Chapter 43 One Rank Higher

Chapter 43 One Rank Higher
Warren, worried that Gary’s mouth would run wild and get them both killed, dragged him off to the side and shut him down the old-fashioned way: with brute force.
The two of them immediately dissolved into another round of half-serious shoving and low-key wrestling.
Julie finally picked out her drink and stood a short distance away, watching them trade kicks and punches with pure resignation.
No matter how smart boys were, once they hit seventeen or eighteen, some part of their brain still insisted on acting like cavemen with better test scores.
She cleared her throat and raised her voice.
“Warren, I picked one.”
Warren instantly stopped mid-motion, lowered the leg he’d been about to kick out, and straightened like nothing had happened.
At the same time, he shot Gary a warning look that said the fight was over for now and would resume later if necessary.
A real friend, after all, did not humiliate his brother in front of the girl he liked.
Gary, to his credit, immediately stood up straight and behaved.
The two of them walked over to Julie, one in front, one behind.
Warren had been about to ask what she’d chosen, but the second he looked down and saw the carton in her hand, he froze for half a beat.
It was the exact milk he always drank.
By now, Jiangzhou had fully slipped into late autumn.
The weather had turned cold enough that Julie didn’t really want juice or soda anymore.
She had stood in front of the cooler debating orange juice versus Mirinda, then abruptly taken the smarter route.
Milk plus instant coffee meant she could make herself a budget latte.
She was honestly sick of drinking plain instant coffee anyway, so switching it up felt genius.
“This one.”
She lifted the carton and gave it a little shake.
Warren seemed to come back to himself a second late.
“…Okay.”
Then, like he needed something else to say, he added, “Do you want some snacks too?”
“No.”
“Yes.”
Julie and Gary answered at the exact same time.
Warren’s eyelid twitched.
He glanced at Gary, who completely ignored the threat in his eyes.
What, he could buy things for the girl he liked, but not for his best friend?
After a long moment of visible self-restraint, Warren gave a reluctant nod.
The second he did, Gary bolted toward the snack aisle like a wild horse that had just snapped its reins.
“I’ll pay for yours first,” Warren said.
He had a strategy.
Once Julie walked away, he fully intended to abandon Gary and his cartload of freeloading dreams.
“Okay.”
The two of them went to the register together.
Warren paid, but before he could stop himself, he asked, “I thought you were buying a drink?”
Julie blinked.
“I never said that.”
Warren went silent.
Julie smiled.
“I’m going to use the milk to mix with coffee.”
“Hopefully it doesn’t turn into a disaster.”
Then she lifted the carton again and backed away with a cheerful, “I’m heading out.”
“Okay,” Warren said.
The moment she left, Warren turned to glance at Gary, who was still joyfully piling up snacks like he’d found a sugar daddy.
Warren didn’t call him.
Didn’t warn him.
Didn’t even bother waiting.
He just turned and strolled back to the dorms at a leisurely pace.
A minute later, Gary came back hugging an armful of snacks and looked around in confusion.
There was no Warren.
No familiar back.
No trace of him at all.
“…?”
Gary nearly started swearing on the spot.
From the end of the first monthly exam to midterms, Julie worked just as hard as before.
The difference was that now she had backup.
Her tutoring teachers were strong, and because they weren’t from Bayview High, she felt far less embarrassed asking questions she didn’t understand.
She was dying to know whether all this effort would actually translate into progress—and if it did, how much.
Exam seating was arranged by overall grade rank across the year, not by homeroom.
That was how Julie found herself in the same room as a half-familiar face from Class 11: Bob Daly.
Right before the AP Literature exam began, Julie was sitting at her desk reviewing notes when a burst of loud male chatter rolled in from the doorway.
She looked up and saw a few boys entering shoulder to shoulder.
Bob was one of them.
He had been laughing.
Then his eyes met Julie’s, and the smile vanished from his face so abruptly it was almost artistic.
For a second he looked like he thought he was hallucinating.
He actually shut his eyes and opened them again.
Julie rested her chin in one hand and gave him a soft, perfectly friendly smile—the kind you gave an acquaintance when you happened to see them somewhere unexpected.
Bob looked even more horrified.
What the hell was this?
He backed out of the classroom at top speed, checked the seating chart posted outside the door, and stared at it like it had personally betrayed him.
How had he not noticed Julie was assigned to this room?
And why hadn’t Mads warned him?
His entire day was ruined.
His reaction was so funny that Julie’s exam nerves immediately eased.
She discovered it was actually a pretty effective coping strategy.
Whenever she started getting anxious during the next two days of exams, she would casually glance back at Bob and flash him one of her bright little smiles.
Smile more, live ten years longer.
By the end of the second day, Bob looked ready to beg her for mercy.
After the final exam ended, he felt reborn.
This time, he had taken the test seriously.
He had read every question twice, checked his answers carefully, and sworn not to lose points through carelessness.
His goal was simple: score high enough next time that he would never have to share an exam room with Julie Carven again.
The psychological damage was too severe.
Unfortunately for him, just as he was beginning to relax, another familiar face showed up at the door.
When he looked closely, it was Warren from Class 3.
Julie was surprised too.
Her brain was still full of exam questions, and this time the midterms had felt noticeably better than the monthly exams.
Last time, there had been whole problems she couldn’t even understand.
This time, even if she still couldn’t solve everything, at least she could see the path.
“I was passing by,” Warren explained simply.
“I’m here to move the desks back to the classroom.”
After every exam, the desks had to be returned.
Usually Warren and the class committee handled the logistics and recruited strong boys for the lifting.
“Oh.”
“That makes sense.”
A few minutes later, Warren was carrying a desk while Julie carried a chair, and the two of them walked back together.
They barely spoke, but somehow the silence between them didn’t feel awkward at all.
It felt practiced.
Bob watched from a distance and wanted to scream.
These two had the nerve to tell people not to spread rumors, but they were out here generating the rumors themselves like a self-sustaining power plant.
They couldn’t even wait ten minutes after the exam to stick together.
Anyone with functioning eyes could see there was something going on.
On the walk back, Warren never asked Julie how she thought she had done.
He didn’t bring up the test once.
He could see she was tired.
Julie, meanwhile, knew if she stayed wound too tight, she was going to lose her mind.
So during evening study hall, instead of reviewing or doing more problems, she passed notes with Beth and Dan and plunged headfirst into gossip.
The three of them had been close since the chaos of sophomore year.
Back then, they had even made a private chat group called The Three Musketeers.
On top of that, they kept a thick shared notebook filled with secret notes.
In hindsight, the notebook had been a brilliant idea.
Loose slips of paper got thrown away, but Beth had kept that notebook carefully for years.
In the future, she would even bring it with her when she moved away, keeping it beside her art desk.
Beth wrote: “Did you hear? A couple from Class 5 got caught in the little woods. Hahaha.”
Julie immediately scribbled back: “Oh my God. Were they hugging or kissing? I need details. The more detailed, the better.”
Dan added: “No details. They were there to break up. Funniest thing ever.”
Julie wrote back at once: “Then never tell me boring crap like this again. I’m not interested.”
Just like that, she felt alive again.
She was genuinely grateful to her friends.
Thanks to them, she would have enough emotional fuel tomorrow to go back to being a senior again.
The teachers worked just as brutally hard as the students.
They didn’t waste time, either.
They marked papers at top speed, calculated rankings, printed the results, and got them distributed almost immediately.
Warren was one of the first students in Class 3 to see the rankings.
Out of habit, he checked the top three first.
Every exam felt basically the same to him.
He could already estimate how he had done, so there was never much surprise, no thrill, no fear.
That part had long since become routine.
But after confirming his own place, his eyes moved quickly over the rest of the sheet.
One name that had once looked ordinary now carried a strange, instant magnetism.
He found it almost immediately.
He looked at Julie’s subject scores, her total, and finally her rank.
Then, despite himself, he smiled.
“YES!”
“Oh my God—!”
At her desk, Julie looked ready to climb the walls.
After hanging from the rafters and stabbing herself with metaphorical awls for weeks, she had finally harvested the fruits of her labor.
She had not only met the target in her guarantee letter to Miss Bell—she had beaten it by one place.
Rank 24.
Her luck had honestly been insane.
A few days before the exam, she had gotten weirdly stubborn over one big problem while doing practice sets.
She had nearly given up, then bullied Tania into explaining it, only half-understood, then finally stopped a teacher in class and made them walk her through it step by step.
It had been one of those formulas she still hadn’t fully memorized or internalized.
And before she had time to forget it again, a ridiculously similar big question had appeared on the test.
She had nearly cried in the exam room.
If she hadn’t gotten the points for that problem, she probably would have dropped to Rank 26.
It was impossible for Warren not to look back.
She was too happy, too bright, too loud.
From several rows away, he watched her bouncing in place, high-fiving everyone around her.
There was a faint smile in his eyes.
Dan was slamming the desk in celebration.
“Julie, you’re amazing!”
Beth and Tania looked at Julie losing her mind and started laughing too.
Julie pointed dramatically around the room.
“You, you, and you—come on. We’re going to the store. I’m treating.”
A whole little pack of them stormed out of the classroom in a burst of noise and energy.
No one could possibly understand how accomplished she felt in that moment.
Yes, Rank 24 still wasn’t close to the sixteen or seventeen she had once held in her old life.
But she was still insanely happy.
Honestly, she was a hundred times happier than when she’d landed that supporting role in a fantasy drama in her previous life.
After she left, Warren turned back to the ranking sheet.
The corners of his mouth lifted slightly.
Good.
What he didn’t expect was that before evening study hall started, Julie would come floating back from the store and stop right at his desk.
Her eyes curved into bright crescents as she set down a pack of plain soda crackers and a carton of milk in front of him.
“Warren, this is for you.”
Warren blinked.
There was something for him too?
He hadn’t even gone with them.
At the desk beside him, Gary was trying so hard not to laugh that he looked physically ill.
His legs were shaking under the desk.
The reaction was honestly bizarre, because for some reason he felt more excited about this than he probably would have about his own love life, even though he had never liked anyone and had never dated.
Warren picked up the milk and crackers, suddenly unsure where to put his eyes or his hands or his absurdly long legs.
“…Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Julie leaned forward, bracing one hand on his desk, her eyes glittering.
“I’m telling you, I was insanely lucky this time. Like, unbelievably lucky, I’m so happy—”
Then she noticed Gary beside him and stalled out.
“Oh. Gary, sorry. I forgot to buy you anything.”
She instinctively started feeling around in her pockets as if she might magically produce a snack from thin air.
Gary nearly choked, coughed twice, and waved both hands frantically.
“No, no need.”
His brother was in too good a mood today.
There was no way Warren wasn’t going to buy him something later.