SANTA MARIA HIGH (COMPLETED)

Part One: 12

Spot any error? Please kindly lemme know! ☺
***

Hope had never been so eager for classes to end. Whatever her opinion was, the physics practical instructor didn’t look like he would give a dime.

Last week they were introduced to some equipment, a basic waste of time actually. Hope was familiar with many of them, from the oscilloscopes to breadboard and screws. Today, they would be identifying resistors and capacitors by their color bands, next week they would confirm their finds using appropriate devices. As fate would have it, she was paired with Obi who made it all so damn easy.

“that’s 5 ohms.” He said. Picking one up. Hope collected it from him, examining the bands and comparing them to the charts on the manual. He was right.

“Don’t tell me you have this all head?” she asked, looking back at the charts and wondering if she would want to memorize them.

“I work with them, a lot. Back at home.” He said, not without a hint of intentional pride.

“Oh.” She said, reaching for a capacitor this time, “why don’t you let folks that haven’t work with them before have a feel of what’s like?”

Obi looked over his shoulder to where the instructor was seated poring over a volume. “Don’t tell me you really want to sit down and argue this crap. I know this stuff; we can be out of here in no time. Beside, you’re smart, you already figured it out.”

“from the books. Hello!” she said, “you’re flattering me. What do you want?”

“I need to watch this match, that starts in the next ten minutes.” Obi said, Hope gawked. Is he serious? “Please, let me handle this. You look like you could use some rest.”

Hope considered her option, fourty five minutes more in this hot overcrowded lab, or a quick break. It wasn’t hard to choose, she felt spent already. She slapped a resistor to Obi’s palm, “You owe me.”

The boy smiled. And within the next ten minutes they were done. Hope submitted their ‘collective’ work to the instructor who shrugged and up ended the slip. “you can go.”

Hope noticed the tension on some of the boys, scribbling fast and punching their calculator, face scrunched dripping sweat like there were in some Nazi think tank. She never understood what the thing between boys and soccer was. But then, they were boys, can anyone understand their weirdness?

Traffic on the hallways had lessened as some students’ classes were over already. She had time to kill, time she’d rather not spend it alone, in her room. She thought of tv in the common room, but that wasn’t as spontaneous as continuing her quest of meeting the statues, or better still visiting the infamous lake.

She stared long and hard at the long way that led past the male football pitch towards and set on the journey. She sighed, she couldn’t go there alone she realized. She had not been able to shake off the bad feeling of being watched. Hope stamped her feet and humphed frustrated at how spineless she was becoming.

As if fate was working in her favor she heard the whistling behind, just some few paces away. An old man, Pa Jacob was walking towards her, in his arm was a white Samoyed, its fur bristled in the wind. Everyone knew Pa Jacob loves going to the Lake when school was over, she had seen him leaving many times, like clockwork. Hope was wondering if she could just tail the man when he spoke up.

“you are the girl with the violin?” he asked. Hope was tempted to look away, to be sure if the old man was talking to anyone els, but she knew she was the one she was talking to. “you played ave maria right?” he asked.