I heard the clock ticking away; every minute, every second one step closer to the end. I heard the quick grating of ballpoint pens scribbling words onto papers that would never see the light of day. What a waste of trees.
I heard a sigh.
Someone shifted in their seat.
A frustrated moan.
“Ten minutes to go!” called deep-voiced Mr. Johnson from the podium.
Ten minutes?
My eyes flew open and I yanked myself upright in my chair, blinded by the blue summer light shining in through the wall of windows to my left. I peered through my eyelids; the atrium was a blur of desks, with students hunched over their papers. At the far end of the room was a grand stage closed off by vividly red curtains. Mr. Johnson leaned against it, looking out over the room with his arms crossed upon his chest and a bored expression on his sturdy face.
As my eyes adjusted, I could fully make out the arms on the large clock that hung on the right wall.
Ten, fifty-one.
Oh, no.
Oh, no, no, no… Nine minutes!
“Shit!” I cursed under my breath.
The desk next to me had a dozen papers spread all over it. Kate Weldon sat with her nose nearly pressed against the wood, her shiny black hair as always a curtain in front of her small facial features and oversized glasses. She let her pen dance across the paper with a ferocious elegance that for a few seconds – a few desperately vital seconds – had me entranced.
My desk had two papers on it, not counting the pile of unused papers by my elbow. One had the exam questions written in a small, but very clear, font. The other bore a half-page of my own unreadable scribbles.
I read through the text, my heart growing heavier with every word.
How could I have let this happen?
Mum and Dad are gonna kill me!
I grabbed my pen in a state of terror.
Okay, take it easy, Annie! Calm down. You have a few minutes left. Relax. Okay, now read the question again. You can fix this.
I read the exam question I had chosen, but if anything, it did nothing to calm me down. ‘Discuss how and to what effect writers have used exaggeration as a literary device in two of the works you have studied’.
I gaped at the question.
How was I supposed to answer that?
Two hours ago, when the exam started, I had chosen to discuss the question in relation to Romeo and Juliet and David Copperfield.
Okay, so far, so good, I thought. They both exaggerate a lot.
I read through my introduction, and to my surprise, it sounded pretty smart - but then it stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence.
I stared at it.
I had put my head down on the desk to think of the right word to end the sentence, and then… well, I must’ve fallen asleep.
I shouldn’t be surprised - I’d stayed up until four a.m. playing Battlefield.
I looked at the clock again. Three minutes!
“Shit, shit, shit!”
What could I add in three minutes?
I quickly wrote: ‘To start off, Romeo and Juliet exaggerates a lot because they fall in love at first sight, then they get married in like three days’ time, and at the end of the week they kill themselves off because they apparently can’t live without each other anymore.’
