Free Catalyst by Laurie Anderson

nearest administrator because their Precious Babies did not get into The Right School. These folks have been robbed . Do you know how much they pay in taxes?
    I wait in line, wait, wait, wait, ignore the choked, snuffling sounds from the Precious Babies curled in the fetal position on plastic orange chairs, ignore the clenched fists, ignore the jiggling knees, the tapping pens. My mind is on pause, my body pulled along by the momentum of the factory line.
    When I finally get my turn in front of the secretary, she’s on the phone and has ten people on hold. She covers the mouthpiece. “If you’re here about a college, Kate, you’ll have to take a number.” She hands me a pink index card. I am number twenty-seven.
    Mr. Kennedy, my guidance counselor, opens his door. “Number four?”
    “Come back later, Kate,” the secretary suggests. “Or Monday morning, first thing. Do you need a pass?” She scribbles one for me with her left hand. “Go out the back door, hon. It’ll be easier.”
    I shuffle down the hall to the exit, past the sounds of weeping and outrage. The last office is quieter. On one side of the desk sits a guidance counselor. On the other, Teri Litch and her mom, a police officer, and my father. Teri’s little brother, Mikey, sits on the floor ripping out pages from a college catalog.

    3.4 Calculation
    I fumble my way to the math wing. Calculus will save me. Give me integrals, give me functions, derivatives, domains, and ranges. I am a differentially abled student, broken by the text-based world. I stumble into class and open the holy book.
    Consider the problem of finding the limit for the following function when the value of x is greater than 1: lim 100 n n → ∞ .
    Aaaahhh. I ponder a table of neatly organized values, values of x, values of n, and values of x n .
    As n approaches ∞ , x n approaches ∞ .
    Math reminds me of pebbles, a whole beach of smooth, wet pebbles that you can pick up, turn over, taste, set down. They can be stacked, subtracted, divided, they can be arranged into patterns, into forms, into meaning. As I do the math, my blood pressure returns to normal. My stomach stops pumping sulfuric acid. My neck unspazzes.
    I finish the problem set before anyone else. Our Math God, Mr. Dodgson, is in the back helping someone who is struggling with the theory of limits. Duh. Next set: lim/x → ∞ x 2 + x–3. And so on, and so on, into infinity. Pondering infinity for me might be what prayer is for other people.
    Prayer . . . church . . . Dad . . . letter (thin) . . . rejection + destruction of life dream = utter misery.
    Oh, crap.
    Time for a clean page. I need to break down my real-life limit problem into its component parts; analyze it, turn it over, taste it; look for the pattern, the form, the meaning. Dissolve the granules of a problem in imagination and come up with a solution.
    Goal—get into MIT.
    Obstacle—they don’t want me.
    Solution—x . . .
    Maybe I could leak this news to the newspaper and shame MIT into letting me in. Maybe I could write to all their famous chemistry grads and get them to force the university to let me in. Maybe I could send them pictures of my father and then they would feel so sorry for me they would let me in. I could offer to work in food service. I could be a probationary student. I could pledge them my first million dollars in wages, and patents to any world-changing discoveries I make. I could name a new element massachusettsinstitutumtechnologium.
    Good Kate whispers that maybe, perhaps, there could be a small chance that I need to suck it up and accept the situation.
    I would rather fall down a bottomless hole.

    Mitch is lurking in the hall when I leave calc. He follows me. His mouth is moving. Again.
    “Look, Kate. It’s not like the world has ended. They can’t take all the geniuses that apply. But it’s going to be okay. I just think you should . . . will you at least look at me? Kate? You have to talk about it. This is stupid. Come