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Hopper had gotten into the habit of tripping over books, and each book now wore scars of their encounters with Hopper’s feet. Fun with Dick and Jane now had a muddy boot print, Curious George Flies a Kite had a ripped cover, and The Bobbsey Twins: The Secret at the Seashore had a split spine. He grumbled to Jane to keep the cabin clean, but mostly he was just happy that the constantly migrating piles of books meant she was doing something more productive than watching General Hospital or Supermarket Sweep all day.
If he thought it could be done safely, Hopper would have hired a tutor. Jane needed one. She had to sound out every word, she struggled with basic math, and her writing looked like she had never held a pencil before, which made sense.
At least she was motivated. Whether she wanted to learn for learning’s sake, the boredom of being cooped up in a cabin, or the promise of joining Mike and the others in school, Hopper wasn’t sure. All he knew was that when he would return to the cabin, he would find evidence of her self-tutelage everywhere: sentences she’d carefully copied from Tom Swift and his Airship, a lopsided map she’d drawn of the United States, and an error-filled multiplication table.
He’d managed to find some elementary school primers and a used set of children’s illustrated encyclopedias (minus volumes G, M, and P), and these formed the structure of her education. At night he would sit down and read with her, and on the weekends at least one of her friends would come over…almost always Mike, usually Dustin, Lucas, and Will, and sometimes Max. They would ramble around the Hopper-approved section of the woods, ostensibly lecturing about history or science, but often falling into descriptions of movies or Dungeons & Dragons. Hopper was skeptical how productive these “lessons” were, but he’d learned better than to interfere. And in fact, it wound up being Max who helped Jane finally crack long division on a rainy Saturday when the rest of the group was occupied by family trips, dentist appointments, and a very bad case of stomach flu.
Slowly, the cabin began to resemble more of a home. At some point in January, a small terrarium appeared on their counter, courtesy of Dustin. Two weeks through February, Hopper noticed a pot of red geraniums blushing in the weak sunlight of Jane’s bedroom window. And come April, a collarless calico with a battered left ear started sunning itself on their front porch. At first Jane, the toughest person Hopper knew, refused to go outside when the cat was present. And then one day he arrived home to find Jane sitting on the couch making her way through The Hobbit with the cat slumbering at her feet. A week later he got the cat a collar with Jane’s selected name (“Bombur,” whatever that meant).
And at some point, he’d managed to fill in the encyclopedic volumes G and M, but by the time he’d finally located the elusive P, Jane had moved onto the Encyclopedia Britannica set that the Dustin had saved when the library discarded it. Questions at dinner shifted from “What does punctual mean?” to “Why did World War I start?” And then one day, finally, Hopper’s answer to a question was, “I’m not sure—why don’t you look it up?” And he’d stopped tripping over Bobbsey Twins books, instead stubbing his toe on Ramona and her Father, a choose your own adventure book, and The Keystone Guide to Algebra.
There was a date circled on the Super DC calendar she’d nailed to the wall: August 2nd, the day of the placement test. Neither of them spoke of the day after Hopper had circled it. But Jane kept the calendar open to August long before summer came around. Sometimes she would compare her clumsy writing to the scrawl on notes written by her friends, and she would throw her notebook across the cabin, either mentally or manually, and dash into her room. But then the calendar would be there waiting for her with August 2nd ominously circled in red Sharpie, and she would step back out, pick up her notebook, give a couple of calming pets to startled Bombur, and get back to work. Sometimes Hopper would ask her if she needed help, but mostly he would just remain quiet, trusting she’d ask for help if she needed it.
On April 30th, Hopper took her to an empty parking lot, and Jane emerged from the parking lot with a new bike and two skinned knees. Shortly after, Jane Hopper got a library card, and from then on, Hopper started swinging by the library on his way home from work in case Jane had lost track of time.
She must have mentioned August 2nd to her friends, because by the end of spring, their lectures had stopped wandering into Middle Earth or a galaxy far, far away. They stayed neatly within photosynthesis, the periodic table, or the Industrial Revolution. Somehow, they had obtained a few previous placement exams, and one day Hopper walked up to the cabin to find Lucas and Will leaning by the door, a kitchen timer in Will’s hands.
“Quiet!” Lucas shushed Hopper. “Testing’s in progress!”
Hopper had rolled his eyes but, after ascertaining that only ten minutes remained of the exam, leaned against the porch post and made awkward, stilted conversation with the sentries.
A rattle inside informed all three how well the first practice placement exam had gone. Bombur shot out of the cabin the moment Hopper opened the door, and when he entered the cabin, he found the Super DC calendar ripped from the wall.
“You’ll do better next time,” Mike assured her, gently wiping the blood from her upper lip. “You were so close!”
“Yeah!” Dustin agreed enthusiastically, and launched into a trick for the nine times tables that Hopper doubted Jane was absorbing at the moment. She nodded along to what he said, but her eyes had the dull glaze of someone lost in their own head.
Only Max came by the next day, and she taped the Super DC calendar together, hung it back on the wall, and refused to leave until Jane agreed to go over the mistakes she’d made in the previous exam.
It took two more practice exams and two more post-exam review sessions with Max for Jane to get a passing grade. The boys cheered—there was discussion of how they could spend the rest of the summer in the arcade, but Max rolled her eyes. “Shut up, you idiots!” she snapped. “She passed by two points—we’re not done here!”
Hopper liked Max.
Jane passed the next three practice exams by wider margins. Now the real exam was only a week away. Max and Mike would arrive at the cabin just as Hopper was leaving for work, and Hopper had to shoo them out every evening. Hopper was never sure whether the disaster that would be waiting for him in the cabin was the result of one of Jane’s tantrums, the natural by-product of several messy teenagers, or evidence of a tornado ripping through it. Flashcards were everywhere.
It was difficult, but Hopper managed to convince Jane to take August 1st off. They drove out to the Indiana Dunes, where Jane squished sand between her toes and waded into Lake Michigan. They could just barely see Chicago’s skyline in the distance, and Jane quietly provided a few details of what she’d been doing last fall.
They stopped by a hole-in-the-wall on their way back. It was close enough to Chicago that the place served a decent Italian beef sandwich. Jane poked at the mushy sandwich suspiciously, took a deep breath as if preparing herself for something unpleasant, and then broke into a smile as she chewed her first bite.
“They didn’t take you out for Italian beef when you were in Chicago?” Hopper snorted. Yet another reason to disapprove of Jane’s Chicago friends.
She shook her head and took another hungry bite. Her cheeks were stuffed, and juice dribbled down her chin. Hopper wiped the juice off, and Jane chased down the beef with some chocolate milkshake.
“Next time you’re in Chicago,” Hopper told her, “you’ll have to get saganaki.”
She looked at him curiously.
“It’s cheese,” he explained. “They bring it to your table on fire.”
She raised an eyebrow skeptically, as if she thought he was pulling her leg. “Does it burn you?” she asked.
“They put out the fire before you eat it,” he assured her. He stole a sip from her milkshake, and soon they started the drive home. The sunlight was weak, and the clock read 7:53.
“14 hours and seven minutes,” Jane said.
Hopper didn’t have to ask what she meant. 14 hours and seven minutes until the test. He nodded.
“You’ll do fine,” he said.
“What if I don’t?” she asked.
“You will,” he insisted.
“Mike said the same thing,” she said. The corner of her mouth tugged down. She seemed to find this answer insufficient. Both Hopper and Mike had failed somehow. “What if I don’t pass?” she asked more slowly, emphasizing each word.
“Then…” Hopper sighed, “then you’ll be fine. You’ll still go to school.”
“I’ll still go to school?” she asked.
Shoot, had he really not explained this to her? No, looking back on it, he guessed he hadn’t.
“You’ll still go to school,” he repeated. “They’ll put you in special classes.”
“I won’t be with Mike?” she asked.
“No,” he shook his head. He didn’t have Mike’s records in front of him, but Mike and his group didn’t seem like the kind of kids who would be in remedial classes. “Maybe a couple. But mostly no.”
“They’ll think I’m stupid,” she said.
“Your friends won’t think you’re stupid,” Hopper insisted, tapping his thumb against the steering wheel.
This was not news to Jane. “Not them,” she said. “The mouth breathers.”
Oh. “Maybe,” Hopper admitted. “But who cares about them? Screw ‘em.”
“Screw ‘em,” Jane repeated.
Hopper winced. He should start watching his language now that Jane was going to mixing with more people.
“And,” he continued hastily, “if you do well, you can move into classes with your friends next year.”
“I can?”
Hopper nodded.
Jane let out a sigh and leaned back into her chair. She rolled down the window, and held her hand out to catch the wind whipping past them.
Hopper flipped on the tape player. Rapid Roy started midway through. Hopper sang along, and soon Jane joined in.