Page 39 of When You Were Mine

“Are you kidding me?” I hiss. “I couldn’t answer a single question.”

“I know,” he says. “Ballsy.”

“Not ballsy. Incompetent.”

“Relax,” he says. “It’s a quiz, not the goddamn SATs.”

“Relax?” I say, my face getting hot from frustration. “Do you know quizzes are twenty percent of our grade? If I get an F on this one, that means that even if I pull As on all the rest, the odds of still getting a B in this class even if I work and study constantly for the rest of the semester are very likely. And a B is a 3.0. Do you know what Stanford’s admission average is? It’s like a 4.3.”

“Breathe.”

I exhale and fold my head down onto my desk, knocking my forehead on the wood. When I look up, Len is smiling.

“You’re so dramatic,” he says. “The way I see it, it’s not that big of a deal. But if it really means that much to you, fine.”

He takes his quiz out from under my hand and erases his name, putting mine in its place. Then he takes my quiz and erases mine, writing his own.

“Could you cool it with the hysteria now?” he says. “?’Cause that panic attack was really getting in the way of my Monday.”

My mouth hangs open as he puts a one hundred on one quiz and a zero on the other and hands both of them to Lauren to pass up to the front.

“What did you do?”

He puts his hand on my shoulder. “Helped a fellow classmate out. Revolutionary, I know.”

“You justcheated.”

He looks behind him. “I cannot catch a break around here.”

“You’re going to get an F now.”

“So?”

“Don’t you care?”

“Not really.”

“That’syour problem,” I say, anger boiling up to my throat.

“My problem?”

“You don’t care about anything.”

“Correction: I don’t care about anything unimportant.”

“But I just explained to you—”

Len holds up his hand. “I get you’re anxious about Stanford, or whatever. All I’m saying is that there’s more to life than obsessing over quizzes.”

“I get it. I’m lame. Just some totally type A nerd you have to work with. I just can’t believe you’d go so far to prove it.”

Len laughs. “You must have had a really rough weekend. Because you sound wild.”

I sniff. “I did.”

“Look, that guy’s an ass,” Len says.

“Rob?”