The night before the first final, the common room was a graveyard of ambition. Ethan was asleep on his keyboard, a string of 'j's' scrolling across his screen. Mason was trying to drink information directly from his textbook by placing it on his forehead. Jade was so deep in a chemistry fugue state she was trying to balance a spoon on the nose of a structural model of benzene.
And Alexander was silent. For the first time in weeks, he had no lectures, no critiques, no philosophical frameworks. He simply floated, watching them, a strange, soft expression on his translucent face.
He saw not lazy students, but exhausted kids. He saw Ethan, who had debugged a ghost and hacked a university, brought low by a simple logic error. He saw Mason, the master of chaos, rendered helpless by the demand for structure. He saw Jade, the unflappable rock, looking genuinely lost. He saw Liam, a ball of anxiety, and Chloe, whose sarcasm was a thin shield for her own fear.
His grand theories of education seemed hollow. His desire to make them "understand" felt suddenly selfish. What they needed right now wasn't to understand Kant; it was to pass their finals and get a full night's sleep.
He had been trying to build them a cathedral of knowledge when all they needed was a simple, sturdy bridge to get to the other side of the week.
He floated over to Liam, who was rocking back and forth, muttering "Monet, Manet, Money, Manay…"
"Liam," Alexander said, his voice uncharacteristically gentle.
"I can't do it, Alex," Liam whimpered. "The flowers are screaming and the haystacks are judging me."
"Forget the screaming. Look at me." Alexander's form glowed a little brighter, commanding attention. "The Impressionists were not trying to confuse you. They were trying to capture a feeling. A moment of light. When you see the Monet, you will write this: 'The painter uses soft brushstrokes and a bright palette to create a sense of peaceful, fleeting beauty, capturing a single moment in time before it is lost forever.'"
Liam stared. "That's… that's it? No critique of the capitalistic commodification of nature?"
"Not for this exam. That is your answer. Write it down."
He moved to Ethan, gently shaking him awake. "Ethan. Your error is on line 78. You have a nested loop where you need a 'while' statement. It's a simple fix. Nothing existential about it. Just fix it."
Ethan, bleary-eyed, looked at his code. The ghost was right. It was a simple, stupid mistake. The relief was so profound he almost started crying again.
He went to each of them. He gave Mason three simple, memorable points about media literacy. He helped Jade see the elegant, predictable logic in the chemical reactions. He reminded Chloe of the key political theorists she already knew, stripping away the pressure to be brilliantly original.
He wasn't teaching them anymore. He was reminding them of what they already knew. He was calming them down.
The next morning, as they gathered their things, a nervous, jittery unit, Alexander stopped them at the door.
"A final thought," he said. They braced for a last-minute, panic-inducing lecture on Socratic ignorance.
"You know the material. You have worked hard. This test is not a measure of your worth, but a temporary, insignificant obstacle. Go in there. Write what you know. And then," he said, a faint smile on his lips, "we will order far too much pizza and never speak of the Krebs cycle again."
It was the most practical, non-philosophical, and perfectly timed thing he had ever said.
As they walked into their respective exam halls, the paralyzing fear was gone, replaced by a manageable nervousness. They weren't carrying the weight of existential philosophy with them. They were just carrying their pens and the quiet, steadying certainty that their friend, the ghost, believed in them.
For the first time all week, they felt like they might actually survive.