Afterglow

08

She looks over at me, down at my test, then locks eye contact with me again. She shrugs, placing her face in the palm of her hands, smirking at me. "Better luck next time."

With that, she ignores me for the rest of the class period.

Game on Juliana Walker.

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About A Week Ago

We jumped around a little with our AP Chemistry curriculum, and now, we're currently reviewing how to balance reactions. Worst of all, we're learning how to balance Redox reactions, and I only half understand what we're doing.

Right now, we're working on a graded partner worksheet again. Julie seems to be flying through it, while I'm slowly trudging along but I think I'm right.

"Hey." Devin walks up to Julie and I's lab table with his worksheet in hand. "Do any of you get this?"

Before I could tell Devin our grades fucked, Julie waves him over. "I know how to do it. Let me see what you have."

"Oh thank god. My partner and I have absolutely no idea what we're doing." Devin lets out a sigh of relief while passing his paper over to Julie.

She takes a scan through his paper. I don't even know how she's reading his handwriting. The other day he came up to me in the locker room to compare lab results, and I couldn't read a damn thing.

Julie clicks her mechanical pencil so lead is out, and circles some part of his paper. "You're honestly on the right track. You just didn't balance the electrons right."

Devin smacks his head with the palm of his hand. "You're right. I don't know how I missed it."

Julie smiles at Devin. "It's ok. Everyone makes little mistakes like these. The electrons should be six each."

I look down at my paper, scanning through the scribbles of what I call numbers, and I don't see a single six electrons written anywhere.

"Six electrons?" Devin looks up from correcting his paper as Julie puts her pencil down to look at me. "I'm sorry, but I don't have six electrons written anywhere when balancing the equations and I'm pretty sure I'm right."

Julie shakes her head, lips pierced together. "No. There definitely should be six electrons while balancing. Your work must be wrong."

"Another argument?" Mrs. High comes up to us, leaning against the countertop.

"Yes. I was correcting Devin's paper, and I pointed out how he needed to balance number two out with six electrons. Jace, here, doesn't have six electrons written anywhere. Now, we're debating who's right." Julie explains. Mrs. High looks between the two of us amused before she starts to go through Julie's work.

I shake my head at her, standing my ground. "I'm right here. You must have messed up along the way while you were speeding through these equations."

"How does knowing what to do effect my work?" She asks, eyes challenging me.

"Error. You're not looking closely enough like me."

She scoffs. "You mean not going as slow as you."

Devin stifles a laugh, while Julie looks at me all confidently.

"Sometimes accuracy is better than being fast."

"Julie's work seems right." Julie shoots me an 'I told you so' look, while I roll my eyes. There goes my ego. "What did you do wrong?"