The Exam

‘Shhh’ The teacher hissed in the almost silent exam room. A slight murmur had disturbed the perfect silence but in her experience, it signalled an unwelcome rebellion. It was the last day of the school term and also of a largely unrewarding career for her.

A few faces turned up from their papers and regarded her the same way they always did; part boredom and part defiance. It only ever lasted a few seconds with teenagers but always demanded deciphering. She leered at them, searching for the source of the disturbance. There was none. Nobody was taking chances. It was the last Literature exam. They needed to focus.

It would be minutes before another murmur disturbed the silence, this time slightly louder. Unclear what was causing the disruption, the teacher rose from her seat to arrest the trend. The small hall was packed with 50 students; a sea of army green sweaters with a spattering of white collars. The cold outside kept the temperatures from rising inside.

‘Maintain silence throughout the exam. Noisemakers shall be disqualified!’ came her stern warning. A few eyes glared back but most heads resumed their earlier position. When she sat back down, a strange sensation rippled through the underside of her left thigh. Leaning as gracefully as she could to her right, she discreetly investigated with her left hand, immediately finding the offending object; a jagged cement-like stone. That was definitely new. That and the dust that now coated most of her fingers.

The murmur at the back of the hall now grew into audible sounds. Having picked out one voice she knew she marched there and growled “Daniel?!”

“I am sorry Madam but there are things falling on us from the roof.” He defended himself, adolescent voice swinging wildly between shrill and deep pitches. The teacher first looked at the roof and then at the desks near Daniel’s. Indeed, there was a crack in the ceiling and every desk close by seemed to have been a receptacle for debris. Before anything could make sense there was a loud crash at the front of the hall. Everything after that happened in a blurry and merged sequence. Falling concrete. Fine dust. Frenzied screams. Flying papers. Fresh blood.

She would see her face on the television screen that evening with scrolling text hailing her as a heroine. Her mind stayed blank, no clue what could have earned her such praise. The noise in the general ward filtered through her foggy thoughts. Screams. Moans. Cries. The usual symphony of pain, very much like the sounds in the hall.

A short distance away, a conversation found its way to her.

“But how?”

“I don’t know Mum. She was closest to the door but she saved all of us first.” Lianne, an exceptionally troublesome teenager from 4J.

Sighing, the teacher slipped her aching, bandaged body under the thin hospital blanket. If ever there was a sign that it was time to move on this was it. The sky had fallen.