Word Count: 540

His hair was a mess but he didn’t really care. He wasn’t there to look pretty; he was there to take a damned test.

Paris sat in one of the remaining desks in the room he’d been directed to at the testing center, not quite at the back but not too close to the front either. It felt odd to be there, even after attending his remedial classes. There was something about sitting for an examination that seemed more real than sitting around listening to an instructor talk at voluntary review sessions. He felt like he was in school again and he couldn’t say he liked it. Test-taking had never been his forte—not unless it was something more practical, routines or experiments that he could perform in the place of pencils and paper and written assignments.

But here he was, in sweatpants and Chris’s oversized DCU hoodie, drugged up on flu medication with his pencils and his calculator in front of him, and a bag of cherry cough drops close at hand.

Sometimes he still wondered what the hell he thought he was doing. He certainly didn’t need this to prove to himself or anyone else that he was smart. He knew he wasn’t—not the way other people were smart, surely not the way his boyfriend was. Paris knew himself to be mediocre at everything except dancing, a C-average student who might be able to do better if he tried harder, but not the sort to put any kind of importance in his grades. He’d stayed in school only because he’d had to up until he was sixteen, and then after that it’d only been a matter of waiting for the right excuse to be able to drop out without his mother hounding him about it.

He told himself that he was doing this because he wanted more control over his life and his future, and maybe that was true. Somehow doing this stupid test and getting his GED to go back to school seemed like the logical thing to do in order for that to happen. There were things he wanted in life and everybody said college was the right way to go, even if he could probably get by dancing without it. Maybe he wasn’t smart, but he wasn’t stupid either—no matter how many times he muttered and whined things like “I wish I wasn’t so dumb” or “I can’t do this” when things got too overwhelming.

And maybe that was what he wanted to prove, either to himself or the people who expected things from him—not that he was brilliant, but that he wasn’t stupid. Maybe he just wanted to show that he was more than he let on.

So he was here—in an uncomfortable desk and sicker than he’d been in years, but at least he’d made it. He had a thermos of soup and a packet of crackers for his lunch break and a couple of protein bars for snacks in between, with a few bottles of water and some medicine to take again in four hours, and a text from his boyfriend on his phone—“I believe in you.”

Now all he had to do was believe in himself.