I Kissed A Girl In My Class Read Online Free PDF Page B

was a grey and black representation of the moon’s surface
complete with craters and peaks. Neha had finished her end of the
job. Ma’am came up to have a closer look at it and forgot the
untidy floor. “Good job, children,” she said, “is it over
then?”
    “No, Ma’am, we are
still working on our rover,” said Manu, “it is to be a working
model and so it’s very challenging”. It really looked like a
challenge with the motor and battery stuck on a thick thermocol
square that dwarfed and hid the wheels underneath. It looked more
raft than rover. They still hadn’t been able to get the wheels
running.
    On the other side,
the water cycle model was coming along nicely, although as Manu put
it, it was very boring. They had painted their base sheet green to
show a meadow, and stuck little plastic cows and sheep on it. In
the middle was an impossibly blue pond shaped like an amoeba, and
from it three wires zig-zagged vertically to show evaporation. They
were making a few smaller, white amoebas to represent clouds, and a
hut to put on the meadow, and God knew what else. It was going to
be a very picturesque model but “totally girlish and boring”, Manu
kept repeating out of Neha’s earshot.
    In the third
period, Rachna Ma’am also surveyed the models, and felt even more
doubtful about Manu’s idea. “We are almost there Ma’am,” he assured
her, “the wheels, the motor, everything’s working perfectly and
it’s just a matter of joining them together. We will be done in a
day or two”.
    How wrong he
was.
    Neha’s moonscape
waited patiently for the rover to arrive. Every afternoon Akshay
rushed off to buy more thermocol and it was promptly cut into
squares to make the rover base, but every time the base cracked
under the weight, or was cut so roughly that it had to be thrown
away, or they got the size of the motor wrong, or made one of the
wheel wells too big. There were mistakes and more mistakes.
    When they tried
running it with a wheel stuck to the motor, there wasn’t enough
clearance for the motor and it touched the base. One time, they got
the whole ugly thing to run a few inches but as soon as it hit a
turn, it stopped. They realized the tracks they had carved were too
rough, and decided to smooth them with a hot blade. It seemed like
a good idea at first, but then, sometimes the blade got too hot and
the thermocol shrank and curled, while at others it wasn’t hot
enough, so the thermocol melted and stuck to it. And all the while
a river of candle wax flowed on the last desk.
    Friday came, and
Manu again told Rachna Ma’am it was just a matter of a day or two,
but she wasn’t bothered any more. The girls had finished their
water cycle model, it was beautiful to look at, their charts were
neatly drawn and the whole had been stored safely on the top of a
cupboard in the science lab for the big day.
    The first battery
ran out during trials, and it was an expensive one. Manu cajoled
Vikram to get another. Their parents were tiring of the incessant
demands for the project, and the team, barring Neha, was turning
irritable. Manu most of all. On Thursday, the second week, and two
days before the exhibition, he had another idea. He tore two gears
out of the toy car Neha had brought and stuck one of them to the
motor’s wheel with instant adhesive. The other he attached to the
wheel axle, and now the motor was raised sufficiently for the rover
to run without its parts scraping the bottom. However, they still
couldn’t make it go around the bends. The motor, they realized,
wasn’t powerful enough.
    It was Vikram’s
fault, Manu decided. He should have brought a better motor. “But
this is the only one I have,” the other boy protested. Things were
looking ugly, and realizing that Vikram would walk out with his
things, Manu patted him on the back and said he was just
kidding.
    Would Neha please
make another moonscape, with wider tracks at the curves? “No way,”
she said. She had had her fill of the