Ideal School Life (3)

Chickens and cows on a farm.

Chickens and cows on a farm, and Farmer Marie has to count how many legs they have.

“Sakura-sensei!”

I should’ve known better than to whisper-yell an ironic nickname in the middle of a tense exam, but I didn’t care. Seeing Marie’s questions had triggered me beyond the point of English, and I was mentally prepared to cuss the school out in hyperfluent Japanese sex noises if it really got down to that.

Thankfully, it didn’t seem like Boobies noticed me saying her pet name, only that I’d raised my hand for her to come over. But the delay between my arm going up and her noticing was so short I couldn’t help but feel she somehow predicted I’d end up doing this.

“Yes, Darren?”

Her expression was even more patronising than usual.

I wasn’t about to fail by pointing out she was a bitch, however, so I picked a much more topical complaint.

“Not even Terence Tao could prove this shit in 40 minutes, Stacy. There’s something wrong with my paper.”

I don’t know why I called her Stacy.

Evidently, Boobies didn’t either, because she gawked at me for a split-second like I was retarded. FOR THE RECORD I AM NOT. Then she looped back into the same answer she gave Erica.

“Like the instructions say, you may request a new set of questions by turning—”

“COME ON!” I whispered. “That excuse might work on someone else, but not me. You can’t bullshit me when something is clearly—”

“Then reset the paper. And stop being rude, or I’m going to fucking fail you. Understand?”

“…”

She smiled, waved me off, then turned around faster than I could say “menopause”.

Holy shit.

Women.

I watched Ms. Emi’s figure recede as she sauntered over to the teacher’s desk. As I did, a few intrusive thoughts popped into my mind: The first was to throw my tablet at her, the second was to pick up a ballpoint pen and stab Marie (I’m not sure why I brought her into this), whilst the third was to start taking off all my clothes as fast as I could and start screaming about “society” as I beat my blazer against the floor — ideally I’d sneak at least three whips in before getting sedated in the neck again. Sadly, my desire to be normal was burning as much as my determination to not be a sex offender in that moment, so in the end I settled on an illusory fourth option: seething and coping.

Dr. Sakura Emi? More like, “My husband won’t fuck me anymore so now I have to take it out on my male students! I hate men! All men are bastards! I’m going to go fuck Darren now!” AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA—

Sigh.

31:17.

As much as I wanted to sit there and fantasise about Boobies injuring herself, I knew I had a responsibility to score well on the test. After all, I’d never scored below 90% on a Math exam before, and I wasn’t about to let the one I got mugged off by a teacher be the first. More importantly, I’d already decided beforehand that I’d give up on school if I got ranked lower than Erica… which was okay at first, except now I didn’t feel like giving up after meeting Bryan and Marie.

I am going to ace this, or shit myself trying.

But how exactly?

To do that, I needed to overcome one glaring issue: the seat I chose.

In most other positions, I could’ve checked three other tablets: the ones on my right and left, as well as the person in front assuming they were short enough. Unfortunately, Bryan happened to be Bryan with his Bryan-esque physique, and sitting in the last column meant there was no person on my left — only a window. That was great for daydreaming during lessons, but not so great if you were trying to cheat during an exam. Even worse was the fact that despite having a clear view of Marie, she was hunching over her tablet as she wrote, so all I could see was a bunch of pink hair and a middle school problem sum typed in Calibri.

If only I could see what she was writing. That way, I could…

Wait.

After realising something that should’ve occurred to me sooner, I raised my hand. In my defence, I’d never had to think so hard about how to cheat before. Once Boobies noticed, she approached my desk with another condescending look that suggested she’d been desperately waiting to piss me off for a second time.

“This again?”

One of her eyebrows was so arched I was afraid it’d jump off her face and latch onto me. Well, too late. I’d committed.

“Can I go to the toilet?”

Rather than instantly telling me to fuck off, Ms. Emi surprisingly took a glance at her phone. Maybe she was checking the time, maybe she was liaising with the other examiners if there were already students in the toilet… but it was happening.

I was about to pull the heist of a lifetime.

I’m such a genius.

I’m a goddamn psych—

“No,” she said.

“Wait, what? Why?”

“You don’t meet the requirements to use the toilet based on your bladder and bowel levels. During a 40-minute paper, we only allow students to use the toilet during emergencies.”

No way.

They had a hidden camera in my ass.

“Of course, I understand that you might’ve been looking for a way to destress during the exam, but you’ll have to find another solution that isn’t using the toilet. Sorry, but these are the rules.”

“At least you’re not being rude about it this time…”

“What?”

“Er, nothing. Thanks.”

Ms. Emi smiled and stepped away, but then hastily turned around as if remembering something.

“Right, one more thing. Don’t call me for anything stupid again. One more unnecessary question, and I’ll fail you on the spot. Don’t think I’ll let you off lightly the third time, Darren Chong, because I will do it.”

“…”

“Don’t test me.”

I’m going to club you in the head you inbred—

Breathe.

I picked up my tablet with every intention of tossing it at Ms. Emi, but at the last moment I decided to just turn it over.

Don’t get angry just because you were wrong.

All things considered, I should’ve expected this outcome. If the school was going to spend millions on student accommodation and nutrition, they probably wouldn’t design their exams with such an easy trick like checking other tablets — or, at the very least, the solution wouldn’t be so biased in favour of something random like seating allocation. I was just angry because the first conclusion I’d arrived at wasn’t the right one.

I leaned back in my chair.

You know, the idea of checking other tablets would’ve immediately occurred to me as flawed if I’d just thought about the exam’s rules logically.

Let’s go over this more carefully, and more calmly.

Fact one: “The questions in this diagnostic test are scaled to your relevant Affinities.”

Disregarding that “relevant Affinities” meant nothing to me at the moment, the “scaled” part of the statement implied that every student was meant to face equal levels of relative difficulty on the test. I wasn’t sure why I’d forgotten that. Still, this sort of assumption was highly subjective, and would be proven far more easily if I was sitting around four tablets instead of just mine and Marie’s.

Thankfully, I wasn’t just limited to two information sources.

Fact two.

I glanced at the girl on my right one more time, then the timer.

28:31.

I still couldn’t see what she was writing, but she’d just moved onto Question 3. With 28 minutes left and 5 questions in total, either the questions were ridiculously easy to her, or she didn’t know how to solve 1 and 2 properly.

Which was it?

She’s right handed, and I’m sitting on her left.

I can see her questions, but I can’t check her working.

Her writing document is on the wrong side of the tablet.

My initial response to this problem was to get up and find another angle, but listening to Emi mention “destressing” made me realise something. The clue was in my face the whole time.

Earlier on, when Marie was writing fluffy notes with hearted ‘i’s and filling up her seating plan, she was sitting upright such that I could glimpse everything without meaning to. Now she was bent over to the point where she was effectively lying on the table. Maybe this was a sign of being absorbed in focus, but I was more inclined to believe she didn’t know what she was doing because of something else.

QED.

Now, fact three.

The difficulty level.

When everyone first got their papers, they immediately reset them. Even Erica caved in and asked for a nonexistent formula book. Based on her personality, I don’t think she would’ve resorted to an excuse like that for a normal high school math paper even if it was extremely difficult on the surface. She definitely sensed something wrong.

Erica Park is someone who follows instructions, so the fact she ignored the exam’s preamble is quite telling.

Okay.

Putting all three clues together, my theory was that everyone was given a set of impossible questions relative to their current abilities. What for, I’d probably figure out after, but it was increasingly clear this was intentionally designed to be impossible to pass… while giving the impression to examinees they simply got a difficult paper. They made it such that it seemed believable a “gifted” high schooler could ace the exam, relative to whatever you thought gifted ability was. If only I hadn’t recognised every question on my papers from past-year International Math Olympiads and the Oxford Mathematics Prospectus, maybe I would have bought into the scam like everyone else at three flips and attempted the paper in futility. Or maybe I just had a huge ego.

Great.

I figured out the catch.

But so what?

Just because I figured out the catch didn’t mean that I found out how to abuse it. It was like clicking on the “hint” button on a chess puzzle and having it highlight a piece — you still needed to calculate the moves and its continuation if you couldn’t see the answer right away.

I couldn’t figure out what the continuation was.

What would the school possibly stand to gain from giving a bunch of kids an impossible quiz?

I leaned back—

Oh.

Right.

Bryan talked about it earlier. This school wasn’t a normal school.

“Neural scan complete. Vitals OK, Stress OK.”

It was obvious. The answer was that the school was stressing us out.

As that thought anchored itself into the forefront of my mind, I very calmly flipped over my tablet and looked at my new Question 1.

QUESTION 1: Show that (cosec x -1)(cosec x +1)(sec x -1)(sec x +1) = 1. Hence or otherwise, show that (cosec x -1)(cosec x +1)(sec x -1)(sec x +1) = 2tan²2x - 5sec2x for 0 < x ≤360°. [8 marks]

Middle-school questions.

“Shit, I really got it.”

I said it loudly enough for Erica to hear, grabbed my stylus, then started scribbling away on my tablet with 24 minutes to go. Surprisingly, Ms. Emi didn’t seem to care, because I didn’t get any warnings for turning around and purposefully taunting another student.