Nocte Yin

Chapter Twelve

Savvy smiled. “Yes, thank you. And you? How was your Christmas?”

“Good.”

“And New Years?”

Her smile instantly crooked. “New Years was… great.”

“Really?” Savvy asked hesitantly, noticing how stiff Nocte’s cheeks were.

“Yes!” Nocte insisted. “We visited the Elders and… had fun.”

“Good,” Savvy said decidedly.

Not really, but Nocte wasn’t going to correct her.

“You ready for exams?” she asked, quickly changing topics.

Savvy wavered. “I think so?”

“Me too.”

#

Nocte was not ready for exams.

She had not expected it to be like this.

Hundreds of pens scrawled over hundreds of papers. A giant hourglass stood at the front of the Examination Hall, slowly emptying away. Her pen broke and she quickly discarded it for another with a shaking hand. She swore it was too hot in the room as a cart stopped by to pick up the textbook she was returning.

Nocte swallowed as she leaned over her paper, preventing others from cheating. Princess Vanessa was writing the exam behind her; Paine and Noir elsewhere. Savvy was in the desk next to hers, a shaking ball of nerves with her eyes moving erratically from one question to the next.

If Nocte wasn’t so worried over her own exam, she would have spared some time to pity her friend.

Everyone was trying to cheat. Professors and their aids paraded in-between the desks to discourage such actions, but if anyone managed to cheat, then bravo (!), the professors had taught them well.

But for Nocte, cheating was not an option. She had more pride than that.

That didn’t, however, change the fact that she had hardly studied. Two weeks before the exams, all the professors had given them last-minute assignments to do. Several times she had wanted to order one of the younger students to do it for her. (Apparently, that was what everyone else had done.) She had resisted temptation, of course, which had left her with no time to study.

But that was okay, or so she had thought. At Athena, she had never really needed to study to get an eighty before, but apparently Evil was different. But it wasn’t like she hadn’t listened to the lectures or copied notes or did the homework. It was that she hadn’t wanted to listen to the lectures, copy notes or do the homework.

She never wanted to go to Evil, period.

So now she was in the middle of an exam with the afternoon sun barbequing the already sweating-from-nerves students and Paine glaring at her every few minutes-

And she was stuck on the first question.

Nocte cursed and wracked her brain for the answer, but knew she’d never find it. Eventually, she bull-shited her way through the first set of questions, hoping that she had got at least fifty percent, before moving onto the next set of questions.

As the hourglass drained, students began to exit the room, done but not perfect. Finally, Nocte looked over her answers one last time before handing it in and leaving the hall with sigh of relief. Savvy, on the other hand, was still scribbling feverishly when Nocte closed the door behind her.

She figured she might as well wait for-

Sploosh!

The bucket hit her head before landing on the floor. Nocte felt the water soak through her uniform and sighed. Of course Paine was there to witness her humiliation. Of course Noir was there to cackle away. Of course Princess Vanessa was present to wrinkle her nose.