Ionic and Covalent Bonds

Finally, Josh arrived at the Caltech for his senior year.

His tutor group had grown too much during the last two years, it was the biggest among all the groups that the Caltech had ever seen. This underscored Josh's extreme brilliance and popularity among the slightly younger students. This year, he was only assigned three new students.

Arwen Hawkhauser, the teacher for practical engineering who had instructed the students in their freshman years, had lured three new students from his hometown Boston, all across the country.

Those freshmen were Cody Martin, Barbara Simka Brownstein, and some Tapeworm whose proper name renamed unbeknownst to anyone, especially to Josh.

On the other hand, Mindy and Firewire had now started their own tutor group where they had to take turns in order to bee able to care for their baby.

"Today, we are going to study redox reactions ... " Josh announced in front of all the pupils. "In a redox reaction, the so-called redox number of the reagents are subject to a change. Many think that this is equivalent to one reagent losing an electron, while the other is going to gain it."Josh coughed. "But this is an oversimplification you may read in your highschool books. But here we need to say good-bye to that myth. While it appears superficially true when we study simple ionic bonding, such as the chlorides salts of metals ..."

The students chuckled.

"I remember some of my ignorant high-school mates who was so dumb, he thought that scientific errors about hydrogen atoms were funny ..." Quinn remarked, chuckling noisily.

"What an idiot!" Cody exclaimed. "Only my foolish twin brother Zack could be worse!"

Josh sighed. "You don't know my step-brother Drake!"

"Should I?" Cody croaked.

"You would wish that you didn't know him, trust me!" Josh replied.

"Not knowing Zack would be quite advantageous as well!" Barbara Simka Brownstein exploded. She had come to deprecate Zack as much as Mindy hated Drake.

"Ionic bonds are idiotic!" Cody remarked. "It is like as if I borrowed something unto Zack who will never give it back to me, just in order to make us mutually dependent." he sighed deeply.

"I know that feeling ..." Josh moaned with disgust. "It was like that between Drake and me for like four years, until Drake's little sister Megan tore us apart, for the better of both of us ..."

Cookie nodded. "I remember the insane relationship between my so-called friends Jenifer Mosely and Ned Bigby ..."

Josh sighed. "We could talk about that subject on and on, but ionic bonds are not the only possible bondings in chemistry. Now we need to move onward to covalent bonding which is characterised by sharing of electrons. Even here, it is possible for redox numbers to change." He sighed. "For example, in a Chlorine-Fluorine reaction, the redox number of Fluorine goes from zero to minus one, whereas that of the Chlorine goes from zero to plus one."

"Valence bonding would be between me and Josh!" Quinn remarked astutely.

"Sure, sweetheart!" Josh chuckled and swooned.

The other students applauded fanatically.

Thereupon, Josh told the students to perform all of the various experiments around redox reactions that he had just prepared.

Cookie was the most industrious of the students in Josh's tutoring group. He performed experiment after experiment at an incredible speed while recording the results in his usuall detailed and acribic manner.

Josh's tutor groups had been a plain success over three hole years. Alas, time had come to graduate from Caltech.

Drake and Megan were about preparing a graduation party. The ionic bonding between Drake and Megan had become very strong during the last years, although it was as insane as in the case of Zack and Cody.

More than that, they planned for Josh's future after Caltech. They wanted him to return to San Diego Belview and become a freelance inventor. He should share again a room with Drake, until he was going to marry Quinn, as this was the best for both of them: The problems between Drake and Josh that had caused them to stray from their determined paths were all gone by now, and both Drake and Josh were established in their field as a scientist and a rock star, respectively.

As of yet, Josh didn't know anything about Drake's and Megan's plans for him.