The national selection called for a research application, and for the first time in my life I was writing about something in which I was not an assistant but an author.
I called the project the Open Ladder: a preparation platform for schoolchildren from families with no money, where a mentor's invisible work is made visible. Every hour is accounted for, and every method bears the name of whoever invented it. A peer mentor is paid in money or in credit and no longer pays for helping with herself and her silence. Every one of my inventions from the blue notebook – structure ladders, question cards, memory hooks, breathing pauses – became an open lesson, with one new rule that had not existed in my first life: no pupil may become anybody's free prop.
Hanna tested the draft of the platform with the fury of a tax inspector. She pressed every button twice, typed digits into the name field and negative numbers into the hours field, and by evening she had brought me a list of nineteen ways to cheat my accounting.
"If a button can be pressed twice," she said, "it will be pressed twice. I'm the eldest of four children, I know what I'm talking about."
"You've just wrecked a week of my work."
"I've just saved your application. Point nine especially: a sixth-former can run up hours for herself with an invented pupil. You need a second signature, a parent's or a teacher's."
That was how cross-signatures came to be in the Ladder's charter. Later, at the interview, that point would be singled out for praise. I learned the lesson: a system you build on trust should first be attacked by somebody who loves you.
My mother, knowing nothing about the application, introduced me to the women who came into the shop: half of them had children for whom school came as hard as a foreign language. That was how the Ladder acquired its first real pupil – Mila, twelve years old, daughter of the woman who bought three yellow tulips every Saturday.
We worked in the back room of the shop, between the buckets and the rolls of wrapping paper. Mila was afraid of maths tests to the point of nausea, in the literal sense: before each one they had to give her water in the school lavatories. At the first lesson she sat on the edge of the stool as though it were the edge of a cliff and looked at the problem as if the problem might bite.
"We're not going to solve it," I said, and turned the sheet over. "First tell me out loud: what are they asking here? In your own words. As though you were explaining it to a younger brother."
"I haven't got a brother."
"Then to the cat."
Mila snorted, the first time all lesson, and started explaining apples and baskets to the cat. Three sentences in, she suddenly stopped: "But that's just division." I said nothing. A question card works exactly like that: fear lives not in the answers but in the questions you do not understand. Two weeks later Mila finished a test all the way to the end for the first time. Her mother came into the shop with a cake. My mother accepted the cake, cut me a slice and asked what it was I had got myself into.
"Coursework," I said. Half of that was even true.
The draft of the application I took to Hartmann. He read it in silence, then took a red pencil and for forty minutes took my text apart down to the screws – hard, without anaesthetic, on some scale of fury known to him alone. "Who pays the mentor if the district does not?" he wrote in the margin. "What stops a school from appropriating your method, the way they appropriated you?" And, across a whole page: "Here you are asking permission to exist again. Stop it." Seventeen notes grew in the margins. The last one read: "You apologise too often. Assert."
"Is this a demolition?" I asked.
"This is editing," he said. "A demolition looks different: they praise you and forget you. Come tomorrow after lessons and we'll go through the funding section."
The next day we sat until dark. Hartmann knew the inner workings of foundation budgets the way they are known to a man who has spent ten years writing applications for clients and being angry on their behalf. As I was leaving I asked him why he spent his evenings on me. He was collecting his papers, and answered without lifting his head.
"Because you are the first person in this Gymnasium who is building a ladder downwards rather than up. Anyone can build upwards."
I walked home through wet snow and understood that I was proud and furious at once. For the whole of my first life I had been good exactly as far as Julian needed me to be. It turned out that without him I was better.
And on the Thursday there was a cream envelope in my locker. My name was written on it in silver ink, and the paper smelled of lavender. Hanna read it over my shoulder and made the sound animals use to warn of danger.
"Smells of manipulation."
"Smells of lavender."
"Same family of plants."
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