Indira [Completed]

three ; the day i would see him again

Our summer term exams finished as quickly as they had arrived and just like that, my seemingly continuous burden of twelve exams, all of which were in the sciences, were continued no more. I walked out of my last one, an A-Level Mechanics test on the twenty-fifth of June – not a retake, but the real thing we had started learning the course for only nine months before – with two things. One was a heavy cold, my sinuses were congested and a migraine was on the horizon, my pockets were stuffed with half-used tissues and I was a walking health risk. Two, was the heavy feeling of failure, the pricking thought I had no doubt screwed up my last exam, which I should have spent more time revising for.

See, it wasn't entirely my fault. The week before, I had had not one, not two, not three, not even four, but five back-to-back exams: two for Chemistry, one in Psychology and two of Core Maths. So I had, without meaning to, put off Mechanics revision for the weekend before the exam, which was scheduled for eleven in the morning on Monday. I couldn't have predicted that I was going to catch the common cold at the same time my hay fever was playing up, all a few days before my last exam of the year, and my life at school.

So, while everyone else put on their tuxedos and dresses and headed off to our summer ball, which was being held in a rather upscale hotel in the centre of town this year, I stayed at home, laptop opened, pen in one hand, my notepad on the desk until my eyes glazed over because of the velocity equations and considerations of Newton's Laws. I mean, how many laws did this guy need? I had sighed, giving up after an hour. I was getting nowhere. My blocked nose was only getting worse despite how many times I tried to clear it into a Kleenex, the feeling of numbness had spread to my head and I was getting more shivery than conscious, so I had retreated to bed where I proceeded to sleep for the majority of the weekend.

Hanna hadn't been a great help either. She had been at home too, trying to get some last-minute revision done for the Mechanics exam instead of attending our last ever prom. Trust our school to fuck up big time and book the date of the prom the weekend before the last exam, instead of after. Not that it affected most people; no, there were people who had a Mechanics exam on the Monday who had decided to go anyway, what difference would one evening make, if you didn't know, you didn't know. Finn Thompson and Calla Nordstrom, I had found out from the live pictures being posted on Facebook, were two of these people.

They were never photographed together, however, always separately, which was odd seeing as I thought they were now dating, seeing each other, whatever you wanted to call it. I wanted to call it I don't care, but I don't know, my body language, my Facebook history and my actual language said something entirely different. Among the pictures, I saw James Carter and Kyle Hutton, one hand around a beer bottle, because they were both eighteen now, and the other around each other. Figures the two of them would be close.

I clicked my phone screen off and fell asleep a swift ten minutes later, not really making much of an overactive effort to be productive for the remainder of the weekend. I was only furiously woken up by my mother on Sunday morning, when she had decided she had had enough of me sleeping for the last fifteen hours and wanted me to do something else with my life. She walked into my room with purpose, threw back the curtains and turned the fan off near my bed, on the table.

"Uthe par," 'Get up,' she demanded, standing above the bed. The light filtered in and danced around her hair, making her look like some sort of jilted angel, which of course, she wasn't. My mother wasn't an angel, only jilted. "Kotodin tui ghumabe ar?" 'How many more days will you sleep?'

"Panch minita," 'Five minutes,' I groaned into the pillow, turning around so now my back was to her.

"Dui sekend," 'Two seconds,' she countered and when those two seconds were inevitably over, too soon for my liking, she threw the duvet back and sat down, rubbing circles into my hair until I sat up, swatting her away because she knew how much I disliked that. "Bhalo meye. Ami tor janya ausudh nye eshchi. Bicks ar akta Noorophen." 'Good girl. I got medicine for you. Vicks and one Nurofen.'