The old man made me kneel in the yard the next day while it rained.
"If you want to act like a martyr, stay there," he had said.
I stayed there until my knees went numb. I didn't care.
By the end of the week, I was back at the junk shop. I bought old ledgers and copied math problems into the margins of newspapers. I didn't have a teacher. I just stared at the patterns until the numbers started to make sense.
Professor Sterling came back a month later. He sat on my porch and looked at the newspapers.
"Who taught you to solve these?" he asked, pointing to a calculus proof.
"I just figured it out," I said.
He took out a fountain pen and wrote a problem on a clean sheet of paper. "Try this one."
It took me ten minutes. When I handed it back, he stared at it for a long time.
"You shouldn't be scrubbing floors, Flora," he said. "You should be taking the university entrance exams."