All You Never Wanted

6. Spanish

The next morning, Megan decided to completely ignore Jake. It wasn't like she wanted to, but it did seem to be her best option. Besides, she was kind of embarrassed that she'd let him get to her like that in science yesterday, and she was determined to make sure that it didn't happen again.

It was easy for her the first two classes. But she knew that it would be a lot harder in third period. Megan sighed to herself, steeling her nerves. Then, she walked through the door and into Spanish – where she knew that Jake would be right there again. Only this time, she'd have to deal with Greg being there too.

Megan walked into class, sticking her nose up in the air and pointedly ignoring Jake and Greg as she walked past. Of course, she'd done the same thing to Jake in history, and then again in math. He'd looked vaguely surprised, but she couldn't figure out why, especially with how he'd been acting just yesterday.

At least today when Mr. Clarinval had everyone pair up for speed-dialogues, Megan wasn't surprised at her inability to find a partner. She was just glad that Jake hadn't been here the other day to see how shocked she must have looked when it happened the first time. At least now, she expected it.

It was kind of a struggle, but Megan finally found a partner – Annie. She really hated to admit it, but Annie was probably the only person more useless in Spanish than Megan herself was. Megan sighed – this was going to be rough. She flipped to the glossary in the back of the book, looking up the words she'd need for this stupid thing.

"So how long does it have to be?" Megan wondered out loud. She knew there was supposed to be some sort of minimum length, but she had no idea what it was.

"Probably like two minutes." Annie said.

"Ok." Megan mumbled.

It sure seemed like a lot to her, but Megan decided not to complain. Instead, she got to work, writing down words that she would probably need for it. Even still, she caught herself glancing over at Jake and Greg. Were they struggling as much as she and Annie were? It didn't look like it, but that wasn't exactly a surprise to her – she'd just really hoped that for once it'd be true.

In the end, Megan spent almost all her time going through the dictionary, just looking up words. She didn't want to complain or anything, but it seemed to her that Annie had picked a lot of really complicated phrases for this thing. Why couldn't they just keep it simple? Why did she have to say "I was planning on going to the store" when she could just as easily have said "I want to go to the store?" Or even better – how about just "I am going to the store"?

Still, she wrote down everything that Annie wanted to say. She couldn't help but be just a little bitter when she thought about how these stupid dialogues didn't seem to matter just a few days ago. It was too bad that now she really was going to have to put some actual effort into school. Still, maybe Annie's ideas weren't so bad. After all, it wasn't like Megan was doing so good in the class that she could really afford to complain.

The dialogues were supposed to be pretty short – that was why they only had about 15 minutes to prepare. Then, they would have to stand up in front of the whole class and read what they'd written. Megan could only hope that what she and Annie had written actually made sense and that the grammatical errors were at a minimum; she really didn't want to embarrass herself any more than was absolutely necessary.

Megan was already pretty nervous about this whole thing even before Mr. Clarinval started asking for volunteers. But when the first group stood up to go, Megan and Annie still only had about six lines written. Megan looked around; it looked like everyone else was basically done. There were only two other groups that Megan could see who were still writing anything at all. But Megan knew that she and Annie couldn't afford to put their own pencils down.

"Let's keep going." Megan whispered to Annie. Annie just nodded.

Annie slid their dialogue paper away from Megan and over to her own desk. Then she wrote down another line. Megan read it quickly and nodded; she was pretty sure she knew what it meant, and it sounded reasonable enough. At least the fact that they had a real time crunch now meant that Annie had finally started making much simpler sentences.

Once the whole thing was thirteen lines long, they decided it was good enough. Megan was actually glad that she only had to read five of them. How bad could she screw up five lines?

In the end, Megan and Annie didn't actually have to get up in front of the class and read theirs out loud; it was the only good part of the day so far. Jake and Greg went, and of course they sounded great. Megan tried to ignore them, but it was hard. She caught herself wondering just how much Greg had actually contributed to writing it – or did Jake just do the whole thing himself?

About halfway through, Mr. Clarinval glanced up at the clock. And when Jake and Greg took their seats, Megan braced herself for the possibility that she could be next. It would really figure if she had to go right after Jake. But instead of calling on the next pair, Mr. Clarinval stood up.

"We'll stop there." he said. "The rest of you can go tomorrow."

Megan sat up straighter – that was both good news and bad. Why would he be stopping class now? There were still almost fifteen minutes left in class. So now what was going on?

"Everybody put away your books. Pencils out, everything else off your desks."

Megan slowly put everything away, heart racing slightly as she did. She was always a little nervous whenever she had a quiz – especially a pop quiz. And sure, lately that kind of thing didn't really matter; she was popular enough even with teachers that she was never really in danger of failing.

She still did just as terrible as she always had – her wishes hadn't done anything to change that. But she'd been liked by her teachers enough that they all just sort of let her pass. They made excuses for her, weighted the tests differently, that sort of thing. Megan knew it wasn't fair, and she really did feel bad about that. But that didn't stop her from being glad that it happened; she needed those extra points way too much to worry about the fairness of the situation.

But this time, knowing how her popularity wish worked did nothing to put her mind at ease. All she could think about were two things: Jake wasn't her genie anymore, and she seemed to be considerably less popular than she was last week.

Megan took the half sheet of paper from the kid in front of her and looked down at it. There were ten sentences, each with a blank space somewhere in them. At the top were ten different verbs. Great. So Megan was supposed to find the right word and conjugate it. She knew one or two from Jake's tutoring, but over half of them were a complete mystery to her. Well, she would just have to make her best guess. It looked like she might be having her first real test as to whether or not she was still popular enough to pass high school. And if she wasn't, she was going to have to find Jake fast. She only hoped that if she did find him, she could fix it so she wouldn't be stuck repeating junior year.