Verity and Ada

It was almost never close enough.

"The dog run across the yard," Verity announced one morning, proud of the speed of it.

The sentence hung in the air, and it hung crooked. One small dog, at the front, looked back over its shoulder as if something were pinching it. The workshop went a little quiet, the way a room does when a picture on the wall is one degree off level and everyone pretends not to notice.

Verity felt the crookedness and didn't know where it lived. "It's fine," she said, less sure now. "The dog. Run. Across the yard. It's — it's got all the parts."

"It has all the parts," said a calm voice from the doorway. "It just doesn't have them listening to each other."

The speaker was a small, unhurried figure with round spectacles and her head tilted very slightly, the way people tilt their heads when they are listening for something quiet. This was Agreement Ada. Ada did not do the action. Ada did something Verity had never thought to do at all: before anything moved, Ada counted.

"May I?" Ada asked, and Verity, relieved to hand the crooked thing to someone, said please.

Ada walked to the front of the sentence and looked — really looked — at who was standing there. "One dog," she said gently. "Just the one. See? A single. So when it comes to you, Verity, and asks you for an action —" she turned, "— you have to answer it the way you answer one."

"How do I answer one?" Verity asked.

"With the -s," said Ada, and pointed at the little glowing charm on Verity's belt. "For a single someone, in the here-and-now, you clip on the -s. The dog barks. Try it."

Verity unclipped the plain ending, clipped on the soft -s charm, and said it: "The dog barks." And the small dog at the front of the sentence stopped looking pinched. It sat up straight. The whole line of words settled level on the wall, and the quiet in the room turned from the holding-breath kind into the easy kind.

"Oh," said Verity, staring at her own belt. "Oh. It wasn't a bigger word it wanted. It wanted the matching one."

A student named Perry had drifted over, and Perry set a genuinely nasty sentence on the bench between them — the kind grown-ups use to trip people up.

"The box of crayons —" Perry read, and stopped, grinning. "is, or are, on the shelf? There's a whole bunch of crayons in it. So — are?"

Verity's hand drifted toward her plural ending, tempted. All those crayons.

"Wait," said Ada, and put a light hand on Verity's wrist. "Don't count the crowd, Verity. Count the one who's actually the subject." She stepped up to the sentence and did the thing that was her whole gift: she looked past the loud middle part. She cupped her hands around the little travelling phrase of crayons and, ever so gently, dimmed it — not deleting it, just quieting it — until only the true subject at the front still glowed.

"What's left glowing?" Ada asked.

"...Box," said Verity. "One box."

"One box," Ada agreed. "The crayons are just visiting. The box is who the sentence is about. So?"

Verity clipped on the singular ending, sure this time. "The box of crayons is on the shelf." The sentence rang true, level, done. Perry groaned happily, the way you do when a trick fails in the best way.

"You looked past the distraction," Verity said, a little awed. "I never look past anything. I just go."

"You go," said Ada, smiling. "I look. That's why we're good together."