I sent it, then set my phone down on my desk. I jiggled my foot up and down, willing him to text me back. I wasn’t sure exactly why, but my crazy brain had decided that if I could just hear back from him, everything would be okay. And actually, maybe it wasn’t that crazy – if I knew Justin was okay, maybe the tightness in my stomach would completely dissipate. Instead, I sat there with my phone on my desk, waiting and waiting for it to beep with a text.
A text that hadn’t come by the time Dr. Tropiano came into the room. I slid my phone off my desk and into my bag, but I made sure I could still see the screen, and I kept it against my leg so I’d be sure to feel it vibrate.
“Good morning,” Dr. Tropiano said. She’d added a strip of purple to her hair over the weekend. It seemed like a very daring thing to do.
For a second I wished I had the confidence to do something crazy like that, and then I realized my weekend had included an MMA fight, almost losing my virginity to a guy that wasn’t even really my boyfriend, and then getting kicked out of said guy’s apartment this morning by police officers. It was kind of disturbing.
“I hope you all had a great weekend,” Dr. Tropiano trilled. She said it like she’d had a great weekend. For the first time in her class, I felt negatively towards her, like maybe her whole ‘I’m so happy’ thing was really just an act. How could someone always be so positive?
I pulled out my notebook and got ready to take notes. But Dr. Tropiano didn’t sit on the edge of her desk the way she usually did at the beginning of each class. Instead, she started passing out papers.
“I hope this won’t be too painful,” she said, smiling. “Most of the questions are short answer, but there are a few multiple choice. For part one, the short answer questions, the responses should be one or two words. Don’t drive yourself crazy coming up with a whole response. There will be plenty of time for essays when we have our first test later in the semester.”
The anvil of dread that had been banging around in my stomach trying to escape had a small victory as it wormed its way up into my throat. I grabbed for my syllabus and ran my eyes down the page.
There it was, in black and white. A quiz. Today. A quiz I had totally forgotten about. Usually, I would have checked my syllabus over the weekend to make sure I knew what was coming up this week. But I hadn’t checked it, because I’d been so busy with Justin.
I started to feel flush and hot, and I took a sip of water from my bottle. I’d never been unprepared for a test before. Not just in college, but in life. Okay, I told myself.
You’ve kept up with the reading. You’re going to be fine.
I looked down at the syllabus again. Yes, I’d kept up pretty well with the reading, except for the one chapter I was supposed to have read over the weekend. But how many questions would really be from that chapter? See? I told myself. Just relax. This was going to be easy. Short answer questions? Pfft. I could completely handle that.
“Um, hello?” the girl in front of me asked. She was holding the stack of quizzes Dr. Tropiano had given to the person in the front of our row. She shook them back and forth. “Are you going to take one or not?”
For a split second, I had the weird thought that maybe I shouldn’t take one. That maybe I should just grab my bag and run out of there. I could say I’d gotten sick, that I was about to throw up, that I’d had a weird spell where I felt like maybe I was going to faint.
But I didn’t do any of those things. Instead, I reached out and grabbed at the stack of quizzes the girl was holding out to me.
“Thanks,” I said.
She just rolled her eyes and shook her head as if she couldn’t believe the idiots she was subjected to on a daily basis.
I put one down on my desk, then passed the last one to the boy sitting behind me.
If he was disturbed or annoyed by the fact that it was taking so long for him to get his quiz, he didn’t act it. He just put the paper down on his desk and got to work.
I looked down at the paper in front of me. Twenty questions. Fifteen short answer, and five multiple choice. Easy. In high school, I would have owned a test like this without even studying. In high school, you could pretty much sleep your way through class and still figure out how to do well, as long as you weren’t a complete and total idiot.
But as soon as I tried to answer the first question, I knew I was in trouble. Yes, I’d kept up with the reading, but I’d thought this was going to be a Mickey Mouse class.
So it’s not like I’d bothered reading things more than once. If I’d known we were having a quiz, I would have certainly brushed up on the reading so that it would be fresh in my mind.
I was only certain of about three of the first five questions, and the next five were dicey. The last five – forget it. They were from the chapter I hadn’t even read, and so I was completely in the dark. I didn’t even know what to write. I had to leave them blank.
Thankfully, the five multiple-choice questions were a little easier. Having suggestions of what the answers could be jogged my memory, and I was pretty sure I got most of them right. But still. By the end of it I was fairly sure I’d gotten at least half of the questions wrong. Missing ten out of twenty questions was an F.