Page 14 of Hilarina and the Ogre

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.”

Hilary could have killed him. Really. His relief and frustration and stupid shakiness were that strong. “Shit.” He swiped at his eyes, feeling so turned around inside he didn’t know what was going to come out next. “Shit.”

“Want to take a walk?” Trenton asked.

They read during lunchtime. It was nice outside. Nice for the beginning of November anyway, and they sat on the back steps with books in their laps. It was another thing Hilary hadn’t expected himself to do, and when Trenton first offered, Hilary waved the book away and said, “I’ll never finish it.” But Trenton only took out another of the things—he had five or six in his bag—and said, “Do you like poetry?”

How would Hilary know something like that? He’d never read any poetry. Not outside of the Shakespeare play they assigned once a year. Was Shakespeare poetry? He wasn’t sure.

But poetry could be read in bits and bites. A whole book was frightening, but a couple of pages weren’t too bad. He read,

The bear who sits above my bed

More agèd now is he to see:

His woolen eyes have thinner thread,

But still he seems to say to me,

In double-doom notes, like a knell:

‘You’re half a century nearer Hell.’