Alyson

Friday was a close call.

Tuesday, I really kicked my school skills into high gear. I didn’t work out that entire week. Homework and work that I had pretended didn’t exist for the semester gorged themselves on my time from after school until 11 PM or later each night. It was mostly work for AP Art History and HL English. The lack of self-care, paired with the six-hours-of-sleep nights, actually made me sick. The sickness was pretty tame during the day, but flared when my stress did—at night.

I went to the library twice to maybe learn something about pre-calculus. My friend V, an A+ in friendship and in the gradebooks, practically taught me the whole semester of pre(ty stupid)-calc in 40 minutes. The next day, however, I took my math final. I passed by one percent. Mr. S didn’t even give me points for the drawing I innocently placed under one of the free answers. *Sigh*

We prepped the next night in the library for my math retake the following day (which was also the last day of school, whoops). V rented a study room, complete with a white board and an dry-erase marker! I drew John Cena on the board and they snapchatted it. Feels good to be appreciated.

Pretty sure that everything I needed to know for the rational functions retake was on my sheet, I provided more Snapchat material and finished one art card for Art History. I saw my long-and-somewhat-lost friend D, and we sat down for an hour, talking about John Waters and making fun of our schools in the kids’ section.

Friday: Me whining around the art room because I had to go do my retake. This is what I do to myself, wake up one morning (lol THE LAST DAY OF SCHOOL lol) and decide that I’m going to try to be an A++ student. My brain feels like a sticker that just won’t stick to things like math. You can certainly press it down as hard as you want, but it’s just going to peel off eventually. With this encouraging metaphor in mind, I went off to take my test. Again.

When I finished my test, I turned around and couldn’t find Mr. S. We’d been the only two people in the room (yikes). As I was starting to blame the hour and 10 minutes of math for my newly-lacking vision: “How’s it going?”

A single, shrill noise came out of me.

He was lying on the floor. OK.

“Just put the test on my desk.”

“GbyeMrSHaveagoodbreakthanksforlettingmeretakebyeeeee”

At P.F. Chang’s later that day, V and E compared As, while I concentrated on my spicy tuna rolls. Deciding to join their party, I checked my grades.

“Guys, I got an A in HL English!”

High fives all around. My first weighted A is locked in. ♦