BEEP BEEP BEEP
Twist awoke with a start. Her eyes were dimmed and cloudy, but otherwise fine. She turned on the snooze button on her alarm and proceeded with her usual routine procedure: scramble to the bathroom as fast as equinely possible without any spills. After getting cleaned up and having her eyes adjusted to the bright light of day, she recalled her schedule.
"Eat breakfath, check on my candy cane mix delivery, feed Bartholomew the kitten, and go to thool." Twist listed off.
She couldn't remember much about what Ms. Cheerilie had planned for them today, until the activities of last night hit her:
"The thience tetht!" Twist almost shouted. She had spent 4 hours or so till midnight, studying and preparing for what was sure to be the hardest exam in class yet. She had procrastinated her studying (somewhat common for a filly of her age) and had to cram as much from her notes as she could. She mentally revisited the basic information before she noticed something quite irritating; a painful buzzing in her left jaw, so far un-attended to in the rush of the morning. Although she usually woke up almost as early as the sun to work on her striped treats, her late night study session 86'ed any attempt at a peaceful sleep. After enduring a simple breakfast of biscuits and pony tarts, she decided that the pain would hinder her chances of concentration, and so she visited her dad for a remedy.
"Hey dad, my throat ith hurting, do you have thomething to help it?" Twist asked considerately.
"Why? did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed this morning? I know you said something about it a week or so ago but I must have forgotten about it" her dad Sugarcane responded.
"It'th not too bad, but it ith dithtracting me, and I need to conthentrate for my tetht." Twist replied.
Sugarcane rooted around the medical cabinet in the kitchen (a strange decision, but the kitchen was close to the living room, so it made it more convenient. He found some prescription pain killers he and his wife had taken for general pain and anxiety from having a kid that formed hot candy using nothing more than her mouth. It took a while for the medicine to kick in, time that Twist used to review her notes again as well as complete a few extra chores before Sugarcane called her back downstairs to leave for school.
By the time she had left, Twist was feeling noticeably calmer and more relaxed, and by the time she had reached the schoolhouse, she didn't have any stress at all about the test. Whatever thoughts Twist had were immediently tossed outside the window upon entering the sea of shouts and constant movement that was the classroom. Although the test wasn't scheduled for an hour later, foals were still scrambling to squeeze in as much study time as possible before the school bell rang and their teacher walked in.
Twist respected Ms. Cheerilie even when she assigned difficult homework or panic inducing tests because of her relatable teaching ability and because she could (usually) remain calm and teach with ponies like Diamond Tiara and the Cutie Mark Crusaders effectively. Even if she wasn't perfect (the amount of notes and whispers in class that she missed made Twist think that her teacher was clinically deaf or just oblivious) she always did good at her job.
Although the science test was going to be the highlight of the day, she still had to undergo her other subjects as well. It was about halfway through their literature lesson that Twist began to feel odd. Her stomach began to warm up, and whenever she got up to go to the bathroom or sharpen a pencil, she got slightly dizzy and disoriented. As the day continued, it became worse, slowly warping from slight nausea, to full blown... whatever she had. It made it hard to focus during class, although she sat near the back of the class, so Ms. Cheerilie seemed not to notice. When the time came to use their microscopes to observe organisms in class, an act that involved standing for a considerable period of time, she had to be excused to the outhouse in the backyard.
When she came back, her teacher was substituting for her in her group of Featherweight and chowder, and she seemed to stay there, for the rest of the activity. Twist was too uncomfortable to actually use the microscope, an activity she usually enjoyed, so she instead sat in her chair, and leaned on her desk offering advice and bits of info on how to find this germ or that.
When the test had finally started, she had to turn in the worksheet that she had spent all night working on, having putting off doing it for quite some time. By the time the tests were finally passed to her table, Twist was paler than usual, and was sweating even in the cool post winter air from the window. Whatever calm tranquility was replaced by a sickly knot in her stomach, threatening to unleash that most disgusting of bodily fluids (throw-up) onto the floor beside her. Twist was sure that she had a fever of some kind, but a quick hoof to the forehead disproved that notion. She wasn't sure what to think about this newest development in the battle for her immune system, so she decided to ask the only pony in the room smart enough to know.
"Hey Mith Cheerwilie, what kinda thickneth ith it called when your thomach gets upset, you get dithy, and you feel like your gonna throw up?"
All of the students in her group slowly backed away with expressions ranging from confusion to disgust.
"Erwhm, well, it could be a lot of things Twist, I'm not sure" came Ms. Cheerilie's non-answer, which was captituilated with a quick escape from the teacher in question.
By the time the teacher told everypony to turn their papers over and begin, Twist was fairly anxious and tired. She could barely sit still, let alone take a difficult test with some form of accuracy, but she trudged on anyway, determined to see the end of it. The test was 50 questions in total, ranging from simple naming queries, to more advanced questions that question the wording about the lysogenic cycle. This was the only school and teacher in Ponyville, they had educational deadlines to meet.
Twist had focused almost solely on her homework as a study guide, that there were a bunch of questions that flew over her head, maybe she could remember them if she focused, but as it stood she only had a 1/4 chance to get it right without being concentrated enough to narrow them down. So she had resorted to guessing and, for whatever it was worth, she did try her hardest but there were some she just couldn't decipher. When she was 3/5's of the way through, she got to the matching section; 20 questions divided into sections of five and incidentally, the easiest section. She finished after pretending to double check her answers (she was sure that her teacher gave bonus points just for looking at her answers again), and handed the packet to her teacher.
Twist looked up to discover that nopony, not even Sweetie Bell, had finished yet. Although in experience that tended to mean that you rushed and didn't get good answers, she felt confident that what she did put was good enough for a 70.
She had taken her bags outside to a bench to wait for everypony else to finish after her: some walked out with big smiles on their faces, some walking out with stressful expressions and often bags under their eyes (Silver Spoon especially, who had spent the next 10 minutes pacing around wondering about her answers while Diamond Tiara tried to find new and inventive ways to get her friend to shut up.) Some, like Chowder, knew that they were destined to fail, and walked out with hollow, blanks faces full of contemplation of how to explain their failure to their parents, or those whose parents didn't have high expectations wondering why they couldn't remember anything. Twist was somewhere in the middle, post test adrenaline putting her sickness on the backburner as she reviewed her noted for the nth time.
When everypony had finished, Ms. Cheerilie had decided to let class out early because of a mistake in scheduling; the class was supposed to come after warming up with the math lesson on integers, so she deligated grading until she got home. Which meant that Twist would have to wait for tomorrow to find out if she did good or not, if nothing else, the waiting was killing her! So instead of worry and mope in the corner, she decided to eat her lunch. She couldn't eat it earlier because she was certain that putting in anymore food would make it start to come back out, but she could ignore the rumbling in her stomach for no longer. She opened her crude red lunchbox and grimaced; one bag filled with a few of her small candy cane treats she loved to set aside for herself, and one of those plastic kid lunches, filled with those cheese pizzas that always make a mess, this time filled with crackers and off-tasting cheese. At least it had a chocolate in it...
She didn't feel up to walking back home just yet, and she still had an after school music curriculum class hours later anyways, so she decided to stay. She tried laying down on a bench for an hour and sleeping, but she didn't fall asleep, and only managed to lie down for half an hour before she became bored, so she decided to see if anypony else was still around. As it turns out, the Cutie Mark Crusaders were at another bench, eating whatever remained of their lunches and playing some strange card game. She had never met or talked with Scootaloo or Sweetie Bell, but she did know Apple Bloom, and decided to inject herself into the group by setting her stuff down on an empty space on the table, and resting her head on the edge.
"Hey Twist, are you okay? you look a little... down." came from a concerned Apple Bloom, as she put down her cards for a moment to make sure her earth pony friend was okay.
"Yeth, I'm juth a little sick, that'th all, I thould be alright, after I go to my muthic clath I can go home." responded Twist.
"Well if you're sick, I reckon you ought'a go home and rest for a while, you don't need to be walkin' around like that when you're ill" Apple Bloom retorted.
She had considered simply skipping her class, but there was a 3 tardy limit before she was kicked out, and she couldn't remember how many she already had. Twist decided to weather the storm of whatever had so virulently inflicted upon her. So she kept her head down and listened to her friend and acquaintances (she couldn't think of anything else to call them) play some game called Pony' oh or something to that degree. She still had an hour or two to waste, and things were going fine, until the unwanted attention of two bratty fillys showed up in her circumstance.
"Well if it isn't the Blankflank Brigade, with their patron saint Twisted up playing another stupid game. Diamond Tiara gave them a nasty look.
With little more than a sigh and a collective rolling of eye brows, each of the ponies had decided to ignore the two until they left. However; they wouldn't leave so quickly.
"So what'cha playin?" Silver Spoon asked semi innocently, it was clear that it was just the initiation of further mockery.
"Pony oh? so you play that game those disgusting nerds Snips and Snails play with that fat friend of theirs? I guess that would fit with you four, especially you Twist, you always seemed to be in with those freaks."
The group tried to ignore her, but eventually Twist gave out from frustration, and walked away from the situation, much to the enjoyment of the two bullies, who decided not to pursue.
All it took was a simple walk to clear her head and soon, Twist was back at the schoolhouse, fillies not in sight, but she could see her music teacher walking inside. When Twist got inside, the classroom had roughly a third of the role already seated, with her favorite seat in the back already taken. So with a sigh, Twist briskly trotted up to one in the middle, surrounded by a few ponies that didn't go to the regular class and who she didn't bother to learn the names of.
Mr. Sound Spike was an old, brown stallion with big muttonchops and a cutie mark of some kind of instrument with chart-like bars rising from the sides in a pattern and a some kind of brown hat with all kinds of notes, folders, and miscellanious paper scattered about his desk haphazardly. She had heard that Mr. Sound Spike had used to hunt monsters in the everfree, though how he then became a music teacher was anypony's guess. He spoke with an accent she was not familiar with, and always smelled like dense smoke. He always had extensive lectures planned which had little to nothing to do with the tests or papers, but were important to him nonetheless.
Twist noticed that her nasuea and intense dizzyness was mostly gone, and so when Sound Spike started handing back papers, she decided to spend class time doing what she usually did:
Doodling
She had doodled all kinds of things; from video games, to houses, animals, her hooves, and even objects in the classroom. She had the drawing skills of a five year old, and she wouldn't know detail if it hit her in the back of her head, but it occupied her time all the same. She enjoyed doodling because it allowed her to retain knowledge from class, and have something for her to do as he played various songs from some sort of magical sound stone he levitates to the ceiling. When he gets into lessons, Mr. Sound Spike gets really focused and intense, often missing ponies falling to sleep listening to outdated music and his own piano playing.
When she finally was done an hour and a quarter later, she found her dad Sugarcane waiting outside with a cart and the sun beating down on him as he looked around for his child. She managed to sneak up on him (an impromptu game they've been doing lately) and without another word, made off for home.
"Hey dad? I've been thick pretty much all day, I thought I wath gonna throw up or fall down and I was really tired too. Do you know what could have made me thick?"
She had thought back to breakfast, lunch, even whatever could have been on the door handle on the classroom door, but nothing came to her, until she remembered the pill her dad gave her that morning.
"I don't think I should be giving you pain medicine anymore, because this is the second time I've given you something for pain and you got sick off of it. From now on if you need medicine ask your mom or leave a note because I don't want to give you anything else" Sugarcane replied.
By the time they had gotten back home, her nausea had sprung back up again and she had to spend a while lying in bed, waiting for her sickness to subside so that she could work on her candy cane mix that came in the mail today. Bartholomew tried to cheer her up, to no avail, and eventually she had to eat dinner slouched down in her chair to stop being dizzy. When her mom Honey Suckle got home she was almost asleep, and decided to study with whatever time she had left until she became tired. Twist fell asleep studying her music and reading, when her mom came to tote her into bed. Twist woke up with a little back pain from sleeping on her side (on the floor) but she was other wise fine until she remembered her test grades and clammed up. She stopped being sick in the morning finally, and repeated her usual ritual that typically ends with her rushing everything at one, this time almost ending with a man full of toothpaste and teeth covered in mane gel.
After a few minutes of role and general announcements, Cheerilie had chosen to spare the foal's suspense and hoof out the test grades. There were a contingent of happy and down trodden faces among the general "meh" grade range. Scootaloo had even scored higher than Apple Bloom and barely higher than Diamond Tiara, much to Scoot's bragging. It looks like someone is gonna be proud of her when she got home.
When it was time for Twist to stop stalling and flip over her paper and she her grade Twist hesitated, not sure whether or not she wanted to know. After an eternity, she flipped over the small packet of papers containing her test.
Her grade? 57/100
Twist hates science