happy ever after ☆ mevie

finals week

Evie -
My phone alarm rings, louder than usual, so it wakes both me and Mal up at 6am, so we can be ready for our 8am math final. It took me hours of convincing for her to agree that waking up earlier so we'd have time to review our notes again would be better than waking up fifteen minutes before, with barely enough time to get dressed and get a bite to eat before rushing to the exam, which is, as you might guess, what my beautiful disaster of a girlfriend wanted to do.

I get out of bed almost immediately, but Mal groans and wraps herself deeper into her covers. I pull open the blinds, letting in a little bit of light, since it's almost summer, so the light has shifted.

"Wakey, wakey, M," I say in a sing-song voice as I walk to her bedside. She turns and looks at me, with tired eyes and a stubborn smirk.

"I'm trying!" she says, stretching her arms. "Desperately trying." I laugh as she dramatically sits up with another groan and yawns loudly. "Seriously, how do you get up this early every day?"

"Good routines, a knowledge that I need sleep, and a lack of a caffeine addiction," I say with a chuckle.

"Three things I don't have," she says, yawning again. "It's hard not to drink two coffees a day when they have lattes here," she pauses, looking out the window toward the Isle. "Back home it was just bitter brown water."

"Isn't that what coffee is anyway? Bitter brown water?" I snort and she rolls her eyes sarcastically. "That's what it is to me, anyway."

"Fair," Mal says, getting out of bed.

I walk to my dresser, where I laid out an outfit for each of us. I pick Mal's up and walk back, placing her outfit on her bed. We both change and then head out to get early breakfast. There's always oatmeal and fruit salad out in the cafeteria in the morning, though the breakfast buffet isn't served until 7. We each fill a bowl with oatmeal; she gets cinnamon and I get blueberry. We take a seat in our usual corner spot of the cafeteria and I pull my math notebook out of my blue leather messenger bag and open to my "review" page. Mal sits next to me and I lean on her shoulder while we read through my notes. I have a section of the page for each of the 10 units we covered, each explaining the basic concepts we learned in that unit. I wrote it all in my favorite blue gel pen, and of course I added little doodles around the page with a gold gel pen.

"Your notes have always been so much more put together than mine," Mal says. "Even at Dragon Hall you had the prettiest notes."

"It's more fun to study with pretty notes," I say. "That's probably why you hate studying," I tease. She snorts and takes a bite of her oatmeal. We finish our breakfast and I do a couple practice problems before we clear our dishes and head to Ms. Newman's classroom for the math final. We take our usual seats next to each other and wish each other good luck. Other students file in, and the bell rings.

"Best of luck on your test, students," Ms. Newman says as she passes out the tests. The Auradon Prep crest on the front of the paper test reminds me of when I aced that chemistry quiz a couple weeks after we came to Auradon. It was kind of my realization that I'm so much more than my appearance. I smile at the thought and look at Mal, who looks back with a smile. If only I had known that I would ever feel this level of joy back when I was stuck on the Isle.

Mal -

The bell rings again two hours later, but Evie finished her test about 30 minutes ago already, though most students are only now finishing up. Ms. Newman collects the tests as we exit the classroom.

"How do you think you did?" I ask Evie as we enter the hallway, automatically taking her hand in mine.

"I think I did well," she says. "You?"

"Mmmm, I'll pass it. Maybe not an A, though." I look at her and wink at her. "I was kinda distracted by how much I love you."

"I noticed you looking at me a lot," she says, snorting. "I hope you didn't copy any answers off me," she mutters sarcastically.

"Oh, how could I do something so immoral?!" I reply, matching her sarcasm. We both laugh.

We split apart for our separate finals; Evie has a literature final, and I have a history final. I do better on that one than the math one: I've always found history more interesting than long division and times tables. It's more complex and real, I think.

There's one more final that day, for chemistry. We both have separate chem classes, so I send her a text wishing her good luck before my test. She replies, wishing me luck too, along with her signature blue heart. I can't help but smile as I get that complete feeling. No matter what's going on in the world, I'll always have my E, and that's more than enough.