Page 6 of Substitute for Love

“Poppy seed muffins from Doreen, the front office lady. Could you take the class roll to her please and see if she brought any for me today? And don’t you dare take a bite.”

The students laughed. He smiled at their reaction. Gabe had already won this class over. Felt light as air. But makingthem laugh was the easy part. Now to keep them from burning the school down for the next hour. Surprisingly harder than it sounded. Thank goodness this wasn’t chemistry class.

A quick glance at the lesson plans and Gabe knew the drill. Hand out the math worksheet stacked on a table at the front of the class. He picked up a pile.

“Let’s see what you’re working on today. Ohyay,geometry.” He handed a piece of paper to each student as he said, “Points, lines, and planes, logic and reasoning, angles, slopes, triangles, polygons, circles, volume, area. Anyone want to know if you’ll use this after high school?” Groans from the students.

“I’ll take that as a yes.” With all sheets passed out, Gabe headed to the whiteboard. The lesson plans told him to have the students work silently on their own, but that was the last thing he did at any sub job. Why do the boring thing when you could do the fun thing?

The student who had taken the roster to the office returned, holding a muffin on a napkin in his hand.

“Perfect timing.” Gabe grabbed the muffin and practically shoved the whole thing in his mouth.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” the student said, and Gabe waved him to return to his seat.

“I’m hungry!” several students in the back row chimed in.

“Why don’t we all get muffins?” a girl in the front row asked.

“What?” Gabe’s voice muffled from the muffin. He shrugged. “You gotta make friends with Doreen.” Making friends with the grown-ups at school was something he started way back in the day. He always knew which teachers had food to share. Not like he didn’t have food at home, just not parents to eat meals with. Of course he loved to eat, but it was the interactions he craved.

“Now,let’s get down to business.” Gabe sang the line fromMulan, then took a final swallow and rubbed his belly. “Mmm.Scrumptious. My favorite.” He threw the napkin away, and grabbed a black dry erase marker.

“Give me a shape. Any shape,” he asked the students, who yelled out replies.

“Circle.”

“Triangle.”

“Rectangle.”

“Square.”

“Rectangle.” Gabe drew one on the board. “How do we get the area?” While math wasn’t Gabe’s favorite subject, he had excelled in the required math courses for his archeology major.

A student blurted out, “Length times width. Obviously.” The other students giggled.

Gabe wrote Area = L x W on the board. “Right. So why do we care?” He turned around and faced the students.

“Wedon’tcare!” a boy in the back said, and again everyone laughed.

“You don’t careright now,” Gabe added. “But what if you get a job to pay for college tiling people’s kitchens and bathrooms? The last thing you want to do is have a bunch of leftover tile when you’re done. I’m telling you now so you don’t have to learn the hard way like me.”

Paying his way through college had been hard, but he was proud he finished. It seemed he had to do everything himself. Only child with busy parents type of life. Which was lonely. But at least he could live on his own terms.

“Now give me another shape. Any shape.”

“Heart!”yelled an overly exuberant girl in the front row who blushed and slumped in her seat.

“Oooh. She’s in love,” one of the boys said.

Everyone laughed hysterically. The girl looked mortified, so Gabe tried to redirect the attention to himself. “Let’s do it. Heart.” He switched to a red dry erase marker and drew ahumongous heart on the board. “Anyone know how to calculate the area?”

“Uh, measure length and width?” a student said.

Gabe considered the student’s comment. “Not quite. But keep thinking. Anyone else?”

“So, do you, like, need to cut it up into pieces or something?” one girl said.

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