Chapter 49 The Midterm

Chapter 49 The Midterm
"You're going to pass," Dara says, without looking up from her flashcards.

"I know," I say.

"Then stop doing that with your pen."

I set the pen down. I've been clicking it rhythmically for ten minutes without noticing, the way I do when the information is all there and my brain is just running it on a loop, checking and rechecking. It's not anxiety exactly, more like the body's way of burning off energy that has nowhere to go before the thing actually starts.

We're in the library, the three of us me, Dara, Zion,the hour before the orgo midterm. Zion is not reviewing anything. He closed his textbook fifteen minutes ago and has been sitting with his coffee, looking out the window with the expression of someone who is either completely at peace or running a separate internal calculation that none of us have visibility into.

"Zion," I say.

"Mm."

"Are you not reviewing?"

"I reviewed everything I needed to review last night." He turns from the window. "Reviewing the hour before an exam just moves information from long-term storage into working memory, which degrades faster under test conditions. Better to let it sit."

Dara and I look at each other.

"That's either very smart or completely wrong," she says.

"It's very smart," Zion says serenely, and goes back to the window.



Professor Ped midterm is fifty questions of mechanisms and theory and two long-answer problems that require you to think through a reaction pathway from scratch. It is the kind of exam that separates people who understood the material from people who memorized it, which is by design Ped said so on the first day and I believed him and studied accordingly.

I work through it steadily, left to right, flagging the two I want to return to and moving on. The long-answer problems I save for last, I've learned that's where my best thinking is available, when the smaller questions have cleared the way.

Problem two is a synthesis questiongiven a starting material, propose a route to the target compound using only reactions covered in the course. It's the kind of problem that has multiple valid answers, which Okafor also said on the first day. I'm not looking for the right answer,he said. I'm looking for a defensible one. Show me your reasoning.

I write mine out methodically each step, each reagent, each justification. It takes twenty minutes. When I'm done I read it back once and I don't change anything, which is how I know it's right.

I hand the exam in with seven minutes to spare.

In the hallway after, Dara finds me immediately. "Synthesis problem," she says, a greeting and a question at once.

"Grignard followed by acid workup," I say. "You?"

"Same first step, then I went through the alcohol."

"Also valid."

"I know." She exhales. "Okay. I think I'm okay."

Zion emerges from the exam room behind her, takes one look at both our faces, and says: "You both did fine. Stop processing."

"You can't know that," Dara says.

"I can, approximately." He adjusts the strap of his bag. "Lunch?"

We go to the campus café and we don't talk about the exam, which Dara negotiated by saying the debrief was over and Zion enforced by simply not engaging with any exam-related sentence anyone tried to start. I find this restful. We talk about Dara's upcoming clinical observation week, which she's been preparing for with the intensity of someone going into surgery herself, and about the journal Zion reads that publishes the kind of research papers I've started wanting to read too, and about whether the café's soup is actually housemade or from a packet, which Zion says he can determine by the sodium content and texture variation, and Dara says that's insane, and I say I believe him.

It's a good lunch. It's the kind of good that comes from people who genuinely like each other's company without needing it to be more than that.

The results post on Friday morning.

I'm at the desk under the garden window, tea going cold beside me, when the email notification comes through. I open the portal. I find my name.

Eighty-seven out of a hundred. A-minus.

I sit with it for a moment. At Whitmore, an A-minus would have felt like a near-miss — the scholarship culture there created a specific anxiety around anything less than perfect, a constant sense of conditional belonging that made every grade feel like a verdict. Here it feels like what it actually is: a strong score on a hard exam, evidence that I understood the material and could think through it under pressure.

I text Caleb: Midterm results.

He responds before I've put the phone down: And?

Mira: 87. A-minus.

Caleb: MIRA.

Mira: It's one midterm.

Caleb: It's orgo. Do you know how many people fail orgo.

Mira: I wasn't going to fail orgo.

Caleb: Obviously. I'm just saying... you should be proud of yourself.

I look at the message. I think about it honestly. Am I proud? Not in the loud way. In the quiet, settled way of someone who did the work and it produced what the work should produce.

Mira: Yeah. I am.

Caleb: Good. You should be.

Caleb: Also Lily wants to know if you'll video call her Saturday. She has something to show you about the stuffed animal.

Mira: Tell her yes.

Caleb: She's going to lose her mind.

Mira: Good.

I set the phone down and look out at the garden — February going toward March now, the bare fig tree just starting to suggest something at the tips of its branches, the first hint of what's coming. I've been watching it out this window for two months and I've never caught it the moment it changed, only after — but today I think I might be close.

I go back to my notes. I have two more assignments due before spring break and the literary journal deadline is in two weeks and Zion sent me a paper last night that I want to read properly.

There's a lot of work. I like having a lot of work. It means there's a lot ahead.