Long Division

by Emily Paul

Suddenly her head snaps up from the vocabulary sheet she’s been enjoying working on and her blue blue eyes turn towards the clock; her heart drops in her chest like a weight on a string. It’s almost time and she knows it. Soon the vocabulary lesson will be put away in the dark depths of the desk before her and the math book will come out gnashing its pointy teeth, preparing to devour her, preparing to rip her tiny body to shreds.

The teacher stands and announces the lesson switch from English to mathematics, and the blue-eyed girl wishes she could stand and run, run far far away where there is no adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing; especially dividing. She can do nothing but place the vocabulary sheet in a folder, saying goodbye to the beautiful words she loves and that make sense to her, and get out the fiery math book that burns her hands with shame. Her fingers tremble while turning to the page written on the blackboard in chalk, the numbers and symbols on the paper staring back at her, their curves and loops mocking.

The teacher starts passing out small whiteboards and erasable markers, one to each student. Hers is set on the desk in front of her small frame and she wants to turn to the teacher and tell her that she doesn’t want the whiteboard, that these whiteboards haunt her dreams, that they are the essence of fear, shame, and embarrassment, that she hates these whiteboards more than anything. The rectangle of white stares at her, the teacher reads the first question out loud from the book, kids around her start writing furiously on their boards with the markers, the rectangle of white stares at her. She doesn’t know where to begin. She looks at the book, the numbers and symbols swirl, she can’t understand them, frantically she copies some numbers from the book onto her whiteboard, she doesn’t know what to do with them. Times up. The teacher calls for all the students to hold their whiteboards up showing their work and the answer. The students raise their rectangles of white high above their heads towards the front of the room, beaming. Her blue eyes turn downward as she sheepishly raises her own. The teacher moves from one side of the room to the other all the while praising the students, they all have the same number circled at the bottoms of their boards.

The blue eyes shift upwards to the teacher who has a frown on her face as she puzzles over the lack of numbers on this whiteboard. They shift around the room, only to fall on other eyes, brown, green, and hazel, her classmates’ eyes; they penetrate her like lasers. The blue eyes shift down, focused on the black marks carved into the desk. The girl feels herself turn red, the heat working its way around inside her body, singeing her organs. She feels herself shrink and her stomach twists into a large knot that tightens like cold metal clamps, gripping and tearing her insides.

The teacher’s voice makes her jump in the small plastic chair, she states that the girl’s number is wrong, the whole white rectangle is wrong, the girl must stay in at recess and practice more mathematics until the number at the bottom of her board is right. Tears slip from the girl’s blue eyes, burning their way down her cheeks, and falling on the scratched surface of the desk in front of her.

Emily Paul was dropped on her head as a child but has since fully recovered. Born in New Hampshire and raised in Jackson Hole Wyoming, Emily’s young dreams of becoming a rocket scientist were shattered in elementary school due to a mathematical procedure know as long division. With encouragement from nauseating buffalo and other western wildlife art, in high school Emily embarked on a journey to paint something other than elk. This journey has since carried Emily to the coast of Washington, where the buffalo don’t roam, and into the care of Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, where long division doesn’t roam either. Here she enriches her brain with classes in fine art and creative writing and on the side ruins her eardrums with punk music, tires her body with days of snowboarding, and wastes away hours with her nose in a book. Currently Emily Paul sits in front of a computer typing in the third person.