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Romance,
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Daughter,
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espinonage,
spy espionage
lady,” Jean
said, looking down in a fake blush. “Anything for my best
friend.”
Melina smiled. A memorable friend
moment.
“ But seriously,” Jean
added. “You are going to change shirts and ditch the mom haircut.
Aren’t you?”
“ Goodbye, Jean,” Melina
said as she walked away. “See you at lunch.”
………………………… .
Melina walked through the door of her first
period physics class and paused to look around the room. The
classroom was set up more like a laboratory than a classroom.
Instead of individual desks, there were seven workstations, each
with a sink and four barstool type chairs. Her teacher, Mr. Clary
didn’t like assigned seats, so everyone just came in and sat at an
open space at a workstation. Melina made sure she arrived to class
a few minutes before the bell. She wanted to get to the class
before Alex so she could let him decide whether he wanted to sit
near her. The class was already half full, but Alex wasn’t there
yet, so she spied an empty workstation and sat down.
Melina spent a few moments fidgeting in her
seat while she monitored the door. Then she remembered she had a
few pages left in her book, so she took it out and began to read.
After a few minutes, out of the corner of her eye, Melina saw the
stool next to her move.
“ Is anyone sitting
here?”
Melina looked up to see Alex standing next
to her, holding the stool.
“ No, please. Sit down,”
Melina said, motioning toward the chair with an open
hand.
Alex sat down and reached into his backpack
for his notebook. “Did you get an answer to the extra credit
question on last night’s homework?”
Melina sat there without saying a word.
Hundreds of thoughts raced through her mind. The thought at the top
of the list was that he wanted to sit by her. That meant that he
did not think she was nuts. Next, his first topic of conversation
was routine talk about homework. That meant that the incident
yesterday was not worth talking about. It was behind them.
Alex looked up from his notebook. “Melina?
Did you get an answer to the extra credit question?”
Melina finally stopped staring into space,
and looked over at Alex. “Oh… yes. If you subtracted out the force
due to friction of the tires on the pavement, the answer came out
correct.”
“ Oh, man,” Alex sighed as
he put his head down on the workstation. “I can’t believe that I
did not think of that.”
“ Don’t worry,” Melina
said, putting her hand on Alex’s shoulder. “I don’t always get the
extra credit problem. Mr. Clary tries to make that problem extra
hard. Most of the time you have to go back to one of the previous
chapters for an equation or piece of information to solve the
problem.”
“ Okay. Everybody take out
your textbooks and turn to page fifty-two.”
It was Mr. Clary. He was speaking from
behind his desk at the front of the room. Melina had not noticed
him come in. She also just noticed that she still had her hand on
Alex’s shoulder. She withdrew it quickly, although she did not know
why.
“ Chapter three.
Magnetism,” Mr. Clary said as he wrote the word magnetism on the board. “Today is
the first day of a new unit. The unit on magnetism will last two
weeks. As in the previous units, each of you will be paired with a
classmate for the lab portion of the unit.”
There was a noticeable rumbling in the
classroom. In other classes, if there was a two-person project,
then the teacher let the students work out with whom they were
paired. Mr. Clary insisted on a random assignment of the students
that were to work together. He said that it forced the students to
be exposed to work habits that they may not have seen before. He
was right, but Melina still thought of it as a school version of
Mystery Date. Her last lab partner was one of the legendary
‘slacker boys’. They were so called because they spent more time
playing with their portable game players than helping with the
assignment.
Mr. Clary sat back down