Arin's thumbs flew across the screen, a lazy smile tugging at his lips.
Arin: Good morning, Aunt. I'm at college right now.
Three dots. Then her reply slid in, sweet and dripping with heat.
Aunt Jas <3: Oh… have a great day, arin.
He tapped the heart reaction, pocketed the phone, and leaned back, just as the classroom door slammed open.
Professor Blue stormed in, a thick stack of white test papers clutched in his meaty fist. The entire room snapped upright like someone had yanked invisible strings. Panicked students scrambled to their assigned seats, posture suddenly perfect.
"Phones in your bags! Drop them by the blackboard, NOW!" the man bellowed, voice rattling the windows.
Everyone obeyed instantly. Nobody dared test the Bald Tyrant today.
Professor Blue (fifty-something, gleaming scalp, white mustache, belly hanging over his belt like he was six months pregnant) was the undisputed dictator of Business Mathematics. Arin had nicknamed him that ages ago, and it stuck in his head like a curse.
Arin casually slid his geometry box onto the desk (his personal arsenal) and waited.
One unlucky soul was chosen as paper slave and forced to distribute the blank sheets.
Then the professor turned to the blackboard and started scribbling the actual questions in his infamous doctor-scrawl—so tiny and messy that from the back rows it looked like a swarm of ants had died mid-march.
Typical. The man only had eyes for the front two benches. In his world, if you sat anywhere else, you were automatically an idiot.
The seating was a strict 5×5 grid. Arin occupied the top-right corner, practically glued to the window. To even read the board, he had to stand, lean over the second bench, squint like a half-blind mole, then slink back to his seat.
When the last question was finally scratched onto the board, Arin dropped into his chair and stared at the paper in pure horror.
'What the fuck is this?'.
Every single topic he'd skipped (every damn one) was on the test. Everything he'd actually studied? Not a single trace.
He dragged a hand down his face, a silent scream echoing in his skull.
'I'm so screwed.'
The questions stared back at him like a death sentence. Every single one had to be answered, and each felt like three questions had been welded together by a sadist. His pen hovered, brain blank. Half-solved scribbles littered the page; the rest were virgin white.
'I swear, one day I'm gonna kill this bald bastard with a fucking pencil', Arin snarled in his head, already tasting the fantasy.
"Twenty minutes left!" Professor Blue barked, voice slicing through the room like a guillotine.
Arin jolted back to reality. One of the equations—he knew this one. The formula was folded razor-thin inside his sock. Problem was, he couldn't remember which sock.
The professor prowled the aisles, belly swaying like a pendulum of doom. Arin hunched over his sheet, pretending to write, one eye tracking the man's patrol pattern.
In the suffocating silence of the mathematics examination hall, Arin saw his chance.
His heart hammered like a piston in a racing engine. Trying to look casual, he slid his left hand down and pulled a tightly folded chit from inside his left sock. He opened it with shaking fingers.
"Fuck… not this one," he muttered under his breath.
The crucial derivative formula he needed was in the chit hidden under his right sock. But the professor had just completed his slow, predatory lap around the room and was heading back to the front. The rotation had reset.
"Fourteen minutes left!" the professor announced in that flat, merciless voice.
Arin's pulse roared louder than a jet engine at takeoff. This was the make-or-break test of the semester; without that one formula, he wouldn't score a single mark. He clawed at his memory, but only grey fog stared back.
Then the hall exploded into chaos.
Two rows ahead, a student was hauled to his feet. Tiny scraps of paper spilled from his sleeve like guilty snowflakes. The professor snatched the boy's answer sheet, ripped it clean in half with theatrical fury, and marched him toward the door. Gasps rippled through the room.
It was Reiner.
Arin's heart now thundered faster than a cornered stallion galloping across burning desert sand. Visions of himself being dragged out, sheet torn, future ruined, flashed in blinding succession. But the brutal math remained unchanged: no formula meant zero.
Getting caught still meant zero.
No risk, no marks.
He chose the risk.
"Five minutes left!" the professor barked. A handful of smug geniuses were already standing, handing in their papers with triumphant smirks and strolling out.
The professor moved through the aisles, collecting the finished sheets into a growing stack. Arin pretended to scribble nonsense equations, buying precious seconds. When the man finally turned to carry the thick bundle toward the main desk, Arin moved.
Like a striker in the final second of extra time, his fingers flashed to his right sock, yanked out the correct chit, and snapped it open. The formula burned itself into his retinas in one frantic heartbeat.
Then he wrote—faster than Lightning McQueen hitting the straight at the Piston Cup, pen scorching across the page as integrals, limits, and derivatives poured out in perfect, beautiful order.
The final bell screamed.
Arin scrawled his name at the bottom, ink still wet, chest heaving.
He'd made it.
Barely.
Arin slung his bag over one shoulder and slipped out of the examination hall with the rest of the survivors.
The corridor felt ten degrees cooler, the air suddenly breathable again. He let out a long, shaky sigh that carried every last drop of tension from his body, then beelined straight for the nearest washroom.
He pushed open the door, chose the farthest stall, locked it, and finally (finally) released the piss he'd been holding for the last torturous hour. The relief was almost religious.
Phone in hand, he leaned against the cool tile wall and unlocked the screen.
One new message, timestamped 24minutes ago.
From {Aunt jas<3}. One-time photo, as always.
He tapped it.
The image loaded from the bottom up: an impossibly deep cleavage filling the entire frame like soft, warm mountains, the kind of view that could make a man forget his own name. Only at the very top, squeezed between them, was her face (small, mischievous, eyes sparkling with wicked promise).
The caption floated beneath: "come home early hehe".