Free The Silent History: A Novel by Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, Matthew Derby Page B

noise, whether they understood or not.
    They could pay attention when they wanted to; they could understand when I was mad, or frustrated, or pleased, and react to it; and they were intensely interested in each other. Once, during music hour, I noticed Keith and Laura, who were probably the two worst students in the class, marching rhythmically to Puccini and staring at each other, looking like … well, in normal circumstances, I’d say it was a flirty stare. I danced over to them, just to get a closer look, and they quickly stopped.
    I saw this more and more, this intense mutual attention. Not just with Keith and Laura, and not just boys and girls. During recognition exercises, during recess. They stared at each other, I stared at them, we all sat quietly until 3:30 and then went home.
    Meanwhile, the other teachers were burning out. When Mrs. Mullins quit monitoring lunch to spend more time napping in the teachers’ lounge, they needed someone to take the cafeteria. Mullins was a small-time tyrant, and she had created this lunchroom atmosphere that went past orderly into state-prison territory. I don’t know how she did it. There were forty students in the school, and they sat in groups of ten at four big round tables, four circles of silents. Looking back, I think these round tables did more for the kids than anything we tried in the classroom.
    Anyway, I volunteered to do lunch. Mostly I just wanted to get away from the other teachers. I sat at a table by myself, the cold dead sun to the four planets of silents. I drank coffee and read. In any other school I’d have a stack of papers in front of me to grade, but here I could just sit with a soft-core novel about interspecies love on a forbidden planet and relax. The kids ate purposefully and continued the staring and threw their food away when they were done. This is how it went day after day. Pretty soon I stopped paying attention. Months of pleasant oblivion passed.
    Until the day of our annual self-study. Even though the principal, Mr. Haskins, said the study was just a formality, the other teachers were stressed. Turns out, as much as they complained about their jobs, they had no desire to go back to a normal school, where they’d have to actually teach.
    Mr. Haskins was touring the lunchroom, so I had to abandon my novel for the day. Sometimes Haskins seemed almost human, other times he was this ugly remorseless machine of jurisprudence. He was in machine mode that day, making the kids get up from their chairs so he could check if the floor was clean. This is how it happened: he was crawling around under one of the tables, hunting for crumbs, and then I saw Keith slyly pouring out his chocolate milk on the other side. Baiting the trap. Mr. Haskins crawled around some more, wriggling around on the floor army-style because the tables were so low, and when he came back up, the front of his white dress shirt was covered in chocolate milk. He looked down at the shirt and let out this spastic huff of air.
    I was staring at Flora, who kept glancing under the table. She turned to Aileen, a girl in my class, and I saw it … like a brief surface ripple across her face. Perceptible only because I had looked at Flora so much. And then Aileen smiled just short of laughing. Okay, I said to myself, that’s new. I could feel my heart beating clear to my spine. Aileen glanced under the table just like Flora had. She looked across the table at Keith and Laura, whose backs were to me, and I saw something similar happen in Aileen’s face. That brief ripple, like fog across a mirror. I couldn’t believe it.
    Keith and Laura smiled too.
    This was it. This was the moment I knew. They had begun communicating.

 
    VOLUME TWO

 
    KOUROSH AALIA
    OAKLAND, CA
    2021
    The discovery at the Oaks School only confirmed what we’d suspected all along—that our brains are much more flexible and adaptable than any computer or machine. Brain plasticity, we call it—seamlessly repurposing