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“Well it’s a pity you don’t get to decide what my dad does with his ideas.”
“That’s what you think,” Axel retorted, and stood.
I flew to my feet too. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He just brushed past me and walked away, cradling that damn prototype like it was the most precious thing in the world… and like I was nothing at all, which was of course exact
ly how he saw things.
I wasn’t the sort of person who burst into tears because someone was mean to me or anything like that, but at that moment I was feeling very teary. Usually when people had been mean to me in the past, they were angry with me, or they were trying to get a reaction or response out of me. All of which was probably true for Axel, but the way he did it, it was so impersonal it made me question whether I was even real for a second.
I really just wanted to leave that fucking party, but I knew Callie wouldn’t be ready yet, and I wasn’t so busted up over this I was going to stagger all the way home in my heels. There was absolutely no chance I’d enjoy anything that was happening from this moment on either, but I didn’t really know anybody who still enjoyed coming to school either, and yet we all managed to show up and have a bit of a laugh. I could get through the next hour or two… or three, if I needed to.
I sauntered away from the scene of that confrontation like I had one of those every other day, looking around for someone drunk enough and familiar enough that I could strike up a conversation.
Chapter Two
Four hours.
That was how long I’d had to wait until Callie was able to take me home. I almost wished I’d taken one of the many offers of free booze floating around and gotten wasted, though I was terrified of the idea of drink-spiking and didn’t like alcohol that much anyway. I still had the hungover feeling blaring out of the eyes of several classmates who’d been at that party, but I’d had none of the fun.
And of course there was a prac test organised for that morning, to be taken under the same conditions as our final exams coming up in a few weeks. I don’t think ‘recently wasted’ was a part of the conditions they were going for, but I’d gone through this last year when I was doing a couple of pre-tertiary level subjects, so I knew they went all out. They got test exams generated for everyone with our state student ID numbers printed on them instead of names and everything.
At least, they were supposed to have gotten one for everyone. Once Mr. Phillips was done handing out the stack and had returned to the front of the room, I was still sitting at my desk with an empty spot surrounded by essential exam gear like pens and a roll of lollies.
I raised my hand. “Um… Mr. Phillips?”
He just stared at me, then he took in my problem. His eyebrows went up and up while he looked around him as if he expected my missing piece of paper to appear.
“I’m sorry, Aileen,” he said finally. “There must have been some error in the system. Or perhaps I left one of the papers behind in the office… would you mind taking my job and keeping an eye on everyone else as they get started while I go and check?”
I tried to just stay in my seat and pretend I didn’t understand any of what he’d just said, but he kept beckoning me forward until it was more awkward not to comply. “Do I get a stick to wave around or something?”
“You get to stand on hallowed ground,” Mr. Phillips told me, “and write down the name of anyone who takes advantage of my absence so I can automatically fail them.” My eyes bugged out at that much power. “I’ll only be five minutes.”
He turned his attention to the rest of the room. “You can get started… now, and I expect you all to behave while Aileen is in charge.”
Mr. Phillips ran out the door, and my largely post-intoxicated classmates slowly turned to their papers as commanded… but pretty much everyone kept peeking back at me, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that.
What were the odds I would become the first exception in the entire history of Burgundy College’s very reliable bespoke fake-exam-printing system?
I caught a pair of eyes that made me look back: Axel. He was smiling a little as he looked back down at his paper, which wouldn’t have triggered anything in me normally… but at that exact moment it gave me a flashback to our confrontation at that dumb party the night before, and suddenly I was wondering. If he had the shits with me enough over that, would he be able to do something that would interfere with our school exam-generating system? He seemed to be up on all this technology stuff, so it was at least plausible.
I tried to catch his eye again, but he was conveniently absorbed in his exam paper. I had to be letting my imagination get away from me, anyway. There wasn’t some big conspiracy behind everything that happened.
I started pacing anyway, my thoughts circling one another like some pack of conspiracy theorist wolves.
It was only when there was a soft, “Aileen?” from the doorway almost drowned out by a lot of scrabbling from the desks in front of me I realised I’d been milling around without paying any attention to the task I’d been assigned.
Mr. Phillips didn’t look ready to call me on it, though. He was sweating from forehead and armpits, and it occurred to me he’d been gone a lot longer than five minutes. There were only twenty minutes left in the period. “Aileen, I’m so sorry, I couldn’t find that paper anywhere. Then when I went back to the main office to get a replacement produced, apparently you don’t come up on the system at all? Were you ever properly registered?”
“I assume I was last year, when I was able to complete a mock exam without problems.” I was being far too snippy, but Mr. Phillips was too flustered to call me out on it. “I’m sorry, this is just so frustrating. Can’t you just get the paper printed out and pencil an ID in for me for the moment?”
Mr. Phillips looked queasy like I’d just suggested cannibalism as the solution to the problem. He glanced at the rest of my class, most of them not doing a very good job of pretending their main focus was still their fake exams, and lowered his voice from its previous volume. “Apparently not, Aileen, it was designed to be very resistant to misconduct so it just doesn’t generate exam papers for nonexistent candidates.”
So now I had a computer system confirming Axel’s assessment of me… and come to think of it, could that really be a coincidence? I glanced back over at Axel, and his cutesy little grin as he bent over his own work told me all I really needed to know.
“What I’m going to do for now,” Mr. Phillips was saying, “is reproduce the paper manually from my master list of questions, and then you’ll have to come in over lunch or after school to make it up.”
