Monday morning. 6:00 AM.
The alarm on Ethan's phone went off and he silenced it before the second buzz, sat up, and stared at the wall for approximately four seconds before getting moving. Six hours of sleep. He felt fine — better than fine, actually. There was something clarifying about having a plan.
He caught his reflection in the bathroom mirror while brushing his teeth. Still strange, seeing this face. The jaw not quite as sharp as it would eventually get, the shoulders not quite as broad. But the eyes were the same. They'd always been the same — the thing people noticed first and had a hard time explaining afterward.
He ran a hand through his hair. It was getting long — floppy, the kind of length that looked accidental rather than intentional. He made a mental note to get it cut properly this week. In the previous life he hadn't developed any real sense of personal presentation until about twenty-four. No reason to wait that long this time.
He grabbed a ten from the emergency drawer under the coffee table — his parents kept it stocked for exactly this situation, mornings when they left early for the store — and headed out.
Jake was waiting at the corner of Henderson and Park at 6:20, hands in his hoodie pocket, looking like a man being executed.
"I hate mornings," Jake said.
"You say that every morning."
"Because it's true every morning."
They walked the four blocks to school along the route they'd been walking since freshman year, past the dry cleaner and the nail salon and the breakfast place on the corner — Sam's Diner, which had been there since approximately the Eisenhower administration and showed no signs of stopping.
They went in.
The smell hit Ethan before the door was fully open — eggs, toast, coffee, the specific warm-grease smell of a short-order grill that had been running since five AM. He hadn't eaten here in years, in the previous life. At some point the mornings got too early and the meetings got too early and breakfast became a protein bar consumed in an Uber.
He ordered eggs and toast and ate them properly, sitting at the counter, and it was genuinely one of the better meals he'd had in recent memory.
Jake, across from him, was reviving incrementally with each sip of orange juice.
"Mock exam today," Jake said.
"I know."
"You ready?"
"Yeah."
Jake studied him. "You're very calm about it."
"I've done a lot of practice tests."
This was technically true, in the sense that Ethan had sat through this exact exam once before, in another life, and remembered it with the fidelity of a recording. The questions, the trick sections, even the specific place he'd second-guessed himself on a calc problem and gotten it wrong.
He would not be getting it wrong this time.
Jefferson High at 6:45 had that particular low-energy Monday hum — lockers opening, people moving through the halls with the glazed expressions of the recently woken. Ethan and Jake split off at the sophomore corridor and Ethan made his way to the senior wing, Room 214.
His seat was in the back row. His tablemate, Mia, was already there when he arrived, reorganizing her pencil case with the focused energy, processing exam anxiety through stationery.
Mia was one of those people who was easy to underestimate until you paid attention — sharp, funny, kept up a running commentary on everything happening in the classroom that she delivered exclusively to Ethan at a volume slightly below teacher-detection threshold. She was 5'10" and had been quietly dominating the class rankings for three years without making a production of it.
"Morning," she said without looking up.
"Morning." Ethan sat down and opened his review notebook to the last page, not because he needed it but because it looked appropriately studious.
"You ready for this?" Mia asked.
"Yeah."
"Last one before the real thing." She finally looked up. "You seem extremely relaxed."
"People keep saying that."
"It's a little unsettling." She went back to her pencil case. "Normal people are at least a little stressed."
"I work better calm."
"Must be nice," she said, not unkindly.
Mr. Henderson walked in at 6:55 with a stack of exams under one arm and a coffee in the other hand, gold-rimmed glasses slightly askew, the same faded navy cardigan he wore approximately three days out of every five. He'd been their homeroom teacher for all three years of high school — the kind of teacher who remembered what every student had said they wanted to be in freshman year and asked about it periodically.
He set the stack down, adjusted his glasses, and swept the room with the practiced eye of a man who had taken attendance for twenty years and could detect an empty seat from across a crowded classroom.
"Alright," he said. "Twenty-five days. This is the last full mock before the real thing. Treat it like the real thing." He paused. "Someone go to the bathroom now if you need to. I'm serious. Every year someone raises their hand twenty minutes in."
Three people got up.
He waited.
They came back.
"Squad leader — can you distribute these, please."
Connor Walsh, class president, built like a linebacker, meticulous about everything except his own hair, collected the stack and began moving through the rows. When he got to Ethan's desk he set the paper down cleanly, moved on.
The exam landed face-down in front of him.
Mr. Henderson clicked his pen. "You may begin."
Ethan turned the paper over and read through the first section with the calm attention.
The questions assembled themselves in front of him like old acquaintances. The calc section, the reading comprehension with the paired passages about infrastructure, the rhetoric analysis prompt he remembered spending too long on in the previous life.
He didn't rush. Rushing looked suspicious and also wasn't necessary. He worked through each section at a pace that was confident without being theatrical, checking his answers once, moving on.
The one question he remembered getting wrong — a statistics problem in the math section, a subtle trap in the wording — he read three times, smiled slightly to himself, and answered correctly.
He finished with twenty minutes remaining.
He went back and checked the whole thing once more. Then he set his pencil down, turned the paper face-down, and spent the remaining time thinking about the World Cup bracket.
Twenty-five days until finals.
Thirty-two days until the opening match.
He needed seed money. The World Cup plan was solid — the knowledge was solid — but knowledge without capital was just information. He needed somewhere between two and five thousand dollars to make the first moves worth making. Enough to compound into something real by the time the final whistle blew in Rio.
He had $847 and a guitar.
Options, he thought. There are always options.
He was still running the list when Mr. Henderson called time.
In the hallway after, Mia fell into step beside him.
"How'd you do?" she asked.
"Fine, I think. You?"
"The rhetoric prompt got me." She pulled her hair back, thinking about it. "I went in one direction and then changed my mind halfway through, which is always a disaster."
"Go with your first instinct next time."
"Easy for you to say, you looked like you were doing a crossword puzzle." She glanced at him sideways. "I mean that as a compliment. Mostly."
Jake appeared from the adjacent hallway, backpack half-zipped, looking marginally more alive than he had at breakfast.
"Stats section," Jake said immediately. "The wording on question fourteen. Did anyone else think it was trying to trick you or was that just me."
"It was trying to trick you," Ethan said.
"Did you get it?"
"Yeah."
Jake pointed at him. "How."
"I read it slowly."
"I hate you a little bit," Jake said, without heat.
The three of them moved through the hall toward the exit, the post-exam energy of two hundred seniors slowly depressurizing around them — some relieved, some frustrated, some already dissecting individual questions with the intensity of a post-game analysis.
Twenty-five days, Ethan thought.
He had work to do.
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