Page 13 of Hilarina and the Ogre

Annette had also followed them to the door. “Text us when you get back, so we don’t worry.”

Trenton didn’t seem to know what to say to that. “I don’t have Hilary’s—”

Hilary grabbed the boy’s phone to put in the number, but not fast enough. Annette was appalled. “He cooks you breakfast and teaches you for hours on end, but you didn’t even bother to give him—”

“He has it now, doesn’t he?”

She shook her head. “You’re worse than your father.”

Albert popped his head into the hall. “There’s someone worse than me?”

Annette leaned in to peck his cheek. “Only sometimes.”

As promised, Trenton was back the next day, and an hour earlier, even. It meant being surprised again—though in the shower this time. When Hilary reached out to grab the towel from the toilet tank, he had it handed to him by an enterprising ogre.

Hilary seriously would have cracked his head open on the porcelain if a surprisingly quick Trenton hadn’t grabbed his arm to keep him standing. “Hilary,” the boy said, remembering his directions in time.

Hilary put the scowl onto his face at full blast. “You’re doing this on purpose. I know you are.”

Trenton’s face was serious business, but his eyes weren’t. “I did knock, but I guess you were singing too loudly.”

Hilary refused to be embarrassed. He was the one who’d nearly gotten killed, after all. “Get out.”

They completed even more problems than the previous day—more than Hilary thought he could do in a row without straight-up dying. But by the end of it, he still didn’t feel comfortable with the material, or like he knew anything. He was prepared to keep going—to stay up all night breaking his teeth on it if he had to, but he couldn’t force Trenton to do the same. At ten o’clock, the boy once again closed the book.

It brought out a new level of Hilary’s desperation. “If you give me a list of examples—some page numbers—”

But Trenton hadn’t stopped because of that. “You’re fine. You don’t need to do any more.”

Hilary certainly didn’t feel fine. He’d managed the last few problems with minimal help, but not well or confidently enough to declare himself finished. “I don’t think—”

“We can do a few more in the morning to warm your brain up,” Trenton compromised. “But it’s better to sleep now. Your body needs rest more than it needs studying.”

It was the kind of thing Annette would have said, and Hilary couldn’t help but disagree. All the sleep in the world wouldn’t help him if he had no clue what he was doing while awake. But after five hours of help, he couldn’t argue. Between the dance and the two days of studying, he’d really screwed up Trenton’s weekend. The boy was working and tutoring from morning to night, but he showed no resentment. Then again, Trenton never showed much of anything at all.

When they emerged from the room, they found Annette had already set up the couch. It had Hilary feeling a little better, thinking they’d have more time in the morning for studying that way. Maybe that was why he slept as well as he did—a little too well, it turned out. Trenton didn’t wake him early. Instead, they did only about fifteen minutes of math problems. Only a warm-up, after all.

“The exam’s first period, so we’ll be able to get it over with,” Trenton said, as if that was a good thing, and went to the kitchen to make breakfast.

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.”