by Lou Morgan
“Spare me. Just … no.” Tigs held up her hand. Dom grinned, and Izzy tried not to smile. Of course Tigs would assume that he was seriously hitting on her.
“What do you want to start with? History or maths?” Mia spread a few sheets of paper across the table, pushing all the folders to one side. Everyone groaned.
“Can’t we start with something easy? Like Mandarin?” Dom asked.
“Mandarin’s only easy for you guys, remember?” Izzy laughed. She could see Dom wriggling his box of FokusPro out of his pocket, turning it over to open it. Mia glanced up, watching her brother thoughtfully, but said nothing.
“Yeah. And Noah.” Dom tapped a strip of tablets out on to the table.
“Hey!” Noah was obviously starting to feel picked on. It didn’t usually stop them. Dom teased him because Noah was his best friend, and Mia teased Noah because Dom was doing it. And Mia always had to do whatever her twin was doing, even if it didn’t necessarily work the other way around.
“That’s because Noah’s a freak.” Tigs said the last word a little too loudly, a little too brightly. Izzy didn’t like the way it sounded – petty and unkind, and jealous. It wasn’t exactly Noah’s fault that he was smarter than the rest of them put together, was it? And it wasn’t like he taunted them with it. Not the way Tigs liked to taunt them with her family’s money, or her connections, or her home.
Maybe Antigone Price was the devil, but it was sure as hell better to have the devil on your side than not.
“Maths,” said Mia. “Seeing as our resident swot has started us off; Noah, how do you calculate the volume of a frustum?”
“A what?” muttered Dom. He had already punched out one of the little yellow pills and was rolling it around in his hand thoughtfully.
“Keep up. A frustum. A cone with the pointy bit cut off?”
“How the hell d’you know that?”
“It’s in the notes?” Mia held up her folder, turning the page to face her brother and displaying it to everyone. Sure enough, there was a neat drawing of a squat cone, and a column of equations and numbers.
“Huh,” said Dom. “Better hope this works, then, hadn’t I?” And without another word, he dropped the pill into his mouth and threw his head back to swallow it.
All around her, Izzy saw the others doing the same, pulling faces as the taste of the pills caught on their tongues. Grey winked at her as he swallowed his. “Down the hatch,” he said, then coughed. “Wow. That is foul.”
Izzy looked at the little yellow circle in her hand. She didn’t really remember pulling the pack out of her pocket, or tipping the tablet on to her palm. But she obviously had, because there it was. Looking right back at her.
“You need a drink?” Noah was holding out a can of whatever sugar-loaded drink he happened to be favouring that month. It was bright orange, and however bad a taste the FokusPro might leave, Izzy suspected that might be worse. She shook her head, smiling. “No, thanks. I’m good.”
And she dropped the tablet on to her tongue, tipping her head back and swallowing. The pill caught in her throat and for a second, she thought it was going to stick there forever. She swallowed again, hard, and thankfully this time it went down. When she looked up, everyone was staring at her.
Izzy coughed feebly, and banged a hand on her chest. “Got stuck,” she muttered. It was good enough for everyone, it seemed, and they all turned their attention to the surface area of a cylinder. All except Kara, who was looking thoughtfully at the palm of her hand. Izzy watched from the corner of her eye as Kara very quietly tucked her small yellow pill down the side of the cushion.
Chapter Three
Izzy hadn’t realized that time could go so fast. Every day of study leave was the same – she would get up and drag herself to the kitchen to find some breakfast and coffee, then drag herself back to her room, where she spent the entire morning with her head firmly stuck in her books. At some point in the morning, there would be a text from Grey, asking if she had the notes from yet another class he’d completely forgotten. They had it down to a fine art now. He’d text her, she’d dig out the notes and trudge to the front door, cross the hall and call the lift. When the doors opened, she dropped the notes on the floor inside and pressed the button for the eighteenth floor. Then she’d wait for the lift to come back down to the thirteenth with whatever notes he’d borrowed yesterday.
At some point, if she remembered, there would be a sandwich, and then it was back to work. The hours blurred, and more than once she had heard the front door open and her dad calling her name and been surprised that he was home so early, only to look at the clock and realize it was almost ten at night and he’d brought dinner back with him.
And so it went. Her eyes felt gritty and hot and she didn’t think she’d slept for more than four or five hours a night since the last day of term. She had a headache that wouldn’t shift no matter how many painkillers she threw at it. The inside of her head felt buzzy, as though a fine trickle of sand was constantly running down the inside of her skull. It was impossible to tell whether it was the stress and the pure panic of the looming exams getting ever closer, the lack of sleep or the sheer amount of information she was trying to cram into her brain. Dates of Richard II’s reign? Got it. How a blast furnace works? No problem. Newton’s four laws of… No, there were three, weren’t there? Newton’s three laws of motion. Had it down.
Izzy wondered whether anyone had ever experimented to see how much stuff a brain could hold before it exploded. And, if they had, would knowing the results make her feel better or worse?
So far, she’d done her best to ignore the quiet little voice at the back of her mind that kept saying could it possibly be the FokusPro making her feel so strange. Because the little voice was wrong, wasn’t it?
It was true that the scratching feeling had started the morning after she’d taken that little yellow tablet. It was true that the cold sensation she’d had the first time she held the pills had now settled in the pit of her stomach and didn’t ever quite seem to go. It was true that after a full day taking them her fingers tingled and the edges of her vision took on a strange, sparkly effect. And that was without even thinking about the dreams she’d been having.
Yes, all these things were true. But. Within half an hour of taking that first dose of FokusPro, Izzy had felt more awake than she ever had. More focused. Her class notes made sense. Even the funny little scribbly bits where she’d obviously been in a rush or hadn’t got a clue what was going on and had just copied things off the whiteboard word for word. More importantly, she could remember it all. Everything she’d covered in these endless, endless revision sessions. Not just bits here and there. All of it. Every single word. She could not only picture the pages in her folders or textbooks, see the words arranged on the paper as clearly as if they were spread out in front of her – she could follow them exactly. She knew what they meant, she knew how to apply all the theories, how to make them work. It wasn’t that the pills made her smarter – at least, she didn’t think that was it. It was more like they helped her shut out everything except the notes.
Well. Everything except the notes and the scratching inside her head.
And dreams were only dreams. They weren’t real. But exams were. Results were.
There had been the awkward moment one morning when, deep into the Peasants’ Revolt, her dad had appeared in her bedroom doorway – yesterday’s shirt unbuttoned at the neck and his tie scrunched in one hand. In the other, he held one of the blister strips of pills, waving it back and forth like a metronome.
“Do I need to be worried about this?” he’d asked, frowning at her.
Izzy shook her head. “They’re just a study aid.”
“Mmm-hmm.” He looked sceptically at the packet in his hand. “And where did they come from?”
“Health food shop.” The lie was surprisingly easy.
“Really?”
“The one down on Cheapside. You know?” Izzy flipped a page of her textbook.
“I see,” he sighed. “You’d tell me, wouldn’t you? If there was something…”
“Yes, Dad. I’d tell you.”
“Promise?” He looked earnest.
“Yes, Dad. I promise.” She tried to hide the smile that was threatening to creep across her face. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her – she knew that. He just worried about her. More since her mum had left; since they’d moved to the Barbican. She tried to see it as his way of showing he cared. After all, her mother had left him, too.
He’d hovered a little longer in the doorway. “Just … don’t get too caught up in all this, OK? They’re only exams, you know. In a few years, no one’s going to care what kind of results you get. The last thing I want is for you to push yourself too hard. Like you did at your other school…” He let the sentence hang in the air. Izzy tried to ignore it.
“A few years is still a few years away, though, isn’t it?” She shrugged and nodded towards the tie in his hand. “Are you staying at home today?”
“No such luck, I’m afraid.” He tossed the pill strip over to her. “Just came back to change my shirt.” He plucked at the fabric of his white shirt between his finger and thumb. “Everyone’s flat out on this project. I’ve just sent the team out to have a break and get some air.”
“You were working all night? Again?” It wasn’t much of a surprise to Izzy really. She’d got increasingly used to finding his bedroom untouched in the mornings, the bed unslept in.
“It won’t be for much longer. We have a couple of days to get all the systems up and running, and then there’s the presentation to the board in Frankfurt… And then life goes back to normal. I promise.” He stepped into the room and dropped a kiss on the top of her head. “I’ll take some leave over the summer. We’ll go out and do things.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” He smiled at her, even as he copied the same tired tone of voice she’d just used when she said the same thing to him. “Love you, sweetie.”
“Love you, too, Dad.”
“Good luck with the revision.” He ducked back out of the room again and she was just about to ask him to stop – to tell him that she had lied about the pills, to tell him the truth – when she heard his bedroom door close.
It wasn’t worth it. It would all be over soon and then the summer stretched out ahead of them. A summer that was mostly going to be spent lying on the grass in the Barbican gardens. Kara had a summer job lined up in the Barbican theatre, but it wasn’t like she needed the money, was it? She was so crazy about the theatre that she’d probably have paid them to let her work there.
That was all very well, but there was no way that Izzy was going to be doing anything other than enjoying the rewards of having worked so stupidly hard for the exams.
The Clerkenwell School had its own dedicated exam hall. Some schools just used a couple of classrooms with the desks rearranged into long, straight lines. Or maybe they used the gym. The assembly hall. Something like that. Clerkenwell wasn’t like other schools, and so it had its own full-time exam space. When it wasn’t being used for real exams like these, it was used for mocks – just so nobody ever forgot that Clerkenwell was All About Results. Three times a year, without fail, every single student sat down to a series of exams on every subject they took. And three times a year, without fail, a handful of pupils left the school after their last paper of the session and didn’t come back.
No pressure or anything.
Ahead of the day’s first exam, they all lined up against the wall, waiting for the doors to open, like cows outside a slaughterhouse. If, that is, cows had bundles of revision notes on little cue-cards that they were frowning over in the hope of cramming something at the last minute, or if cows had spent an entire afternoon traipsing round the City of London trying to find a stationery shop that sold clear plastic pencil cases. Tigs had, naturally, decided the rules about what you could take into the exam hall didn’t apply to her and instantly vowed to take revenge on the invigilator who confiscated her Louis Vuitton pencil case. Izzy had to choke back a laugh at her wail of, “But it’s monogrammed!” echoing around the exam hall.
It didn’t take long to get back into the routine they all knew. They were herded in, they found their assigned desks and they sat down. They wrote for an hour and a half, they got up and they left. Some days, they did it all over again straight after lunch. Twice.
After a day or two, Izzy thought as she traipsed out of yet another session (Science II) rubbing her aching wrist, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. Provided you could ignore the inevitable cry of “I am not a number!” from Grey every time they were told to write their candidate numbers clearly in the space on the front page of their papers.
Izzy studied, she turned up on time, she gave up anything resembling a social life and she crossed off the exams marked on the calendar with thick black permanent marker.
The only hint of drama came later, midway through the second history paper. It had all been going fine – the sun was shining, the clock was ticking quietly and they had been blessed with an invigilator who was much happier sitting on a chair at the front of the room than constantly walking up and down the aisles between the desks with squeaky shoes or soles that clacked with every … single … step. As far as Izzy was concerned, it was an easy paper. She knew this stuff, after all, and although she didn’t have quite the same kind of tunnel-vision focus that she’d had while she had been revising and taking the FokusPro, the after-effects of the pills were only just fading. Reluctant as she was to give Tigs any kind of credit, it looked like she’d been right. The FokusPro was just what they’d needed. Just what she’d needed.
So it was quiet, and everyone was writing, and there were only four papers left to sit before everyone was free to spend the summer doing whatever they wanted. And then, midway through the session, there came the unmistakable sound of someone in the room starting to cry.
It was muffled at first, as though whoever it was had hidden their face behind a sleeve in an effort to keep quiet. But then it grew louder and louder, less controlled, until it wasn’t so much a sniffle as full-on weeping. People looked up from their desks. Dom, sitting in front of Izzy, turned round in his seat and mouthed, “Who is it?” She shrugged, but all the same, she twisted round in her chair and tried to work out who’d been broken by Clerkenwell this time. The weeping built to a wail, and then to a howl. It was coming from the back of the hall, and everyone had stopped writing. People were craning their necks, leaning out to the side to see who it was.
The invigilator looked up from his book and sighed. “Is there a problem?” he asked, his voice a little louder than it needed to be. Nobody paid any attention.
“I said, is there a problem?” He dropped his book on the floor. Everyone ignored him. Despite the strict no-talking rule in the exam room, people were starting to whisper to one another.
“Quiet down, now. Is—” Whatever the question was, nobody got to hear the end of it. There was another howl from the rear of the hall, and the sound of a chair scraping back across the parquet floor and someone trying to get out from behind their desk. A faint scuffling, and then the almighty clatter of the desk turning over and hitting the floor.
Izzy watched as Kara fled the exam room in floods of tears.
“So, what was with Kara’s total meltdown?” Tigs held out her empty cup, swinging her feet back and forth as she sat on the low wall. Juliet shrugged and poured from the plastic jug of punch she was holding, then pushed her glasses back up her nose. It felt safe to talk about it now. The exams had finished that morning, with another science paper that could only be described as ‘brutal’ (or by Tigs as, “the worst thing that has ever, ever happened to me. Ever.”). No one had wanted to bring up the subject of Kara’s freak-out before all the papers were done. It had felt like bad luck, somehow. Like jinxing them when they were doing so well.
“Has anyone even seen her since?” Tigs continued when Juliet had toppe
d up her drink.
“I’ve tried calling her,” Juliet sighed. “Her phone’s going straight to voicemail and she’s not replied to any of my texts. I was hoping she’d come tonight.”
“Did you go round to her place?” Izzy asked.
“I went round this afternoon but there was no one at home.”
“Well, she didn’t turn up for any of the maths papers. Maybe she’s sick?” Izzy fished a bit of mint out of her drink. It stuck to her fingers no matter how hard she tried to shake it off, so eventually she gave up and ate it. Music spilled through the open door behind them, and candles flickered in old jam jars on the ground or hanging from the nearest branches, while fairy lights twinkled in the surrounding bushes.
They were in the garden outside Juliet’s place, and it was Juliet’s birthday. The lower floor of all the townhouse-style apartments on this side of the Barbican opened straight out on to the large residents’ garden – each had their own small square of paving, and then the whole of the shared garden spread out in front of them. Tigs might have the best view, but Juliet had the grass. There were rules about using the garden at night – almost all of which came down to the fact that no one was supposed to. Most of the group were lounging under the spreading walnut tree that shaded the path around the edge of the lawn. Juliet went inside to fetch another jug of revoltingly sweet fruit punch from the kitchen. And, feeling bad that it was Juliet’s birthday party and everyone seemed to be treating her like some kind of waitress, Izzy went to help. When they emerged from the kitchen, Dom leaped to his feet.
“Sweet sixteen, baby!” he whooped at Juliet as he stumbled through the branches and ducked inside. He was doing a lot of that – making excuses to go in and out, passing them at every opportunity. And every time he did, he said something to Juliet. And every time he did that, she turned bright red beneath her glasses and fiddled with the edge of the dress she’d bought specially. Not to impress Dom, of course – despite the fact that it was dark green, his favourite colour, and printed all over with tiny red roses.