"Time's up — pencils down!"
Mr. Henderson checked his watch and stood up from the desk at the front of the room.
The classroom erupted.
"Already?!"
"No no no—" A guy two rows over, Dylan Park, slapped both hands on his desk. "I had four questions left!"
"The curve on that last section was insane—"
"I didn't even get to the final essay—"
The post-exam chaos rolled through Room 214 like a wave, everyone turning to their neighbors, comparing damage, cataloguing disasters. Connor Walsh was shaking his head slowly at his paper like a man reading bad news. Mia was pressing her fingers to her temples with her eyes closed.
Ethan set his pencil down, turned his paper face-down, and watched it all with quiet amusement.
He'd finished with time to spare. He'd even deliberately left the last part of one question incomplete — a fully perfect paper from someone who'd been visibly relaxed the whole time would raise eyebrows, and Ethan didn't need eyebrows raised at him right now.
Mr. Henderson collected the papers row by row, glancing at each one briefly out of long habit. When he got to Ethan's he paused for just a moment — taking in the neat handwriting, the coverage — and gave a small nod before moving on. Not a word. But the nod said enough.
Ethan returned to his seat.
Mia leaned over. "Please tell me you also struggled on the stats section."
"Little bit," Ethan said.
"You're lying."
"Little bit," he said again.
She pointed at him. "Infuriating." But she was almost smiling.
Jake appeared from across the aisle, dragging his chair over with a scrape that Mr. Henderson pretended not to hear.
"Okay," Jake said, dropping into the chair. "Real talk. The reading section. The second paired passage. What was that."
"It was fine."
"It was not fine, Ethan, one of them was arguing the opposite of the other and they wanted you to synthesize them and I—" He made a gesture indicating his brain leaving his body.
"You find the point where they agree," Ethan said. "They always agree on something. That's the anchor."
Jake stared at him. "...That's actually helpful. Why didn't you say that before the exam."
"You didn't ask."
Neither Ethan nor Jake went home for lunch.
They walked two blocks to the sandwich place on Olentangy, the kind of no-frills spot with six tables and laminated menus that had been feeding students from Jefferson for as long as anyone could remember. Ethan got a chicken sandwich and a water. Jake got the same thing plus chips plus a cookie, which he consumed in the order: cookie, chips, sandwich.
"You need to study with me this week," Ethan said.
Jake looked up. "...What?"
"Seriously. The next twenty-five days matter. I'll go through the weak sections with you."
Jake set down his sandwich. He had the expression of a person trying to determine whether this was a joke. "You want to tutor me."
"Study together. There's a difference."
"Is there."
"You're not as far behind as you think," Ethan said. "You're losing points on stuff that's fixable. Reading comprehension, you rush. Math, you second-guess correct answers. Fix those two things and your score goes up significantly."
Jake was quiet for a moment, processing this.
"Why do you suddenly care about my score?"
Ethan shrugged. "Because you're going to do fine and you don't know it yet. Seems like a waste."
Jake looked at him for a long moment. Then he picked up his sandwich again.
"Okay," he said. "Yeah. Let's do it."
"Good." Ethan took a drink of water. "Not the internet café though. Actual studying."
"One condition."
"What."
"You explain the paired passage thing before every exam from now on."
"Deal."
Back at school for the afternoon session.
The English exam was administered by Ms. Rachel Kim — twenty-six, sharp, the kind of teacher who had clearly skipped a grade somewhere along the way and never quite lost the slightly-ahead-of-everyone energy that produced. She wore a dark blazer over a floral blouse and had the presence of someone who found the subject genuinely interesting, which made her easy to pay attention to.
Every guy in the class paid attention to Ms. Kim's class. Ethan was honest enough with himself to acknowledge this included him, in the previous life, for approximately the first three months of senior year before other things took over his mental bandwidth.
She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and addressed the room.
"This is the last full English mock before finals. Treat it seriously. Use it to find your gaps — that's what it's for." She scanned the room with the calm authority. "English rep — papers, please."
Sophie, the English class rep — top five in the class academically, three years running, the kind of person who made a point of being helpful without being performative about it — stood up and collected the stack.
When she got to Ethan's desk she dropped the paper in front of him with a slightly theatrical thud.
Ethan looked up. "Rough morning?"
"Statistics section," she said flatly.
"Brutal," Ethan agreed.
"Don't." She narrowed her eyes. "You finished early. I saw you."
"I had some spare time near the end."
"I cannot stand you right now." She moved to the next desk, but the corner of her mouth was doing something that wasn't quite a frown.
Ethan turned his attention to the English exam.
He read through it at a steady pace. The reading sections were clean. The grammar questions were straightforward. The essay prompt was asking students to argue a position on the role of individual responsibility versus systemic factors in personal success — a topic Ethan had, in the previous life, spent approximately a decade developing a fairly nuanced opinion on.
He finished fifteen minutes early. Set his pen down. Looked out the window at the Jefferson High parking lot baking quietly in the May afternoon sun.
Twenty-five days until finals.
Thirty-two days until the World Cup.
$847 in the bank.
The plan needed a funding mechanism. He'd been turning it over since Sunday. The options were limited but not zero — he had skills from the previous life that a seventeen-year-old in 2014 shouldn't technically have. Financial modeling. Market pattern recognition. He couldn't walk into a brokerage, but he could find other angles.
He needed to think bigger about the next two weeks.
There are always options, he reminded himself. You just have to find them.
Ms. Kim called time.
Ethan handed in his paper, nodded at Sophie on the way out — she was still visibly processing the statistics section and did not nod back — and headed into the hallway where the afternoon sun was cutting long rectangles of light across the linoleum.
Jake materialized beside him.
"Essay prompt," Jake said. "Individual responsibility versus systemic factors. I argued both sides simultaneously and I don't think that was the assignment."
"You have to pick one and defend it."
"But what if both are true."
"Then you pick the one you can argue better and you argue it well." Ethan pushed through the side door into the afternoon. "That's what the exam is testing. Not whether you're right. Whether you can build a case."
Jake considered this for three steps.
"That's actually kind of a useful life skill," he said.
"Most of this stuff is," Ethan said. "People just don't notice."
There are some advance chapters ahead in my Patreon. If you are interested can check it out.
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