Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 122966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 615(@200wpm)___ 492(@250wpm)___ 410(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 122966 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 615(@200wpm)___ 492(@250wpm)___ 410(@300wpm)
I’d been right about it fitting snugly onto the small counter between the stove and the freezer.
Pipsqueak was buzzing with excitement and had talked my ear off while we were out for dinner, and I’d learned there were two ways—two good ways, pardon me—to temper chocolate. For the record, I still wasn’t sure I understood the process of tempering chocolate, but nonetheless. Pipsqueak preferred the machine, although she did sometimes want to do it by hand, and now she was thrilled that she could afford a marble worktop. She’d shown me on my laptop, because evidently, I just had to see it, and it was roughly the size of my stove. In other words, she planned on putting it there when she experimented. And then she could stow it away behind the door when she was done.
I did my best to nod along and ask the right questions.
“Would you mind if I hijacked one of your drawers for some tools?” she asked. “I noticed you have some empty ones.”
“You can do whatever you want. As long as you don’t move the coffeemaker, the kitchen’s yours.” I handed her the cord to the machine. “Wanna do the honors?”
She grinned and wasted no time in plugging it in. “You’re gonna get so sick of me being here all the time.”
I sincerely doubted that.
“I think I’ll survive,” I chuckled. “You’ll have to excuse me now, though. I’m dead on my feet and just want to fall asleep to the evening news.”
She snickered. “Dad does that.”
I winced.
Being compared to someone who was almost sixty…
“Thanks, Pipsqueak. You always know what to say.” I patted her on the head as I passed her on my way to the living room.
“Why are you limping, Mr. B?”
“Because it’s fun.” Or because I’d worked out with Darius last night, and the fucker had put me through the wringer. To be fair, he wasn’t feeling too hot today either. “Remember, guys, what we cover today will be on the test,” I said, getting back on track. “This exercise is just to help you memorize things.”
Despite walking around like a senior citizen, I was in a good mood, and my two senior classes were currently on the path toward high grades in geography.
“You know the rules.” I tossed and caught the tennis ball that kept my hands occupied. Being energetic was foreign to me. “We’ll start off easy. When was the last census in the US?”
Most hands went into the air.
“Mr. Nolan,” I said and threw him the ball.
“2010,” Gage replied. “Um, TJ, when’s the next census?” And so the ball continued to TJ.
“2020.” TJ clearly hadn’t prepared his own questions, so he snatched one of the twenty I’d listed on the whiteboard. “Keira, why hasn’t gerrymandering become illegal?”
“Some gerrymandering is,” I interrupted. “Not that our politicians haven’t figured out ways to get around it.”
I gestured for Keira to proceed with her answer, and then I grabbed a marker to draw a line through the question TJ had used.
“In short,” she said, “because when a party has the majority, it’s never in their interest to ban it.” She paused. “Niesha, who was Elbridge Gerry?” She tossed the ball across the classroom, and Niesha caught it.
“He was the vice president who came up with the practice,” Niesha said.
I leaned back to half sit on the edge of my desk and butted in. “Can you tell me a bit more about him?” I asked.
She nodded. “He was a Democratic-Republican, he signed the Declaration of Independence, and, uh, he was very old when he became VP?”
I chuckled. “Good.”
She smiled with relief and passed on the ball, and a question, to Joshua.
I rubbed the sore part along the backside of my leg as I listened to the questions and answers, and I interjected whenever I wanted someone to elaborate. And for some reason, it never stopped being funny to the students when someone dropped the ball.
As we neared the end of today’s class, I took over and steered the questions toward the topics that would be covered heavily on the test. I wanted their focus to be on the drawing of the maps that made up our voting districts and why the practice of cracking was a direct threat against democracy.
“Good job today, everyone,” I said once the tennis ball was back in my hands. “Before the test next week, I want you to write five hundred words on how politicians can apply racial gerrymandering and get away with it.”
I soaked up their groans of complaint and smirked to myself as I rounded the desk to collect my things.
For the first time in ages, it felt nice that the day was over, but it wasn’t something I’d been eyeing the clock for.
Noticing that Keira was lingering while the others were in a rush to leave, I gave her my attention.