Boney Watches

Boney has been in this classroom since 2019. Before the current teacher, before the current year-group, before the laminated vocabulary cards on the back wall that no one reads anymore. He was here when the projector was new and exciting. He is here now that it is just the projector.

He has seen three hundred and forty-seven fractions lessons. He knows how this goes.

The teacher is moving through the room. There's a girl — Ada, third row — who has her hand partway up and has had it partway up for most of the lesson. Boney notices this in the way that Boney notices everything: completely and without the ability to do anything about it. He is a skeleton. He has a varsity jacket (red C, which stands for nothing and everything), a cowboy hat at a forty-degree angle, and a sword in his chest.

The sword is for danger. Boney has a clear operational definition of danger: threat to the classroom's safety, educational integrity, or collective wellbeing beyond what can be addressed by the present teacher. In those cases, the sword comes out. The sword has never come out. This is, Boney understands, a good thing.

But he watches Ada's hand, and he watches the teacher, and he watches the teacher move toward the back of the room to deal with a knocked-over pencil case, and the hand comes down.

Boney's sword stays where it is. Unaddressed fractions are not danger. Boney knows this. He accepts it.

But if he could move — if the sword's threshold were lower, or if there were a different kind of intervention available to him, something smaller than a sword, more like a tap on the shoulder — he would have moved toward Ada fourteen times today already.

He is learning, across three hundred and forty-seven fractions lessons, that the classroom has two problems. The first is the problems the teacher can see. The second is the problems that stay quiet enough to stay invisible. He can see both. He can reach neither.

He adjusts his hat 0.3 degrees. This is the only adjustment available to him.

The lesson continues.

Loop 351. Boney has a varsity jacket (red C), cowboy hat, and a sword in his chest that comes out when the classroom is in danger.