Page 11 of Karma Kitty Christmas
Marcelle was currently working on a C, which for him was a big furry deal, but Isaac was impressed—damned impressed—by the kid’s initiative, and by his ability toseemath in everyday things—including art.
“Mmm… I’ll add fifty points to your lowest test grade,” he said, thinking that should pull the boy’s grade up nicely. As heglanced around, he saw a number of kids pulling out their own graph paper and the colored pencils they were required to bring to class and gazing at him with expectant expressions.
“Okay, then,” he said, walking up to the whiteboard. “Here’s the deal. The blanket I’m working on is twenty squares by twenty-five squares. You can make yours twenty by twenty, but no smaller.” He wrote the assignment down and then outlined it. “No fewer than five colors, with three algebraic equations showing how you figured out how many squares of each color you’d have to make to create your blanket.”
“Are you going to make the best one?” asked one girl, and Isaac grimaced.
“Honey, something like this takes me amonth, and my friend already picked out the picture he wanted—”
“But what if we make somethingreallygood?” Henrietta asked, and Isaac figured he’d let the unseen Luca be the bad guy.
“I’ll tell you what,” he said soberly. “I’llaskmy friend if he’d want to take a look at the designs and see if one of them would work instead of what he picked out. And if Idomake it, remember, it’s for somebody else.”
“That’s okay,” Henrietta said happily. “My grandma can teach me how to make granny squares. Maybe I can make my own blanket instead.”
And that set them off—but in a quiet way. As each kid planned and plotted and sketched, they talked about somebody they knew who crafted and how if they’d known,theycould have been making their own pictures with squares and half-squares too.
Isaac watched magic happening and turned to Marcelle, who was grinning at him with absolutely no shame.
“Look what you did,” he said softly. “Aren’t you proud of yourself?”
Marcelle nodded. “Absolutely always,” he said.
“You should be,” Isaac told him. As the bell rang and the kids packed up their colored pencils and graph paper reluctantly, Isaac texted Luca to tell him what he’d inspired, thinking the man had been kind, funny, and good company the night before. Maybe he’d enjoy knowing—
Awesome! Can I—I mean, can I come to your classroom and judge? Like a contest and everything? When is the assignment due?
Isaac stared at the text, absolutely gobsmacked.
Two days before the final, the last Friday in May.
Great! I’ll be there! Can we still work on the blanket even if we don’t know what it’s going to be?
Isaac thought of the two hundred tiny white squares he’d need for the majority of the blankets in the pattern book.
Sure. If we make too many squares in one color, we can sew them up to be a sweater or a stuffed animal.
Awesome! Tell the kids yes! And I’ll be by your house on Saturday to learn so I can do my part!
Isaac gave a thumbs-up to that, because he didn’t want to… to… give the (right?) wrong impression, and then glanced up when he realized he wasn’t alone in the room.
“Marcelle?” he asked.
“Did your boy say yes?” Marcelle countered.
Isaac grimaced. “He’s not my boy—”
Marcelle rolled his eyes. “Well, he should be. That look on your face when you were texting—it had ‘That’s my boy’ written all over it.”
Isaac resisted the urge to shift his eyes left and right, like some sort of deviant. “I should be quieter about expressions like that,” he said, then felt compelled to add, “And he’s not my boyfriend—and he’s only thirty.”
His reward for that was a snort. “Yeah, don’t give me that. You’re making afive-hundred-square blanket for this guy’ssister. He’d better be important. But why didn’t you make him a sweater?”
Isaac thought about the crap-brown thing he’d shoved in the back of his yarn bins the night before. “Sweaters are an awfully big commitment,” he said. “For somebody I’m not dating yet. No, he did something nice for me, and I offered to make him something, and hereallywanted a baby blanket for his sister, and he was willing to help make it.” Isaac shrugged. “It’s more like I found a new friend than a newboyfriend.”
Marcelle’s pixyish features took on the calm superiority of the wisest sage. “What was the nice thing he did?”
Isaac swallowed. “How old are you?” he asked, because damn if this kid wasn’t just pushing into his business.
