You Asked for Perfect(4)

He turns, and I point to an empty classroom. “In here,” I say. He raises an eyebrow, and the word “please” escapes my mouth.

No one seems to notice as we slip into the room. I shut the door behind us. For a moment, I’m overwhelmed by his scent. Spearmint and basil. I take a short breath, pulse jumping.

“Ariel?” he asks. “Why are we in an empty classroom?”

“That’s a very good question,” I say.

With the lights off and blinds closed, I’m grateful it’s too dim to read his expression. I’m not sure which would hurt more, a look of annoyance or amusement. Not that I care what he thinks of me.

“Ariel?”

“I failed the quiz,” I blurt out.

“I know.” He shifts. “Is that it?”

“Please don’t tell anyone.”

“Why would I tell anyone?”

“I don’t know.” I tug at my pockets. “So you won’t? Say anything?”

“No.” The warning bell rings. “I’m going to go now…that okay?”

I clear my throat. “Yeah. Fine. I mean, sure. Thanks.”

Since when do I get tongue-tied around anyone? I guess since when I fail quizzes. I step to the side, and Amir moves past me and opens the door.

Then he’s gone.

I close the door again just so I can bang my head against it.





Two


“Ariel, do we have an appointment?”

Ms. Hayes, my guidance counselor, looks up from her desk. I’m standing in the doorway of her office, one backpack strap looped over my shoulder. Guidance is busy since it’s still the start of the semester, but I don’t have the luxury of making an appointment during a lunch period because I don’t have a lunch period because I had to make room for an extra AP course. Hopefully Ms. Hayes can squeeze me in before my next class starts.

“Um, no,” I say. “Do you have time?”

Her desk is a mess of papers. And there are not one, not two, but three coffee cups in front of her.

“Time, time…” she mutters, clicking her mouse and scanning her computer. “I have exactly five minutes until my next appointment. What’s going on?”

Great. Five minutes. That’s plenty of time to discuss my entire academic future. I like Ms. Hayes, but she has something like three hundred students assigned to her, so I’ve been trying to steal spare seconds of her time since freshman year.

“Um.” I stand by the chair at her desk, hands gripping the back, as pressure mounts behind my eyes.

Why do I feel like I’m in trouble?

Ms. Hayes picks up her phone and begins typing. Crap. I’m losing her. I need to talk, now. “I failed a math quiz this morning.”

Ms. Hayes looks surprised. My stomach constricts. “I’m sorry to hear that. What happened?” She nods to the chairs in front of her. “Go on, sit.”

One chair has a towering stack of folders and pamphlets on it, the other a filing box. I move the box to the ground and sit.

“I studied,” I say. She peers at me, silent. “I mean, I guess I could’ve studied more. And my dad kept distracting me this morning. But I thought I had the material down. I mean, it’ll be okay, right? It’s only one quiz.”

“Well, it is only one quiz,” Ms. Hayes says. “We can’t worry ourselves silly over every little grade.”

I breathe out, relaxing a bit.

“But,” she continues, “assuming you still want to be valedictorian, it does mean more for you than others. And when a student is taking almost all AP classes, colleges want to make sure they haven’t bitten off too much. So, we definitely want to get you back on the right track.” She smiles at me. A smile. At a time like this. “Now who teaches AB?”

“It’s BC. Mr. Eller.”

“Right, of course. Let me see if I can pull up his syllabus.” She unwraps a granola bar and bites into it. Then, chewing while clicking around the computer, she says, “Here we go. Okay, quizzes are weighted quite heavily. Twenty-five percent of the grade. Let me check…” She clicks a few more times. “Looks like you have five quizzes this semester, at five percent each, so as you can see… What exactly did you score?”

“Fifty percent,” I mutter.

Her silence is punishing. She taps on her phone. “Fifty percent on five percent of your grade, so that’s two point five percentage points gone. That’s not catastrophic by any standard.”

I swallow. “It’s not?”

“Not at all. You’re still at 97.5 percent. Though the quiz affects your margin of error going forward, which could be challenging as the difficulty of the class increases.” She puts down her phone and looks up at me. “Math is an uphill battle.”

I pick at the fabric of the seat. “So what do I do?”

Ms. Hayes glances at the clock. “My appointment is running late.” She gives a soft smile. “Good news for you. Give me a second. We’ll come up with a plan.”

I wouldn’t be this close to the finish line without Ms. Hayes. Over the years, even in our truncated time together, she put me on the right track, signed me up for the classes I need. She advised me how to audit courses like orchestra so they don’t bring down my GPA, how to skip lunch and sign up for zero period classes and take PE online so I could squeeze in extra weighted credits like AP Latin and AP European History.