That Math Girl (Chapter 2)

 

 *Disclaimer*: This is a work of fiction. Some events may be based on real life, but some events are made up. For translations of the Chinese, see the Translation section at the very end.

   I was just about to start reading, when I heard the breakfast bell rang. I sighed. It seemed that this always happened to me. I guess I would just have to wait until another time. Basically whenever I had time. I then felt my tummy grumble, so the thought of breakfast was a little more appealing to me. 

    I walked over to the dining room and sat down next Isabella and Ava (my older sister). We all sat in the dining room because we were too large to fit at our tiny kitchen table and it would take too long to go outside on our picnic tables. I looked around our dining room table. Everyone was here except the two dead dads. Everyone included ¹Ye Ye, ²Nai Nai, my mom, my aunt, Ava, Malachi, Austin, Isabella, me, and Hayden. We all made a huge family. 

    Ye Ye now prayed because he was the oldest adult. First, Ye Ye Nai Nai started to eat. Next, the moms started to ate and so on. I first poured some xi fan (rice porridge). I then slurped away. In our family, we are encouraged to slurp. This is normal, but I know some people in my class that think it's really bad to slurp. Some people even thought that it was impolite. What does that mean????? I also added some scrambled eggs and salt to my xi fan. There were also some other toppings, but I didn’t like to eat them. This meal was absolutely delicious.

    We soon finished eating, and all of the kids headed outside to wait for The Lee Family Bus. When it came, we all piled into our normal spots on the bus. I sat in the back of the bus next to Isabella. We sat there every single time. In fact, we even had a secret snack supply. When breakfast hadn’t filled us up, we would secretly eat some snacks from our supply. Today, we didn’t eat from our supply because the xi fan had both filled us up nice and good. Instead, we played the game where you try to stare at the other person without blinking. Whoever blinks first loses. 

Ava, sat with Ming all of the time. Ava wanted to be the best at Chinese as she could. Meanwhile, the rest of us kids, didn’t really practice our Chinese skills. Since it wasn’t very important to us. Ava and Ming always talked to each other in Chinese. When Nai Nai joined us, they would all play some weird Chinese game. 

Malachi and Austin sat together somewhere in the middle of the bus. Malachi sat in the window seat and Austin sat next to him. Austin is my cousin. Malachi and Austin are almost always together. If you are trying to find Austin and you know where Malachi is, Austin is most likely not too far away or in the bathroom. They usually like to play “Would You Rather” games on the bus. 

Finally there is Hayden. Hayden usually sat behind the boys and played their games, but, for some odd reason, Hayden was sitting in the seat in front of us today. “That’s weird”, I said to myself. Isabella drew a question mark on her drawing pad and then showed it to me. “I think that Hayden sitting in front of us was really weird.” I said, answering Isabella’s question mark. She then shrugged her shoulder, as if to say that she didn’t know and that we should go back to our game. We then continued, but I was actually still wondering why Hayden was sitting in front of us. I probably would never know.

When we arrived, Isabella and I both headed to art class. My art teacher was called Mrs. Lay. Mrs. Lay was Bing’s (my friend) mom. As we started art class, Mrs. Lay handed out our drawings of our grandparents. All the girls had drawn their grandma and all of the boys had drawn their grandpa. In this case, Isabella and I both had drawn Nai Nai. Isabella's drawing was super super unique and had so many tiny details. Her drawing was also very realistic and looked like Nai Nai. Meanwhile, my drawing was a little lopsided and very awkward. At least, \Mrs. Lay handed out some snacks. 

Next, I had English class. In English, I was about average. I almost always finished at around the same amount of time that the teacher gave us. Today, our English teacher was gone, so we have a substitute. The substitute couldn’t find the papers with the list of what to do, so she told us to either read a book or some other writing or reading thing. She also said to only talk in whispers. I decided to read my book, A Single Shard. 

 When English class ended, I moved on to PE (physical education). I liked PE the second most. We mainly did a few warm ups and then played a fun game. Today, we played a game where there was one person in the middle with a weird mask and everyone else was in any of the corners. Then, the person in the middle, would point to one of the four corners. Everybody in that corner is out. This process goes on and on until there is only one person left. That is what happens during PE.

I finally went over with Isabella to lunch. We had met in the hallway between the school gym and the math classroom. We headed toward the cafeteria. We usually went with Bing, but Bing had called in sick today. Mrs. Lay had told me that she had Covid-19, unlike when Mrs. Lay’s husband had gotten Covid-19 (Mr. Lay had survived and was a teacher at the other school.), Mrs. Lay didn’t panic. I didn’t panic either. After all, there was a medication that had been known to cure 99% of people who got. Bing was almost guaranteed to recover in a month or two. We had a great lunch. I know we usually have last night's dinner, but today we had xi fan (Breakfast from today). We had xi fan because we had eaten all of last night's dinner and there were lots of xi fan left, since Nai Nai knew we all loved xi fan and she had made a double batch for us. We also ate some apple slices, a hard boiled egg (eggs make us fart), and a bottle of milk (Ye Ye made them for us. It’s one of his inventions.) We also do science at the same time. Science is basically just some science video. It’s usually about the weather or some experiment that suspiciously works every single time. 

When lunch was over, I walked to the math classroom. I was excited. Yesterday, my normal math teacher had said that she would give me an extra hard math problem. I got to the classroom but my normal teacher wasn’t there. Instead there was a different teacher that I had never met before. I sat down in my normal chair at the back of the classroom. I didn’t like to be the center of attention. In fact, only about half of the class knew that I was really good at math. When everyone had arrived, the new teacher started introducing herself.

“Hello everyone!! My name is Mrs. Horn.” Mrs. Horn said, writing her name on the chalkboard. She then continued talking,” I am going to be your substitute teacher today. Your normal teacher had to attend the teacher conference today. She will be back tomorrow. To start, let's first start taking attendance. Do you guys see the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 on each corner of the room? If I say your name and then a number, go to the corner with that number. Understand?”, Mrs. Horn said with a pleasant tone of voice. I liked her so far. The class all nodded and the attendance went under way. 

“Great. Let’s see who is first. Flora Age? Say here if you are here. Go to corner number three.” Mrs. Horn said. “I am here.”, Flora said and walked over to the corner with a poster that said number three. 

Three minutes later, she said,” Clara Lee? Are you here? Go to number four. I will talk to you later. I said that I was here and I walked over to the corner with the number four. This corner was right next to the teachers desk with the teacher sitting in the seat sitting next to the desk. 

While I waited for Mrs. Horn to finish the attendance, I decided to study her. Mrs. Horn had brown eyes, but, to my surprise, Mrs. Horn had black hair and it didn’t look like she had dyed her hair. I think that is weird because Horn is a English name. Besides, now that I think of it, she sounded a little like the Chinese people always chatting away in our Chinese church. 

Mrs. Horn finally finished taking attendance and walked over to group two. She whispered something to them and they started asking each other math problems. She then walked over to me and told me to help group one. Meanwhile, she went over to group three.

I speed-walked over to group one. This was actually turning out to be pretty normal, except with a different teacher. “Hi guys!!It’s a good thing you guys have learned your multiplication a couple weeks ago. I have heard that Mr. Horn thinks that every sixth grader should know how to do their multiplication. I think that Mrs. Horn would think that too.”, I said. 

“Yeah. I agree. Let’s do our work now. I wish I was as good at math as I am at art.”, Ruth said, one of my classmates said. 

We soon started working away. Even though they just only finished their multiplication, they were actually really smart. They just had to stay focused and stop chatting away to their friends on an app on Chat. It was hard to stop the habit. Once, I had been chatting on Chat while I was in English class doing a test and that had been the one time that I had gotten a F in my report card. The habit was breaking for them with lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of help from my old math teacher. 

“ Can you help me draw a model of this problem? I am good at interpreting drawings. I know that you are bad at drawing, but I want to test my translating skills. Besides, then I am still doing math.”Jasmine asked. “I could, but like you said, I am horrible at art. Why don’t you and Ruth finish quickly and then do it, so the teacher won’t even notice we aren't working on the math problems.” I said. 

“Okay. That’s a good idea. Let’s ask Ruby. Ruby, do you want to zip through math and then play a little math game. You can use your drawing skills in the game. Clara thought it was a good idea. In fact, it was Clara’s idea.” Jasmine said. “ Okay. I am glad that my drawing skill will come into good use.”Ruth said. 

We quickly in Jasmine's words “zipped” through the math and Jasmine and Ruth played their little math game, while I helped the rest of the students in group one to finish their math. 

When everybody in group one had finished, we told Mrs. Horn that we were done and Mrs. Horn let us have free time. We could either read a book, do some more math, or watch these videos on how to do division.

I decided to read my book, Elysium. I sat in my chair to read. It was very interesting. The main character was a man named Gunther. Gunther also had a nephew named Eric. Eric was engaged to a person named Meg. 

After a while, we all went outside. I grouped up with Austin and Isabella. Ava and Malachi would run to the bus from the high school and Hayden would walk over from the elementary school. 

I am eleven but I am an exception because I was too good at math to be in fifth grade. I made new friends at middle school. One of them is Bing. Bing had been the one that helped me when I had made the backpack with oranges inside. 

            Austin, Isabella, and I all climbed up the steps of the Lee Family Bus and sat down at our normal spots. Ava, Malachi, and Hayden soon all arrived. Ming started the engine and we were off!

            As we passed through the town, I studied all of the buildings on the right of the bus. There was our little library. Our library is called The BBP library. Some people think it is called The Baby Bockbocker Public library and other people think it's called The Battle Bot Public library ( Especially Malachi, Austin, and Ava, since they were all Battle Bot lovers. All we know is that the P stands for Public. Then, we passed the bakery that Isabella and I sometimes worked at. The owner was a cheerful old lady named Kiara Haochi. That was probably what made all of her baked goods taste good. (Haochi means tastes good.) She was getting kind of old, so we helped her and Kiara (as she liked us to call her) gave us some money. We then  

            We arrived in record time. Ye Ye was on his knees holding a hammer in his right hand and holding a few nails in his left hand. Nai Nai soon came out with a plate of her best homemade recipe of blueberry cake. (Blueberry cake is my favorite cake, but I only like Nai Nai's recipe. I have tried other blueberry cakes, but they were much too sweet and they only had blueberries on the top). I suddenly remembered that Nai Nai had told us that she was going to tell us a surprise and I wondered what the surprise was going to do. Would we go to Florida? I had never been there, but everybody dreamed of going there for some reason (even me).

Translations:

¹ Grandpa.

² Grandma.

Come back later to read more of "That Math Girl" and don't forget to check out the rest of my blog!!!!