The morning of the exam

Tiffany reached out an arm to turn off the alarm and sleepily opened her eyes. She enjoyed a few moments of quiet calmness as the last bits of her dream faded from her mind, and had even started to think about breakfast, before the realisation that today was the day hit her like a train. She groaned slightly and stared at the pile of books on the floor around her bed. Against all the advice her teachers had given her, she had spent the night before furiously revising, checking things on the internet, making endless notes in the margins of her textbooks. She picked a book up now and tried to read what she had written and began to panic when none of it seemed to make any sense. She closed her eyes and forced herself to calm down.

'Come on, Tiffany,' she said to herself. 'It's all there somewhere in the back of your mind. You just have to find it at the right time.' Thinking that if she didn't know it now, then she never would, she closed the book and threw it back onto the floor with the others.

As she showered, then ate her breakfast in the kitchen, she pushed all thoughts of electrons, gravity and equations out of her mind. Physics might not have been her favourite subject - it seemed too distant from people and life and all the things that she really cared about - but she rarely had any particular problems with it. If anything, it bored her and she didn't understand how other students struggled with fairly simple problems. It wasn't finding the answer that bothered her, but figuring out why the answer was worth finding in the first place.

Her mum drove her to school and dropped her off with a quick kiss on the cheek. 'Good luck, dear,' she said briefly, before driving off into the distance. Her parents' attitude to education differed slightly from the pressure other parents at the school put on their children. They valued education, but saw it in a broader

sense than exam results, and would have been quite happy if Tiffany decided to leave school and spend a year travelling around the world. Unfortunately, Tiffany's teachers didn't share the same vision and made sure all the students were aware of the need to maintain the standards of the school.

The exam was due to take place in the gym, which had been filled with desks and chairs, each one one metre from the next. Outside the gym, crowds of people were waiting, some beginning to sweat with worry, and it seemed strange for the usual shouts and cheers of the gym to be replaced with this quiet murmuring. Somewhere someone was crying, but the general feel was of nervous anticipation. Tiffany glanced around for her friends and spotted them in a corner. Amanda was talking as Tiffany arrived.

and then you take the first number and you multiply it by...what is it? Oh, I know this...Oh, hi, Tiffany. All ready? I spent the whole of yesterday evening revising, and Amy didn't even steep!' Tiffany looked at Amy, who smiled slightly and yawned, and thought to herself that there was such a thing as doing too much revision. She noticed that Amy had a maths textbook under her arm.

'And are you doing a bit of extra revision for tomorrow as well?' she said, laughing. The others looked at her blankly.

'What do you mean, tomorrow?' Amy said. 'Tomorrow's physics. I brought this for a last-minute look before the maths exam. Today's maths exam.'

A cold chill came over Tiffany as the bell sounded and everyone started to make their way into the exam hall.