Somewhere along the way, GCSE secondary exams rear their ugly heads, and we can’t complete them in the allocated time. The letters pop up and have to be addressed before we can even think about working out how many cakes Ahmed and Brian will have left at a bake sale if they have 243 of them and sell 23 percent within the first hour. When we do the practice papers, we get about a third of the way through by the time everyone else has finished.
If we don’t complete the papers, we will most likely fail and have our scholarship taken away. We’ve heard about something called Extra Time. It gets given to people with learning difficulties. If you go to the Special Needs Department, you can be assessed to see if you qualify.
We sign up for an assessment. Two weeks later a plump woman in a baby-blue suit with short crimped brown hair comes to the department to test us. She goes through sheets of tests with us, licking her finger to turn the pages in that disgusting way of older people.
She asks us endless questions about circles, puzzles, and patterns, recording the time we take to answer them. We answer all her questions as slowly as possible. After an hour, she disappears to a little room to assess her notes. We wait at the desk, trying to make all the lies we have told to get to this stage not be so red.
Blue-suit woman comes back, patting our arm and smiling like she’s about to tell us we are dying from some incurable disease.
No one else will suffer if we get Extra Time. This is a safe untruth.
She informs us that we are “a slow processor.” We will be given the full amount of Extra Time and extra classes to help. Sympathy drips from her words like honey. She understands that we are academically very strong, but these problems will hold us back if they aren’t addressed. We smile and try to look reassured by her promises that we now have everything we need to succeed, and that it was brave of us to ask for help.
Over the next few weeks, we start weekly classes in the Special Needs Department. Mrs. Hall, the teacher, is plump and looks like a mole. She is kind to her core. We think she sees through the slow-processor diagnosis, because instead of focusing on “improving our reasoning skills” as instructed, after two sessions she asks us about our files and our work notes. We admit to her that we don’t file anything or write many notes in class.
She asks us if it’s because we are thinking about something else. We don’t have the heart to lie to her, even if it means the time is taken away. We say yes, it’s because we are thinking about other things. Thankfully she doesn’t ask what. She tells us to bring a file from a different subject each week.
Mrs. Hall brings us in a box of Celebrations every week. She pours them out across the desk and tells us to eat as many as we like, because she says we need fattening up. The two of us guzzle our way through the box, and she chats about her son Michael and her three dogs.
We sort through the notes we have managed to write, and the hundreds of worksheets and handouts that have ended up piled under the bed in our dorm because we don’t have time to organize them. The papers sift through her podgy hands and into appropriate plastic folders and topic sections in a whir of efficiency. Something about her puts us at ease. By the end of term, everything is beautifully highlighted, subheaded, and in its place. If anyone checked, there would be nothing to indicate that we weren’t the perfect student.
The morning of GCSE chemistry is a letter avalanche. On stressful days, more things are done wrong and must be recorded. I wonder whether we generate letters simply because we’re more anxious and not because recording them serves any inherent purpose. She shrieks:
NO! NO!
That idea is ludicrous. The correlation is false: the words are valuable in and of themselves and caused by real mistakes and nothing else.
I’ve never seen her get scared before, but something about my suggestion made her tremble. I saw a vulnerability I didn’t know existed. Why?
Today, Wimborne is united. We have an early breakfast and sit in silence, forlornly spooning cereal into our mouths. Textbooks are spread across the table, and between mouthfuls, everyone is trying to absorb as much as possible about ionic bonding.
What is going through their heads is unknown, though Ellie is weeping. For our part, we have seventy-four letters to account for. It’s 8:10 a.m., and the exam begins at 9:00. No time for last-minute revision. We frantically try to go through our list without doing anything else wrong.
We walk across to the sports hall at 8:45 a.m. Alice tells everyone who is going on about how badly they are going to fail to shut the fuck up, since we all know the only person who is going to fail is her.
The doors to the hall open at 8:55. The whole grade files in, and hundreds of shoes squeak across the floor and chairs squeal as they are pulled out from under desks. “You’ll do great,” Mum texted this morning. “You’ve done so much work. You deserve to nail it!”
What really happened was that over the Easter holidays, we sat upstairs in our bedroom at our desk in front of the window, with textbooks and notepads spread out in front of us, for about ten hours a day. Mum brought us snacks on little saucers and kept showing up with mugs of tea. We used this time as an extended Pause. We went over all the bad things we’d done since we started Hambledon, focusing hard on the things that were so red they’d made it into the Master Archive. This was mixed in with assessing the minutiae of day-to-day things that made it onto our list during the holidays.
All in all, the revision we actually did was limited.
It’s 8:56 when we find our desk. By focusing hard and engaging in as little pre-exam chat as possible, we’ve managed to assess 56 of the now 102 letters. If we’re going to start the exam on time, four minutes remain to deal with the rest.
We’re stuck on 57. There is no way to excuse it.
At 9:01 a.m., we hear the proctor say “You may start now.”
But of course, we may not start.
We may not start until 9:41 a.m., which is how long it takes to sort everything. The official exam ends at 10:30, at which point the chairs squeal outward again as the majority of students in the room leave the hall. Outside the door we hear a swelling roar of postexam chat, unsuccessfully quashed by proctors calling out “SHHHHH, the exam isn’t over for everyone!”
There is something calming about a room that is intended to hold a lot of people being empty, or in this case, relatively empty—nine of us are left. It’s like a theater after the performance when everyone has shuffled out, and all the adrenaline has evaporated because it no longer serves any purpose. The room is silent apart from the soft flicking of pages—the others are checking through their papers. The only constant sound is our own pen scribbling; we’re writing so furiously we would not be surprised if when our exam paper gets taken away, the tracks of everything we wrote were inscribed on the desk. In this last half an hour, blissfully, we manage to finish the paper, adding the word GEEK to our list to account for anyone who noticed us scribbling away madly.
Afterward we leave the room with Alice, a fellow Extra Timer.
“How did it go?” we try.
“Shit,” she replies, swigging from her water bottle. “Why do you even get Extra Time anyway? It’s so unfair, because you’re really clever.”
“I’m a slow processor.”
“What does that even mean? It sounds totally made up.”
This is hard to dispute.
The rest of our GCSEs pass in a similarly uncomfortable fashion, but despite my moaning, I would be happy for them to drag on forever. The end of GCSEs will signal the end of this phase of school life. The junior-school days will be over, and we’ll move out of Wimborne and into Austen, an ugly prefab bungalow on the outskirts of the school grounds, which looks like it replaced something that got bombed in the war, except that it didn’t.
Girls going into sixth form are allowed to make a list of a few people they want to be in a house with. We and Scarlett held an emergency conference on the fire escape connecting Wimborne and Aylingforde and engineered our lists so that we’d be certain to end up together, along with Ellie. We and Alice won’t be in the same house, because all our friends outside Wimborne are different. Georgia is leaving to go to a different school, where she can focus more on her running.
It’s not a major deal who you end up with really, because everyone in sixth form gets their own room so they can revise for their A-levels. This means there will be no one to distract us from the monotony of the letters.
She will relish this opportunity to have long evenings and nights to ourselves, analyzing our data. She will say that now we have our own room, it’s better to avoid people altogether, because our bad behavior only generates more words and creates more routines.
She is about to take hold, and there is nothing that I can do about it.