Chapter Text
From: mamapike8
To: autobiographical-q, ct_yankee_fan_00, ladiezman47, byronp86, movingvan87, thetardis7000, cheer_bear100, aireclayikepay91
CC: johnpike55
Subject: Secret Santa!
Hi gang,
I’ve gathered all of your Secret Santa wishes. Since we’re all scattered this year, I decided to email each of you the person you’ll be buying for and their wish. You should be getting that sometime in the next 24 hours. Well, one of you will just be getting a name, as I still haven’t received one person’s wish. (Hint, hint.)
Hope those of you off at college are doing well. Study hard and I’ll see you soon!
Love, Mom
I have to say it: I loved college. I’d expected it to be like high school, except for the whole ‘living with 1000 other kids in one building’ thing. But it was completely different. I could eat dinner at eleven-thirty one night and four-thirty the next. I could stay up all night if I wanted to. And the classes were way more interesting. I was taking a couple standard classes, composition and a math class. And then I had all kinds of interesting classes: Intro to communications, fundamentals of computer science and intro to public speaking. I’d already decided that the communications and computer science departments weren’t for me, but I still had a good time doing the assignments and participating in class discussions.
“Did you know we have a hospitality management degree here?” I asked my roommate Dave. I was looking at the school’s website, reading the list of majors in each department.
Dave rolled his eyes, because it was about the seventh time I’d made a similar announcement. “Shouldn’t you be studying?” he asked. How do I describe Dave? Three key things you need to know about him: he’s an economics major, and he doesn’t study too often, but when he does, he really buckles down. He’s a man of extremes—he’s either moving so fast he’s like a blur, or he’s crashed. He came off to school with no intention of ‘settling down’ but he met a girl the very first day he was here, and now he said ‘Jessica’ as often as I said ‘Haley.’
“You’re probably right,” I told Dave. I had been studying my communications notes until about ten minutes before. I decided to take a quick break and check my email. I had found the note from my mom to the whole family and I’d gotten a little distracted. I love Christmas. I look forward to it every year. I can’t explain it; it’s not like I still believe in Santa Claus or something, but the magic that goes with the jolly fat man who slides down your chimney to leave you presents had never really gone away for me. I love baking and cooking. I love shopping for presents (which is saying something, because normally I avoid shopping like the plague.) I don’t even mind having to clean the house to get ready for Christmas.
Of course, there was an extra element to it this year. Christmas also meant going home for the first time all school year. It meant getting to see Mom and Dad in person instead of talking to them on the phone. It meant sleeping in my own bed instead of one that had been slept in by probably forty other people, with a mattress more than five inches thick. It meant Haley.
Of course, I had to get through exams first. I am not a good test taker. I can study and study and feel prepared, and then when I sit down with the paper in front of me, everything just flies out of my head. I had an A in every class except communications, because the only grades in that class were test scores. I was hovering at a low B in there. I wanted to pull that up, but the final for that class was comprehensive. I was taking half an hour every day to study for the class, but I felt like it wasn’t doing me any good.
One last thing you should know about Dave: he’s good a reading people. Very good. I finally closed the school’s website and pulled my notes back out. I’d rewritten a few of them last week so they were more readable. I pulled the notebook up close to my face because the letters were all dancing. That had been happening more and more lately; I wasn’t sure if it was stress or if I needed glasses. Dave watched me closely and I knew he could see my frustration. “Don’t you have some friends in that class?” he asked me. “You guys should get together, make flashcards, quiz each other. Do Jeopardy. Everything’s always more fun with friends, even studying.”
He was right about that, but there was one key fact he was missing: I didn’t want all my friends to know what a dum-dum I was. It was bad enough that he knew how badly I freaked out before every test. Did I really want my classmates to see that side of me, too? I sighed and jiggled the notebook. “I’ll call Aaron later.” Aaron was one of my teammates who happened to be in my communications class.
Dave could tell I was lying. “What subject are you up to now?” he asked. He’d shoved aside his own notecards, indicating he was done for now.
“The history of television.”
“Oh, gag,” he said, sounding so much like his girlfriend that I stifled a laugh. “I remember how you struggled with that the first time around.” I remembered, too. He’d come in as I was shouting every curse word I could think of (and a few I made up) at my textbook. A few of the neighbors had been scared of me for a couple days afterward. “All those dates.”
I nodded. “I can’t keep them straight. I have all the facts in the right order, but I can’t keep the years right.”
Dave nodded sympathetically. “I’ve had that problem before too.” He took a look at his watch. “I’m so tired of studying I could just die. Thank goodness the semester is almost over.”
I wasn’t looking at it that way. All I could see was that I had five exams that were looming over me. As much as I wanted to look forward to the cheer of a Pike family Christmas, I couldn’t get excited about it for too long when finals were so much on my mind.
I leaned back over my notebook, trying to get the words to come back into focus. All I wanted to do at that moment was get up and run, but I forced myself to sit in my chair. One of my knees kept tapping, which really wasn’t helping things.
I was still staring at the same page of notes fifteen minutes later when Jessica showed up in the doorway. “How’s the studying going?” she asked both of us.
Dave had put all his books away, changed his clothes and even brushed his teeth over the last few minutes. “As well as it ever does,” he told her with a hug.
She kissed his jaw and he released his embrace. “And how about you, Jordan?” she asked me.
I didn’t lift my eyes off the page, even though I wasn’t getting anywhere with it. “Don’t mind him,” Dave told her as he grabbed a sweatshirt. “He’s gone insane. He’ll be back in his right mind this time next week.”
I shook myself and gave Jessica a sheepish grin. “Sorry, lost in my notes,” I said, trying to make a joke of it, though it didn’t seem to be working. “What are you two up to tonight?” I asked. It was Saturday evening and exams started Monday morning. A couple of my teammates had given me a piece of advice: take either Saturday or Sunday night off to blow off steam. Dave had really liked that idea, so he and Jessica were headed out for a night out on the town.
“It’s a mystery,” Jessica said. It was early December, but she was dressed without a jacket—so different from Connecticut. Mom had told me the night before that there was five inches of snow on the ground and it was probably ten degrees outside. “Dave won’t tell me what our plans are. But I will tell you he’s spending the night at my place, so you’ll have the room to yourself tonight.”
I wasn’t really looking forward to a whole night alone. It’s not that I’m scared to sleep by myself, but I’m used to having other people in the room. Whenever Dave spends the night at Jessica’s—which happens about once a week—I have trouble sleeping.
Add to that the fact that I had absolutely nothing to do but study and I was definitely not going to have a good evening. I didn’t have any plans and there was nothing on television. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t hear from Haley that evening. Ever since Thanksgiving, she’d called me a lot less—about two days a week. The first couple days, I’d worried about whether this said something about our relationship. After we finally spoke again, though, I stopped thinking that way. She sounded absolutely dead. Kitchen & Bath was open longer hours for the holiday. Haley was going in earlier in the day and getting home later at night. I felt for her because I knew she wanted to cut back her hours and work fewer days a week, but it was the busiest time of the year and the chances of that happening were slim. So she was toughing out the next couple weeks, not happy about it in any way. I was toughing the time out too, because no one seemed to understand my insecurities about tests the way she did. Or maybe, I just never showed them to anyone else.
That sounded more accurate.
Dave grabbed a sweater. “Take the night off, Jordan,” he said. “That communications final isn’t until Tuesday, right? And you’ve got tons of time to study. Relax—I know you know how. Have a few of my beers, even.”
I grunted at him. I couldn’t afford to take the night off. There was too much more for me to study still. But I knew if I told him that, I’d get a lecture—of the nice, “for-your-own-good” variety. Dave and Jessica left in a flurry of “see you laters” and I was alone.
I grabbed a can of energy drink and settled back in to studying. I put aside my communications book and picked up my computer science notes to review vocab. Even though I hadn’t slept much the night before, the energy drink was not the solution. Instead of making me less tired, it just made me more jittery. Still, I plunged on, hoping something was getting into my brain.
I had given up working on my vocabulary and was rereading another part of my communications book when there was a knock on the door. By that point, I don’t even know why I even had the book open. I was half asleep, the words were swimming all over the pages and I definitely wasn’t learning anything…but I wasn’t ready to admit defeat. I’d shut the door after Dave had left almost four hours earlier, but I hadn’t locked it. “Come in,” I called, not looking up from my book.
Jessica entered. She was laughing when she first slipped through the door, but the happy expression quickly left her face. “Dave left his bag here. I swear, he’d forget his head if it weren’t attached.” I eyed her briefly but then flicked my eyes back to my book. She leaned against my desk and made a face. “You haven’t been studying all night, have you?”
I shrugged. “I have to do well on these exams.”
“I get that. But you’re going to study yourself sick.” Jessica shook her head. “You already look kind of pale.” I shrugged at her again; I’d always been a little pale anyway. She scrunched up her mouth, and her expression reminded me so much of my mom when she wants to tell me that I’m on the wrong track, but she knows I won’t listen to her. “What would your girlfriend say if she saw you like this?”
I set the book down and pulled my knees up to my chest. Adam has told me before that I am the second-best pouter and tantrum-thrower in our family, but that night, I was aiming for first place. Haley is always telling Byron he needs to relax, so I could only imagine what she would say if she saw me now. We’d just gotten together when I had my last high school exams, but I hadn’t even blinked at those. I’d already been accepted to college, and it didn’t matter how well I did after that.
I imagined Haley’s voice in the back of my head: “You haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, and you haven’t been sleeping. It’s not going to matter how hard you study if you don’t take care of yourself.”
I wrapped my arms around my knees, looking toward the wall. Moments like this were the times I got the most homesick—because my mom would have come in with a sandwich and made me eat something if I’d skipped dinner. “I just want to get these exams over with so that I can go home,” I mumbled, more to myself than to Jessica.
“I get that,” she said in her best soothing teacher-to-be voice. “I think you just need to remember that, one way or the other, exams will be over by this time next week. You can either chill out and know you did the best you could because you were relaxed and prepared, or you can be carted off in a straightjacket. The choice is yours.”
Jessica left at that point, but I could hear her in the hallway, talking to Dave. “I’m worried about him,” she said.
Dave was a little more mindful of how thin the walls were in that dorm. “Once he gets through exams, he’ll be fine,” he replied in a lower voice. “He hasn’t been home all year, and you know he talks about Connecticut like it’s Eden or something.”
The two of them left, heading across campus back to Jessica’s room in an all-girls dorm. I thought they were being overly dramatic. Sure, I’d gotten pretty testy before a couple of exams earlier this year. And yeah, I’d forgotten to eat lunch. And dinner. And maybe my gut was so wrenched up that I’d slept about two hours the night before.
Okay, so maybe they were right. But how exactly was I supposed to go about relaxing when my stomach was tied in knots and I couldn’t shut off my brain? My gut sloshed around and I decided to start with something to eat. (It was eight p.m. I’d last eaten nearly eleven hours before.) I made a sandwich and found a banana Dave had smuggled back from the cafeteria that morning. I turned the television on, but I don’t even know what I watched. What I do know is, in spite of the energy drink, I fell asleep on Dave’s decrepit old recliner chair and slept through until the morning…the paper plate from my sandwich still on my lap.
***
Although I felt better physically (except for a crick in my neck) when I woke up that morning, my attitude toward my tests hadn’t really shifted. I woke to find Dave standing in front of the bathroom door, smirking at me. “Did you sleep like that all night?” he asked. I growled at him, rubbing sleep from my eyes. “Hey, no, I’m not knocking it. At least you slept, and obviously you ate something. You’re looking a little better already.”
I eased out of the chair, feeling several joints pop in the process. “Do we have any orange juice left?” I asked him.
“Yup, bought some the other day, but it didn’t make it into the fridge.” He reached under his desk and pulled out a miniature carton of juice. “I brought some bagels and cream cheese back from One World. Have one before you get back into your studies.”
I made a face at him, partly for sounding like a parent and partly because he had to go and remind me about exams. “Thanks, Mom,” I snarked, but I accepted both the orange juice and the bagel.
“You’re welcome, Son,” Dave quipped. He sat down at his computer and opened up a Sudoku website; he starts every day with the latest puzzle, because he says it keeps his mind sharp. I sat down at my computer also, forcing myself to eat the bagel slowly. I opened my email and found another note from Mom about Secret Santa. Before I opened it, I started a countdown: it was Sunday morning, meaning I had fewer than 156 hours until I was home.
The email was a bit disappointing. I had been anxiously awaiting the announcement of the wish I needed to fulfill. I figured it would give me something other than my exams to focus on. But I was going to have to keep waiting. “Jordan,” Mom began, “You’re buying a gift for Mallory. Unfortunately, she hasn’t gotten back to me with what her wish is. I’m going to give her a couple more days, so hold tight, okay? Love, Mom.”
“Hold tight.” That was pretty funny, considering I felt like I’d already lost my grip. I checked my other messages; nothing new. Both of my brothers were busy preparing for finals as well. Adam had mentioned how one of his grades was still ‘borderline,’ so he’d been putting a lot of effort into studying for that class, while Byron was building something for one of his classes that was giving him fits. (Byron freaks out as badly about exams as I do, even though he always gets his A in the end.)
I wasn’t quite ready to pull out my studies again. My stomach wasn’t as upset as it had been the day before—eating seemed to have helped that—but I was afraid that opening a textbook was going to put me right back where I had started. So I took a few more minutes and composed an email of my own. “Honey, I don’t know if this will help how stressed out you are, but I’ll be home in fewer than 156 hours. qqqqqq.” I could remember distinctly a phone conversation in which Haley had asked why xoxo meant hugs and kisses. We’d never answered the question, but I’d told her that Qs signified some serious heavy petting, just to hear her laugh. I’d ended every email I’d sent to her since with at least one Q.
I dug around my stuff and found my fundamentals of computer science book. That was my Monday exam and the teacher had hinted that it was mostly going to be defining vocabulary terms as well as filling the pictures in on a few diagrams. Diagrams weren’t a problem, because I’d always been good at that. Show me an item, let me touch it and I’ll learn it just fine; show me a picture later and I’ll remember it. It was defining terms that was going to be harder. I’d done everything I could with the list I’d made. “Dave, can I buy some notecards off you?” I asked him.
He chuckled. “My mom knows how much I love notecards. I seriously have almost a desk drawer full; she buys them at the dollar store.” He reached into the drawer and pulled out a fresh pack, which he tossed at me. “They’re on me. Merry Christmas.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Glad to know I’m worth a dollar-pack of cards to you,” I observed.
“Jordan, you owe me thirty bucks so far this year for beer. Stop being such a tight-ass about studying and we’ll call it even, okay?”
In my head I added up all the times I’d told him I’d pay him back for the alcohol his older brother had bought us and found out he was wrong—I owed him forty dollars. “Yeah, okay,” I said guiltily. I had no intention of actually writing off my debt to him, but it was easier to keep quiet about it and instead turn back to my new notecards. It took me nearly an hour to write them all out and then I spent another hour reviewing them. In this time, Dave had covered a little bit of each of his subjects. “I don’t like to dwell too long on any one topic,” he’d told me during midterms, “because I don’t think it helps.”
I set my notecards aside, but then thought the better of it. I dug deep into one of my dresser drawers until I found an envelope. Inside were my social security card and birth certificate, a one hundred dollar bill (for emergencies) and a couple of other odds and ends. Among the items in there was a hair elastic, the type girls with long hair wear. I’d found it in my jeans pocket one day, with vague memories of Haley asking me to hold onto it when she’d taken her hair down while we were out on a date. I’d never remembered to return it to her, and somehow it had ended up in my “important documents file.” I grabbed the elastic, which was purple and sparkly—very Haley—and wrapped it around my notecards. Seeing it there, catching the lamp light, made me take a deep breath. 156 hours. I could survive that. And exams.
The resolve didn’t last too terribly long. My English final was an essay, and I’d basically figured out there was no way for me to study for that. I reviewed the terms and ideas we’d gone over all semester, but I didn’t feel too bad about that grade. I had a solid A, and I’d already turned in a research paper that was the real bulk of my grade. I was okay in statistics, too. I have a way with numbers—I even scored higher on the math portion of the SAT than Byron did. Plus, those two finals weren’t until Friday, anyway. I could worry about them after I’d passed (or flunked) computer science and communications.
And so I came back to communications. The class hadn’t been too terribly bad, but I’d come to loathe it with a fiery passion. When I’d first signed up for it, I’d been seriously flirting with the idea of going into radio or television production. Now, I never wanted to hear either of those words ever again.
I had a handle on most of the vocabulary in that class. I could tell a cathode ray tube from a transistor. But you throw too many dates at me at once and I just get confused. During the last test when I’d had to deal with the history of television, the professor had written the dates and expected us to fill in the events that had occurred then. As I’d told Dave the night before, I’d memorized the facts in order, but I just could not remember the years. I’d had to makes some guesses, but most of the points I’d lost on that test had come from that section.
I didn’t realize I was sighing and grunting and making other displeased noises until Dave—who had gone back to studying for his Western Civilization class—crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it at me. “Hey,” he said, “Some of us are trying to learn over here.
“As are some of us over here.”
“Yeah, but you sound like someone’s torturing you while you’re doing it,” he observed. He turned toward me instead of addressing his desk. “What are you attempting to study?”
“I’m back at the history of television.”
“Again?”
“It’s what I need the most help with,” I pointed out. “None of these dates is getting into my head. Every time I try to study them, I just want to jump out of my seat, run out the door, head off campus, keep running until I reach the ocean, and then maybe start swimming until I hit whatever’s on the other side.”
Dave jumped out of his seat. I’d been kidding about everything after running out the door, but he seemed to have caught the spirit behind the whole statement. “Well, let’s solve that. Get your notes and your book and put them right here.” He shoved aside his backpack and I obliged. I had absolutely no idea what he was planning, but I knew him well enough to know it’s easier just to follow him when he’s five steps ahead of me. I always catch up eventually.
Dave looked down the ‘hallway’ of our room, the part that leads underneath the loft in the back from the front half of the room. He’d bought a couple carpet runners that ran the front half of the room. Both were a little dirty. We weren’t exactly slobs, but the room was cluttered and lived in, and both runners probably needed a vacuum. Dave rolled up one runner, taking various papers and other crap with it. Then he laid out a row of computer paper. “Do you see what I’m doing here?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nope.”
He rummaged around in his desk for a while before emerging with a roll of bright green duct tape. “It’s a timeline, like we used to make back in elementary school. You put the first date over here,” Dave gestured vaguely to one end of the paper while taping an entire walkway of white paper to the floor, “and your last date over there.”
I nodded, but I was still bewildered. “How is this going to help me learn the facts any better?” I asked.
“You’re a movement kind of guy,” Dave said. “You learn thing best when you do rather than when you see or hear. This is a tactile, kinesthetic way for you to learn your dates. Trust me, Jordan.”
I looked at him skeptically. “Kinesthetic?” I repeated.
“You know. Movement.” Dave pulled out a fresh packet of notecards and tossed it at me. “Give it a try.”
I was still unsure, but I pulled out a navy blue Sharpie marker. The marker had been in my backpack when I’d arrived at school, much to my surprise. But that wasn’t the end of my shock—it had been taped inside a notecard. ‘Someone’ had written “Good luck at school” with the Sharpie before attaching it. The note was unsigned, but only one of my siblings has a limitless obsession with Sharpies. I sincerely doubted Vanessa knew that I’d be making a giant timeline across the floor with it when she’d shoved it in my bag.
I wrote years across the bottom of the paper, trying to space them evenly. Dave watched me without comment, but he was bouncing. “Did you want to help me with this?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “You’ll learn it better if you do it yourself.”
I didn’t look up from the paper. “But you said yesterday that studying was more fun with a friend.”
“Okay, okay,” Dave said. I’d finished writing the years and he took the marker from me. “You make out the events on the notecard and tell me the date. I’ll write the date in the right spot, and you’ll put the card in place.”
We got started and I quickly found that he was right: moving around and placing the cards helped me remember them. Dave wanted me to tape the cards in place, but I declined. “I’m going to put them down a couple of times before I tape them,” I informed him.
He lit up. “You’re really getting the hang of this,” he said.
I had just put down the last card for the third time when Jessica showed up. “What are you two doing?” she asked. She didn’t mean the question to be rude; she was just genuinely curious.
Dave gave her a kiss. “Organizing the history of television.”
“Ahh,” Jessica said as I grabbed up a roll of tape. She didn’t seem concerned or weirded out by our afternoon activity. In fact, she seemed to find it interesting. “Taping those in place now?” She asked. I nodded as I started putting little pieces of tape on each card. “I have a roll of masking tape in my room. I’ll bring it by later and you can really tape them in place. Then you can stand on them and hop from card to card, like you were playing hopscotch.”
I was amazed. “That’s a great idea.”
Dave put his arm around her. “Where do you think I got the timeline idea from in the first place?” he asked.
Jessica critiqued my timeline from one end to the other. “This is pretty good. You’re a kinesthetic learner, huh? If you like this one, I’ve got a bunch more ideas. The kids I’m working with right now are big fans of one that involves bouncing a ball off the wall. I think that would be right up your alley.”
She grabbed a beach ball out of the mess on Dave’s desk. “My kids were doing it for math facts, but it will work for just about anything. It’s a speed thing—it makes the facts automatic in your brain.” She tossed the ball toward the wall a few feet away from her and shouted, “Seven times six!” When the ball headed back to her hands, she caught it and shouted, “Forty-two!” Jessica tried to spin the beach ball on her fingers, but she just dropped it.
I picked it up. That sounded like a good idea, but I wasn’t sure I could use it for the current topic. It would probably work for my computer science vocabulary, though. I nodded seriously at her. “What other ideas do you have?” I asked her.
“Oh, tons,” Jessica said airily. “But right now, I’ve got the best idea of all. Why don’t you come to the gym with me and Dave? We’re going to swim some laps, but maybe you could run the treadmill for a while or do whatever it is you jocks do.”
Dave grabbed her about the waist from behind and squeezed her tight. “We’ll have you back here with plenty of time to keep obsessing over exams, but you’ll feel better while you’re doing it.” He picked Jessica off the ground and she squealed.
If they’d asked me that the day before, I’d have turned them down flat. But other than being edgy and still wanting to flee the state, I was feeling a lot better. And after half hour on the treadmill and some time on the free weights, maybe even the jitters would go away.
We spent a little more than an hour at the gym, and then Jessica brought the tape gun over. She and Dave went back to her place and left me alone to my work. I picked up the beach ball where I had left it on my chair and took its place. I spent five minutes or so bouncing the ball off the wall against the bathroom, not saying anything else. After I had a steady rhythm going, I undid my notecards. Not having enough hair to secure with the elastic, I instead wore it on my arm, glad no one was around to see it.
I started with the cards. I read each vocabulary word and then tossed the ball. Sometimes, it took me five or six bounces before I remembered the definition, but it was working. By the third time I went through the deck, I was able to define all the terms before I caught the ball.
I ate some lunch before I worried about my timeline again. I taped all the facts in place and hopped from event to event, calling the dates out loud the first time, then calling out the events the second time. I spent another hour playing with the timeline—sometimes just pointing at things with my Sharpie, sometimes reading them in my head, sometimes saying things out loud.
By three p.m., I was done for the day. I’d decided to take my own advice and take the evening off. Dave came home just as I finished playing a game of Call of Duty. “You look more relaxed,” he said.
“Amazing what shooting some people does for excess aggression,” I suggested.
Dave laughed. “Get any studying done?”
“Get this,” I said. I jumped out of my seat and headed over to the timeline. I closed my eyes and hopped from card to card, reciting the date and fact on each one as I did so. “And that’s all thanks to your girlfriend.”
“She helped,” Dave acknowledged, “but that’s all you. You’re the one who memorized all that.” He reached into his gym bag and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Jessica says that some of the smartest people out there aren’t really good at taking tests, but once they figure out how to study and make it stick, it’s not so hard.”
He handed me the sheet and I squinted at it; it was titled ‘Study tips for kinesthetic and tactile learners.’ “I’m going to take another twenty minutes or so to over this again tonight, and again before the exams. But I need to let go of it for the rest of the time. Are you free to do something with me tonight?”
Dave picked a DVD off the shelf with a sly grin. “Die Hard marathon?” he asked.
“Do you even have to ask?”
***
I’d gone over my timeline twice more that night before bed and had flipped through my notecards with the ball once. When I awoke in the morning, I did the same thing. I was surprised to realize that I could flip the card and know the definition without bouncing the ball; I’d suspected that the facts would go away once I stopped bouncing. Dave had already promised to go over my communications notes—all of them, not just the history of television—with me after my computer science final in the early afternoon. I’d gone to bed early with the intention of a solid night’s sleep, and for once, the fates had been on my side. Once I mastered that timeline, my gut came unclenched and I found it much easier to turn off my brain when the lights went out.
I took another break while Dave was off taking his first final. I spent a little more time on Call of Duty and then checked my email. My exam was at one; I planned to eat in the cafeteria around noon and then review my diagram and notes once more.
My email was a lot more interesting this morning than it had been the day before. I had a reply to my last message: “Fewer than 132 now. Good luck on your exams. I know you’ll do great. Big fat Q, Haley.”
And then there was one from Mom. “Secret Santa update” she’d titled the email she’d sent to me and CCed Mallory. “Since Mal is not coming home for Christmas this year, she’s decided not to take part in Secret Santa. As such, I’m passing on her recipient to you. You’ll be buying a gift for Nick. His wish: “Something that’s mine that I never have to share with anyone else.”
Well. When we were kids, we’d wished for impossible things all the time, but this was harder than I was used to. I started wracking my brain for something that Nick would never have to share with anyone, but I didn’t let it bother me too much. One thing at a time.
It was nearly noon, and I needed to head out for lunch. I took my whole backpack despite the fact that I only needed my notecards and some writing utensils. I stopped by my mailbox on the way to the cafeteria and saw that there was a piece of paper in there—a package pick up slip. Dave’s mother is constantly sending him boxes, so I was surprised to see my name on the slip. No one had sent me anything all year, so what could it possibly be?
I turned the slip in and the question of who the box was from was quickly answered: the box was labeled Kitchen & Bath on every side. I put it in my backpack and took it to the cafeteria and then across campus. I had five minutes before my exam started; I had intended to use them to go over my notes one more time. Instead, I ripped the tape off my box and found a gift basket—sunflower seeds, nuts, M&Ms, a heating pack to go across the eyes (stress relief, it said) and a whole bunch of other items. I found the packing slip and discovered that it was called the exam survival box. I was already smiling when I spotted the note:
Jordan, I wanted to put a box together on my own (and be creative about it) but I didn’t have the time. So I cheated. I hope this gets to you just when you need it most. All my love, Haley.
I put everything back into my backpack and disposed of the box, putting the note in my pocket. Everyone was settling into their seats in the lecture hall for the computer science exam, and I joined them. My confidence had been at an all-time high prior to entering the room, but now my gut started twisting back up. This wasn’t the exam I had really feared, but I’d been nervous about it just the same. Here it was: all the information I’d spent so much time trying to memorize, and I just knew it was all going to fly back out of my head, just like it had every other time before.
The TAs passed out the exams and when mine hit my desk, I felt the panic rise into my chest. I picked up a pencil, but then lowered it. Even the diagram on the front page, which I had aced the first time around, blurred into an image I couldn’t recognize. I took a deep breath and put my hand on my pocket—on the note from Haley. I remembered her words from earlier this year, when I had told her about one of my communications exams: “You’re obviously a good student when you put your mind to it.” I skipped the diagram for a moment and turned to the second page, where the definitions began. I looked at the first word and my mind went blank. Just like I had feared.
I closed my eyes for a moment and pretended I was holding that beach ball again. I bounced it off an imaginary wall in front of me, and just like that, the definition of the term came back to me. I looked at the next word, and I knew that one, too. I started filling in definitions carefully but quickly. With a few simple tricks and some confidence, I’d conquered the test. I knew this one was definitely going to be an A.