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It turns out Rory hasn’t been busy, as I’d thought, reproducing lines like a robot. He’d been creating this.
There are stick figures trapped in what resembles Dante’s version of Hell. Figures being whipped and chained, fire burning all across the page, strange blood-soaked stick figure orgies, and an elevated winged stick figure in the background reading from an interminable scroll.
‘Forsake your sins, heretic,’ it reads in thick, medieval-style black ink, and I have to deliberately purse my twitching lips. ‘Repeat the creed faithfully and the punishment shall be reviewed.’
Rory glances slyly at me from under his curled hand to check my response. I flip the paper over and write, ‘Looks like a good time, tho?’ The instant Rory reads it, he throws his head back to suppress a laugh.
Baxter leaves the room only once, when the silence is stifling and my eyelids start to droop. Even Rory holds back a yawn on multiple occasions. Baxter must sense the heavy, drowsy energy in the class if she trusts us not to fuck shit up the moment she disappears.
When the room is free of her, my head slams onto the desk, and I take a blissful moment to just shut my eyes and zonk out. I’m so tired, drool starts forming on my lips and begins to drip onto my paper. I have to rub my face hard to wake myself up.
Rory leans back in his chair and blows a loud gust of air from his mouth. He snatches up his paper and recites, “‘Must be diplomatic’. What’ve you got?”
For a moment, I’m surprised. I thought we’d have been given the same lines to copy, but no, somehow I’ve ended up with an exercise double the length of Rory’s. “‘Must not bring the school into disrepute.’”
“Huh,” says Rory, looking intrigued. “Swap?”
And so we exchange papers.
“I want to bring the school into disrepute. Maybe my father will wake up, then.”
“I want literally anything other than this,” I mutter, my head in my arms.
“You know, you could probably work on your personal statement. You think Baxter’s going to count how many lines we’ve done?”
I stare at him. “You mean you didn’t number them?”
Rory laughs. “No. Why would I?”
“Whywouldn’tyou?”
“Because this is a load of crap and I have at least seventeen more detentions lined up in my busy schedule.”
I run my hands down my face. “Fuck, why did I number them…?” Because now it’s not just me who can see I’m only on line 174, but Baxter too.
Rory’s lips quirk. “Sorry, little saint. You’re just too good a person, helping out your own persecutor.”
“I’m not a good person,” I mutter, grabbing a spare sheet of paper. “Screw it. I’m gonna write my statement instead.”
Rory makes a soft gleeful whoop under his breath, while Baxter’s footsteps clop through the outside corridor at breakneck speed. “I hope that’s how it begins: ‘I’m not a good person.’ Show St. Camford they really don’t want to mess with you.”
That’s not how it begins, because it turns out that writing a personal statement is incredibly difficult. It takes forever to find the perfect opening sentence, and then another age to figure out how to assemble my comparatively mediocre achievements into some kind of list that sucker-punches the admissions person into realizing how goddamn amazing I am. It’s a struggle without any official commendations. I’m not related to anyone renowned. I’m not in the national press as one of the Top 30 Under 30, just for existing. The last time I was in a newspaper, my name was a detail in a local obituary on my dad’s death.
Somehow, I construct something that resembles a half-decent personal statement. I draw on anything I’ve done with my life that makes me sound bigger and more important than I am — my feminist book group, the old debate society, me being an experienced first aider, my sought-after Lochkelvin scholarship, and my lifelong passion for dancing — and hope it makes me at least, if not a knock-out candidate then endearingly relatable.
It’s when I’m thinking about how to wrap up my first draft that Baxter catches my eye. This is a mistake. My poker face is nonexistent, and so, reading guilt or, worse, a lack of it, she storms over to my desk so fast that I’m unable to bury my statement behind the regurgitated lines.
She grabs the sheet of paper, her beady eyes narrowing at my words. Rory’s head swings around and he watches the scene attentively.
“What twee nonsense is this?” Baxter barks, looking revolted as she scans the page. “‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Lochkelvin student in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of an esteemed institution of further education.’”
“It’s Pride and Preju—”
“You were supposed to be writinglines. Those, at least, contained accurate syntax. In your opening paragraph alone, I’ve counted three grammatical mistakes and five split infinitives.” Her glare is poisonous as it lands on me. “This isnotgood enough.”
And before I know it, before I can protest it, Baxter takes my personal statement and shreds it in two.
