NaNo2014 day 10

[shamera]

“You should do just fine.” His father reassured him as the two of them crossed the threshold to the building currently designated as the communal high school, coming in from the cold outside. It still hadn’t snowed in the settlement despite the amount that had built up in New Bodhum. Somehow, Hope already missed the white landscape.

“I know.” Hope responded, the third time since they stepped out of the apartment that morning. He wasn’t altogether too worried about the exams since he had scanned through all the textbooks easily during his trip. Bartholomew, however, seemed to need some convincing.

“After this, they’ll get you set up in classes. It might be hard to catch up at first, but you’re smart. Everything will work out.”

“Okay.” Hope agreed amiably. He hooked his gloved fingers through his backpack straps, walking slightly behind his father down the unfamiliar but brightly lit halls. The entire place looked too sterile, like the hospital corridor. He would rather not have to attend school at all (couldn’t he just browse through the textbooks like he had done the past week?), but at the moment it seemed like it would make his dad happy just for him to pass the exam and get into high school.

The administrators behind the long desk in the hallway (and again, Hope was getting uncomfortable similarities to the hospital) didn’t so much as glance up at them as his father confirmed their appointment with the school examiners. The man behind the desk pulled up a holographic map with directions to the exam room, and then flicked it away as Bartholomew glanced at it for references and then thanked the man.

The room in question at the end of their destination was fairly austere, although Hope felt a spike of anxiety was he walked through the doorway behind his father and glanced at the trio of examiners seated at the wall, a desk between them and the rest of the classroom — and this was a classroom, with five desk facing the examiners all interspaced so that the students wouldn’t be able to touch each other with extended arms.

The desks provided, however, were top quality. Hope had seen some of those testing desks before when he toured the high school campus he was to have attended in Palumpolem. He had pointed them out to his mother, who laughed at how different they looked from when she was in high school. They were sleek and dark, edges smoothed out to prevent injuries and with a holographic interface built into the desk surface, flat to reduce the amount that students other than the one seated right before the desk would be able to see.

“Mr. Estheim?” The woman seated in the middle between two male examiners greeted them with a smile, her voice pleasant. “And this must be Hope. Excellent. You’re right on time.”

There was something about her smile (too wide, too bright) that unnerved Hope, and he looked up at his father.

Bartholomew, however, didn’t seem to notice as he laid a hand on his son’s shoulder in reassurance and repeated, “You’ll do just fine.”

“The testing will end in four hours.” The woman said as Bartholomew looked up toward her. “That is if we start promptly. The results would be delivered before the end of the day.”

He nodded, and then looked back to Hope. “I’ll be here to pick you up after the testing.”

“Yeah.” Hope agreed, nodding. It was rare for Bartholomew to be able to take this much time off work, and Hope was fairly certain the world would soon end (again) if his father missed any more work. Somehow, all the stars in the sky would align and explode or something. It was just prudent to reassure his dad and get these tests over with, with as little stress as possible.

“Please, take a seat.” The woman said, and Hope chose a desk to the left after his father left the room, setting his backpack down nervously. The other two examiners remained silent, their expressions unreadable. “We will start with the math segment of the test. You have forty minutes to complete the section once you start.”

The desk underneath his fingers lit with a touch as Hope settled in, showing a countdown.

“Ready? And begin.”

—

It was a good thing he reviewed through the textbooks, as the math questions spanned far past just the first few chapters and beyond even the end of the textbook. Algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus…

Hope paused in thought a little after thirty minutes into the testing period, feeling suspicions. While the questions weren’t impossible to solve, they did take some thought and concentration, seeing as he hadn’t reviewed most of the concepts. He paused five minutes before the end of the segment, however, staring down on his desk incredulously at the three dimensional diagram of vector space and subspaces. It was the only question he could see left, although there hadn’t been a definite number of questions from the beginning. Each just got progressively harder.

This is insane, he thought to himself even as he started to map out whether the map was an isomorphism, using every resource allowed to him for the exam. This is linear algebra. I had way too much trouble with this.

I shouldn’t know this. I shouldn’t be able to solve this.

When the timer buzzed at the end of the testing segment, Hope let out a long breath and tried to calm his pounding heart, before looking up to meet the deep grey eyes of the woman examiner. She was smiling, but it was the same smile as before — too wide, framed by lips that were too red.

“Excellent.” She said. “The next segment is an essay question that will span the next twenty-five minutes. Are you ready? Testing will commence in thirty seconds.”

Hope’s mind blanked for moment. Shouldn’t he be allowed a few minutes reprieve at least? But the holographic interface on his desk was flashing a countdown again, and he could barely manage to glance up once more to take in her too wide smile and the two other examiners besides her (both of them so stoic, Hope couldn’t so much as make out if they felt bothered by sitting there for all this time without getting up,) before he had to focus his concentration on the table in front of him.

As the essay question revealed itself to be an analytical summation of causes and events during the War of Transgression through a series of historical passages, Hope spared a thought for Fang and Vanille.

Then he knew exactly what to write.

He was done with his essay long before the twenty-five minutes were up, and asked his examiners if he could get up to get some water. This time, it wasn’t the woman who responded, but the man sitting on her right who gave him a nod and said quietly that he needed to be back before the next portion.

The next section was separated into three: biology, chemistry, and physics. Hope couldn’t even figure out where his answers came from, except that he was fairly sure none of those questions had been covered in the textbooks he had reviewed the past week. Some of the material was distant from his mind, which made the multiple choice sections quite a relief.

He glanced up once in a while when he had the time to see his examiners frowning at the screens before them. As he finished each section with time left to spare, he continued to get more test sections with little to no breaks in-between until he was tapping his stylus impatiently on his desk while waiting for countdowns to start. There was something inherent bothersome about the test that Hope couldn’t quite put a finger on.

Except he could. One the very first questions in the test were covered by his textbooks.

He was still answering questions when Bartholomew came back, concerned due to being nearly half an hour late. It was then and only then that the examiners ended his testing as he finished the last question before his timer went off again.

The woman exchanged pleasantries with his father and promised the results before the end of the day.

“How was it?” His father asked him as they left the facility, the administrator in the hall now a different person who, like the previous man, did not so much as raise their head when the two of them walked past.

Hope thought about pointing out how most of the questions hadn’t been covered in his review books, but then thought better of it as he glanced up at his dad’s smiling face. The protests and complaints died off in his mind at that fond smile, much rarer now after the Purge.

“It was okay.” He said instead, swallowing the oddities he had observed the past several hours. “It was just really long.”

“Yes.” Bartholomew agreed. “Why don’t we get some food to celebrate? You won’t have to do that again for a while.”

Hope agreed readily, threading his fingers around his backpack straps in attempts to concentrate on something other than the questions he answered.

—

Six hours later, Hope sat in the hallway of his temporary home outside the door to his father’s room, not bothering to turn on the lights as he listened to his father speak softly inside the room, his tone a low simmering rage. He had spent the past six hours with his father, Bartholomew Estheim taking the rest of the day to indulge his son’s hobbies. Hope had done his best to find more things he might have in common with his father with limited success. At the very least, he thought, they both tried.

He already knew this was coming, though.

“You can’t just tell me my son failed the exam.” His father hissed beyond the door, accompanied by the sounds of heavy pacing. “Do you really expect me to believe that? Do you take me for an idiot? Hope is brilliant, smarter than half the students in your school already!”

There was a pause, presumably the people over the phone attempting to calm Bartholomew down.

“Well, I demand to see a copy of his test. No — you can not keep me from them. Unless he deliberately refused to answer your questions, there is no way you can convince me he failed. No. No, you listen. This is my son, and I will have your entire establishment investigated and brought down for discrimination and counterfeiting student examination results if you do not convince me that you’re not lying to me. And the only way you can do that is if you release his test results to me.”

There was a heavier footstep than normal.

“How is it illegal for parents to—? No, I won’t argue this with you. If not me, then release to it a government official for an unbiased evaluation. I will say this for you: I hope you’ve brushed up on your legalities because I will bring you down for this.”

Hope got to his feet quietly as he heard his father drop onto bed with a heavy sigh. He lingered at the door for just a few moments more, uncertain of himself, before mouthing a silent ‘sorry’ to the door. He wondered if what he just heard was similar to the conversation Bartholomew must have had after Hope left the hospital.

But he had known already. The moment he had seen the woman examiner’s wide, wide smile, Hope had already known he would never go to school there.

--

A knocking in the middle of the night woke Hope up, and he listened carefully as his father greeted the person at the door (Rygdea, his hearing told him) and invited him inside. Hope got up from bed, pulling his blankets with him, as he slipped to the other side of his small room and laid down right in front of the door, trying to hear better through the gap there and see the vague lights and shadows from the living area. Had this been his home back in Palumpolum, Hope could never have attempted this form of eavesdropping, but the apartment was small and built only as a temporary structure without the sliding steel doors he was accustomed to.

“Good news and bad news.” Rygdea was saying.

“Just tell me you have something on that charlatan parading itself as a school for children.” Bartholomew responded, sounding tired. “Tell me my son didn’t deliberately fail his examination.”

“Ahh. Yes.” Rygdea cleared his throat, and there were a few moments of silence interspaced before he continued. “That’s part of the bad news, I suppose. Good news: you were right about them messing with his tests. Bad news: they were right about Hope not belonging in their school.”

“What is this?” Bartholomew asked.

“His test results.” And here, Rygdea’s voice grew serious. “Which brings me to more good news and bad news.”

“How does this prove he doesn’t belong there?” His father sounded indignant. “His scores are—”

“Exceptional? Yeah, that’s the thing.” There was a momentary pause. “That’s not the examination they give students entering high school. Hell, I’ll bet half my salary that the people who gave him that test wouldn’t be able to answer as many questions as he did. This is a post-secondary exam, Bart. And not your typical standardized tests, either. This is a progressive test, which, okay, to be fair, it’s actually the kind of test they’re supposed to give him. Progressive tests keep giving questions that get harder and harder in order to assess what level the person’s already at. You’ve taken it, yeah?”

His father didn’t respond.

“And here: his analytical essay. Ha! Had a former uni professor of mine take a look at this. I can see why they failed him in this section, especially if they’re high school teachers. Your son basically bypassed the entire question so technically he didn’t answer this portion of the exam at all. But my ex-prof, he loved it. As an analytical essay written on a time limit, it’s quite brilliant. Of course, I doubt whoever made this test expected anyone to write the whole essay criticizing the lack of evidence provided by each passage rather than use the passages as evidence.” Rygdea snorted. “Hope’s got some good persuasion skills here. I haven’t done any further research on this topic, but I’m already ready to see things from his point of view.”

There was the creak of the couch, possibly the soldier sitting forward.

“Good news, bad news… bad news is that we can’t get them for refusing to admit a student on discrimination. They were right: Hope doesn’t belong there. We can’t get them for fraud, either, since they could claim that the test was given as a mistake. They’ve got their bases covered there. Good news, most post-secondaries would take him based on this test. I sent this to various institutions — got some connections there, and even Eden U. claimed they would take this student.”

He paused. “...Bad news, they took that back when they found out who the student was.”

Hope winced. While he had been boggling over his own test results (had the questions really been that hard? He expected it beyond high school entry level, but…), he hadn’t thought it would actually impress professors. Either way, of course Eden University (which had moved their campus after the capital crashed) wouldn’t taken an ex-l’Cie. He wondered if that was what happened to Serah. Lightning had once told him about her sister’s acceptance into the school, yet Serah was now in New Bodhum living as a teacher rather than continuing her education.

“Good news,” Rygdea continued when it seemed clear Bartholomew wasn’t going to respond. “Well, you’re right. Hope’s brilliant. He doesn’t seem to have a single weak subject, although I wouldn’t stop here. Progressive tests aren’t supposed to have a time limit. You’re supposed to keep answering questions until you can’t anymore, and… I gotta agree with that school. They’re just not good enough for him. There’s nothing they can teach him.”

“It doesn’t make sense,” his father murmured.

“You’re telling me.” Rygdea responded evenly. “Who knew the squirt had it in him? At least you can put aside all concerns about the accident leaving any kind of lasting brain damage. I’d say if he’s not at a hundred percent, his mind’s still working better than most people I know.”

“It’s not that.” Bartholomew objected. “Hope learns fast. Faster than most children his age, yes, and he’s extremely bright… But where did he learn all this in the first place?”

There was silence, and then Rygdea burst out laughing. “Seriously, that’s where you’re going with this? Your son’s a smart kid with nothing to do the past month. He probably just ended up studying because he was bored! It’s not like there’s much else he can do, right? And his friends are all grown up. Heck, if I were a kid with no one but grown ups for friends, I’d probably study harder too to keep up with conversation.”

“...Yes.Yes, that must be it.” His father breathed out a deep breath. “I had hoped that school would introduce him to more children his age. Would play-dates still be acceptable for teenagers?”

“Oh, definitely not. He’s at the age where play-dates just turn into plain dates. I’d be careful there.”

The conversation smoothed out there, but Hope had stopped listening in already. He pulled his blankets tighter around him, giving no thought into returning to bed.

His dad was right. He didn’t recall ever learning those subjects.

Maybe he learned in the future. He grit his teeth, rolling away from the door to stare up at his ceiling. Did that mean he really was starting to remember?