Scholarly

December - The Thing About Finals

This starts really light and fun and gets really heavy. Sorry 'bout that. But hey, at least it's longer...? Hope you're still liking this! Also, I included some ~recommended listening~ for this chapter. Hope you like that, too.

Finals week had Sydney at wit's end.

"Alternate interior angles are supplementary. Alternate interior angles are supplementary. Alternate interior angles..."

"Uh, Syd?"

Sydney glanced up. "Oh, hey. What's up?"

"Nothing, just...wondering why you were talking to yourself," Leah explained with a slightly nonplussed expression.

Sydney grimaced. "That was out loud?" She hadn't been aware of that.

"Yeah, but thanks for the tip." Leah grinned. "I can't remember anything."

"Yeah, hopefully we'll do okay. Some sophomores told me the geometry finals are really easy." Even if it weren't, Sydney was pretty sure she knew the geometry theorems well enough to get by, but extra review never hurt.

Leah nodded. "Hope so. I probably should've studied more."

"Same here," Vivian cut in, materializing suddenly with prominent bags under her eyes.

"You look exhausted," Sydney pointed out.

"I am," Vivian sighed miserably. "I was up until three studying bio."

"So you're going on, like, two hours of sleep?" Leah asked.

"Three," Vivian corrected with no conviction. "I'm gonna die."

"You're not going to die, Vivian. You're probably more prepared than anyone else." Sydney was fairly certain she'd studied enough to pass all of her finals in a coma; anything else would be against her nature.

"Which one is first?" Vivian asked, yawning.

"I think..." Sydney pulled out her phone and consulted a picture she'd taken of the schedule. "Bio's first. Room 338 with Larsson."

Leah groaned. Mr. Larsson, a physics teacher, had allegedly been yelled at multiple times for keeping the air conditioner in his classroom at least ten degrees colder than the budget allowed. "I'm shivering already," she deadpanned.

Suffice to say it this was an extraordinarily bad time for air conditioning. It was easy to forget with most of the school packed together like sardines in the library to get out of the cold, but winter had arrived, and like everything in Aspen, the season showed up in style. The entire campus was blanketed in white, every roof drooping under the weight of the snow. Icicles dangled from every available surface. Tristan and Ricardo had taken to plucking the icicles off of low-hanging roofs and hurling them at each other (that had gotten them a detention after about two seconds). And now, following a storm that'd dropped slushy sleet on top of the existing snow, a coating of ice made the smallest movements treacherous.

It felt all too appropriate for that to happen during finals week. Now, the bells would signal imminent death in both the academic sense and the physical one.

"Twenty bucks they call the paramedics sometime this week," Vivian commented as they watched their classmates stream out the doors after the bell rang.

"No way I'd bet against that," said someone behind them. Sydney turned, finding Jess with a decidedly-not-finals-week-approved smirk. "Remember that junior who broke her foot back in October? It's gonna be like that, but...worse. Way, way worse."

"That happened to Steph once, didn't it?"

Sydney braced herself – I should've known – forgetting for a moment that wherever Jess went, Brandon wasn't far behind.