The It Girl(42)

“Fine. I’ll go.” April stood up and stretched luxuriantly. “I’ll text you. Castanets for a first, thumbs-up for a second, or skull and crossbones for a third.”

“Dickhead,” Hannah said, but she couldn’t help laughing. Somehow April’s attitude was exactly what she needed—a reminder not to take this too seriously. It wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt like it. What made it worse was the unfairness of it all: April hadn’t even done collections—it turned out her professor didn’t believe in setting them in the first year. Will and Ryan had just done some kind of extended essay and got the marks back the same week. Hugh, on the other hand, had gone off white and trembling in his academic gown to sit a proper exam paper, and had been checking his pigeonhole every morning to see if the results had come through yet.

Hannah wasn’t sure how she had been expecting to get her results—a slip of paper in her pigeonhole, or an email from Dr. Myers. Instead, without warning, she’d had a group text from Rubye, one of the girls at Dr. Myers’s drinks party. Marks are up on Dr. M’s office door. Rx And that was it. No photo. No hint of how anyone had done. And everyone doing English seemed to have received it—which meant there was a very good chance they were all down there now peering at her name, while she was up here too scared to go and look.

“No,” she said now, making up her mind. “No, I have to go. It’s better to know.”

“You know it’s bullshit, right?” April said. She put her hand on Hannah’s arm. “You do know that? It doesn’t count for anything.”

Hannah nodded. But it wasn’t true. Right in that second, that list was everything.



* * *



SOME TEN MINUTES LATER HANNAH was walking down the corridor towards Dr. Myers’s office door, her palms sweating against her jeans. Even from this distance, she could see there were three pieces of paper tacked against the wood, and a girl Hannah recognized as third-year English was bending down, reading the rightmost one. As Hannah neared she stood and turned, a satisfied smile on her lips.

“Good luck,” she said to Hannah. “Hope you get what you wanted.”

“Thanks,” Hannah said, “you too. I mean—I hope it was. What you wanted, I mean.”

The girl smiled again, a little patronizingly this time with a slight calm down, dear air, and then moved past Hannah, leaving her alone to study the short lists of names.

The left-hand one was first-years, and she looked automatically halfway down, where J normally sat in the alphabet, before realizing that it wasn’t in alphabetical order but some other, confusingly randomized system. Her tutorial partner, Miles Walsh, was roughly where she would have expected her own name. Beside each name was a list of symbols—βα, β+ Hannah read beside Miles’s name. And γ++, β- beside another’s. A lump rose in her throat. What did it mean? Was this some kind of particularly cruel Oxford trick, dangling her marks in front of her in some kind of impenetrable code?

“Oh, hi,” said a voice behind her, and Hannah whirled around to see Jonty Westwell, the boy from Dr. Myers’s party, standing in the hallway. “Checking out your mark? Same here. Wish he wouldn’t put them up publicly. Most tutors only do that for prelims. What did I get?”

“I have no idea,” Hannah said, her voice stiff with a rage she could only half contain, “because they’re in some kind of fucking foreign script. What does that even mean? What’s a bloody y plus when it’s at home?”

“Oh!” Jonty began to laugh. “God, yeah, sorry. They used Greek grading at my school so you forget how weird it must be to people who’re used to percentages. That’s not a y, it’s a gamma—you know, like… alpha, alpha minus, beta, gamma plus, all that. Oh look, here I am.” He ran his finger down the second-year list to a position about halfway down. “Beta alpha, gamma plus plus. Could have been worse. I knew I fluffed the second essay. Where are you?” He looked over at the first-year list curiously, and then laughed. “Well, you don’t need me to translate that.”

Hannah looked at where he was pointing—to her name at the top of the list, with α, α written beside it.

“What do you mean?” she asked uncertainly, and Jonty grinned.

“Myers writes them out in order of class position. So from the fact that you’re first, you can probably guess you’re home and dry. But in case you hadn’t worked it out, that’s alpha, alpha.” And then, when she didn’t answer but only stared at him, waiting for the translation, he clarified. “There is no alpha plus. Alpha is the best mark. You got it for both papers. I’d say you did okay.”



* * *



“CHAM-FUCKING-PAGNE,” APRIL CROWED, when Hannah came back, blushing and unable to hide her huge grin.

“I can’t,” Hannah said. “I really can’t. It’s—” She looked at her phone. “It’s nearly six, I’ve got an essay I’ve got to get done for tomorrow, and besides, I’m broke.”

“Hannah.” April was severe. “It’s not every day you come out top of your class in your first exams. I am taking you out for a drink, whether you like it or not.”

“Okay,” Hannah said, a little reluctant, but laughing. “But just one, okay? Seriously just one. I have to get back for supper and I have to get this essay done. It’s due in first thing tomorrow.”