Matilda was fuming by the time Hortensia walked in. Her hands were covered in glue, there was glitter in her hair, and this stupid crown Miss Honey was making her wear kept slipping down her face. Matilda was ready to rip the current project to pieces. She was supposed to be making some kind of sculpture using strips of paper and glue, but no matter how hard she tried, it wouldn't stand up.
"Man, what the hell, I thought your mom was the nice one." Hortensia grumbled. School had already been dismissed, leaving the classroom empty save the two of them. She plopped down in a nearby empty desk. "How am I supposed to write lines with my knees up to my chest?" Matilda ignored the feeling of eyes boring into her. "Umm, what are you doing?"
"My detention." Matilda grumbled.
"Are you kidding me? You get to do art for your detention!? That is so not fair!" Hortensia complained. Matilda slowly craned her neck towards her and glared, the paper crown she had made now covering one eye. Hortensia smirked at her. "What's with the, umm, what is it supposed to be?"
"She's making me wear everything I make." Matilda moaned. "It's supposed to be a crown."
"That's a crown?" Hortensia laughed. "You look like you scribbled on a piece of paper, ripped it, and taped it to your head."
"Shut up." Matilda hissed. "This stupid thing is so itchy." She scratched at the back of her neck where her coiled paper necklace hung, careful not to rip it in case Miss Honey made her do it over.
"Does Miss Honey have the leash to go with your collar?"
"It's a necklace." Matilda said.
Hortensia snorted. "You made it too tight, it looks more like a choker."
"Don't you have lines to do?"
"What are you working on now?" Hortensia asked, ignoring her. Matilda sighed before holding up the instruction booklet. Hortensia studied the page, looked at what sat in front of Matilda, then back to the booklet. "I see you're going for a more…modern art approach." She said, trying to suppress a laugh.
"I hate art." Matilda grumbled. She had only done three out of five projects. She frowned as the "sculpture" collapsed again. Two out of five projects! She had been at this for over an hour! Was Miss Honey going to make her keep going at this until she really finished five of them? They'd be here all night!
The door opened. Both girls turned in their seat to see Miss Honey walking in.
"That better not have been the sound of talking I heard!" Miss Honey said. Both girls shook their heads. "I don't see you writing, Hortensia."
"Why does she get to do art projects and I have to do lines?" Hortensia complained. Miss Honey's eyes shifted to Matilda and back.
"Does it look like she's having fun?"
Hortensia craned her neck and looked at her a moment. "It looks like she's trying to hang herself."
Miss Honey sighed. "Matilda, what are you doing? You're going to choke yourself." Matilda was pulling on the back of the rings, tightening it even more around her neck.
"I'm trying to get it off without ripping it." Matilda said, growing even more frustrated.
"Why did you make this so tight?" Miss Honey asked, disentangling one of the paper links and liberating the girl's neck, which was now covered in glue and angry red marks.
"I ran out of paper! I had no choice."
"Matilda!" Miss Honey said sounding exasperated, "You were supposed to cut the paper into strips and tape them together. Now both of us are covered in glue, and how in the world did you-" Miss Honey stopped after seeing the melancholy expression on her face.
"I ran out of tape making something else." Matilda mumbled. Miss Honey looked around, but didn't see anything. "It's just as atrocious as everything else I made though."
"Would you let me see?"
"It's in there." Matilda said, pointing to the empty desk next to her. "Please don't pull it out though." If Hortensia saw it, she'd probably keel over laughing. "It's for you." She added barely over a whisper.
Curious, Miss Honey lifted the lid of the desk and stared down. Sitting atop another student's scattered belongings, was a piece of paper covered in taped on glitter spelling out the words, "THANK YOU FOR BEING MY MOM!" Underneath were two taped on popsicle stick figures holding hands.
"I thought we didn't have any glue, and that's why I used all the tape, but then I found the glue, and it was already too late, so that's why I had to glue the necklace together and-"
"Matilda, I love it." Miss Honey said, a now genuine smile spreading across her face. "This wasn't even one of the projects."
Matilda shrugged. "I wanted to make it before I got…" She put up her hands and bent her fingers into claws for emphasis. "Frustrated." She finished. "It's not perfect or anything…"
"Matilda, it doesn't need to be perfect to be special." Miss Honey said before closing the lid of the desk. "The fact that you made it is what makes it special." Matilda looked away, now feeling embarrassed. Miss Honey strode over, lifted her crown up and kissed the top of her head. There was a moment of silence before Miss Honey coughed and winced before she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. "Matilda, how did you get glue in your hair?"
Matilda flashed her a sheepish smile and shrugged. Miss Honey sighed and shook her head. "Alright," she said taking in the work Matilda had put into everything. "I think you've been punished enough. Go in the bathroom and try and get all that glue and glitter off and meet me in Mr. Trilby's office. We have a project for you I think you'll enjoy." Miss Honey watched Matilda scurry off, wincing at the sticky substance now coating the door handle.
"What about me?" Hortensia asked. Miss Honey looked down at the blank piece of paper save for her name and raised her eyebrows.
"What about you?"
"Can I be a part of your secret project?"
"Absolutely not." Miss Honey laughed. "You're staying here and writing lines."
"So you're trusting me to stay in your classroom, by myself?" Hortensia asked. Shoot, Miss Honey thought as she bit her lip. She hadn't thought that far ahead. She looked around the classroom. Would it be in one piece by the time they got back?
Miss Honey sighed. "Fine, we need someone to make copies."
"Yes!" Hortensia exclaimed pumping her fist in the air. "I knew you were one of the nice ones." She quieted down once she saw the look on Miss Honey's face as she came within inches of her own.
"If I ever hear you're threatening one of my students again, I'll be making sure you're writing lines until the day you graduate."
Hortensia gulped and nodded her head vigorously.
"Good," Miss Honey said, her features softening once more. "Follow me, I'll show you what we need copies of." She led Hortensia down the hall, ignoring the comment under her breath which sounded like, "It's always the quiet ones." When they entered Mr. Trilby's office, both Matilda and Mr. Trilby were already waiting in a chair looking at them both curiously.
"Can I have Augusts folder, sir?" Miss Honey asked. When he handed it to her, she handed it to Hortensia. "Go make three copies of everything in this folder, and don't lose a single piece of paper. Then come right back, and I'll give you the next month, until you finish making copies of the whole school year."
"The whole year?!" Hortensia exclaimed. "I'll be here all night!"
"Would you rather be writing lines?" Miss Honey asked.
"No." Hortensia mumbled before hanging her head and heading back out to the copier.
"Outsourcing the work to the students already, Miss Honey?" Mr. Trilby laughed.
Matilda watched as Miss Honey's face began to turn a deep shade of crimson. "No! Sir, It's for her detention, I would never!"
Mr. Trilby laughed again. "I'm only teasing you, Miss Honey." Jennifer gave an uncomfortable, nervous laugh before sitting down next to her daughter. He then turned his attention towards Matilda and smiled. "As for you, since you have such an extraordinary knack with numbers, Ms. Honey suggested we let you take a look, just for fun. Once Hortensia comes back with the copies, what we'd like you to do is to go through and highlight any…mistakes you find."
Matilda gave him a confused sort of glance.
"Sweetie, this is completely voluntary, if you don't feel up for it, or it's too hard, just say the word. You're not being punished anymore." Miss Honey said.
"Is it another test?" Matilda asked.
"No," Mr. Trilby said, "it's not a test, it's more like…"
"A puzzle," Miss Honey threw in. "or a long world problem in math. You like those, don't you?"
Matilda nodded. "Will it be challenging?"
"Yes, that's why we thought you might enjoy taking a crack at it, and if you enjoy it, we can keep coming back after school. It's not something that can be solved in one night."
Matilda seemed to frown for a moment. "A large math puzzle that can't be solved in one night?"
"Exactly," Mr. Trilby said. "You see, the puzzle starts with a big monetary number, and every time money is spent, the big number gets lower and lower. The problem is, the big number is already almost gone, and we have all these little pieces of the puzzle that need to match and tell a story as to why the big number…isn't so big anymore. Does that make sense?"
"You're letting me help with the school's bookkeeping records?" Matilda asked, eyes now shining brightly.
"What? No, no, of course not, this is just a hypothetical puzzle." Mr. Trilby tried to say, his voice now raised an octave higher than it should be.
"Matilda, how much exactly do you know about bookkeeping?" Miss Honey asked.
Matilda shrugged. "I was reading a book about a man who was in jail for embezzling money from his company, but he was actually framed. I didn't know what embezzlement meant, so I looked it up, but then I got curious about how embezzlement works, which led to Ponzi schemes, then to money management and banking, then to bookkeeping and auditing." Miss Honey and Mr. Trilby exchanged blank looks.
"And how much time did you invest in researching bookkeeping and auditing?" Mr. Trilby asked.
"An afternoon." Matilda said. "Then I went back to the book I was reading." Miss Honey watched as Mr. Trilby seemed to deflate in his chair like an untied balloon.
"But you have a general understanding of what we're trying to do, right?" Miss Honey asked.
"So you are going over the schools accounts?" Matilda asked. Miss Honey nodded.
"If that's the case, I'm going to need more than receipts. I'll need payroll, ledgers, accounts receivable..." Matilda listed off a few more things off the top of her head. Miss Honey looked from Matilda's eager face to the now pale headmasters.
"I, I can't let you see those things. Th-their private." Mr. Trilby said. "We're just letting you see the school's expenses for fun. I've already gone through everything else." He turned to see Miss Honey's face. "No, I can't let a student go through our staffs' personnel files. There are wages, social security numbers, it would be a major breach of privacy."
They waited in silence until Hortensia got back with arms full of papers. She dumped them unceremoniously on the desk before pulling up a chair.
"That's a lot of stuff!" Hortensia complained. "What are you guys doing with all this? And why's the squirt involved?"
"We're looking for mistakes in the math." Miss Honey said.
"You're going to have a field day then, there's over 10 just on the first page!"
Both Matilda and Mr. Trilby reached for a copy of the first page and frowned. "No there isn't," they both said in unison.
"What are you, blind?" Hortensia asked.
"Enough, go start on the next month and leave this part to us." Miss Honey said, handing her another thick envelope.
Matilda scowled as she read and re-read the first page. What was Hortensia talking about? She ran the numbers inside her head, then proceeded to read them aloud. So far, everything checked out. It was the beginning of the year purchasing order for textbooks. Matilda frowned, no wonder Hortensia complained so much about her mom making her buy her own replacements if she lost them. They were expensive for a student to have to shell out the money for, even if they were the cheaper paperback pull apart for grade schoolers.
Matilda flipped through the next page, and then the next mentally doing the math in her head for all the subjects and grades she had completed this year. She grimaced at the number. Had Miss Honey really stolen over 600 pounds worth of text books for her? No wonder the Trunchbull was so mad!
Matilda could feel expectant eyes following her every movement as she flipped through page after page. Her forehead began to crease with worry. They had expected her to find at least something, anything! There were purchase orders for toilet paper, soap, erasers, markers, lightbulbs, cooking ingredients, chalk, but nothing stood out to her as suspicious. The math added up. If anything, now she understood why the school bought the cheapest toilet paper possible. She flipped the last page over and looked up.
"I'm sorry, everything adds up." Matilda said. The textbook industry was a scam, but she had already known from reading articles about it in the newspaper. She had even heard a university student complaining about it during Christmas break in the library.
"I came to the same conclusion." Mr. Trilby said. "Well, I'm relieved. At least I didn't miss anything glaringly obvious."
Matilda remained silent, glancing over the first page again.
"Sweetie, if you didn't find anything wrong on there the first time, I doubt there is. Hortensia just likes to blurt things out to make people worry. Last week she told me I was trailing toilet paper on the bottom of my shoe as she passed me in the hallway, but when I looked down, nothing." Miss Honey said. Matilda rolled her eyes. It sure sounded like something Hortensia would do, but still. She stared at the page until the next month's worth of copies arrived.
This batch of papers wasn't nearly as big. This time Matilda was able to highlight a few numbers that were off, but it didn't make much of a difference in the budget. Still, it seemed to make the adults happy whenever she was able to spot a few subtle errors, like a decimal in the wrong place, or an added zero where there shouldn't have been. By the time she had gotten through the third month, she had found a total of six errors, but no obvious fraud.
"I think we ought to call it a day." Mr. Trilby said. "It's getting late."
Matilda looked up from the papers and noticed for the first time it was already dark outside. How long had she been looking at this? A wave of exhaustion now seemed to crash over her. When she looked back down at the paper, she frowned. The previous neat column was now a blurry mess. She rubbed at her eyes, but the numbers refused to refocus.
"Mr. Trilby, I need your opinion on something." Miss Honey said. "I'm not sure what to do about..." Matilda had her head down, but she was sure they were talking about her. "It's just not working out."
"Is it still about the teacher, or...?" Mr. Trilby asked.
"No, while I'm certainly not a fan of his, it's much more complicated than that. We had a talk today, and she finally managed to get it through this thick skull of mine." Miss Honey said. "She's just not built for traditional education, and I'm at a complete loss. I can't expect her to sit in a classroom like any other child. She absorbs information at such an impossibly fast rate, but is stuck being taught at the rate of the rest of the class. She wants to come back to my class and continue what she was doing before, but what about next year? And the year after that? There's never going to be a classroom setting that can keep up with her." Miss Honey let out a sigh. "She needs a one on one tutor and a much faster paced curriculum, but it's nothing I can find for her here."
Mr. Trilby remained silent for some time before answering. "Actually, what if you could? You know if you took the job-"
"Sir," Miss Honey said. "I doubt the board would be happy if I requested to hire a teacher for one student."
"Hear me out," Mr. Trilby said. "What if you could still be her one on one tutor?" Matilda lifted her head now, intrigued. "If you took the headmistress job, you'd have access to all the curriculum materials. Instead of placing her in a class, you could put a school desk in here and have her study with you."
"Headmistress?" Matilda asked, looking at Miss Honey, who seemed to be at a complete loss for words.
"You could even dismiss her for recess with her friends class, so she doesn't completely miss out on social interaction." Mr. Trilby added.
"I could." Miss Honey said. Her eyes were wide as they took in the room with a new perspective. Matilda could see her mind was going a mile a minute. What in the world was going on? "Would they really let me do that?"
"You'd have to make a case for it and present it to the education board as to why she's not in a classroom, but I think her test scores alone could make a near solid case."
Miss Honey remained quiet for some time thinking things over, only coming to when Hortensia entered with another month's worth of print out.
"That's it for today, you're excused." Mr. Trilby said.
"Yes!" Hortensia exclaimed while stretching. "There wasn't even anything interesting to read through. I can't wait to get home and eat."
"Wait!" Matilda called, before Hortensia could make it out the door. "What you said earlier about there being a bunch of mistakes. What did you mean?"
Hortensia frowned. "You said there weren't any."
"But why did you think that? You weren't just joking, were you?" Matilda asked. Something had been bugging her, but no matter how long she had stared at the page, nothing jumped out at her. It was probably nothing, but it wouldn't hurt to ask.
"The textbooks were too expensive." Hortensia said.
Mr. Trilby frowned. "Textbooks have always been expensive, that's why it's important to take care of them."
"No, on the list, they were like really expensive." Hortensia said. Matilda gave her a blank stare before searching the pile of papers for the first page of the report. Hortensia dug through her backpack for a minute before pulling out her math book. "Look, the price is right on the back of the book. Twelve pounds, I remember because I had to buy a new one last month." Matilda gaped open-mouthed at the list.
"She's right!" Matilda said, "Look! The purchase order is for 37 pounds a book!" She groped around before pulling out the second and third pages. So that's 25 pound difference per textbook, times the number of subjects, times the number of kids in a class times the number of grades." She wrote a large figure on the back of a piece of paper and slid it over to Mr. Trilby.
….
"Stop beating yourself up, Matilda." Miss Honey said on their walk home. "Of course you'd be more interested in what's inside the book than the outside."
"But how did I not see it?" Matilda asked for the tenth time. "I still can't believe it was Hortensia who found the fraud." She grumbled.
Miss Honey let out a chuckle. "How do you think Mr. Trilby feels? He's been agonizing over it for weeks, and the school's notorious problem child finds it in one glance. I'm still very proud of you though, you know why?"
"I didn't do anything." Matilda mumbled.
"Oh yes you did," Miss Honey said. "It's thanks to both of you we found the problem. Both Mr. Trilby and I assumed we knew better and brushed her comment off. It's you who listened and investigated further. You reminded me that I need to pay closer attention to what the children are trying to tell me, even the problem ones. Especially if I'm going to accept the job offer."
"What job offer?" Matilda asked.
"Mr. Trilby wants to retire, and he asked me to take the role of headmistress starting next school year."
"Woah! Are you going to take it?" Matilda asked.
"I'm considering it." Miss Honey said. "It depends on how you'd feel about it."
"Me? Why me? Of course you should take it!"
Miss Honey laughed. "No, not that. I meant how you'd feel about me teaching you privately in the office, instead of you trying to be in a classroom. It's not like I could keep you in my class every year."
"Can we really do that?" Matilda asked, "Wouldn't you be busy with other things?"
"If I can teach a lot of first years and still manage to keep you occupied, then I don't see how this would be much different. You do so well on your own anyway, I'm kind of afraid my only job would be to hand you the next book to work out of."
Matilda shrugged. "It's worked well so far."
"We still want you to go over the other months, just so you know. Just because Hortensia found a large amount of money that went missing, it doesn't mean there isn't more spread out somewhere else. We also need to figure out where the money went."
"No where good if she felt she had to hide it." Matilda said. "So if she didn't keep it for herself, where would the Trunchbull spend it?"
"That's a good question." Miss Honey said. "What would you say to a little snooping through the house after school tomorrow?"
"As long as we don't get stuck in the closet again."