by Tiffany Sala
At least, they were supposed to have gotten one for everyone. Once Mr. Phillips was done handing out the stack and had returned to the front of the room, I was still sitting at my desk with an empty spot surrounded by essential exam gear like pens and a roll of lollies.
I raised my hand. “Um… Mr. Phillips?”
He just stared at me, then he took in my problem. His eyebrows went up and up while he looked around him as if he expected my missing piece of paper to appear.
“I’m sorry, Aileen,” he said finally. “There must have been some error in the system. Or perhaps I left one of the papers behind in the office… would you mind taking my job and keeping an eye on everyone else as they get started while I go and check?”
I tried to just stay in my seat and pretend I didn’t understand any of what he’d just said, but he kept beckoning me forward until it was more awkward not to comply. “Do I get a stick to wave around or something?”
“You get to stand on hallowed ground,” Mr. Phillips told me, “and write down the name of anyone who takes advantage of my absence so I can automatically fail them.” My eyes bugged out at that much power. “I’ll only be five minutes.”
He turned his attention to the rest of the room. “You can get started… now, and I expect you all to behave while Aileen is in charge.”
Mr. Phillips ran out the door, and my largely post-intoxicated classmates slowly turned to their papers as commanded… but pretty much everyone kept peeking back at me, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about that.
What were the odds I would become the first exception in the entire history of Burgundy College’s very reliable bespoke fake-exam-printing system?
I caught a pair of eyes that made me look back: Axel. He was smiling a little as he looked back down at his paper, which wouldn’t have triggered anything in me normally… but at that exact moment it gave me a flashback to our confrontation at that dumb party the night before, and suddenly I was wondering. If he had the shits with me enough over that, would he be able to do something that would interfere with our school exam-generating system? He seemed to be up on all this technology stuff, so it was at least plausible.
I tried to catch his eye again, but he was conveniently absorbed in his exam paper. I had to be letting my imagination get away from me, anyway. There wasn’t some big conspiracy behind everything that happened.
I started pacing anyway, my thoughts circling one another like some pack of conspiracy theorist wolves.
It was only when there was a soft, “Aileen?” from the doorway almost drowned out by a lot of scrabbling from the desks in front of me I realised I’d been milling around without paying any attention to the task I’d been assigned.
Mr. Phillips didn’t look ready to call me on it, though. He was sweating from forehead and armpits, and it occurred to me he’d been gone a lot longer than five minutes. There were only twenty minutes left in the period. “Aileen, I’m so sorry, I couldn’t find that paper anywhere. Then when I went back to the main office to get a replacement produced, apparently you don’t come up on the system at all? Were you ever properly registered?”
“I assume I was last year, when I was able to complete a mock exam without problems.” I was being far too snippy, but Mr. Phillips was too flustered to call me out on it. “I’m sorry, this is just so frustrating. Can’t you just get the paper printed out and pencil an ID in for me for the moment?”
Mr. Phillips looked queasy like I’d just suggested cannibalism as the solution to the problem. He glanced at the rest of my class, most of them not doing a very good job of pretending their main focus was still their fake exams, and lowered his voice from its previous volume. “Apparently not, Aileen, it was designed to be very resistant to misconduct so it just doesn’t generate exam papers for nonexistent candidates.”
So now I had a computer system confirming Axel’s assessment of me… and come to think of it, could that really be a coincidence? I glanced back over at Axel, and his cutesy little grin as he bent over his own work told me all I really needed to know.
“What I’m going to do for now,” Mr. Phillips was saying, “is reproduce the paper manually from my master list of questions, and then you’ll have to come in over lunch or after school to make it up.”
“After school?” I didn’t even know what the bus schedule was like an hour after the one I usually took. I hadn’t done anything after school but go home since netball when I was fourteen, and Marcia was still around to pick me up back then. “Can’t I make it up in our next class?”
“It’s not being counted as part of your assessment, but we’re going to be going through the questions and discussing them, and that’s going to be tremendously beneficial to you so I don’t want to let you miss it.”
He probably wasn’t allowed to be seen putting any of his students at a disadvantage. “But you’re not going to be done marking before our next class. You…” It seemed another level of rude to point out that he’d never managed to get an assignment or test turned around back to us in less than a week.
“This test is being marked under the same conditions as your exams, remember.” Mr. Phillips clearly understood where I had been about to go, but his expression quickly shifted to abashed. “That is, it’s being computer-marked. Well, I suppose yours is going to be hand-marked based on the computer scheme, because there’s no chance trying to get it entered into the computer is going to work.”
I groaned.
Mr. Phillips turned his head along with mine at a chuckle from the ranks of the avid test-takers. “Mr. Bennett, maybe you should spend more time worrying about your own academic performance.”
“Nothing to worry about there though,” said Axel, and went smirking back to his test.
“Well,” I said, “maybe I can come in at lunchtime.”
I could tell he’d been hoping I would nominate a time when he wasn’t trying to eat. “Well… I’ll make sure I’m ready for you then,” he said.
“Great. I guess I’ll come back here?”
“Sounds… good.”
After that Mr. Phillips and I mostly just stared helplessly at one another for the next several minutes of the class, until he decided it was time to start collecting everyone else’s efforts. I made my awkward way back to my seat to listen while he made concluding remarks on the test that meant absolutely nothing to me, his regular glances in my direction showing he was still very aware of my issue.
I would have just asked if I could leave early and have the talk when it was actually relevant, but I had a reason to lurk around until he let everyone go. Once we were dismissed for recess I took my time to get going, finally moving towards the door so that I ended up bumping elbows with Axel.
“All right,” I said as he was turning to look at me, “what did you do?”
He winked. “Well I admit I flubbed a few of the questions on that paper because I was at a party last night. But at least I wasn’t so unprepared they wouldn’t even give me a paper.”
It was so damn cheeky it had to be a confession. “Why? I—how?”
“Aileen, are you suggesting I had something to do with the awkward failure of Burgundy College’s dubiously commissioned replica exam system?”
“Well, did you?”
I was looking around to make sure nobody was near us; he didn’t look anywhere but at me as he said, “Yeah, of course I did. Did you like it?”
“Back to my second question: why?”
“I didn’t think you were getting the message last night that I’m not going to let you just cutesy your way out of addressing this situation like a grown-up. Refusing to engage at all is not how this negotiation is going to work.”
“There’s no negotiation here, I told you all that stuff with my dad is none of your business and I expect you to respect that.” I tried to speed up and break away from him, but as well as being a shifty hacker he was hopelessly long-legged.
“Expectations and reality start out very far apart in a busine
ss deal, Aileen. You should remember that.”
He was not going to just let this drop. What was up with that group of guys anyway?
Well, he thought he was not going to let it drop. “Here’s a negotiation for you, Axel. Who do I have to report you to if I want you to leave me alone?”
“Report me?” His eyes went all wide like butter wouldn’t fucking melt. “For what, Aileen? We’re just two kids who go to the same school, having a chat here.”
I knew better than to go down the path of debating with him. He’d just remind me there was no proof of whatever he’d done to make me not exist to the school’s computer, I was just going to make myself look crazy to everyone, and so on. I knew the drill, I’d watched not one but two of my friends go down the road of being tangled up in his friends, I had seen how they started to deteriorate.
“If there is any more funny business, I’m going to figure out a way to complain about you to whoever will listen that will get their attention,” I told him.
Axel was too tall to laugh in my face, but he managed to laugh over the top of my head. “What, lie? I don’t believe even the daughter of a patent troll would do something like that.”
I just kept walking. Axel followed me for a while, throwing desperate insults in my direction, but when I didn’t feed him he eventually peeled off, so quietly I didn’t realise until he had actually disappeared.
I didn’t know if he was hiding somewhere watching me, but I couldn’t help a little triumphant pump of the fist. That was how you handled an arsehat bully from that squad.
Chapter Three
Walking from the bus stop to my house was as much as I could take. I pushed through the screen on the back door, staggered past Toby and Tim, who were already setting up a small city across the kitchen bench, and found my way to an available seat in the lounge.
Dad saluted me with his beer bottle. He looked like he was still ninety percent with us, which was about the best I could expect when Marcia was going to be around in an hour or so to pick up the boys.
In the early days, just after she left him, she’d show up and drag them out of there squirming and begging for a kiss goodbye, not even meeting my eyes. I sort of thought that was because she was afraid I might beg her to be allowed to come too… and some days I would have, off the slightest encouragement. For a while I didn’t actually think I’d be able to get Dad pulled together enough to survive. I expected him to do something stupid one day and leave me with nobody who even wanted to want me around. But he gradually started putting his pants on in the morning and being functional more and more days in a row, and after a while Marcia actually started honouring their ad-hoc custody arrangement.
I didn’t blame Marcia for any of what she’d had to do before then of course, but I was sad she decided not to come back to us after Dad got his shit together. I understood, though. Sometimes people just go too far and you can’t see them the way you used to. I didn’t blame Elizabeth, my mum, for leaving, and when she came back to meet with me a few years back I accepted her explanation that she’d been in a bad place and unable to care for herself, let alone me, but I never bothered trying to make up for lost time or whatever. That moment had passed.
It just sucked that my brothers were only with us a quarter of the time at most now. They might be just half-brothers technically, but in a practical sense, two six-year-old boys feels like a whole lot more than two whole brothers. Tamara had recently found out she had a teenage half-sister, and I hated it a little when she mentioned how they were getting to know one another, finding out strange things they had in common that didn’t seem to make sense. Not that I was going to find out I liked trains as much as the twins if I got to live with them full-time as they grew older, but they were more and more like real humans as the years went on, and I was obviously going to miss out on the friendship I might have been able to develop with them otherwise. Tim had explained to me just that weekend, cheerful like he’d come up with something absolutely genius, that he’d been telling his friends at school I was sort of like a cousin, not a big sister.
I don’t cry a lot, but that made me cry. Later, when the kids weren’t around to see.
“Want one?” Dad was still waving his beer at me. I shook my head. “I cracked open one of those flavoured ones Sandy left behind last time, absolutely wretched stuff, left it in the fridge for now. You’re more than welcome to take it out of my sight forever.”
“No thanks,” I said. At least it was more appropriate now I was eighteen than it had been when he was offering me drinks before I was legal, but having someone in your family who was an utter mess with alcohol had a way of turning you off things like taking a sip before dinnertime. “Do I really look that wasted?”
“Let’s just say I wouldn’t be that shocked to hear you’d already stopped off at the bottleshop on the way home.”
“No need to do that when we’re so well stocked up here already.” It was a joke, but also a jab. I could tell he’d gotten it too, so I moved right along. “There was this dumb glitch at school today. The computer decided I wasn’t a student and refused to give me a practice exam to complete.”
“Sounds like a lucky break to me,” commented Dad, who was always happy to find a way to get out of anything.
“Not really. I had to come in and make it up over lunch. My teacher and I both disliked that.”
Dad grimaced in sympathy, then glanced at his smartwatch: a new toy he’d been saving up for since the start of the year. “Hey, would you like to—Look, just gather up the boys and bring them into my workshop, I’ve got something really cool I’d love to show you all.”
After the day I’d had I almost wanted to just do it, but I knew how this would end. “Marcia’s going to be here soon, Dad. You know how she gets when the boys aren’t ready on time.”
“Oh yeah.” Dad adjusted back into a reclining position in his seat. I tried not to look like I was so obviously slumping in relief. Sometimes when I pretended it was so unreasonable of Marcia to expect to not be screwed around when she came to get the twins, he would just fall in line. Sometimes he would throw a tantrum about equivalent to what Toby and Tim were going to pull on me when I told them they had to pack up their current game.
Marcia was strangely buoyant, even when the boys weren’t quite ready to get in the car because Dad kept interrupting while I was packing them up, distracting them with silly games and jokes. It reminded me of how things were when she and Dad were still together, when she was so confident she could keep him together.
When she beckoned me off into a corner away from Dad and the boys I knew a bit ahead of time I was not going to like the explanation.
“I thought you should be the first to hear about it.”
I could still remember too clearly when she wouldn’t have needed to justify my being the first, because I would have just been there when something happened. It wasn’t like I went out of my way to embrace her as the mother I’d never really gotten to know, but I was mature enough at that point to understand my dad needed a different kind of relationship to the one the two of us had, and I respected that Marcia seemed to be in it for him and not what he could offer her, which was nothing. So she’d probably come to trust me very quickly.
“I’m moving to the mainland,” said Marcia. “I’ve been offered a really good position at my company’s head office in Brisbane, something I can’t possibly pass up. We’ll be out of here in six weeks’ time.”
“But…”
Marcia looked over at Dad, giving Tim a ride on his back and roaring at Toby like a dinosaur instead of helping them pack all the drawings they wanted to take with them. “I know this is going to be hard on you and your dad, obviously I can’t just fly the boys over every few weeks, but I want you to know you’ll be welcome to visit any time you like.”
She was shuffling her feet a lot and I thought I knew exactly why. Of course she couldn’t just pack up the twins and move all the way across the country and tell Dad to lump it.
At the moment they had an unofficial custody arrangement Marcia had come up with where she had them at her new place most of the time ‘for stability’, and I’d encouraged Dad to go along with it at the time, because I was terrified he’d mess up so badly with them during his drinking episodes he’d lose them entirely. But Dad was a lot better now, and even if I understood Marcia’s reluctance to change things, he deserved more time with Toby and Tim going into the future, not less.
Marcia was getting in ahead of time with me to get me on side. She wanted me to break this to Dad, to make him okay with it. But there was no reason I had to do that. I could just as easily encourage him to kick up a fuss. Tell her she couldn’t just drag his kids off somewhere he would hardly ever see them. Go to court—
Yeah, and that would play out so well for him, wouldn’t it? Marcia had always been good about everything she’d seen in those bad months. She’d never held it up to him after, I didn’t think it was her way… but I bet that would all change if he tried to stop her from doing what she wanted to do with her career. Marcia was ambitious. I think that was what attracted her to Dad, back when she thought he was kind of the same. I bet she would turn up to court with a lovingly handwritten and dated list of all the times Dad had been a flake who didn’t deserve to see his sons.
I had to appreciate she was doing me a good turn though. If she’d just told both of us together, I would have had no opportunity to figure out how to deal with Dad’s inevitable bad reaction. Or maybe even convince her to change her mind.
I tried to choose my words carefully, but I didn’t have anything but the sad truth. “You know we won’t be able to visit, Marcia.”
“I know,” Marcia admitted. “It does bother me… you know I would help you out, financially, if I could. But short of buying the damn plane tickets for you, which I won’t be able to afford very often… well, I’m far too aware of what your father is like with money.”
And she also knew it wasn’t her fault, of course. I tried again. “Surely there’s some arrangement that would work out. You could fly down with them and have them stay for longer periods…”