"How was your exam?" Alice asked Rishabh as soon as they left the exam hall, having just done chemistry.
Rishabh's cheeks were burning from the nervousness and fear he had been coping with throughout the exam. "I ran out of time." he said.
"I'm sure you did better than you think you did." said Alice.
Rishabh shook his head, cupping his face in his hands. "I don't know," he said, "I was up pretty much all night trying to do so much last-minute revision, and my head became all groggy by the time I reached the exam hall." He explained. "I could barely think."
"So, you need to get proper sleep, is all." Alice suggested.
Rishabh remembered her suggestion when he went to bed at 11 p.m. that night. His head had given up from the nearly forty-eight hours of being awake anyway. But as he tried to sleep, anxious thoughts bored into his head. He kept thinking about all the things he hadn't done for revision because he was too busy paying the bills and doing the chores. Then fear cultivated into his mind. What if he didn't get the grades he needed to get into university? He told himself that if he didn't sleep, then he surely wouldn't get them and hence tried to force himself to sleep. But it took him several hours before the feverish blanket of anxiousness was replaced by the cool breeze of relaxation, and he could finally go to sleep.
A few weeks later, when the school uploaded the results online, Rishabh knew he wouldn't get the A*s he had hoped for, but he wasn't ready for what he saw in his report.
"A in maths," he read, "that's alright. B in Physics, obviously, as if we learned anything throughout the year. B in Biology, of course. What else do you get for focusing on what to talk about with the girl of your dreams rather than on the lesson. B in chemistry. Of course. Ran out of time in the very first exam. How stupid of me." He said, smacking his head.
Immediately, he went on UCAS to see which universities he could get into to do medicine with the grades he had got.
As he checked the entry requirements for his dream universities, they seemed to slip further and further from his fingers. He left his room to get some air but instead ended up even more suffocated as he saw his family looking up to him. The family he had hoped to provide for somewhere in the near future but was on the brink of needing help himself. He could barely breathe. Rishabh took his keys and his phone and walked outside. A car almost ran over him as he crossed the road while lost in his own thoughts. 'Would be better if it did,' he thought, 'put me out of my misery.'
He found himself approaching the local park. As he reached the lake, he put his head inside it and screamed.