tuesday afternoon

[deepest_magic]

Elizabeth's house is within walking distance. Bella goes over to it the following day, after lunch, carrying two extra clumsily-frosted but perfectly baked cupcakes in her hands and notebooks in her backpack.

Comments

[neverbeatme]

"Okay, imagine you are having a problem with someone that you want me to help you solve," she says. "Think of a specific example. What would you tell me about it?"

[deepest_magic]

Bella closes her eyes. "Uuuum, last year we had to do group projects in English with assigned partners and mine wouldn't do any work and the teacher didn't believe me. I'm not sure whether the right place to solve it would be with the teacher or the other kids though."

[neverbeatme]

"What can you tell me about the conversation you had with the teacher about it?"

[deepest_magic]

"She said that part of the assignment was teamwork, and that if I couldn't work with my team I needed to 'cultivate those skills', and that she was sure they weren't really going to sabotage our project because their grade depended on it too, and that if I kept complaining no one would want to work with me when we did get to choose groups."

[neverbeatme]

"That doesn't sound promising. What about your group?"

[deepest_magic]

"One of them didn't care about his grade at all and outright didn't want to do anything but sign his name and pretend we'd all worked together, and the other one was either trying or pretending to but she always forgot or had other things she thought were more important come up."

[neverbeatme]

"I could probably manage the distracted one. In person I might be able to get the other guy to admit how much he didn't care in a way the teacher couldn't ignore, but that's trickier to pull off."

[deepest_magic]

"What actually wound up happening was I called their parents. They weren't happy, but I didn't really want to be their friends."

[neverbeatme]

"That's one solution. Did it work?"

[deepest_magic]

"It worked okay. We got a B. The teacher decided her opinion had been vindicated and the whole problem had been solved by me trying harder, but I don't have to have that teacher again."

[neverbeatme]

"Acceptable."

[deepest_magic]

"I'm a little worried that the teacher is going to be stupid at more kids than she would have been because of that, but I don't have any clever ideas about it. I guess maybe when I'm eighteen I can go tell her off once I am magically able to have worthwhile opinions." She waves her hands to accompany the last clause.

[neverbeatme]

"I don't think you had much of an effect on her one way or another. People who'll take any outcome as a sign they're right will take any outcome as a sign they're right unless a choir of angels descends from heaven to sing them a little song about how wrong they are."

[deepest_magic]

"Do you know where to get choirs of angels?" asks Bella.

[neverbeatme]

"Sadly, no."

[deepest_magic]

"That would be really useful. If you could call down choirs of angels to sing wrongness at wrong people," sighs Bella.

[neverbeatme]

"It would probably cause more problems than it solved. But it's a nice thought."

[deepest_magic]

"Heart attacks. Bewildered scientists. Copyright claims on the little songs."

[neverbeatme]

She giggles.

[deepest_magic]

"And the news would never shut up about it, either, it'd be all choirs of angels all the time, and I bet there would be silly cults."

[neverbeatme]

"So many silly cults."

[deepest_magic]

"And probably some really stubborn people wouldn't even believe they were wrong if an angelic choir told them so," sighs Bella, picking at a frayed spot on the hem of her jeans.

[neverbeatme]

"Probably."

[deepest_magic]

"I wonder what that is like. I wonder if it is so much like not being wrong that I couldn't even tell. Maybe I am wrong a lot about a lot of things and I can't notice no matter how hard I look."

[neverbeatme]

"It's possible," she agrees. "But mostly, if you're trying, you can eventually tell. People who are like that are trying really hard not to tell, because it's more important to them to feel like they're right, or have everybody agree that they're right, than to actually be right. Or because they're just so sure about something that they can't face being proved wrong."