2013


An hour and a half into the exam, Maz Nakir started putting in wrong answers.

She had her reasons: she wasn't a big fan of Biology, and had never obviously applied herself in the subject. For GCSE Physics, she had only put in three or four wrong answers, because she enjoyed the subject very much and had revised hard to keep up appearances, but for Biology? Fuck it. Maz went over her pencilled in answer for Question 13, scrubbed it out, and penned in something objectively incorrect.

Maz wasn't a cheat, per se. Or, she wasn't sure to count what she did as cheating. But for the whole of her life, no matter how little she knew of the subject, she had always gotten the answer right in her exams, if she so chose to know it.

Of course, this strategy had been great when she was younger, but there comes a time where getting 100% around the board starts to look suspicious, and after a close call of her primary school trying to catch her at cheating and nearly getting rid of her even when they couldn't prove it, she had carefully curated a style of exam-taking that made her look nicely mediocre. Of course, her parents still cited the days when she had been a perfect test-taker, but she got the feeling even they had become suspicious, and so she continued her trend.

This didn't work for English, she had found, nor History, nor anything with a subjective answer; if she had to write her opinion, her little knack for knowing things wouldn't work. But if there was a definitive right-or-wrong answer? Well, she just... had a good talent for guessing.

The exam ended just as she penned in the final wrong working, and she neatly placed her pen down. She had used this pen for work since 2011; the ink never seemed to run out.

She strolled out into the cloudy haze of the afternoon: it was a warm July, but a stormy one, and she could feel the humidity in her hair and in how much she was sweating into her overwarm uniform. It was going to thunder tonight, without question. She gravitated, as all students do, to the small, whispering groups discussing the last two hours. She pulled on a mask of concern.

"Hey," she said to an alarmed friend of hers, joining him as he walked briskly from the exam hall. "How'd it go?"

"You joking?" Nate said. "That was the worst. I'm failing for sure."

"I'm sure it wasn't that bad, mate," Maz consoled.

"Yeah? What did you get for Question 13?"

Maz frowned, trying hard not to guess. "Uh, seventeen."

"Seventeen?!"

"See? You're at least better than me." Maz clapped him on the shoulder. "Are you coming with to mine?"

"God yeah."


Starbucks bought, exams commiserated, day drawn to evening. Maz sat playing idly with cards, shuffling and reshuffling them in a circle of her friends. The heat of the day had lessened to a low, roiling calm before a storm, bearable now she was out of uniform, but no less humid. They had all come to Maz' garden to relax, because it was close, and because Maz' mum let them drink on the premises. The gnarled ash tree above them fluttered shadows on Maz as she shuffled.

Maz' palms were sweaty, but even so, she had a 'knack' for shuffling cards, and she flicked one into the air. It dropped, twisted mid-air, looked for sure like she couldn't catch it, but it moved oddly, flickered in space for a split second, and—she effortlessly integrated it back into the pack. Then, realising she was with company, looked up.

Nate and Charlotte blinked. Jack leant in with his eyes wide.

"How'd you do that?"

Maz shrugged.

"Practice. Wanna play poker?"

In fact, if Jack had placed a gun to her head just then and demanded the truth, Maz couldn't have told him how she did 'that'. Or anything she did, in fact, that she'd taken to think of as just an odd knack, or coincidence, or lucky habit. In fact, all of Maz' life had been carefully ignoring everything that was unspeakably wrong.

Like how she could get right answers in every test. Like how she could flip a coin and it was always land on heads. Like how her hair, after a terrible cut, came back the same length next day. Or how, when she was seven, she had fallen off the scariest swing at the park at its highest point, and drifted to the ground as light as a feather. Or how, when she was nine, she had hugged her dead cat after it had broken its neck falling off the roof, and for four awful hours it had walked and meowed with a broken neck, not breathing, not seeing, before slumping down dead again.

But Jack had not demanded the truth, because Maz had gotten very good at making herself unsuspicious, and so they played poker in the waning golden sunlight of her garden.

"All I'm saying is," Charlotte said as Maz dealt the cards, "I don't know what I'm going to pick if both sixth forms accept me."

"Alright for you," Nate cut in, snatching up a half-eaten pack of Doritos and grabbing a ridiculous handful, "Some of us are figuring what happens if none of them accept us."

"Or I get the GCSEs back and they're all 'U's," Jack chimed in with a sigh, grabbing an even more ridiculous handful. "I'm going to be that loner retaking Year 11 while everyone else's in Sixth Form."

"Worse ways to go," Maz shrugged. "You hear about Sam in Year 13?"

"Who?"

"Blond, blue eyes, tall, always wearing the cravat thing."

"Cravat?"

"That napkin tie."

"Oh, gotcha."

"What'd he do?"

"Emailed a naked selfie to the whole school."

Charlotte stopped halfway through stuffing Doritos in her mouth, making her look like a particularly demented chipmunk. Maz grinned.

"What?!" Jack said. "Like everything?"

"Like, he had just his torso on show in the camera, but there was a mirror behind him to specifically show his arse."

"That's weird," Nate said with a horrified expression, although he wasn't quite horrified enough not to grab more Doritos. He seemed to find that the packet was empty and tossed it away with annoyance. "What kind of dickhead does that?"

"A suspended dickhead," Maz said, flourishing one hand, before setting down the last cards and grabbing for the empty Doritos packet. She found a perfect handful, suspiciously the amount she had wanted, still inside. She blinked at it then abruptly crumpled the still-empty packet and chucked it into a bin bag set against the tree.

Looking up at the sky while the group dissolved into discussions of how they always knew Sam had been a weirdo, Maz noted that the sunlight and the warmth was waning fast; it must be late already, although she could have sworn she had seen a clock half an hour ago that said six. She clicked her phone. 6:30. She frowned. It shouldn't be this dark.

But she had a lifetime of ignoring things that happened to her, so she started the festivities.

"Cider, anyone?"

"Got any beer?" Nate asked, to which Maz gave him a look of annoyance.

"I literally just said cider. Mum's okay with you guys drinking a little, but not enough that your parents could complain, so Kopparberg it is."

"I hate Kopparberg," Nate whined, grabbing a can and opening it.

"How come your parents let you drink?" Charlotte asked, grabbing her own can. "Mine'd go ballistic."

"Dad wouldn't let me, but he's always doing lectures so he can't get a say," Maz said, feeling just a little twinge of frustration that even during off season for uni, Dad hadn't come back to the house yet. Another conference he could only FaceTime briefly from. "You've met mum, she's an eccentric. She figures that getting me to drink young prevents me drinking excessively."

"Little does she know," Nate said with a grin, "You drank half that bottle of vodka at the post-Geography party."

"That was epic," Jack said. "You didn't even look drunk."

Maz smiled non-commitally. She hadn't been drunk. She had never found a limit she could drink to and get drunk.

Charlotte was counting out some loose change from a zippable pocket. "Anyone else for penny stakes?"

"I'm up for that," Jack replied, leaning back where he sat to grab his wallet. "What kind of minimums?"

"I'm not going higher than a pound per round, I need to get the train tomorrow," Maz said. "So let's put it at a penny minimum, you guys always drive the cash up too fast. Not that I'm calling anyone out in particular. Jack."

"I like drama!"

"No, really?" Nate said. "I thought you hated drama, Mr 'Have I Told You I Take GCSE Drama'-"

Maz laughed, cutting in. "-'I'm Going To Apply For RADA'-"

Charlotte threw a crumb of Dorito in Jack's direction. "-'I can't stop myself from singing American musicals'-"

"-Alright-" Jack tried, looking a little put upon.

"-Mr 'Have you heard of Lin-Manuel Miranda'-"

"Fuck off!" Jack laughed, throwing a Wotsit at Charlotte's head, who squealed as it lodged itself in her curls. "Until you actually listen to 'In The Heights' you can't call me out for that."

"I'll listen to it after EngLang, I promise."

"I'm going to have Wotsit crumbs in my hair now," Charlotte grumbled, yanking the snack from her hair. Maz rolled her eyes and tapped Charlotte's cards insistently.

"Okay, everyone ready to go?"

Nate looked up from sorting through some loose change. "Hang on, Maz- how're you going to fleece us out of our cash if you're the dealer?"

Maz had kind of hoped they wouldn't call her out on that. "-Uh, I don't know, I'm just dealing."

"Come on, live up to your challenge. I know the rules, and I don't have enough for both this and the bus anyway."

Jack piped up. "Yeah, I've never seen you play, Maz! Come on, show us what you've got."

Nate gestured for the cards, and while Maz really didn't want to hand them over it would have been weirder to argue, so she handed them over and recieved a well-shuffled hand of two in return.

She sneaked a glance at it. Ace and King, both hearts. She hid her frustration by draining as much cider from her can as she could in one go, and grabbed for the wallet in her bomber jacket, throwing down the small blind for the round with a little too much force.

She really hated this.

Nate laid down the first card with a flourish and an eyebrow wiggle to the group. "Ten of hearts, the Dave of Love. Everyone?"

"Call."

"Call."

"Raise." Charlotte threw twenty pence into an empty Dorito bowl sat in the middle.

"On the first round?" Nate asked, an expression of distaste on his face. "Charlotte, have you ever played poker before?"

"You're not my dad, I'll play how I want."

"Alright, fuck it, whatever. Your money, mate. Maz?"

Maz held her cards to her a moment. Ace and King of hearts. If the Queen and Jack got played as well as the 10 already laid down, she'd have a royal flush, the highest possible card hand.

She put them down. "Fold."

"Nice job fleecing us," Jack grinned. Maz gave him a fond middle finger and drained the rest of her cider.

A few rounds passed before anyone noticed the constant inclusion of high-ranking and same-suited cards being laid out, and before anyone noticed that Maz was folding every single round. But it was just long enough for someone to call out the latter before the former, and for Maz to consequently be encouraged into staying on to the end.

"Come on," Charlotte said, elbowing Maz good-naturedly. "You're gonna buy yourself out of the game at this rate. One round, and then we'll let you drink in sulky silence."

Maz bit her tongue briefly, just briefly.

"One game, and then I'm going back in the house and getting something drinkable. This Tesco Value stuff isn't good just because it's cheap, Jack."

"Alcohol is alcohol, Mazza, and the price differences are lies perpetuated by the capitalists."

Charlotte shook her head, counting out pennies to call a bet. "One of these days, I'm mixing real cocktails for you cheap fuckers."

Maz sighed, drained the last of yet another cider can, and called the bet.

Nate laid down the third card. "So that's a King, Ace, and Queen of spades. Possible royal flush, once again."

"Have you actually shuffled these cards?" Jack asked. "This is like the third time now."

Nate looked annoyed. "I'm shuffling these like a motherfucker, Jack. It's just luck. 'Sides, they're all different suits, how would I manage to get a set of different royal flush possibilities?"

"I'm just saying," Jack responded, "You should give me the other two cards if you want to be a dickhead."

"I fold," Charlotte said, throwing down her cards. "'Sides, I have to go piss."

"Go, go," Maz said dryly, "more cash for us."

"All forty pence of it," Charlotte returned, standing up, then looking up at the sky. It had gotten dark. Maz blinked into the darkness. Something about this felt wrong.

"We've been playing way too long," Charlotte said, gesturing to the dark sky before walking down the garden to the house. Maz looked away.

"Threesome of kings," Jack said, throwing down his cards. Nate sighed.

"Again, not what it's called."

"Three pair."

"I hate you. Maz?"

"Mm?"

"Your cards."

"Oh. Yeah." Maz threw them with feigned indifference into the middle. The Jack and the 10 of hearts. Perfect royal flush.

Jack and Nate, after several seconds of silence, burst into mutual hysteria. Jack clutched at Nate as he collapsed backwards.

"Oh my god," Nate whimpered, headbutting Maz helplessly as he doubled over in laughter. "Maz, you're the worst best player at poker."

"My title has been taken! The money is yours!" Jack upended the bowl of change into Maz' lap, before he reverted into giggles.

"Did you stack the deck before I got it?" Nate wailed through gasps into Maz' shoulder. Maz shook her head, feeling more self-conscious than she had in a very long time.

"Just lucky, I guess," Maz said.

I need to be more careful, Maz thought, deeply uncomfortable with the laugher, feeling more uncomfortable by the moment. Something like this can't happen again.

It was at that moment that the screams began.

Charlotte.

Close, still in the garden.

Maz looked up in shock, hadn't Charlotte started walking down the garden minutes ago?, but reared back as she realised she could now see—nothing. Opaque black. Something in her mind pinged to tell her that the wrong sky she had seen before when Charlotte had left had been wrong because there had been no stars in it. The darkness pushed against her. She could feel that it had a mouth, scraping at her arm, something toothy and round. She called out and it was muffled. She started to panic. Charlotte's screams died away.

She pushed the darkness and it pushed back, pushed her down so she was lying on the cool grass. She could feel a packet crunch underneath her. The darkness wrapped around her, pushed down like a blanket getting ever heavier, until her chest had no air and she was shaking, shivering, oh god, what is this, oh god, my chest will break. The mouth bit down hard and she could feel flesh rip from flesh.

Fear surged adrenaline in her and mixed with anger and came from her like a force of fury.

She felt something inside of her burst.

White, then nothing.