“Rook knows things,” Soren said, by way of explanation. “Show him.”
She turned the laptop around.
The thesis statement was for a paper on the social consequences of the first world war, and it was actually not bad — she had an argument, she had a scope, she was trying to bespecific. But the framing was backwards, leading with the most general claim and burying the most interesting specific point at the end of the sentence.
“Flip it,” I said. “Your strongest claim is the last clause. Lead with that.”
She looked at the screen. “Which clause?”
I pointed. She read it again. Her face changed — that specific shift that happened when a thing that had been sitting slightly wrong finally resolved itself.
“Oh,” she said.
“You had the right idea. You just buried the good part.”
She was already retyping, muttering slightly to herself, and Soren was leaning against the doorframe watching with an expression I couldn't fully read. I looked at him and he looked quickly back at his sister.
“Read it back,” I said to Poppy.
She read it back. It was better. She knew it was better before she finished the sentence.
“Okay,” she said, and she looked up at me with the assessing look again, slightly recalibrated now. “You're really helpful.”
“Don't sound so surprised.”
“Soren's helpful too but he doesn't know history.”
“I know history,” Soren said from the doorway.
“You know music history. It's not the same.”
“The French Revolution had a significant impact on?—”
“That's not what the paper's about, Soren.”
I looked at Soren. He pointed at Poppy with his mug. “She starts arguments and then changes the subject when she's losing.”
“I'm not losing, I'm redirecting.” She was back to typing. “Thank you, Rook.”
“Good luck with it.”
She was already halfway into the next paragraph and had apparently concluded we were done, which we were.
Micah flagged us down on the way back through the hallway.
He was sitting on his bedroom floor surrounded by the colour-coded flashcard situation Soren had described, which was as bad as advertised — four different colours of card, three separate piles, and what appeared to be a supplementary system of sticky notes that had been added to the original system and then started developing its own internal logic.
“It's organic,” Micah said, when he saw me looking at it.
“It's a second system inside the first system,” I said. “At a certain point you're just making more work.”
“The colours mean different things.”
“What does orange mean?”
Micah looked at the orange cards. “I forget.”
Soren made a sound that was not quite a laugh.
