Chloe had breezed through the multiple-choice section of her AP Gov exam and was three paragraphs into what she considered a bold but textually defensible five-paragraph dunking on the current Supreme Court for failing to hold itself to the standards of judicial review established in Marbury v. Madison when the lights went out in Mr. Unger’s windowless interior classroom, rendering it so dark that she could no longer see her handwriting on the page.
The twenty-plus kids in the class uttered a dozen varieties of exasperated noises.
“Gaah!”
“Come on!”
“Mr. Unger! This is ridic!”
“Shhh!”
“What?”
“Mr. Unger?”
“Shhh! We’re taking a test!”
“Not anymore.”
“Can you even see?”
“No.”
“Mr. Unger!”
“I think he went to get coffee.”
“Can somebody turn on a light?”
“The power’s out, genius.”
“Use your phone!”
“It doesn’t work.”
“Mine either.”
Chloe squinted as hard as she could at her exam. It was hopeless. She couldn’t see the page well enough to even finish the sentence she’d been writing.
This is SO unfair. She’d been crushing it. For the first time all week, something had been going right. And now this?
“Does anybody’s phone work?”
“Wuuut?”
“This is crazy, fam.”
“Somebody go get Unger.”
“I can’t even see the door!”
“It’s right there.”
“Super helpful, Sean. Great.”
Chloe set her pencil down and slumped back in her seat. The movement jostled her desk, and she heard the faint wooden trill of her pencil rolling. She shot her arm out to stop it, only to hear it fall to the floor. Reaching down, she swept her open hand back and forth until she found the pencil. When she brought it up again, a quick probe with her thumb revealed that the lead had broken off.
That was the final insult. Only the knowledge that Josh Houser was sitting two rows away kept her from bursting into tears of frustration.
This is the worst week of my life.