Wendy BooydeGraaff 3 Zachary Shiffman

THE DECIMAL PEOPLE by Zachary Shiffman

Prime numbers are the orphans of math. Unlike those lucky composites, they aren’t

products of two other numbers. This is what I was thinking when I saw Jay Ferrer return to

Mallory Middle School, three months after the crash.

I was outside holding the door for arriving students. Jay’s aunt dropped him off at the

curb and he passed me and into the school like a dying storm, roiling with a natural anger but

exhausted. His hair was curly and chaotic and his backpack sagged off of his wiry frame. Later

that day, in my fifth period class, he spent the whole period drawing on the graphs in his

textbook, making ladders out of y axes and toothy mouths out of parabolas. I hoped he

wouldn’t flip to the pages on prime numbers and think what I had thought.

In the teacher’s lounge during eighth period I ate my turkey sandwich and sat in the

same chair I had sat in when we learned of the crash. That morning all of the teachers’ eyes

had been wide, the backs of our chairs untouched as Linda, the history teacher, delivered the

news of Declan and Harper Ferrer’s deaths. My mouth tasted dead.

“They weren’t even speeding,” Linda said, wobbly-voiced. “Not even speeding,” she

repeated. “53 in a 60. 53.”

And now, three months later, the dead taste was back. I pushed my sandwich across the

table and looked out the window. It was gray and lightless outside.

“What should I expect?” asked Frannie Calvanese across from me. Copies of No Fear

Shakespeare: Hamlet peaked from her tote bag. “I have Jay next period.”

“Quiet,” I said. “Not engaging much. Reticent, if you want to use that SAT vocab you

love so much.”

She smiled, but it faded fast. “Poor Jay. Even after all these years on the job, I still have

trouble helping the quiet ones...”

I knew she wasn’t just talking about the school. Her daughter, Sam, was a quiet kid,

too. The kind of kid who had a whole galaxy in their head, one adults weren’t privy to, and all

Frannie could do was hope no black holes appeared. I met Sam for the first time at the previous

year’s Take-Your-Child-To-Work-Day, and I remembered seeing Frannie in the hallway with

her during seventh period, her hands tight on her daughter’s forearms. I had only caught three

words over the trinkle of the water fountain before Frannie lowered her voice. “...Trying to

understand…”

“The other students are doing their best,” I said. “There are whispers, sure. Weird

looks. But they’re mostly just… avoiding him, from what I’ve seen. Eggshells all over.”

“Like he’s cursed,” muttered Frannie.

“Orphans tend to be.”

“Hopefully things won’t be so tense after today.”

“Hopefully.”

The bell rang. Ninth period.

“Wish me luck,” said Frannie, ducking out. I packed away my sandwich and went to

teach my final class which, thankfully, was the type of class that acted as if their hands would

be lopped from their wrists if they dared raise them. I blew through the lesson and assigned the

homework and when it was over I went to the library. In the back there was a long oval table

ringed by plastic chairs. I claimed one and waited.

Slowly students filtered in. One was a theatre girl in my third period class named Jennie

Tozier who struggled, seemingly perpetually, with anything remotely related to fractions. I’d

drawn and divided enough pies for her in attempts at visual explanations to open up a bakery

from my notepad. Then there was Thomas Normand, a basketball player who wanted a

rephrasing of today’s lesson. The rest were there for the same thing, or for help with one

problem or another from the previous night’s homework. Good kids. They had stayed after

school for this session, for help, and despite my exhaustion by this time of the day it always

made me happy to see them. Today there were seven of them, but I knew that number would

increase as the mid-year placement exam crept closer.

Jay Ferrer, despite being a competent math student, typically attended these for one

uncertainty or another, and I couldn’t help but throw glances at the seat he usually took. Empty

today. I hadn’t expected him to appear— not on his first day back. But a part of me was

disappointed, nonetheless.

“Mr. Tiernan,” Jennie Tozier’s voice broke through my thoughts. “So, when the

denominators are, like, different…”

Let x be a man from Cleveland, Ohio. Born and raised there, he played quarterback for

his high school football team and played in college, too. Let’s say he also had an affinity for

math; he liked the music of the formulas, the siren song from the other side of the equals sign.

He majored in something “number-infested” (as Frannie would teasingly call my class) and,

after graduating, found a nondescript job working in finance at a reputable and well-paying

corporation. Let this be the place he met y who, for my purposes, has a similar background to

x. She worked one cubicle over and they bumped into each other on the way to the copier and

this happened again and again until even the janitors knew it wasn’t clumsiness at play. Within

a year they were engaged. Within two, married.

Then the corporation went under. It was swallowed by a bigger fish, or couldn’t keep

up with the market. x and y were cast out and struggled to find work. Their home, once a

modest but comfortable suburban spot, became an apartment, then other places, the walls

shrinking and molding until there were none at all. These places I can picture, because these I

know.

This is fictional. Brimming with variables— unknowns. It’s likely all false. I’m playing

in Frannie’s realm. All I truly know about x and y is that, on August 11th, 1983, they produced

a son. Me.

For the purposes of fiction and math alike, let me be m.

x*y = m. Alternatively: xy = Michael Tiernan, age thirty-one.

m is not unknown. m went to Scranton University and, like his fictional father,

graduated with a number-infested degree— so infested that when m’s boyfriend at the time

snatched it from his hands and used it to fan his crotch as a joke, he could practically see the

numbers fall off the paper like sand from a bathing suit. It too m until the age of seventeen to

finally admit to himself, with a mix of terror and relief, that he was attracted to >1 kind of

person. Until his late twenties m oversalted his meat because he was still used to SPAM, and to

this day he never leaves a plate unfinished. m worked as an accountant at a major firm for three

years before quitting. m was engaged to a veterinarian named Annie, a woman about whom he

loved everything except her name, and, later, her decision to cancel the wedding. m solves

simple exercises on a shitty math app on his phone in between things—like sitting in the

waiting room at a doctor’s office, or in the teacher’s lounge at Mallory Middle School—just to

keep his mind in sight. m avoids churches and temples and mosques. And of course, m is an

orphan, because x and y are fictional unknowns, and at one point in the downward slope of

their lives they placed m on the porch of the first well-off house they saw, rang the bell, and

subtracted themselves from the equation.

The next morning, after an uncommitted sleep, I paid a visit to Frannie’s classroom.

Bookshelves cuffed the walls and the desks were arranged in circles. Frannie was at her desk,

thumbing through her personal copy of Hamlet. The play looked as if it had entered the

honeymoon phase with a rabid dog, and Frannie’s eyes rode the pages so fast I swore she was

skimming, though she’d promised me that she’d never skimmed a story in her life.

“Morning, Michael,” she said, shutting the book.

“Morning,” I said, setting my bag down on a desk and grimacing at my doing so. The

top was open and Frannie spotted the book inside instantly, as if it glowed a bright radioactive

green.

“Michael Tiernan!” she grinned, “Are you reading a book? A novel, I daresay?”

I removed the book from my bag and handed it to her. “Not exactly.”

She looked at the cover and frowned. “The Elements?”

“By Euclid.”

Euclid’s The Elements was a treatise of theorems, proofs, and developments of

geometry and logic. It had been recommended to me by a fellow mathematics major from

Scranton named Kendall Brandon. “Trust me, Mike,” Kenny had said, three weeks prior, over

coffee. “Reading the proofs and theory of what we teach is important.”

“Is that right,” I replied.

“Science teachers don’t just tell their students that for every action there is an equal and

opposite reaction and then hand out the exams. They talk about Newton. They show off his

cradle. The American education system has thoroughly and brutally censored and assassinated

the history (and teaching, for that matter) of mathematics for students. They have ground it into

a flavorless factory-craft of bulimic memorization and seemingly-pointless processes. Don’t

you want to know where the intrigue of math actually exists? The humanity?”

Kenny was a professor at the local community college. He had an intellectual face—

pointed, with calculating but thoughtful eyes. After graduating Kenny had gone on an

expedition to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, a mostly-solitary journey outside of civilization and

other external reliances that was far beyond anything I was physically and mentally capable of.

I admired Kenny more than anyone I’d ever met, and so after our catch-up I drove to the

nearest bookstore. Though a sense of non-belonging is a natural cologne on an orphan’s skin, it

was heightened in the presence of novels and texts that I had no intentions of reading.

Regardless, I eventually found and bought a copy of The Elements, all thirteen books crammed

into one volume.

Frannie gave the text back. “I see. Numbers and proofs and formulas, oh my. Well, it’s

not Baldwin or Vonnegut, but it has two covers and a spine, so I’m proud of you. Is it

interesting?”

The day I purchased The Elements I took it home, read eleven pages, fell asleep, and

had yet to pick it up again.

“Very,” I said.

I didn’t feel bad lying to her. Technically, I had been doing it for years. I had never told

her— never told any of the faculty at Mallory, in fact— that I was an orphan. Never told her

why I insisted on getting so drunk after parent-teacher conferences that my taxi driver would

need a taxi driver after catching whiffs of my breath. Never told her why my parents were

never in town for the Christmas break, or why I didn’t connect with Pip in Great Expectations

after she forced me to read it the first year we met. The monster from Frankenstein, though—

that was good shit.

“How’s Sam?” I asked.

“Same as always. She barely talks, barely plays.” She sighed. “I feel like I committed

some unforgivable crime against her in a past life.”

“Kids are weird,” I said. “We know that more than anyone. Give it time.”

“That’s what everyone’s been saying...” she muttered, then rubbed her eyes with her

palms. “Sorry, that was bitchy. I appreciate it.”

The day was starting soon. I slang my bag over my shoulder.

“Enjoy that book,” Frannie said. “Don’t spoil the ending for me.”

“Ha ha,” I said, and left the room as the bell rang.

On Friday afternoon I stationed myself at the back of the library. Soon the students

came, and this time, to my surprise, Jay Ferrer was among them. He claimed his seat, his eyes

and pen fixed on his notebook. When it seemed he didn’t have any questions, I turned my

attention to the other students.

Twenty minutes into the session, after answering Jennie Tozier’s third question about

how to divide fractions, Jay looked up from his sheet and asked, “For prime factorization, do

“What do you mean?” I asked, hoping my voice sounded more teacher-like at the table

than it did in my head. We were way past prime factorization in my class, but Jay was playing

catch-up for his missed months.

Jay flipped around the homework sheet he was working on. One of the example-

problems at the top displayed the solution (the prime factorization of 18) as 18 = 2 x 32, rather

than the simpler (albeit longer) 18 = 2 x 3 x 3.

“No,” I said. “Ignore that.”

Jay nodded, but before returning to his work his gaze seemed to catch, and when I

looked to my right I noticed that two of the students— Thomas Normand the basketball player

and another athlete named Aiden— had been whispering. To my left, Jennie Tozier stared at

Jay before averting her gaze and reddening. Jay noticed this as well, and his eyes ringed the

table, landing on each student present, and each avoided the orphan’s gaze. The milky air of

the library had curdled thick and I realized that this was likely the first— and only— time any

of the students had heard Jay speak since he returned to Mallory.

Was there a creature in the world that attracted pity as efficiently and reliably as an

orphan? In Jay’s eyes I could see the flitterings of anger, and in the other students’ there was

fear. Fear of the emotional bomb they perceived before them. Fear of saying the wrong thing

and setting it off.

“Thomas,” I said, breaking the quiet, which couldn’t have lasted more than five

seconds. “How did you do with number seven?”

The session passed, and when the students left the library Jay was the last to go,

grabbing his bag and scowling to the exit. Something in me lurched and I called out, “Jay.

Wait.”

He turned to me.

“You’ve got a lot of catch-up work to do,” I said.

“Yeah. I think I might need a little more time…”

“It’s fine. Get it to me whenever it’s done. No rush. How are you handling the

concepts?”

“Okay... I guess.”

“You only asked one question today. One question for nearly two units of material. I

expected more when you showed up today.”

Jay shrugged.

“Do you have any more questions?”

“Yeah… I mean, I can figure them out at home, though.”

“If you had more questions, why didn’t you ask them?”

He shrugged again.

“Was it the other students? The way they looked at you when you spoke up?”

Jay played with the straps of his backpack. “...Yeah, I guess.”

“How would you feel about one-on-one sessions? You could come, ask your questions,

get caught up quicker. No distractions. We could meet in my classroom once the group session

ends, at 4:15.”

Jay scratched his head. “Maybe...”

“Well, consider it. And let me know.”

Jay nodded, then mumbled that his aunt was waiting and trotted out of the half-lit

library.

Later, at my apartment, all I wanted to do was feed my cat, Oliver, watch television,

and go to sleep. But I didn’t. Instead I retrieved The Elements from my bag, adjusted my

glasses, and crinkled its spine against my thighs while I laid in bed. I flipped to a random page

and ended up reading Book IX, Proposition 20. The infinitude of primes theorem. Euclid’s

theory that there are an infinite amount of prime numbers. That as numbers ticked onwards into

the perennial haze, prime numbers would generate among them.

That’s another thing that orphans and prime numbers have in common. Our infinity. As

long as there are numbers, there will be primes, and as long as there is life and love and

production, there will be orphans.

Halfway through my reading of the theorem my cheeks heated, and with an unpredicted

force I slammed the book shut, tossed it to the floor, and shut my eyes.

I blinked and the weekend escaped me. On Monday I printed the study guides for the

placement exam, which was in a month. They were the same study guides I used every year,

and, like the exam itself, I hardly remembered the problems within them anymore.

At 4:15, after leaving the library, I went to my classroom and Jay was waiting there. A

ripple of relief thrummed within me. “Alright,” I said. “Let’s get started.”

And so it went, and it went mechanically. Jay asked a question. I answered. He

scribbled, his nose inches from the sheet and hand grinning with pencil lead. Another question,

another answer. I wrote on the board. There were stretches of nothing but the clackings of the

What percentage of his mind contained the math before him and not the accident? Did half of

his brain solve the problems while the other half honked and skidded and wrenched metal and

screamed his parents’ screams? Or did the crash take up 60% of Jay while the outside world

only achieved 40%? Or was it 70/30? 80/20? 90/10 or worse?

Or had I helped him— if only for an hour— to forget the fact that he was an orphan,

100%? This I doubted, but the prospect of it spread through me like hot chocolate on a cold

day.

When the hour ended, Jay packed up his papers and I locked the classroom door after

us. His aunt hadn’t arrived yet, so I waited with Jay outside the school. The sky was crumpling

into orange streaks and the school’s gutters dripped from the mid-day rain. Jay was on his

phone, his hair obscuring his eyes, the beam of the screen cutting the boy’s face into a pale side

and a shaded side. Divided. I watched the divided orphan and thought, Prime numbers can’t be

divided like composites can. Not into whole numbers. 41 divided by 4 is 10.25. Prime numbers

are divided into decimals. Jay and I are decimal people.

And while there was a certain genetic sadness to this thought of mine, there was also a

triumph to it, as if I had made a needed discovery in Jay.

When his aunt pulled up in her car Jay thanked me— he was a polite kid, always was—

and went to leave, but before he could I said, “Jay?”

“Yeah?” he said.

“I hope I was able to help you today.”

“You did, Mr. Tiernan. Thanks again.” He moved to the car, and his aunt, a sandy-

haired woman in a pantsuit, called out a thank-you as Jay got inside. I smiled and waved them

I drove home with my thoughts riding shotgun as rattling company. At my apartment, I

deposited Oliver’s dinner into his bowl and watched him eat. Oliver was a deeply incompetent

animal; I needed to lock my fridge whenever I left because he was inexplicably talented

enough to open it and go inside, yet too weak to escape and too unintelligent to learn from his

mistakes and not repeat the endeavor. He finished his dinner, mewled, and trotted to his

litterbox, charmingly unaware that without me he would be dead within a week.

The day, albeit long, had been good, satisfying, and I regarded the coming night with a

tedious welcome. Once undressed, I fell into bed— ignoring The Elements— and slept.

I tutored Jay every day after school for the rest of that week, and then the next. I found

myself excited to go to my classroom at 4:15pm and see Jay there, assembling papers into

coherency on his desk, spiral-notebook-edge streamers aflutter from the chasm of his

backpack. These hours were like little bottled weekends— winding-downs from the industry of

the day and over too soon. Jay’s catch-up work, with my help, burned to the present. I slept

more soundly those nights than I had in years.

Then, on the Monday following these two weeks, I went to my classroom at 4:15 and

found it empty. I waited half an hour before locking up, and un the parking lot I glanced at

myself in the sun visor mirror. The half-light coming through my car window divided my own

self into fractions, cutting off the pink of my lips from its downturned tails.

The next day, I pulled Jay aside after fifth period and asked him if everything was

alright.

“Yeah, sorry,” he said. “I’m almost done with the make-up work, and I think I can

finish the rest during study hall tomorrow.”

“That’s perfect,” I said. “You’re still welcome to come after school, though— either to

the group session or individual— if you have questions about the study guide.” The placement

exam was Friday, and I had handed out the guides last week.

“Oh, okay. Thanks, Mr. Tiernan.”

“Remember,” I said, reiterating what I had said to him countless times in our sessions,

“if you want to reschedule the test date, just let me know. You’ve only had a month to learn

everything on it, while the rest of the class has had all year. Don’t hesitate.”

“I know, thanks,” said Jay, “but I just want to do it. Get it over with and move on,

y’know.”

In the same way Frannie analyzed Shakespeare or Kendall Brandon analyzed Euclid, at

that moment I felt as if I could analyze that sentence— and its speaker— forever.

“Of course,” I said. “Let me know if there’s anything you need.”

Later I sat in the teacher’s lounge, bouncing my leg and eating a stringy celery stick.

The dead taste in my mouth was back and the celery chewed like hair. I was furiously finding

square roots on my latest math app when Frannie appeared.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Thank God you’re not in charge of the school play this year. Seriously, is everything

okay?”

I stood up, trashed my snack, and glared at her. “I said it’s nothing. Drop it, yeah?”

“Jeez, okay. Sorry.” But I was already gone.

Bell. A cacophony of slammed lockers and whoops of freed prisoners. Library.

Crinkled study guides with the hard problems circled and white spaces crammed with

calculations. 4:15. An empty classroom again, leading to empty evenings filled with nothing

but the sounds of the dishwasher and Oliver’s occasional chirp. At night, I woke myself up

with groans that crawled from the back of my throat, prompted by dreams I didn’t remember.

Orphan-howls. Dark bags propped up my eyes.

Friday arrived. Exam day. In fifth period, I watched Jay take the test and thought, He’s

the smartest kid in this class. Months behind the rest and he’ll be the first one done. And I was

right. He turned in his test only thirty minutes after I had handed it out, and I would have

smiled if not for the darkness I saw pulsing on Jay’s brow as he half-tossed the paper into the

basket. I swallowed. That was the face following a bad test.

How much shit would I be in, I wondered, if I just gave the kid an A? These were big

tests. Fudging the grade would be more problematic than a simple rounding-up of a student’s

average. But then, would anyone dare question an orphan’s A?

To my surprise, however, at the end of the day when I moved Jay’s exam to the top of

my pile to grade, every question was correct. My relieved smile grew as I dashed check-marks

next to each solution, the pen scratching the page and emanating throughout the empty

classroom.

Then my smile extinguished and a coldness overtook me. My eyes froze on the final

problem. And I realized that, like the study guides, I barely remembered writing these

problems, and I certainly didn’t remember writing this one.

No, no, no...

The final problem of the test was a word problem. One of its characters, alongside

Simon (who owned Painting Business A) and Glenn (who owned Painting Business B) was the

owner of Painting Business C: Declan.

The name of Jay Ferrer’s father.

I shut my eyes, but Jay’s expression from class had imprinted onto the insides of my

eyelids.

Declan. A hilariously uncommon name. I’d never met anyone named Declan before

Jay’s father and hadn’t since. What cruel, orphan-hating oracle dropped that name into my

mind as I wrote the exam? I made an incredulous noise and dropped the paper onto the desk.

Will ‘Harper’ show up on Jay’s fucking SATs?

I squeezed the bridge of my nose over my glasses. Michael, you idiot… you should’ve

gone through the test before handing them out… you should’ve insisted on the extension, then

you would’ve caught it…

From my bag I took out The Elements and stared at the cover, which depicted a black-

and-white image of Euclid, his beard curled at the end like feelers, his thick-lidded eyes

downcast and seemingly holding all the knowledge of the universe. And it struck me, then,

why the infinitude of primes theorem grated on me so. It was a justification. It attempted to

provide a logic, a math, to the world’s reliable output of orphans. My parents leaving me on

that porch was the correct answer to the equation. The car crash that killed Declan and Harper

Ferrer was a numerical necessity. The world needed orphans like numbers needed primes, and

here’s why. Deal with it. Providing such an authoritative sense to the senselessness (53 in a

60!) somehow made the senselessness worse. Didn’t orphans deal with enough without Euclid

telling us that it was all for a reason, and here’s the text that proves it?

It’s fine. He’s a strong kid. Smart and strong. Decimal people don’t divide easily.

But that was a lie, wasn’t it? I did. Every day I did, bit by bit. Long and torturous

division, like peeling a carrot strip by strip until you just had a pile of orange glop. Sure, there

were ways to slow the decimation— marriage, teaching, cats and apps and tutoring. But it

wouldn’t stop. Not until I did.

So deep into my head was I that I didn’t notice when Frannie entered the room. She

knocked on the desk and I started.

“You okay?” she said.

“Fine,” I grunted, shoving The Elements into my bag and getting up to leave, but she

blocked my path.

“No. Stop. You’ve looked angry all week, and now you look fit to murder. If you don’t

want to talk about it with me, fine… but if something is really wrong, will you at least promise

to talk to someone?”

Frannie’s eyes were full of help. Teacher-eyes. Sometimes when I was helping students

I could sense the teacher-eyes on myself as well, like a second set of lenses in my glasses.

“The last problem,” I said, handing her Jay’s test.

She squinted at the sheet and frowned. “I don’t get it.”

“Declan,” I said. She looked at me blankly, and I raised my eyebrows. “That’s Jay’s

father’s name.”

“Oh. Oh,” Frannie said.

“Yeah,” I said. “You forgot his name?”

“Sorry,” said Frannie. “Brain fart.”

I heard myself scoff. “Figures.”

She blinked. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I mean. Our student’s parents died less than half a year ago, and you

forgot their names.”

Frannie’s mouth opened and closed like a kid playing with window blinds. “Er- it’s not

exactly at the top of my mind right now, alright?”

“Right,” I said through gritted teeth.

Frannie had parents. She’d mentioned them to me on numerous occasions. John and

Evelyn Calvanese. They came to town every year, close to April 1st, to engage in a small-scale

prank war with their daughter for a weekend. Frannie would pick up dinner after school and

after eating the Calvaneses would admire little Sam’s drawings and watch the news before

departing, not to be seen again until Thanksgiving. John and Evelyn claimed a space in

Frannie’s head— a parent-space, one that had always been there and likely always would. She

didn’t need to remember the Ferrers like Jay always would, or like I did. She didn’t need

anything, I thought.

“Look, it’s been a rough couple of weeks for me too, alright? What’s your problem?”

“‘Rough couple of weeks?’ Really? We’re talking about an orphan here, our own

student, and you’re making it about you?”

“I’m clearly not the only one doing that, Michael. I’m sorry you fucked up the test, but

it’s not the end of the world. And yes, I had a rough couple of weeks.”

“What’s wrong?” said Frannie. “Sam’s barely even looking at me anymore, that’s

what’s wrong. It’s like I’m a ghost in my own goddamn house. I’m used to being ignored by

kids, but my own? Am I just a shitty mom?” Frannie’s eyes misted, then broiled with anger.

“But clearly you don’t give a shit, so forget it.”

A twinge of guilt singed me as she stormed out of the classroom, and with an orphan-

howl I swept the tests from my desk, sending pencils flying like arrows and a hundred word

problems fluttering to the ground, a hundred little Declans into a hundred little inevitable

collisions.

I watched Oliver eat, The Elements in my hands, and thought of my friend Kenny. I

imagined him on the wild Pacific Crest Trail, walking for miles, a backpack the size of my

closet eating into his shoulders and sides, sunburnt and alone and strong.

And a memory came to me. I was twelve. Gangly and pale, my knees like cracked

baseballs and my hair greasy and falling over my eyes. I had this idea that if I grew my hair out

as long as I could and then divided it into heights, something— I didn’t know what, maybe

some dormant offspring instinct— would indicate to me the length that my mother kept her

hair at.

Downstairs, my foster parents were fighting again, and the other kids were locked in

their rooms. I shared a guest bedroom with a kid we called Baby and another named Patrick.

They were both asleep in the bed, but I stood by the window, listening to the fight downstairs.

It was escalating, as it usually did, so I knew I was safe to climb.

I reached inside my shoe and pulled out my prize from the garage: a red Coke can. We

were only allowed sodas for one dinner every other week, but nobody was counting. Moving

quietly so as to not wake Baby or Patrick, I slipped my shoes on, opened the window, and

ascended to the roof.

The moon was out, and the stars gleamed across the sky. I cracked open the Coke. It

was warm and flat, since I took it that morning before school, but its criminal factor chilled and

carbonated it in my mouth. When I had wrangled the last drop out onto my tongue, I set the can

aside and laid down, the shingles sharp and incongruous against my back. For a second I

wondered if this was what it felt like on the porch— my back against the hard porous beneath,

the sound of man and woman chafing against each other just out of sight. But soon that thought

faded and there was just the sky and the shingles and the wormy but alive aftertaste of Coke on

my teeth. Alone, parentless, facing the abyss, and… calm. My fingers were locked behind my

head and my toes peaked out of the points of my shoes and for just then— just an hour, maybe

less, maybe more— I didn’t hear the fighting below, didn’t hear Patrick’s snotty snoring or the

neighbor’s asshole dog barking. I didn’t think of how I’d crawl back inside without potentially

waking anyone, didn’t think of school or the maddeningly dogged and inexplicably balanced

feelings blooming within me towards my classmates, didn’t think of x or y. I was in a reverie of

100%, the air was cool, and I needed nothing.

I blinked. Oliver had migrated to the couch, where he cleaned himself, bobbing his foot

in front of his face, each swing nearly connecting his claw with his eye. The Elements was on

the kitchen table, and I picked up a pen and wrote a number on the inside cover. It was a prime

number— the number the Ferrers had died going. 53.

I divided it by 2 and, as expected, it resulted in a decimal: 26.5. This was known; prime

numbers couldn’t be divided and remain whole. But there was another aspect to prime numbers

I’d been ignoring.

I divided 53 by itself and got 1.

I sat back, looking at the digit. 1. Lonely, maybe. But whole. Sturdy, like a pillar. Prime

numbers could be divided by themselves and result in a number; one that’s just as whole as any

other.

I was a math teacher. I knew this. And yet, sitting there in my kitchen, with Oliver

having fallen silent and the phantom fizz of Coke on my tongue, the fact burned new.

The next morning, I stood at the door to Frannie’s classroom. “Can I come in?”

She nodded from her desk, not looking up from Hamlet. I leaned against the

whiteboard. “I’m sorry about yesterday. I was an asshole.”

Frannie didn’t respond. I shuffled my feet. “There’s something I haven’t told you. I… I

never met my parents.”

She put down the play. “What?”

“They left me on a porch as a baby and I grew up in foster homes. I have no idea who

they are.”

“That’s awful...”

“It’s not an excuse. But it’s true.”

“Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because you’re not a shitty mom, Frannie. Sam may be acting like she’s parentless

right now, but she’s not. You’re there. You care. Most importantly, you’re trying. I’ve seen it.

So go easy on yourself, yeah?”

Frannie smiled. “Thanks, Michael. You’re forgiven for your assholery. But… Jesus.

Now I’m the asshole for never realizing…”

“You’re not. I didn’t want you— or anybody— to know.”

“Why not?”

“I was scared, I guess.”

“Of what?”

I scratched the stubble of my chin. “I don’t know. Maybe that if I told people my

parents didn’t want me, they would... agree with them. Throw me out, like they did. That

nobody would need me for anything anymore.”

“I understand,” said Frannie quietly. “Everybody’s needed for something, though,

right?”

A week passed. Things settled into their factory-esque normalcy at Mallory as the

school year chugged along. On Thursday I watched Jennie Tozier, Thomas Normand, and the

rest of the students drain from the library as the clock struck 4:15. Yawning, I packed my bag,

said goodnight to the librarian as she powered down the computers, and left.

I went to my classroom to make sure it was locked up, but was startled to see a mop-

haired form standing over my desk through the door’s window. I entered, but Jay didn’t turn

around. He was looking down, and I realized as I approached him that he was holding one of

the placement exams from my ungraded stack, its page turned to the final problem. His ears

were red and the test trembled in his fingers.

I stepped into his view and had barely spoken his name when he thrust himself against

me, and I hugged my student back and decided I wouldn’t stop until he did or until the primes

ran out.