Finals week is the worst.
"I hate all of you. None of you have to study." I was sitting on the living room floor, attempting to study math, but it wasn't going well.
"Maybe if you hadn't cheated all year off of everyone else, you wouldn't be in this predicament." Carlisle had a point, but I wasn't going to tell him that.
Instead, I silently went back to my work and attempted to study. That lasted a whole 20 minutes before I looked around and realized half of the family was missing. "Hey, where's everyone else?" I asked Emmet.
"They left like an hour ago to go hunting before school tomorrow," he told me, putting his DS down. "Jasper literally said goodbye to you."
"Well, I don't remember any of that," I told him.
"Because you were studying so carefully?" He taunted, knowing how bad I was at studying.
"Can you just come down here and help me?"
"Fine." Emmet set down his DS and moved to the floor next to me.
The two of us attempted to figure out what was going on with my study sheet, but we were both confused. Carlisle had left the room long ago, and I was not going to admit to him that I needed his help. We worked together for hours on math as I attempted to figure out the first problem, but nothing we did made any sense. It wasn't until everyone else came home that I finally conceded.
Edward and Jasper walked into the room to see Emmet and me surrounded by books and papers as we attempted to figure out the math problem. "What are you doing?" Jasper asked us.
I turned around to face them and said, "Please help. I have no idea what's going on on my math study sheet."
Edward and Jasper walked over to us. Jasper sat down next to me as Edward looked over my shoulder to see the worksheet. In under 30 seconds, Edward told me, "You wrote the problem down wrong."
I groaned in frustration as I leaned against Jasper. "You both are not the brightest," he told me.
"Just help me pass high school," I pleaded.
"Of course."
From there, Jasper took over helping me study, and before I knew it, it was time to take my finals. All of my classes were hard, and it was even harder because I had been distracted most of the year with other stuff instead of actually learning anything. By some saving grace, and I'll admit a little bit of cheating, I managed to get through all my finals.
As I walked into the house after the last day of finals, Carlisle was standing at the door with a disapproving look.
"What?" I asked him as we walked inside.
"Something tells me you cheated on your tests," he told me.
I pretended I didn't know what he was talking about. "I did not. I took them all fair and square."
"You got nearly perfect scores on math, and on Sunday, you didn't know how to do the first problem."
We all walked into the living room as Carlisle spoke to see Esme standing with her arms crossed while Emmet, Bree, and Rosalie were sitting on the couch. "Jasper's studying techniques really helped me," I told Carlisle.
Edward and Jasper smiled at my response as Edward walked over to Bree. Alice and Noah laughed at my response behind me, not helping my case.
"Now that we're all in here," Esme started saying, "who helped Emma cheat?" One by one, she looked directly at everyone in the room before landing on Emmet, who was squirming in his seat. "Emmet, do you know anything about this?"
"We all did," He suddenly said, making everyone groan and yell at him.
"Emmet!" I yelled, upset he caved so quickly.
"She was pressuring me!"
"She asked you a question."
"Enough," Carlisle said, stopping our argument. "Why did you all help her cheat? I told you to let her do it on her own."
"She was going to fail," Noah told him.
"You don't know that. She could have surprised us all," Esme responded.
"No." Alice stepped forward as she talked. "She was for sure going to fail if we didn't help her."
Carlisle simply looked at me in confusion and disappointment. "Why were you going to do so bad? You're a smart girl."
"We've kinda been dealing with things all year," I told him honestly. "I hadn't been fully paying attention to school until after spring break, and that was too late to learn enough to pass."
"We figured we owed it to her to cheat since most of the distractions were our fault," Rosalie told him.
"I guess... that's fine," Carlisle told us before turning around and walking out of the room.
"He's just upset because you had a chance to get through high school normally, and that got messed up," Edward told me. "He's not really mad that you cheated."
The rest of us sat down and relaxed after a week of taking tests. We did not bring up our finals until Sunday when all our final grades were emailed to Carlisle.
We were all watching High School Musical when Carlisle walked into the room. "Emma, did you cheat on all your finals?" He asked me.
"No," I told him, not looking away from the screen. "Why?"
"Which ones did you cheat on?"
"Math and Science. But I did English, History, and Art on my own." I turned away from the screen to look at Carlisle after speaking, and a grin broke out on his face. "What?"
"You got an A+ on your English and History final, Emma."
"I did!" I yelled in excitement. "How did I do that?"
"I have no idea," he told me, "but I'm so proud of you!"
"Oh, Emma! That's incredible!" Esme called out, standing up and joining Carlisle.
I had never seen Carlisle or Esme look so happy before, and it made me so happy to see how happy they were about my dumb test score. So, I jumped up off of the couch and ran to give both of them a hug. I always wanted to make Carlisle and Esme proud of me, and I was happy I had done just that.
"You should tell them what you're thinking," Edward called out, probably reading Alice's mind and my mind.
Carlisle and Esme pulled back from the hug as Carlisle looked at me with scrunched-up eyes. "What's up?" He asked me.
I paused, unsure what Edward was talking about, before looking straight at Carlisle and Esme and realizing what he meant. I smiled slightly before saying, "I'm just happy to make you proud, Mom and Dad."
"Oh, Emma!" Esme yelled, pulling me back into a hug.
Carlisle joined her as he said, "You'll always make us proud."
I could tell how much what I said meant to the two of them. While they had adopted all of us at some point in time and we acted like a family, none of us called them Mom or Dad even though they had called us sons and daughters before. For everyone else in the family, it was weird because they were all so close in age and didn't really have either of them as an actual parental figure.
It was different for me. I was young when Carlisle and Esme adopted me, and I felt like they had taken over as parents for me for real.
"I love you, Mom and Dad."
Both Carlisle and Esme pulled me closer.
"We love you too," Esme told me.
"More than you'll ever know," Carlisle said.
Who knew finals, the thing I was dreading most, would have been the thing to make me realize how I felt about Carlisle and Esme. Life is weird sometimes.