Chapter 11

The exams were fun. I didn't need to talk, and I didn't have to hold back to keep from alienating my classmates. It was a challenge to give the teachers enough information to force them to give me a perfect score without piling so much on them that they deducted marks out of spite. The only mid-term I was worried about was Civics. Mr. Sheldon had done so little actual teaching that didn't know what would impress him the most.

The week went by in a flash and we had a few days off while the teachers marked the exams. Then on Monday we went to school to start the second half of the semester. They posted the results in the senior's hall. Everybody's grades were listed in order of their score. The only nod to avoiding the humiliation of being below the red line was that student numbers were used instead of names. Since we'd been using the same numbers since registration in ninth grade I knew everybody's numbers.

It was clear that nobody knew my student number. Maybe because I didn't write it in large black numerals on the cover of my binder so I could remember it. There was a buzz as people pointed to the four top scores; all of them with the same number. Damn! I only got a 98% in Civics.

The cheerleaders were trying to decide which of them was a secret genius. It never occurred to them that this was only the score on the written exam. The only way I passed Phys Ed was by scoring 100% on the written work.

Phys Ed was my private purgatory. My mom insisted that I needed physical activity to be at my best. All the research actually supported her, but I wasn't going to tell her that. This was the last year I would be put through this torture.

After mid-terms things settled back into the usual routine. Some of the people who were below the red line tried hard to focus and bring their marks up. Most of them didn't last a week before they were sleeping through class again.

Mr. Sheldon assigned a major project and told us that we had to work in teams to accomplish it. He informed us that he was familiar enough with each of our styles to know if one person did all the work. He made a show of drawing names and assigning topics, but I was sure I caught a sly grin when he pulled my name out of the hat and assigned me to work on whether corporations should be persons. My team mates were John Wayne, Chastity and Marilyn. Clearly Mr. Sheldon had a twisted sense of humor. The only real question was who would murder who first.

Chastity was trying very hard to come up with a reason for not working with Marilyn, or maybe it was me. Her mouth kept opening and closing but no sounds came out. John Wayne just made a gun out of his hand and pretended to shoot himself in the head. Marilyn rolled nir eyes and slumped further in nir chair.

"OK," Chastity said when Mr. Sheldon told the groups to organize themselves. "I need to get a good mark to get into uni, but that doesn't mean I have to be friends with you." She glared at John Wayne. "Any of you."

Email, I scribbled on my pad.

"Duh," Chastity said, "I'm not giving you my email. I don't want you sending me stupid jokes."

Create a new account, I wrote, No SPAM!

"Sure thing," Marilyn said, "Then we don't need to meet much."

John Wayne scribbled something on the corner of my pad - rooster627@gmail.com. Marilyn wrote transconfusion2@live.com on a different corner. Chastity snorted and wrote 1234567@hotmail.com. She picked up her books and walked out. John Wayne followed and Marilyn and I looked at each other. Ne shrugged.

"You're the best one to get it set up, Tuni," Marilyn said. I just nodded.

The rest of the day went quickly. Advance Math became a rehash of the exam. Henry was still smacking his head for losing a point for skipping a step. Miss Mulholland was sympathetic, but wasn't going to change the mark.

"Math has no mercy," she said. "If you make a mistake, you make a mistake. The only way to find it is to go back through all the steps. If you don't get in the habit of thinking these simple problems through, you won't know what to do with some real math."

That of course meant that she had to show us what some real math looked like. That took the rest of the period and covered every board in the classroom. We convinced her to leave the work on the boards for the next class to freak them out. We went out chortling at the imagined faces of the seniors who would walk in to the room next and think that they had to learn how to derive the Lorentz equations from E=MC2..

Chemistry was a lab. Ms. Granger didn't let Ron anywhere near the desk even though all we were doing was titrations. He didn't care. He spent the entire class talking about this extra special brownie recipe.