The Exam

She gently stepped over the dew kissed blades of grass, afraid to wake the daisies, as she made her way to the beat up, rusty brown bench. After she gently wiped the condensation off it with the sleeve of her coat, she sat down and watched as the sun gently ascended, its rays dancing on the water. She closed her eyes and listened to the gentle ebb and flow of the sea in front of her.

It was 7:30 on a Monday morning. Her parents were already on their long commute to work. Daylight savings time meant the morning was slower to get underway. She liked to sit and think before making it to school. Today was a particularly important day as it was the day of the first mock states examinations, one of many. English was today’s task. She recited her poetry and Shakespeare as she ate her breakfast bar, the daisies awakening, the dew lifting.

Nature had put her in a trance. She jumped as she heard her alarm beep loud and fast, like her heart. This could only mean one thing, time for school. As she went to pick up her bag, she realised that the dates and quotes that she knew like the back of her hand an hour ago, had suddenly disappeared. She started to panic but her second alarm went off. She knew when she had set it that she would probably be panicking at the sound of the first one and was making sure she didn’t dawdle like she usually would on a Monday.

As she strode quickly, the end of her red tartan skirt, which was in tatters from trailing along the ground for three years, felt soggy. This happened to be the style in her school, even though the head nun, Sister Antoinette, would chase after her with a ruler screaming ‘three inches, your skirt must be three inches off the ground!’. It was well known that the girls folded up their skirts whenever they saw Sister Antoinette, giving the illusion the length was acceptable.

As she reached the doors of the school, true to form, she saw an elderly, stern faced woman, with a ruler. She knew the drill by now, and she folded up her skirt just enough to be allowed into the school. She turned the corner of the long corridor, just out of sight of the ruler holding witch, and let it down again, along with the rest of her year.

She was still going over quotes in her head, but the words all seemed to jumble into each other to a degree that she started to have a panic attack. Muscle memory got her to her desk in time, where at 8.59 the doors closed, and the examination papers were given out. She took out her lucky pen, whose ink cartridge had just been replaced in anticipation of this marathon of an exam, after which she had promised her parents she would reward herself with a sausage roll with her friends.

The exam came and went as dramatically as the tide. She didn’t feel it went very well and wasn’t feeling up to company, so she bought the sausage roll and returned to her brown, rusty bench to eat it. She knew she had the afternoon off pending another looming examination tomorrow, so she sat and watched the sun as it lay its head to rest. She noticed its rays dance once more on the water and watched as the daisies went back to sleep. She yawned in consolidatory and was ready to repeat the whole cycle again tomorrow.