The Odd One Out

Chapter 3.4 - Inexplicable Curiosity

Indeed, if Horikita was here, she could've saved both of them. After all, she had more than enough points after blackmailing those third-years on the first day.

That's why when she wanted to talked to me, I invited her to my room. I poured her some apple juice, the apple juice I had bought on the first day of school at the convenience store. The apple juice I had opened but never drank. The apple juice that went bad after I left it in my fridge for almost two months.

To avoid suspicion, I also poured some apple juice in my own cup, but that was apple juice I had bought the day before.

I intentionally gave Horikita the expired apple juice so that she would be absent today. Drinking juice that has gone bad will give you extreme stomach aches that can last up to five days depending on how bad the juice is. Of course, I wouldn't have done so if I didn't know the date of the results, but Chabashira-sensei told us that it would be today.

If I couldn't give Horikita a cup of apple juice, I wouldn't have been able to go ahead with my plan. I needed to have a talk with Horikita in my room. That's why I intentionally made her arrange the study groups, saying it was because she needed to work on her leadership or what not. After the midterms exams ended, she forced herself to come thank me, and that's when I invited her to my room and gave her the apple juice.

That's why today, nobody could help Ike and Yamauchi in this class. Perhaps Kouenji had enough points, but he obviously couldn't care less. Nobody could help them, nobody but me.

In other words, I was in full control of the situation, just like I had planned.

On the answer sheet I sent Ike and Yamauchi before the midterms, I had imitated Kushida's handwriting. The reason I asked Kushida to copy the answer sheet I initially made was not so that she could get all the credit, which is what I told her, but so that I could see how her handwriting looked like. For those two, as long as they thought Kushida was the one who wrote it, they would brainlessly memorize whatever was on there. Of course, they could never memorize all of the answers even if they wanted to. The proof was that none of their other exam scores surpassed the 50s even though they had the same answer sheets as anyone else.

I intentionally wrote wrong answers for some English questions. I didn't change anything else from the original answer sheet I made. It was best if both of their failures were in a single subject. I chose English because we knew before hand that it would be the last exam, which meant that one was more likely forget the answers they memorized. By making a new answer sheet for the English midterm exam with a few wrong answers in Kushida's handwriting, I was certain that Ike and Yamauchi would foolishly copy the wrong answers onto the exam paper.

In addition, I was sure they wouldn't even blame the answer sheet, since they thought Kushida was the one that made them. They would never blame Kushida.

Now, I already knew that the passing grade for the English exam wouldn't be 32. After all, everyone got extremely high marks, so I assumed the passing grade would be above 40. The English exam contained 20 questions, each of them worth 5 points. Therefore, I wrote wrong answers for 12 of the hardest questions of the exam. I couldn't guarantee that they could get 8 questions right and get exactly 40 points. That's why I told Chabashira-sensei to up their points to one below the passing grade in the worst case. I still don't know the actual scores for both of them as I am yet to pay the points, but I would be surprised if they actually got 40 points.

Of course, I had no idea the passing grade would be exactly 41, that's just a coincidence, but I did guess it would be somewhere around that range, based on the performances of the Ayanokouji Group. Indeed, I had created a mock exam extremely similar to the actual midterms, and I made Airi, Haruka, Ken and Akito take it during the last study session, saying it was preparation for the midterm exams. I took their data and took into consideration the range of academic ability of the students in our class, and I predicted that the average score of the class would be at least 80, knowing that we would also know the answers in advance.