FLOOD [Pokémon]

Chapter 47

DARWIN

Monday, April 9, 2018

My room in our old, rental house had been a pretty hard place to work. I'd had a desk and chair, but the walls had been thin, meaning I could hear the TV in Mom's room clearly, even with the door closed, or our neighbor's kids outside screaming and chasing each other around in frantic loops on their scooters and longboards.

Grandpa Jon's place was just as bad though, despite the fact that the room was spacious, and the house was quiet: Mom was at work, and Grandpa? Who knew. Maybe I just hadn't gotten used to the constant silence.

Or maybe it was because looking at my planner generally turned me into a bleary-eyed zombie.

There were markings all over the damn place for the month of April — World History exam, chemistry packet due, hall still life due — with very few of them marked as complete. But the biggest, penned in red, marked by an asterisk, and circled several times, lay at on the eighteenth: COMBAT II MIDTERM, 2 PM. It had been there since I'd turned over from March, but now I stared at it like the lights of an oncoming train, wishing I could close my eyes and suddenly wake up on the nineteenth, instead of suffering all of the choking apprehension that would build up between now and then.

Today's assembly had made things worse: I think at any other high school they wouldn't have gathered the whole of the school in the gym to prattle on about practicals taking place next week, but we weren't just any school. As at all Trainer Highs, the Midterms were a schoolwide event akin to a field day, where schedules shifted around and audiences gathered to see whether you passed or failed. That's why they were denoted Midterms with a capital M — nowhere near your standard benchmarks.

This was mainly because of the Contest and Battle Branches — future Pokémon Coordinators took exams in the form of concerts for band and orchestra and choir, and art exhibitions where their pieces were judged by panels of Contest Branch staff. And of course, Midterms in the Battle Branch involved a lot more screaming and running around than usual, with a physical practical for both Trainer and Pokémon. I was going to be tested on how well I could crawl across a muddy field prone and jump through hoops. Brackish would be tested on how quickly he could retrieve a brick from the bottom of the pool, his swim speed and, ironically, how well he could jump through hoops held up by me. And Don...

Don...

Of course Don was going to be going up against Jamie the Vigoroth, and whether I passed or failed the tenth grade would be riding on if he could get Sergeant Marshall's Pokémon to eat dirt, or at least bend the knee. I shuddered. I didn't even want to think about that.

All of this and more had been explained at today's assembly. So that every Branch School could make use of the facilities, schedules on April 17th, 18th, and 19th were going to be quite different than usual, so that the Professorship Branch could make use of the athletic field for their field exercise on the 17th, and wouldn't clamor with the Medical Branch for use of the sleek new labs in SciTec. And, of course, the scheduling allowed the Contest Branch and the Battle Branch use of the gym without stepping on each other's toes. All other exams were scattered in between.

I'd gotten my exam schedule today in Advisory, and now that I was home, I'd hoped to map out all of my free time between now and the dreaded April 18th for studying, so that I could go to face Jamie without being sick over whether or not I got that dimensional analysis sh*t right in the chemistry exam. Except looking at all of it... Well, it was turning me into a slack-jawed zombie in some sort of involuntary, biological mechanism protecting me from stressing out over all of those due dates.

"Okay, let's come back to it later." I cringed — in the empty house, my voice came out way too loud. I got up, went over to my bedroom door, and peeked out into the sunny hall, listening for a moment. It wasn't my first time being home alone... But in such a big space, it was f*cking eerie. More than once since we fully moved in, I'd worried about not being able to hear what was happening on the other side of the place, and wondered about burglars, and home break-ins. But Quincy wouldn't let that happen... Would he?