Chapter Four #2
Hilary wasn’t able to eat the usual amount.
The anxiety of a math exam always left him on the verge of puking, but he managed more than he thought he would.
Maybe because it was pancakes. He might have had a separate, anxiety-free stomach for pancakes, and Trenton’s were especially good, though the boy didn’t eat any himself, settling for only an apple and some coffee.
“You’re not hungry?”
“It’s better if I don’t eat.”
That was a weird thing to say—and even weirder way of phrasing it. “I thought breakfast was the most important meal of the day,” Hilary said.
“I do better with two meals.”
Hilary couldn’t imagine just two meals. Three already seemed stingy.
Four was better, with early and late lunch padding the day nicely, though when he was doing a lot of dancing, even that wasn’t enough.
But Trenton ate his apple and drank his coffee and made it seem like that really was all that he wanted.
A thing that had Hilary wondering if maybe ogres didn’t like breakfast. Though if that was true, it seemed weird that Trenton was so good at making it.
You needed practice to make pancakes like that.
Then again, there wasn’t room in Hilary’s brain to be pondering it too much, because then Ms. Antwin was handing back the stapled booklets of the exam, and it was nightmare time.
He took a breath, wrote his name at the top, and began.
The first problem was easy, an unexpected bit of kindness from Ms. Antwin that he appreciated.
Whenever he self-destructed on the first question, that spelled the end for him.
But then question two was easy as well. Question three took a moment of thought, but then his pencil was moving before the panic could come.
Questions four and five were easy again.
It was when question eight hit that Hilary came to the obvious conclusion: he was doing them all wrong.
It was the only explanation that made any sense.
Whenever he got cocky, whenever things seemed to be going a little too well for him, it was because he was screwing up.
And if it was this bad—if he was passing through the problems without a care in the world—that meant he was so stupid he couldn’t even recognize the parts he didn’t understand.
Thankfully, some calm came again with question ten when he found himself doing the familiar thing of staring at the numbers without a clue of what to do, but his pencil moved anyway.
Rearranging, as Trenton called it. If you couldn’t see how to attack a problem at first, it was best to rearrange it, using the math rules the boy had taught him.
Though somehow the rearranging turned into solving, and Hilary was boxing off the answer before he realized he’d finished it.
And that was the end. There were only a few problems after that, but they were to simplify, not to solve, which meant only more rearranging, which got easier and easier with every problem.
And then he was flipping over the last page, and it was just the extra credit left, which meant he was done since extra credit problems were only for geniuses.
But a passing glance was enough for Hilary to see he recognized it.
He’d watched Trenton solve the same problem only that morning, barely an hour ago.
With a shaking hand, Hilary copied out the steps he’d seen the boy make and squared off the answer.
That was cheating, wasn’t it? To know the answer like this.
It had to be. And he was sure that as he carried his exam to the front desk that Ms. Antwin would see it on his face and press some hidden switch that would have SWAT guys crashing through the windows, but she only reached for the booklet and asked, “Finished already?”
Hilary had been so consumed with his possible cheating he hadn’t realized that everyone else was still in their seats—something that made no sense until he looked up at the clock and saw with some shock that only twenty minutes had passed. Not even half the allotted time.
The pause gave Antwin the chance to add, “Give me a minute, then. I’ll mark it for you now.”
No, he wanted to tell her, don’t. He was certain that he’d failed, especially the extra credit, which he’d obviously hallucinated.
If everyone else was still working—if even Marathi was still bent over her exam—then he wanted to be out of the room before Ms. Antwin started laughing.
But she didn’t laugh. She just made little ticks down the paper, breezing through the problems—another red flag.
If he’d written anything even half-salvageable, she’d have been forced to take time to parse the madness out in the hopes of partial credit.
But no, she kept turning the pages until she was at the end, one final tick, and flipped back to the front to write his grade at the top in her blazing red ink, circled for extra emphasis: one hundred and three.
He blinked. He stared. He made all the same expressions his father had the previous night with his dumb joke about the mailman.
“That can’t be right.”
Ms. Antwin flipped to the second page and pointed at problems two and five. “Careless errors,” she said, “so I had to subtract a couple of points. You did two plus three instead of multiplying, and you forgot the negative here, see? Check your work next time, and you’re sure to catch it.”
Hilary took hold of the exam. The tick marks she’d made—they weren’t x’s but check marks. He’d gotten them right. He’d gotten them all right. He flipped the booklet over and pointed at the extra credit where it had a big +5 circled with the red ink. “I knew this one. I practiced it this morning.”
She smiled. “Glad to hear it.”
But that wasn’t right. She was supposed to press the cheater switch that would bring the SWAT team.
A new body appeared at his shoulder. Instinctively, he began to fold over the top of the paper to hide the mark, but it was Trenton, handing in his exam. The boy had been waiting for Hilary to be done before bringing his own paper up. “Ready to go?”
Hilary didn’t know what to do. His throat was thick, and he didn’t find the words until they were out in the hall.
“She made it easy. Why did she make it so easy?”
Trenton shrugged. “Seemed about the same as the last one.”
No, that one Hilary had only just barely scraped by with a sixty-eight. “You cheated,” was the realization he was forced to make. “You knew which problems she’d use and made me practice those.”
But Trenton dismissed that out of that. “That was only the last problem.”
“But your questions were harder! Much harder. After every problem, the next was always worse. None of them were easy like this.”
But Trenton saw no contradiction there. “Why would I make you practice on questions you already knew the answers to?”
Hilary wanted to yell. Maybe even hit the boy.
So he did. Shoving at Trenton’s chest, though it did nothing to move that bulk.
“I thought I was an idiot!” And then it was coming out.
The panic, the wasting of Trenton’s time, the morning nausea, and the way the boy would never understand because he was a savant who couldn’t fathom how idiot brains worked.
Hilary smacked that chest again, which Trenton hardly seemed to notice.
“Of course you’d get them wrong if you didn’t know what you were doing before,” the boy said, as if that was the only issue at hand.
It was like talking to a wall. “I’m asking why I understand it now!”
“You don’t. You’re just following some basic rules you don’t grasp the reasoning behind since I wasn’t going to have you deriving proofs the night before an exam. We’ll do it going forward, though. To a basic level, anyway. After all, I can only teach what I understand myself.”