The Trouble with Robots by by Michelle Mohrweis

Author:by Michelle Mohrweis [Mohrweis, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Holiday House
Published: 2022-09-27T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

ALLIE

New schedule or not, math class was torture.

I groaned and leaned back in my chair. At the front of the room, our math teacher, Mrs. Vern, babbled on and on and on and on about graphs. Only a smattering of it made sense, but nobody asked questions, so I sure wasn’t going to start. Instead, I closed my eyes and let my thoughts drift.

Once, I asked Dad why math mattered. I mean, I planned to be an artist. It’s not like I needed it. Math was always my worst subject. I meshed with math like crayons and watercolor. I hated it. Dad used to chuckle and say, Allie, math is everywhere. You wait and see. Knowing math will help you understand so much more about the world.

He was wrong. A year later, and I still didn’t understand why math mattered.

A twisting of my heart reminded me I shouldn’t think things like that. If Mom and Dad were around, would I think Dad was wrong? Or would he have explained it to me by now in a way that I could understand?

That painful and hollow emptiness began to wind through my bones again, like it always did when I thought of my parents. I snapped my eyes open and looked around the room, searching for anything to distract me.

The teacher was going on and on, covering the whiteboard with graphs and formulas. I shuddered. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Alex. He glanced at the board and made a face.

My thoughts drifted back to Dad and Mom, to those days we would sit around the kitchen table. To them looking at my report cards and talking about getting me math tutors.

I imagined Mom saying, It’s not so bad if you give it a chance. Then she’d wrap me in a hug and tell me to keep trying.

I frowned and pulled out my sketchbook, trying to redirect my thoughts.

I ended up drawing the cactus that used to be in our backyard…before I moved in with Oma. A prickly pear with a dozen different, round, flat pads. For a while I lost myself in the art, and everything else became background noise. The murmur of the teacher above me, the rustling of papers, the scratching of pencils. It blurred together into a melody that I barely heard.

I was shading in the cactus’s spines when a shadow fell over my paper. I looked up. Mrs. Vern stood in front of my desk.

“Allie, I asked everyone to start their homework ten minutes ago. Please put the drawing away.”

Mrs. Vern didn’t like me. I could see it in the way her lips drew down, in her rigid stance and crossed arms. She resented that they added me to her class late in the year, all because of that horrible schedule change Principal Gilbert had made.

I pursed my lips and stared down at my picture. Beside my sketchbook lay a math worksheet that somebody had dropped onto my desk. I hadn’t even noticed when Mrs.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.