Trapped in a Room with the Top Student for Better Scores Chapter 02

Trapped in a Room with the Top Student for Better Scores Chapter 02

The handwriting was Nolan Hayes’s.

We’d known each other since we were kids. Everyone in our circle knew I was crazy about him, and Nolan knew it, too.

I struggled in certain subjects, so he tutored me. We’d even promised to apply to the same colleges.

He treated me a little differently from everyone else, but most of the time, I was the one trailing after him like a lost puppy.

When junior year started, his grades shot up overnight. He was practically a shoo-in for the AP program.

I pushed myself to the bone to keep up and clawed my way into second place. But when I ran to tell him, buzzing with excitement, he shut me down. He said he couldn’t tutor me anymore.

“My girlfriend doesn’t want me helping my competition.”

His eyes slid past me, landing on Blair Mercer in the front row.

It hit me like a physical blow.

All those summer nights he was supposed to be tutoring me, he’d been glued to his phone, smiling at the screen. I had asked who he was texting, and he would just shrug and say, [Nobody].

That [nobody] was Blair.

His grades hadn’t improved because of me. They’d improved because of her.

They were together, and I was the idiot who didn’t know.

“I’m only helping her from now on,” Nolan said.

“What about applying to the same schools?” I heard myself ask. “We had a plan.”

I regretted it the second the words left my mouth.

He barely looked at me. “Yeah, I changed my mind.”

“She’s my girlfriend, Avery. You’re not.”

He grabbed Blair a drink, and the two of them walked out together. I could still hear him as they left.

“Don’t stress. With me tutoring you, bumping her out of second place will be a breeze.”

I was crushed.

I spent the entire after-school study block in the library trying to process the fact that Nolan had a girlfriend. But that wasn’t the part I couldn’t swallow.

The heartbreak was one thing. The real problem was that nobody as brilliant as Nolan was going to volunteer to tutor me for free.

God knows my grip on second place was white-knuckled at best.

My AP Calc teacher tore through problems like she was racing a clock—one after another, no mercy. If I lost the thread on a single step, the rest of the lesson was shot.

I’d get home at night and spend hours grinding through a single problem.

I wanted to ask my mom to hire a tutor, but she’d walk through the door at eleven after working overtime, carrying the same bag she’d had for six years, smiling at me with tired eyes. “Avery, what’s wrong?”

I couldn’t say a word.

Just like that, Blair’s scores climbed. She passed me on the very next midterm and took second place.

The whispers started immediately.

“Wow, Avery dropped fast.”

“Hard to compete when Blair’s got her boyfriend doing all the teaching.”

“Maybe I’ll try to pass her next time, too.”

A few days later, my guidance counselor pulled me aside.

Some loudmouth had told her that my crush on Nolan had blown up in my face, and that’s why my grades were tanking.

“Avery, senior year is right around the corner. Where’s your head at?”

“I see students manage relationships and keep their grades up all the time. You hit one bump in the road and fall apart?”

Thunder crashed outside the corridor. The humid air shoved through the open office door in waves.

My head felt packed with concrete. I stood there and took it.

Then a voice came from the doorway, low and unhurried.

Declan.

He and a few guys from the AP program had come looking for the counselor. One of them was complaining about the senior Wall of Fame in the main hall.

“It’s not fair. Everyone else’s photo looks normal, but Declan’s looks like a modeling headshot.”

“Can we at least not have our photos posted right next to his?”

The guys got shooed back to their own classroom, still joking around as they passed me.

One of them must have caught the tail end of my lecture. I heard a quiet scoff.

It was barely a sound.

But I knew what it meant. To them, I was that girl: tanking grades, obsessed with a boy, not worth knowing.

Nobody said it to your face at a school like ours, but they didn’t have to. In a place that survived on test scores, there was an unspoken pecking order, and I was at the bottom.

Declan heard it, too. He glanced at me once, the way you’d glance at a stranger on the sidewalk, and kept walking.

They were halfway down the hall when someone asked him, “Who’s she so obsessed with? Aren’t you curious?”

“Couldn’t care less,” Declan said.

But nobody saw what was coming.

That night, he and I were locked in the same room.