Page 81 of Opposites (Never) Attract
Mom: She can put it on silencer mode.
Bliss: Mom! It’s silent mode. Silencer is what you put on a gun.
Mom: Whatevs.
Bliss: Mom!
Mom: Go touch grass, Bliss.
I looked over at Harmony. “I think I’ve made a mistake.”
“Nope. You’re in it, now. But you will want to put your phone on silent mode when the dinging starts.”
Town Hall Meeting
“And that is my plan,”I stated, finishing up my PowerPoint for the second time that day.
Except this time, I was standing on a small stage in the town hall auditorium, in front of what appeared to be most of the residents of the Gulch.
The McGraws, which now included Harmony, sat in the front row. My mom and sisters behind them. I hadn’t spotted Tag, but I wasn’t sure he’d even come.
Beyond that, it was basically everyone I’d ever known in my life, along with the office staff who supported the town hall and our quaint town historical museum.
Two teenagers had set up a projector and screen for me to present.
I finished, with the Questions? slide up, and looked out over the room, but didn’t see a single hand raised.
I gave Carter, who was in the front row, a bit of a smirk, as if to suggest some people obviously understood my presentation perfectly well.
“Okay,” I said with a whoosh of breath. “If there are no questions-”
“What’s crypto?” someone shouted from the back of the auditorium.
Uh oh.
“It’s fake money,” someone shouted back.
I couldn’t tell who had made the comments, but I looked out to the audience and shook my head.
“No,” I corrected them. “It’s not fake money, it’s just not tied to our traditional banking systems.”
“There are coins, I think.” That was from Mrs. Diaz. “You mine them.”
“Like coal?” Cookie, the BBQ guy, asked. “From the ground?”
“No, it’s not a physical coin,” I said. “You see, a bitcoin is-”
“That’s how Tom Brady lost all his money!” This from Darryl Hernandez. One of two of the town’s municipal workers. “That’s why he has to do color commentary on the football games now.”
“That was a different company entirely,” I tried to explain. “And, fun fact not many know, most of the investors got paid back after the downfall of FTX.”
“But didn’t everyone go to jail?” This question was actually from my mom.
“Well, the CEO did, but, really, that was his own fault for mostly being a jerk.”
The crowd’s murmuring picked up, and I felt like I was losing the room.
“The computers just ate the money,” Darryl Jones said. The other municipal worker in town, who was commonly referred to as the other Darryl. Because when you have two Darryls in town, one ultimately needs to be theotherDarryl. That they were married only complicated things.
