The Secret of Zormna Clendar by Julie Steimle (great reads .TXT) 📖

But unlike all the other people she had blown up at recently, Mrs. Ryant merely leaned back in her chair. The woman did not recoil, or glare, or stare in terror. She went even more introspective. She quickly picked up a nub of chalk from the tray and wrote on the chalkboard. She used the most basic print. When she stopped, she turned toward Zormna and said, “Can you identify any of these letters?”

Zormna looked up at the writing.

“I recognize them. But I don’t know all the sounds,” she said. She pointed to two of the letters. “That one does not have a consistent sound. Sometimes it is ‘Oh’. Sometimes it is ‘Ah’. Sometimes people say it is ‘Ow’. And I know there was a word where it was ‘Oo’. And that one—” She huffed to herself. “That one also does an ‘Ah’ and this flat sound that is not even spoken in my language, and I think one more. I cannot keep them straight.”

“Zormna.” Mrs. Ryant peered more intently at her as one on the cusp of discovering something. “Write your name on the board for me, please.”

“I do not know how, in your language,” Zormna snapped.

Sighing, Mrs. Ryant shook her head. “Do it in yours then.”

Huffing again, Zormna snatched up one of the chalk nubs, a blue one, and signed her name. It went from the top down. Not the loveliest handwriting, but her teachers had always said it was decent.

A rather dumbfounded stare formed on her teacher’s usually intelligent face.

“Ok. You’re right.” Mrs. Ryant rested her hand on her chin. “That doesn’t look a bit like English. How do you read it?”

Satisfied, Zormna set the chalk down. She pointed to each jagged slash, swirl, and symbol. “This is the letter ‘Za’, and this is the letter ‘Oh’.” Continuing on each, she said, “Letter ‘Er’, letter ‘Ma’, letter ‘Na’, and letter ‘Ah’. I could write it neater if you want.” And she did so, right next to her signature. “Za-Oh-Er-Ma-Na-Ah. My name, Zormna. The other one—”

“So there is a sound for every letter?” Mrs. Ryant interrupted, quite interested now.

Zormna nodded. “Nearly. Our vowels occasionally combine to make other sounds, but they are simple enough to know.” She continued, pointing to the rest of her name. “Letter ‘Ceh’, letter ‘Al’.” Aside, “of course there is also a letter ‘Kah’ like letter ‘Ceh’, only it is a harder sound and there is also a letter ‘Ell’ which is softer than ‘Al’ which, for a novice, is easily confused—but that is beside the point.” Continuing with her name, Zormna explained, “Letter ‘Eh’, and ‘Na’, and ‘Deh’, and ‘Ah’, and lastly ‘Er’. Ceh-Al-Eh-Na-Deh-Ah-Er. Clendar.”

Zormna smiled. Her posture relaxed. It was good to see her own writing again in the open. None of this left-to-right garbage. Top-to-bottom made more sense.

Mrs. Ryant cleared her throat. She was still eyeing the chalkboard. But Zormna could tell her thoughts were formulating into learning strategies. “What language is that?”

“A….” Zormna paused. She wasn’t supposed to talk about Home with the natives. That was the main rule. She was already breaking it by showing up her writing to the teacher. “It is an ancient dialect.”

“Ancient? Like Gaelic?” her teacher asked.

Persistent, that one. Zormna thought. Of course that was expected from a good teacher. And Zormna secretly liked that about Mrs. Ryant. However, as being specific would lead to trouble, Zormna cleared her throat and said, “No. Older than Gaelic.” But that thought made her shake her head and chuckle. Her language was much older than Gaelic. She added, “You will never see anything like it again. Trust me.”

“No doubt.” Mrs. Ryant nodded. Then she plowed ahead, as expected. “Could you write out your entire alphabet? I think I might be able to write up some equivalents and see if we can fix a few misconceptions you have of English.”

Zormna winced, peeking one eye up. “Misconceptions?”

Mrs. Ryant nodded. “You are right to believe that English is a difficult language. It seems I forgot that our spelling rules are peculiar when compared to most other languages. But I think I have a phonics book that can help you.”

Another tack? Would this one work? The thought at trying again made Zormna weakly smile. Yet she wondered out loud, “What misconceptions though?”

With a benevolent grin that Zormna was beginning to love, Mrs. Ryant replied, “Not every sound in our language has a letter—unlike yours—which seems to. A lot of our sounds are in fact letter blends.”

Letter blends? Was that what she had been dealing with this entire time? Letter blends? That’s all? Zormna groaned. Now she felt entirely stupid.

“Don’t worry.” Mrs. Ryant assured her, “It really isn’t as hard at it seems.”

Zormna muttered under her breath with a slump against the chalk-board. “I am an idiot.”

Mrs. Ryant didn’t seem to hear. She immediately wrote the English phonemes on the board using letter bends and the alphabet, urging Zormna to copy them on her paper. She had Zormna write her best sound equivalent in her language next to them. It took most of the hour.

When they were done, and they left the back room, they both halted with blinking stares at what was going on inside the classroom.

A good number of the students sat on top of the tables, gossiping together in gaggles. Around one table, a quarter of the students were gathered together, fishing out playing cards from a center deck. Their hands were full of jacks, queens, diamonds, spades, and a few potato chips. The snack bag sat next to a discard pile.

But someone saw Mrs. Ryant and gasped.

Everyone scrambled back to their real seats like cockroaches in the sudden light.

Zormna pressed her lips together, quenching a smirk. She glanced up at her teacher.

But as usual, tolerant Mrs. Ryant did nothing except shake her head at them. No shouting. No berating. Not even a sarcastic word. Instead she silently walked through the room, plucking up the chip bag along the way to her desk. She stuffed it into a drawer.

Clutching her scribbled-on pages full of the most important homework of her life to her chest, Zormna realized that woman may have saved her. Zormna laid down all the writing and her interpretations at her desk and stared at them. Now she would prove it to everyone that she wasn’t lying.

Zormna went straight to work.

*

Jennifer was blown by the abrupt change in Zormna. Little Miss sulky-about-not-being-able-to-read-English, became the Schoolwork Maniac. For good or ill, that girl plowed ahead with schoolwork, focused with dedication. A breathtaking, athletic beauty turning into an ultra-geek was a bit much to handle, really.

But Zormna had stopped sulking. In fact, she also apologized to her and Kevin (with an ingratiating bow), saying she had not intended to insult him or her. She had just been overwhelmed by everyone staring at her, she said. Then Zormna asked for help.

A ploy? Jennifer wondered.

Possibly.

Then again, Zormna was easier to live with now that she stopped acting all superior. Except now that blonde studied all the time. Her nose was hardly ever outside a book after that.

Thing was, all Jennifer and Kevin did was help Zormna with her reading to make sure she understood homework instructions correctly. But while doing so, they started to spend afternoons in the house Zormna had inherited from her great aunt. Mostly they sat among the dust and old furniture while drilling her on basic sight-words. Even then, Zormna usually stayed long after Jennifer and Kevin went home. Because of that, Jennifer’s often parents sent her back to fetch Zormna for dinner.

In fact, Zormna didn’t seem to tire of studying. The hours she had once spent watching TV with Andrew and Mindy were now spent sitting in the living room reading simple books. Then she went through more advanced books. It was kind of freaky, actually. The speed at which Zormna was advancing in her English reading was scary fast.

And that was not all. Jennifer also heard Zormna had freaked out Mr. Parker.

She didn’t get it straight from a classmate, but from a rumor from a rumor of what Brandon Fry had seen at the end of the second week of Zormna’s classes. Everyone was talking about it.

Three days just after Zormna had her private meeting with Mrs. Ryant. Brandon had told his friend about the event (which eventually made it to Jennifer’s ears)…that one day Zormna was doing her weird note-taking thing again in the middle of Mr. Parker’s class when Zormna apparently came to an epiphany and burst out, “Ha! This is so simple!”

Zormna’s epiphany moments were a little scary. Jennifer always flinched when she had them when they studied. Zormna would get this look in her eye. And she would smile, her green eyes sparkling like fire. It was akin to watching a butterfly abruptly discover how to go past the speed of light. Then do it two inches from your nose.

In this case, when Zormna had this particular outburst, Mr. Parker was in the middle of drawing a line graph on the chalkboard.

“Is it now?” the man had shouted back. Brandon said he had chucked his chalk into the dusty tray. Then with wide sweeping arms and a grandiose bow to the blonde, the teacher said, “If this is so easy, then perhaps our flunk-out here can demonstrate this problem for us.”

According to Brandon, Zormna blinked in that ‘cute way of hers’ then her face went so red. But the blonde had recovered quickly and popped out of her seat like a jack-in-the-box and bowed to the math teacher—like someone bowing before doing karate. Brandon half expected Zormna to karate chop the teacher’s neck.

But all she did was say, “Fine. I will.”

She used that chalk Mr. Parker had tossed and immediately fixed her eyes to the problem they were working on.

Brandon couldn’t remember what it was, and he didn’t care. But he did say Zormna whipped the chalk across the chalkboard as if she were Zorro. Zip. Slash. And swipe. The answer materialized right before their eyes.

Mr. Parker growled at her without saying anything—so they knew Zormna had gotten the answer right.

But then the teacher had added with a challenge in his grin, “And graph it.”

But Zormna, Brandon said, merely lifted one eyebrow at him (Jennifer was so jealous, even if it wasn’t true), smugly snorted, and continued writing.

She plotted the curve in three places. With one sweeping arch, she drew the line. The chalk clicking into the tray announced its completion. Then she sauntered back to her seat with all the essence of gloating.

Brandon declared he had never seen Mr. Parker bested ever. Not until that day. In fact, Brandon said, the man just went on with his lesson as if nothing had happened at all. But Brandon swore that he saw the man’s hands shaking—and that he peed his pants. Jennifer believed Brandon had made that last part up. More people would have been talking about it if Mr. Parker had wet himself.

What Jennifer did know for certain was that Zormna had ended up with a pile of math worksheets to finish—a pile about three inches thick—which she spent the entire weekend completing without a word of complaint. The following Monday, she had brought them back to class perfectly completed and stuffed in a folder. Jennifer watched Zormna hand them to the teacher with that insufferably smug grin of hers.

In helping Zormna with her homework those past few days, Jennifer saw firsthand what a dangerous thing Zormna really was. Helping Zormna into literacy was like setting loose a demon that had finally smelled what it had thirsted for. And Zormna charged after it. By Friday, Zormna had gone from Green Eggs and Ham to the Boxcar Children. And the next week Zormna had her nose in the Hunger Games. She was currently reading the final book to the trilogy.

Which is why Jennifer had shivers up her arms when she overheard Mr. Keller enthusiastically share Zormna’s first written paper with the other teachers in the lounge. Jennifer had