Backdated to exam time!
Word Count: 1011
Paris shuffled into the classroom with less enthusiasm than he tried to show on a normal day.
It wasn’t that he particularly liked school. Class and homework and projects still seemed as tedious (and often pointless) as they had when he’d struggled through three years of high school. Those feelings hadn’t changed at all in the intervening years, no matter how much freedom college offered him in comparison. If he cared less what happened to him, if he wanted absolutely no control over the rest of his life, and the direction it happened to travel in, the opportunities that were presented to him as a result, he wouldn’t have bothered to try the college life at all.
It offered little else to him, just the monotony of classes, the comfort of regular work, the discipline of dance (this and the previous of which he could find without it), and the raucous parties he no longer had any interest in.
Yet he feared failure. He feared putting the time and money to waste, and proving himself to be the sort of person he’d always known he was rather than the sort of person he wanted to be. And so he went to class with a dedication he’d never shown before, waltzed in fully dressed (or in his dance clothes, with skirts or shorts or pants and various tops and sweaters pulled over top to lend some modesty to the outfit), and sat attentively in his seat, resisting the compulsion to doodle or scribble nonsense in his notebook while the teacher droned on, forcing himself to listen even to subjects he found no interest in.
He wanted it to pay off. He wanted the trouble to be worth it.
Today, he slid into his usual seat in his expository writing class (somewhere in the middle, a little further from the door than the far wall) and waited with a straining patience, his hands alternately clasping and unclasping, nails occasionally tapping over the top of the desk as one of his legs bounced away beneath it, nervous.
Class did not begin as it normally would have. The students remained talkative, excited, awaiting dismissal following the end of their informal “exam.” Mrs. Clark didn’t take her seat at the front of the room to begin with some lecture on essay writing as she might have during the entirety of the semester that had just passed, but instead ambled down the rows of desks with a thick stack of papers in her arms, passing them between the chattering students, to the left, to the right, to the left again, pausing to make comments and answer questions along the way.
Paris stared down at the desk instead of watching her progress, at least until he saw her standing nearby out of the corner of his eye.
She set a comparatively smaller stack of papers in front of him, fifteen pages stapled together at the top left corner, blank on top but for a blue sticky note, his name, and the title—Mirror Mirror: Perceptions and Misconceptions in Ballet.
Hesitantly, he glanced up. His face way blank even as fear slithered around in his stomach, twisting it around and setting his heart into a maddening rhythm.
“This was a very good paper, Paris,” Mrs. Clark said.
She didn’t smile very wide—that wasn’t her way—but her lips quirked at the corners and he thought she looked pleased, hoped he wasn’t misreading her. He half expected her to continue on with a “but…” and follow with some comment about how he could have done better, how she wished he would have chosen another topic, done something differently, but she didn’t. She looked at him no differently than she might have looked at any other student, though her eyes and her voice carried a note of pride.
“I sent a copy of it to the head of your department,” she continued. “He thought you might want to consider expanding on it, maybe consider it for a future project. The dance department has an honors program you might want to look into. You’d have to write a senior thesis, but…”
And there was the “but…” he’d been expecting, but she nodded her head toward his paper as if to say “you’ve already got a good start.”
He swallowed and nodded, had no idea what to say. Mrs. Clark spent a few more seconds observing him with that small smile of hers before continuing on, passing out papers to the rest of the students in the row behind him. Paris examined the blue sticky note once she’d passed, and saw nothing on it but a name (which he recognized as belonging to the head of the dance department), a building and room number (familiar to him also after all the hours he’d spent in the campus’s numerous dance studios), a casual greeting and the offer of guidance should he have interest in the honors program.
Paris fiddled with it, bent one of the corners back, unsticking it momentarily before sticking it back on, smoothing the tips of his fingers over the writing as the glue reset on his title page.
“You’ll find your grades on the last sheet,” Mrs. Clark announced to the sound of dozens of rustling papers. “If you have any questions, come see me. Otherwise, have a good Christmas.”
Then they were released.
Paris scrambled from his chair, scooping his paper up to shuffle back out of the room, hastily flipping to the back page once he was out in the hall to see the comments and grade scrawled in red ink.
He released a breath, stared for a long time to let it sink in, standing stiffly in the hallway as other students wended their way around him. He reached into his bag, dug around until he found what he was looking for—his phone—and typed out a text to Chris with shaky fingers as his lips slowly curved up and his eyes grew wide with comprehension.
‘I got an A!’
He sent it with pride.
