Dricki: What's Stopping Us

Chapter 2

"Who, Nicki? Nothing."

"Good, because Imma holla at her." He wiggled his eyebrows.

"Ew..."

"What? I thought you didn't have anything with her."

"It's just weird, she's my tutor."

"So? She's around our age."

"Fair enough. Do what you want, I don't even care." Just then, the door opened and their coach walked in with a bag of basketballs, a clipboard with a couple of papers on it and a whistle around his neck. As soon as he put down his things, he blew his whistle. The boys formed a row in front of him.

"Good afternoon, youngsters."

"Good afternoon, coach."

"Since it's Friday, I'll let you do what you want, two by two. Just to relax a little. Here are the balls, make yourselves comfortable." And it was exactly what the boys did the the next fourth-five minutes.

(...)

It was now late evening when Nicki was helping her mother clear the kitchen after they had supper. They had fried chicken, rice and lettuce salad with fruit salad for dessert which Nicki had prepared when she got back home from school.

"Don't forget to lock the doors, sweety." Carol said making her way to her bedroom.

"Don't worry, mom. I got it."

"Sure you do. Well, good night."

"Good night, sleep well."

"You too." Nicki heard the sound of the door opening and closing. She turned off the kitchen lights and made her way to the living where she found the TV on. She had successfully hidden a bunch of snacks on her blanket in the living room so she wouldn't have to go up all the way to her room to get them.

Let's see what's on today, she thought. Fox. No. MTV. No. Disney Channel. Who still even watches this? CBS. Bingo! Judge Judy was on. She watched it for the next 17 minutes until it was over. Then, she decided to watch a movie.

Browsing throughout the channels, she found one that seemed interesting. Just when was focusing on it and enjoying it, loud music coming from nowhere. The bass was being felt at that house as it was the windows were trembling. She sighed and went over to the door to see what going on. It looked like there was a party at Drake's house. There goes her peaceful night. Nicki went back inside and locked the door. Turned the TV off, gathered her things and went up to her room where it took her a while to fall asleep.

***

It's Monday after school and Nicki was inside the library doing her homework while waiting for Drake. She doubted he would show up, but she was wrong. They greeted each other and he sat down taking his Math material out of his bag. They started off with cubic fuction, which seemed to be a lot of people's struggle. She gave him a simple equation.

"What seems to be difficult here?"

"Mr. Smith's methods are driving me crazy. I can't do two different ways and have the same result."

"Fair enough. Okay. So, before using a certain method, first you have to analyse what case you're delaying with." She opened her formula notebook. "We know it's a third degree equation when we have at least y=ax^3. The other parcels bx^2, cx and d may not always appear. The simplest way is using the Ruffini's rule to do so." And then she carried on explaining how to apply the rule.

The next 50 minutes were like that. Nicki explaining and Drake nodded and solving his exercises. Still she noticed that he wasn't understanding or caring enough, but just let it go. When they finished, Drake went straight home and Nicki stopped by at Starbucks to grab something to eat as she only had two apples today. As soon as she got home, she greeted her mother.