we smile at the moon

TWENTY-ONE | JUST A GIRL

  THE CLOCK WAS ticking and my hand hurt.

  It was our English literature paper and my mind was filled with nothing but poems and Macbeth quotes. My hand was moving across the paper with a pen of its own accord. I wasn't even sure I was thinking.

  I'd put in a month and a half, and it was all for this. No, not just a month and a half. An entire school year. Everything boiled down to this week, to prove myself to show them all what I was made of.

  I kept writing.

  I kept writing about Macbeth and Lady Macbeth and how they were overtaken by ambition and pride and everything in between, and how they didn't know how to stop until it was too late and they'd already gone too far to be saved.

  In the moments when I allowed myself to catch a breath and glanced at my writing hand, my left hand, I noticed that black ink had already made itself home on the side of my palm.

  It looked horrendous, but I didn't have time to laugh about it.

  I kept writing.

  Our English literature paper was the last paper of the entire week. After this I was free. My birthday was tomorrow and a few days ago the girls had already promised me that they'd take me out to town and we could eat and celebrate at a nice restaurant. We hadn't planned much else, since exams were so soon and we all didn't feel prepared at all.

  But I cleared my mind quickly after that and focused back on my essay.

  I didn't let myself stop until I'd finished with my first essay and could move on to my next. The next was about the poems we'd been forced to memorise, and I kept going.

  I finished writing ten seconds before the bell rang.

  I had to resist the urge to throw the pen down. I threw my head back, sucking in a few deep breaths, head tilted skywards. I was so tired. I'd never been so tired before. The exams at my old school hadn't been half as long, and we only ever got two exams maximum a day. I'd had three today alone, and all of them were two hour papers.

   I was exhausted. I felt more tired than the time my mum had brought me fishing in the countryside and we'd traipsed there for what felt like miles before finding the lake she was talking about.

  There was cheers and laughter as we all walked out of the Klairns Building. Everyone, even the kids who hadn't taken a single glance at their textbook over the holidays, felt the weight of a giant rock being taken off their shoulders.

  Me, personally, I thought it felt like that one scene in High School Musical.

  The year was almost over. It was late May and school ended on the first of July. But most of us full boarding kids were going back home a day or two before that, since tickets were usually tight at this time of the year. It wasn't just the kids studying at fellow magic schools we had to worry about, but all the full boarding students who studied in British boarding schools. We'd all be cramming onto the same few flights.

  All that was left for us to do was take our papers and relax.

  That was, if we got decent grades that we thought were acceptable.

  That was usually the most painful part of an exam. Waiting for our grades to come back. The exams weren't truly over until you got all your scores, and that was usually the start of the actual hell. The part where you did your exams was usually just the beginning.

  Yunji and Adelina found me collapsed in my dorm, my face muffled in my bed's soft embrace. My roommates had changed, again, since it was now Trinity term. This time, I was rooming with Ella and Gwen. A pair who was never in the dorms, thank god. They even studied in the others' rooms. So I had it all to myself over exams.