（外文电子版资料）SK.Rage.doc

PAGE PAGE 58 A high school ShowandTell session explodes into a nightmare of evil... So you understand that when we increase the number of variables, the axioms themselves never change. Mrs. Jean Underwood Teacher, teacher, ring the bell, My lessons all to you Ill tell, And when my day at school is through, Ill know more than aught I knew. Childrens rhyme, c. 1880 Chapter 1 The morning I got it on was nice; a nice May morning. What made it nice was that Id kept my breakfast down, and the squirrel I spotted in Algebra II. I sat in the row farthest from the door, which is next to the windows, and I spotted the squirrel on the lawn. The lawn of Placerville High School is a very good one. It does not fuck around. It comes right up to the building and says howdy. No one, at least in my four years at PHS, has tried to push it away from the building with a bunch of flowerbeds or baby pine trees or any of that happy horseshit. It comes right up to the concrete foundation, and there it grows, like it or not. It is true that two years ago at a town meeting some bag proposed that the town build a pavilion in front of the school, complete with a memorial to honor the guys who went to Placerville High and then got bumped off in one war or another. My friend Joe McKennedy was there, and he said they gave her nothing but a hard way to go. I wish I had been there. The way Joe told it, it sounded like a real good time. Two years ago. To the best of my recollection, that was about the time I started to lose my mind. Chapter 2 So there was the squirrel, running through the grass at 9:05 in the morning, not ten feet from where I was listening to Mrs. Underwood taking us back to the basics of algebra in the wake of a horrible exam that apparently no one had passed except me and Ted Jones. I was keeping an eye on him, I can tell you. The squirrel, not Ted. On the board, Mrs. Underwood wrote this: a = 16. Miss Cross, she said, turning back. Tell us what that equation means, if