flat. “The sky is a dome with stars painted on it, and it moves arou
nd and around our world, telling us when it is day and when it is night,” he said, drawing a diagram on the blackboard. His chalk was somehow even squeakier than Mrs. Vivi’s, and Zanna kept her sanity intact by imagining a secret chalk-squeaking room deep in the school where little elves took perfectly good chalk and ran it through an infernal machine until it was nice and squeaky.

  Her third-period class—Advanced Chemistry—was no different from her first two. A short woman with a face like a squashed dog introduced herself as Mrs. Wellings and then spent the entire lecture talking about how there were no such things as atoms. By the time the bell rang for lunch, Zanna felt as though someone had pounded nails into her skull.

  There were no open tables in the cafeteria. Back at public school, she would have just gone to the library to eat in solitude, but the morning had taken such a toll on her energy that she just collapsed against the cafeteria wall, sinking to the ground with legs splayed. Nobody seemed to mind. Mr. Oddenben, who was walking around the tables on lunch-monitor duty, didn’t even look twice at her.

  “Hey, firstie!”

  She had just bitten into her peanut butter and jelly sandwich when she heard him. The boy from the bus. He stood over her with three of his friends, grinning.

  “Leave me alone,” she grumbled.

  “Looks like you’re already alone,” the boy said. He sat down next to her and held out his hand. “I think we got off on the wrong foot, eh? My name’s Eddie.”

  Zanna glared at his outstretched hand. “Just leave me alone.”

  “Come on,” Eddie said. “It was just a little fun. No hard feelings, eh?” He waggled his eyebrows, his hand still held out.

  It was a trick. It had to be.

  Her plan had been to smack his hand away, and if he did anything else, to spit the flavorless mash of peanut butter and sandwich bread she was chewing in his face. But he moved quicker than she anticipated and grabbed her wrist in a flash, twisting it behind her back and pinning her to the floor. “Get it!” he shouted to his friends, and for the third time that day, Zanna’s backpack was dumped out.