The math paper was different today. There was a woman with a baby kneeling among the equations. Fatma thought the woman looked a bit like her mother, but her mother was math-phobic. “Hopelessly math-phobic,” she’d tell Aabo, Fatma’s father. That was long ago in the old Mogadishu after she’d overspent on clothes and entertaining her colleagues at the university. When Fatma cried, worried her mother had a terminal illness, Mrs. Ali laughed until her sides ached. “It’s what the Americans say if you don’t have a head for numbers.” She repeated the story a dozen times, always to great laughter, and each time Fatma would lower her eyes and bite her lower lip between her teeth.

A year later, she still cringed with humiliation. Even worse, she blamed her mother’s careless attitude towards numbers for conjuring the plane that carried them from Aabo. On the rare occasion she spoke to him, reciting a prepared list of achievements, she pictured a man as tall and lonely as the number one.

Thinking of Aabo usually made Fatma cry or scratch ashy trails along the map of her arms. Not this time. The Math Woman, her head bowed to fit a line for name and date, showed her the big difference between her mother and father, and the difference was so obvious, she wondered how she’d ever missed it at all.  Like the Math-Woman cloaked in white, Aabo wore only simple, white clothing.

Fatma’s mother loved color. Bright color. Orange, yellow, red, all kinds of green, and lately something called fuchsia. Because her deficiencies in science rivaled those in math, Fatma assumed her mother couldn’t be photographed in black and white. Large and dazzling, like the dyes in her headscarves, she leaked color and lent brightness to most everyone she touched. This wasn’t just Fatma’s opinion.

People loved her mother’s big laugh and broad sweeping hands. For parties those hands could roll and fill sambusas like a machine. They could cut and chop the air itself to carve an entire city or a single face. People either wept buckets or laughed hysterically at her mother’s stories. There was no middle ground. The woman on the math paper, now she thought about it, was totally calm. There was nothing on her stove, no one at her door, and no one calling on the cell phone. Her eyes, gray lines scribbled above a small ‘j’ for a nose and a minus sign for a mouth, were completely fixed on her tiny baby in his crib.

Fatma glanced at the teacher from the corner of her eyes. After giving what she called a crystal clear explanation of the assignment, Ms. Richard had stationed herself at the desk to correct a stack of papers. She wouldn’t like students’ eyes darting about, so Fatma pinched the bridge of her nose to imitate Anh Nguyen’s cure for headaches. She and her mother, feet up to watch TV, identical heads uncovered to scratch and breathe, suffered headaches from speaking and listening to English all day. Fatma’s mother said translating was like doing a puzzle, an activity they shunned after being given several by the Catholic Charities. That was before they got the TV. Some days the puzzle was 100 pieces, other days 10,000.

While Fatma plodded through English lessons at middle school, her mother answered the phone in the Refugee Center and was shuttled here and there to translate for newcomers. Whatever her job description might have read, Mrs. Ali had her own fixed opinions on the worthiness and appropriateness of what the English speaker wished to convey. Naturally there were times she couldn’t or wouldn’t translate what was being spoken and would simply chat with people.

Fatma’s mother liked to chat. The only thing she liked better than learning something new and useful was being the messenger of that information. Fatma told her about the headache cure. Right away Somalis all over the city were bending for daily prayers with red pinch marks between their eyes.

Today, after Ms. Richard explained the multiplication sign for the hundredth time, Fatma knew she was destined to be math-phobic like her mother. She’d leaned her left cheek on her left palm and seen nothing but plus signs. To compound matters, she wasn’t strong at addition either. This fact had been quickly revealed the previous spring when they’d been in the U.S. only four months.

 

On the day of the State Math Exam, when the Refugee Center sent her mother to translate, Fatma tried to tell Ms. Richard her predicament. In answer, the teacher set a Somali-English dictionary on the desk and tapped the cover as if it were asleep and needed a nudge.  Neatly pivoting on her high heels, she began hissing and purring even before she turned at the front of the room: “State Law prohibits me from reading or explaining any portion of this test in English if a suitable translator has been found. Do not open the test booklet until told to do so.”  

Fatma’s head hurt from chasing Ms. Richard’s voice in and out of range. She tried to link the broken signals, even pounding her head like it was the old radio back home. She needed something, anything to make Aabo proud.

As usual her mother was unflappable in an emergency. Smiling at Fatma, she winked as though the State Exam was a game show on TV. Suitable translator, she bragged, tapping her chest when Ms. Richard finally took a breath. The other translators laughed. Powerless to ask what happened if the suitable translator turned out to be your own math-phobic mother, Fatma ground a pencil to powder before Ms. Richard pointed her back to her seat.

Sure enough, Mrs. Ali, her head covered in something resembling a tropical rain forest, only pretended to translate the directions. Actually she was calling Fatma the Somali word for dunce and insisting she ask someone else. Fatma stared hopefully at the Bosnian and Cambodian translators, but they too were sworn and bound to State Rules.

Meanwhile, Ms. Richard circled the desks — as an observer, she explained to the adults, as well as special assistant to Anh Nguyen and others. Those lucky ones included a tall boy who’d arrived the previous Monday. Although no one could translate this to him, Bao, his nose burning red with fear, was being given an opportunity. Remembering her own first week, Fatma gave him a friendly smile and he stuck out his tongue.

Watching the three Cuban kids breeze through the Spanish version of the exam, her eyes itched with envy. Then Luis winked and Freddy gave her the middle finger to show it was a put-on. You couldn’t have told that to Ms. Richard, with her face knotted tight as a pale pink bow. She was the exact opposite of an orchestra conductor, for she had a great talent for conducting long symphonies of silence. Under her soundless baton, nervous students reopened scabs and even the brilliant ones chewed productively on their cuticles. For Fatma, who had memorized her neighbor’s pencil strokes, Anh Nguyen’s bloodied fingers were a source of fascination, never brighter than on test days.

Suddenly, as if the long ticking silence had been a bomb, there was an eruption of horns and bells and whistles and drums at the center of the room. As startled as everyone else, Fatma stared at the cell phone in the open pocketbook at her feet. The next instant a pencil whizzed by her head and Ms. Richard had her hands full breaking up Luis and Freddy. Naturally Mrs. Ali took the call. She was a busy woman and chatted loudly in the hallway to prove it. For nearly ten minutes Fatma’s thin, lonely arm waved like a lizard abandoned by her mother’s scarf. 

The Bosnian girls giggled. Their translator, humming the cell phone ring just below Ms. Richard’s radar, was a slim, handsome Muslim who drove a Trans Am. Fatma saw him late at night, leaning against his car in front of the apartments.  Her best friend Naima said he chain-smoked cigarettes and was dating an American girl even though he was engaged to somebody back home. Hearing the breathy sound of her classmates competing for help, Fatma was sure he would give whatever answers he had without hesitation. What boy wouldn’t? Those girls never covered their heads. Their hair swung loosely over their shoulders, and the boys were forever trying to touch it.

The day after the State Exam, Fatma removed her hijab in the girls’ room. Ms. Richard glanced up for a second, long enough to tuck the tiniest of smiles in her red cheeks. Fatma knew then, even before the class exploded in laughter, how completely the wet comb had been defeated.  If not now, after she’d prayed with all her heart, she knew her hair would never swing and her mother never pay for extensions or straighteners. The best she could do was to wear black scarves. Wrapping her head each morning, letting the ends hang loose like a ponytail, she wondered what was the use of hair if you couldn’t train it to behave.

 

Remembering the State Exam and Aabo and now her awful hair gave Fatma a real headache. She squeezed her nose with one hand, began to raise the other for the nurse, and scratched her ear instead. Ms. Richard had been very clear about anyone asking for a pass. Crystal clear. No one was leaving. Not to the lav, the water fountain, the office phone or to the nurse.

She recounted the math problems. Besides the two examples done for them, there were eighteen to go. Eighteen. “Don’t forget your name,” she heard Ms. Richard warn the first students to hand in work, and, as if this action might bring her closer to completion, she spent five minutes printing the letters of her name.  Lifting her hand for the date, she saw Ms. Richard’s mouth disappear into a thin white line and pretended her eyes needed a good, hard rubbing.

She reexamined the Math Woman. American, she concluded, and, despite the headscarf, definitely not Muslim. She reminded Fatma of the ladies pushing wide strollers in the mall and forcing everyone in the opposite direction to go around.

Without thinking, she slid her eyes back to where Ms. Richard was thumping the corrected papers like a deck of cards and wondered if she would ever see her teacher pushing a stroller at the mall and whether Ms. Richard would make her go around or stop and chat like her mother: “How are you, Fatma? How pretty you look. Are you making your mother proud?”

Ms. Richard glanced at the clock, set the stack on the corner of the desk, and opened her middle drawer. Fatma knew exactly where a certain flair-tip pen would be tucked away and continued to watch Ms. Richard rummage through a shopping bag pulled from under her desk. Everything Ms. Richard did required a lot of effort. She was pregnant with a large, high belly and her short arms didn’t match her anymore. Fatma counted as she took nineteen narrow packages from the bag. Wrapped in crinkly red paper, the packages made everyone peek.

Samouen, one of the class pets, finally asked what they were for. “Santa Claus,” Luis answered before anyone had a chance. The girl beside him, Freddy’s latest girlfriend, sang what sounded like “police mommy dad” until Ms. Richard brought her hand down for silence.  Below the hum of the heater, Fatma caught the whispered Spanish word for nasty woman and rolled it on her tongue like a piece of sugar.  Even Anh Nguyen, who pretended not to hear bad words, tilted her head like a little bird enjoying the breeze.

Fatma snuck a glimpse at the teeny plastic tree in the back corner. All week, Ms. Richard had been explaining about Santa Claus, Christmas, and the tree. They’d been doing holiday word-finds and graphing trees, stars, and candy canes. The multiplication problems today were supposed to tell what someone named Rudolph said to an Easter Bunny. Silently, Ms. Richard carried armfuls of packages to the tree and placed them evenly around the base until all nineteen, piled round and round and higher and higher, made the teeny tree even tinier.

“Can I help?” Luis begged.  Everyone looking up, waiting to hear if the answer might be yes this time, but Ms. Richard, who treated questions as the most unnatural things in the world, was unmovable. “Finish your work,” she told him firmly.  

Nothing stopped Freddy. “Miss, are those presents for us?” There was an excited hush. It was the last day before vacation and since morning the other teachers had been passing out chocolates and peppermints and giving free time for movies and games. Only Ms. Richard, last period of the day, had been withholding. Nineteen faces stared expectantly. Thirty minutes remained. Still time to think she was the greatest teacher in the school, the entire world, if there was something inside those packages for them.

“When everyone’s finished,” she said, surveying the room. “Everyone.”

Fatma heard desperate scribbling everywhere. Only her pencil was moving silently. Very carefully she was copying Anh Nguyen’s answers onto her paper.

“Fatma!” Her head sprang back, and she saw, as through a cloud, Ms. Richard beckon her to the doorway. “Bring your paper.” No one dared breathe, least of all Fatma who watched her best handwriting ripped to shreds.

“Yes?” From overhead a tired voice spoke as if God was on the line, weary of her mother’s prayers for a smart daughter. But Fatma, who attended Muslim school in this same building on Sundays, knew God didn’t live in King Middle School or even visit. It was the nice lady in the office who talked while you waited for the principal and sometimes, if it took too long, gave you papers to staple and let you sort the mail.

“I’m sending Fatma Ali out,” Ms. Richard told the voice. She handed Fatma a clean paper without looking at her. “She’s going to the In-School Detention room until dismissal.”

 

“Tablecloth head!” A pimply-faced boy at the window put up his middle finger.

It would have been too much to bear if she hadn’t heard the taunt before. She heard it so often she recognized boredom in the kids who taunted. Only twenty minutes left, the room monitor grinning into a gift bag, there didn’t seem any point to complaining or fighting.

By the time she signed in, the boy had forgotten her anyway. Facing the window, he’d cushioned his head on a stack of binders, their crumpled contents curling around his head like a pillow. Nestling her cheek in the crook of her elbow, Fatma watched the snow outside seem to fall on the mountain of his hunched back and tried not to cry.

When the bell rang for dismissal, she ran to her locker. She had to pass Ms. Richard’s room to catch the bus on time. Ms. Richard was laughing with teachers on the opposite side of the hallway. She had her back turned and couldn’t see through the crowd of yelling and running students. Fatma held her breath and ducked into the classroom to snatch the last present.

It was still under the tree. One lonely package with a white tag and her name printed in the most beautiful red letters she’d ever seen. Her heart pounding, she started towards the desk and the flair-tip pen but lost her nerve. In the back of the bus, she shredded the wrapping like a tiger and gobbled the chocolate bar and peppermint stick before Naima joined her. She broke the red and green pencils in half and lobbed them at two meek heads halfway up the aisle.

 

Over vacation, Fatma helped catch up on the wash. Her mother’s hijabs soaked in the tub like an underwater garden, and into their soapy midst Fatma pushed her black ones like skinny sharks. Working close to her bareheaded mother, Fatma could count the broken, gray hairs around her face.  It was like staring into the mirror at an old Fatma.  

Meanwhile, Mrs. Ali was her usual chatty self as she sorted clothes from the hamper. She was in the middle of an instructive story about raising farm animals when she found the crumpled math paper in a pants pocket. Lifting her head like a dopey cow, Fatma nearly laughed and sang with relief. Her mother was furiously shaking the lady with the baby. “Where did you get this?” she demanded.

Before Fatma could fully explain about not doing the math, her mother smiled, suddenly very pleased. “You were right not to participate,” she told Fatma. “This is for Christians.”

Fatma knew her mother would tell everyone about her good Muslim daughter and the Christian math. She knew the Somalis would praise her mother for raising such a smart girl and her mother would deny the praise out of modesty. Then she thought of the candy she’d stolen and the broken pencils and the whole miserable week of smudged, unfinished worksheets like a long, littered path between her and Aabo. She cried, on the edge of the tub, with those big hands of her mother pulling her close.