My Notes Aren't Yours Alone Anymore novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Umbrella Example

Ellis hands in a blank midterm. Afterward Keeley describes an example Marlo invented alone at two in the morning and calls it her own.

The midterm had thirty questions, and I had starred nine of them in my notebook two weeks ago.

I wrote the first answer and felt my shoulders come down.

The room was silent except for pencils.

Ten minutes in, the door opened and Ellis came in with a pen in his teeth and no bag.

The professor looked at the clock.

"You're late, Mr. Forbes."

"I know."

"Sit."

He took his old seat behind mine, and I felt the whole row go quiet around him.

I did not turn around.

For twenty minutes nothing touched the back of my chair.

I finished the multiple choice and started the written question.

It asked us to explain what a confidence interval means, in plain words, with an example.

I smiled, because I had a good one.

Last October, at two in the morning, I had invented an example about a man checking the weather before he took an umbrella to a wedding.

I had never told it to anyone.

I wrote it out in four clean lines.

Behind me, the pen scratched once, stopped, and scratched again.

Then it stopped for a long time.

When I looked up at the clock, there were twenty minutes left, and I heard the chair legs slide on the floor.

Ellis stood up.

He walked down the aisle with his paper in one hand and put it on the professor's desk, face down.

The professor turned it over, looked at it, and then looked at him over his glasses.

"Mr. Forbes, this is blank except for your name."

"Yes, sir."

"You are choosing to hand this in?"

"Yes."

"Then I'll record it."

Ellis nodded.

He didn't look at me on his way out, but he stopped at the door, and I felt him stop.

Then the door clicked shut.

I realized I had been holding my pencil so hard that it had left a groove in my finger.

I made myself finish the exam.

When the professor called time, I put my pen down.

I wasn't triumphant; I was relieved, then ashamed of being relieved, and then angry about both.

Keeley was waiting in the corridor, with two coffees.

"Marlo! I got you one. Oat milk, right?"

"How did you know?"

"I notice things about my friends," she said, and she handed it over with both hands.

She looked calm and rested, and she had no pencil dust on her hands, which every other student in the hall did.

"How was it?" I asked.

"Honestly, so good," she said. "I even got the written question, which is the hard one. I did the umbrella thing."

I lifted my cup and stopped halfway to my mouth.

"The umbrella thing?"

"You know. A man checks the forecast before a wedding, and the interval tells you how sure he can be about the rain." She grinned. "Isn't that clever? It just came to me in the exam."

The corridor was loud with students, and the only thing I could hear was the coffee lid creaking in my hand.

I had made that example up alone at two in the morning in October.

It had never been in a lecture.

It had never been spoken aloud, and the only place in the world it existed was my notebook.

"It's a good one," I said, in a voice that sounded fine.

"Right? I'm so proud of it."

She squeezed my arm again and bounced off down the hall to find her friends.

I stood there until my coffee went cold.

Then I went to find Dani at the library desk, because I needed someone to tell me I was not imagining it.

She looked up from her stack of returns before I could say a word.

"Okay," she said. "Sit. What did she say?"

I told her about the umbrella, the wedding and the two in the morning.

Dani put down her stamp.

"So she read your notebook," she said. "Who has ever had your notebook, Marlo?"

"One person," I said.

We both looked toward the library doors, waiting in heavy silence.

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