Eleven years before Now

Is…is that how it’s spelt? Lucy wondered, her mind reeling and her heart thumping rapidly in her chest. She pursed her lips and gasped a little as she tasted her mouth's dry, cottony flavour. She shook her head and looked away from the paper before her to the already two-thirds empty, clear, labelless bottle of water on the edge of her desk. She snatched it up, unscrewed the lid and drained its remaining contents. She exhaled violently when every drop was gone, desperate for precious oxygen.

Lucy timidly looked around the large hall, suddenly self-aware of how loud and odd she was being. Hundreds of other students sat at their own little desks identical to hers, busied away with the exam papers before them. Those nearest shot Lucy with irritated or disturbed looks. Lucy looked to the girl sitting to her left; a stranger with dark hair gave her an awkward smile and mouthed the word sorry before turning away.

Turning to her right, she spotted Oscar’s broad, grinning face a few desks rows away from her. Her cheeks turned warm with embarrassment, but she laughed a little as well, feeling an inch of stress relieve itself from her shoulders. She stuck her tongue out at Oscar, and he smiled before returning to his work.

She took advantage of the moment of levity and pulled herself out of the mire of anxiety that had consumed her moments before and nosed at her peers. She had learned over the years that a few minutes of distraction from her problems could do her a world of good, and the paper wasn’t going anywhere.

Her college was big. Over two thousand students attended, and she barely knew a twentieth of them. It took her a few minutes before she could pick any other familiar faces, all hard at work.

There was Penny, whose pointed face was scrawled into a grimace and leant so close into her paper that Lucy wondered how the girl could ever read the words. Then there was Alice, the beautiful, pampered princess leaning boredly into one hand as she nonchalantly jotted answers that were clearly too brief for the exam before her. The last friend of hers Lucy was able to spot was Alister, the rich bitch of her friend group, who was busy seeing if he could flip his water bottle and get it to land on its lid. That activity was not something those sat near him supported, which Lucy surmised from the tutting and shaken heads.

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Lucy giggled to herself as she examined her friends. None of them appeared to be particularly bothered by the exam before them. None of them were overly worried about the consequences of failing. All of them seemed pretty comfortable as far as she could tell, and as she thought about that, it started to annoy her. Why weren’t they worried? She was. She had already been worried that she would fail this exam, but now, seeing their cavalier attitudes, she was also worried all of them were going to as well. They ought to be worried, after all. Lucy was the smartest of them; they all knew that, and if she was worried, all her friends ought to be really worried. Not one of them was taking this seriously; that was clear.

Great, now I have even more to stress me out, she thought. She looked at the clock at the back of the hall, and a sinking pit opened in her chest. Her racing heart dropped into its endless depths, and her lungs began to wither as she held her breath a tad too long. Twenty minutes. Twenty of the ninety minutes she had for this exam had already passed. She hadn’t even answered a single question yet.

Fraught, she turned away from those around her and glared back at the paper on her desk. She needed to get a move on. She needed to start working on answering the questions, but she hadn’t yet turned past the information page at the front.

It wasn’t even an important page. She just needed to fill out her name and ID number and read the rules. Yet that had proven to be such a monumental challenge. Is that how it’s spelt? She wondered again, looking at the scribbled letters that should have spelt out her name. She was pretty sure it was right. All the correct letters were there, and they were in the right order, but somehow, it just looked off. Lucy couldn’t quite figure out what was wrong with it, but there was definitely something wrong with it.

She should stop staring at it and get on with the questions, but she couldn’t help but imagine what might happen if she didn’t spell her name right. Maybe the examiners won't be able to tell it's my paper? Maybe they will think I didn’t attend the exam and mark me as absent with an automatic fail? Or worse, what if they think its spelt wrong because I sent an imposter in my place? They might think I paid someone to take the exam for me and find me guilty of cheating. That kind of accusation would mean no university would take me. I’d be done for and stuck in this dead-end town for the rest of my life. What would I do? Work in Tesco forever?

As the thoughts wheeled through her mind, they conjured images of her future as a lonely, broke checkout girl, severing the successful friends who no longer had time for her and pretended not to know her. She could barely breathe. Her hands gripped the side of her desk with force as she tried to suck in some oxygen, but her rapid inhalations were too quick, and she couldn’t take in what she needed. Her eyes went wide and sweat billowed out her pours.

How the fuck do I spell my name! She screamed inside her mind as the room around her went dark.