Alex Koplow is a writer from Virginia. Recently John Waters described him as "cute but dumb".

Thirty Six Weeks (August 20, 2011. Issue 30.)

Charlotte's swollen toes stuck off the edge of her bathroom scale as the needle sprung to the highest number yet. Waddling into the bedroom, she tapped her weight into her phone, and a soothing voice announced how much she'd gained since becoming pregnant.

She thought the number meant that her baby weighed forty-nine pounds. Charlotte had watched TV moms brag about their smart seven pound babies, so she assumed that her child's extra size meant it was going to come out brilliant.

And she planned on nurturing that intelligence by immersing her baby in math and making it an instant wiz. From its wrinkly first day, Charlotte's kid would coo denominators and multiplication tables. By kindergarten it would have mastered complex, non-number math. Before the end of sixth grade all the best colleges would have sent scholarships.

Back in bed Charlotte reached for the mildewed textbook she'd gotten at the thrift store when she and her boyfriend went to sell clothes. He'd offered to buy her a new copy in a few months, but Charlotte shook her head, knowing they wouldn't have the money.

"Math is supposed to smell bad," she had persuaded him.

Feeling especially nauseous that morning, Charlotte propped the book on her ballooned stomach and reread the chapter on square roots. The square root sign's encouraging look always made her grin. The way it housed and transformed numbers made Charlotte feel pretty mathematic herself.

Nine months earlier she would have said that her square root was Ramen and fish sticks. Then the doctor told her what was inside her. As a kid Charlotte believed that a baby developed all over a woman's body. Arms grew in arms and feet in feet, plumping a mom until all the pieces were added together and a baby was born.

But the stretched knot of her belly made Charlotte feel so centered. She had expected to be fat and pillowy, but it was as if her baby had reinforced her from the inside out. Her stomach's hair and lines and discoloration didn't bother her. She already wanted more kids, stacks of little math geniuses that she could send all over the world. Charlotte wanted to be constantly pregnant.

Her boyfriend was not as open to this idea.

Undeterred by not understanding the math, Charlotte assumed she could teach the book to someone else. Last year everyone had believed her as Maria in the school play, and she wasn't even Hispanic.

"Plays about gangs," Charlotte tsk'ed in bed. "Dropping out was the right move."

But no matter the bitchiness of the girls or the creepiness of the teachers, she vowed to make her baby stick with high school. Charlotte's advanced child would grow up to be an architect or an engineer someplace important and far away.

Her boyfriend's rattling exhaust rounded the corner on his way home from work. Charlotte stuck her oily nose in the crease of the textbook and felt the frail pages.

After a musty inhale she felt her belly whirr like a print-off calculator. Her square root had smelled the lesson. The wiz was on its way.