Rohan's parents came through quieter: his mother asked Rhea about the seminar with genuine curiosity; his father asked Imani what book she was reading and nodded seriously when she said logic puzzles. Dignity, Imani thought, sometimes looked like taking a child at her word.
---
In early November, before the marking-period review, Imani stayed home one day with a low fever. Rhea arranged coverage at work with the kind of logistical gymnastics working parents know as unpaid secondary careers. On the couch under a blanket, Imani watched dust float in the afternoon light and thought about Room 214's golden hour. She wondered whether the school missed her. She doubted it. Schools missed averages more than persons.
Rhea brought toast. "You don't have to earn rest by being sick," she said. "But since you are sick, rest."
"I'm scared of the review," Imani admitted. "Anonymous notes. Soft words. The way they say valued and then talk about friction."
"Fear is information," Rhea said. "We'll bring paper. We'll bring Ms. Dane if she can come. We'll bring your log. We will not bring a performance of gratitude for being allowed to exist."
Imani chewed toast. "Do you ever want to leave Halberd? Pull me out?"
Rhea was quiet long enough that the answer became real before it was spoken. "Yes. Sometimes. Then I remember you love the honest hard problems and the library and Ms. Dane and even the oak tree in the courtyard. Leaving would be clean. Staying and insisting is messier. I choose messy with you as long as messy doesn't mean unsafe. If it becomes unsafe, we leave. That's the line. Not pride. Safety."
"How will we know?"
"We'll know," Rhea said. "Because we talk. Because you tell me the hallway versions. Because I believe you."
Imani slept after that, fever doing its dull work. When she woke, the paperback of logic puzzles had fallen open on the floor to a page about false premises. She smiled without humor and closed it.
---
Returning to school after the fever day, she found a sticky note on her locker, unsigned: Sorry people suck. Keep being scary at math. The handwriting looked like Lila's. Or like someone imitating Lila. Imani kept the note in her folder. Kindness without a name was still kindness; she simply did not build her house on it.
In Algebra, Mr. Ellery handed back a problem set. At the top of Imani's he had written: Clear structure. Watch arithmetic in line 3. No smiley faces. No inflation. Respect, of a sort.
She corrected line 3 before the period ended, not for him, for the integrity of her own page.
---
Over the weekend the apartment filled with ordinary sounds that felt newly precious: the washing machine's uneven thump, a neighbor arguing cheerfully with a sports broadcast, Rhea humming an old highlife tune while she chopped onions. Imani worked through an algebra packet and then, because her brain would not stop replaying the oval on the board, she wrote a one-page explanation of why intentionally insolvable items, undisclosed, functioned as sorting mechanisms. She did not use the word racism. She did not need to for the logic to stand; she also knew that race lived in the hallway rumors about aid and in the way "climate" had arrived so quickly after her hand went up. She kept the page in her notebook. Rhea read it and said, "Save that. Not for them yet. For you."
Saturday afternoon Cole texted—Rhea had allowed a school-group thread after vetting privacy settings with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for unlabeled medication.
Cole: my dad says Ellery is a legend and you shouldn't have called him out
Cole: also my dad is kind of a jerk sometimes
Cole: sorry