The Long Way Back
Copyright© 2026 by Star Again
Chapter 21: The End of Year
The last exam did not end with freedom.
It ended with a room full of people discovering that standing up could be difficult.
Chairs scraped badly. Pens rolled off desks and no one had the will to bend for them. Someone near the back laughed too loudly, then put both hands over his face as if the sound had escaped without authorisation. The aula smelled of warm paper, coffee, bodies, and the sour fear that remained after fear was no longer useful. Outside, June had the indecency to be bright.
I stayed seated for a few seconds after the invigilator called time. My hand still wanted to write. That was the body’s little joke. For weeks, it had hated the pen. Now that the pen was useless, the fingers kept looking for one more answer to repair.
Mathis stood beside me with the expression of a man who had been acquitted by the wrong court.
“I left two questions blank,” he said.
“Which two?”
“The ones that looked important.”
Elise closed her folder with enough force to make the woman in front of her flinch. “That third question was drafted by a committee that hates students.”
“It had verbs,” Mathis said.
“It had too many verbs. That’s how committees hide.”
Hanne appeared from the aisle with her hair pinned up badly and her eyes bright from exhaustion. “I have decided I passed because the alternative is rude.”
“That’s not how grading works,” Elise said.
“It’s how my afternoon works.”
Saar came down the steps behind them, holding her notes in one hand and a half-eaten apple in the other. She looked no more relieved than she had looked before the exam, which meant either she was made of better material than the rest of us or had simply stopped donating facial expressions to institutions.
“How did it go?” I asked.
She bit into the apple. “Written.”
“That is all?”
“That’s all that matters.”
We walked out together into the square, where students stood in loose groups, blinking as if daylight had become theoretical during exams. Some were already drinking beer from plastic cups. Some were calling parents. One girl was crying into a boy’s shirt while the boy looked both moved and inconvenienced by the fabric damage.
Mathis turned toward me suddenly. “You think I passed?”
The answer rose too quickly. Yes. You worked. You were ready enough. You made fewer stupid errors by the end. I could have given him a structure and called it kindness.
“I think you will suffer until the results,” I said.
He stared at me. “That’s terrible comfort.”
“It is true.”
Hanne smiled. “He’s becoming emotionally affordable.”
“I preferred him expensive,” Elise said. “At least then he was useful.”
Saar looked at me once, then away. She had seen the answer I had not given. That was annoying because it meant I had not imagined it.
We ended at a café because no one trusted rooms with books in them anymore. The terrace was crowded, but we found a table under an awning with a tear in it. Mathis ordered beer with the reverence of a man accepting last rites. Elise ordered coffee because she refused to let the faculty dictate her nervous system. Hanne ordered both and said balance mattered.
For a while we spoke of nothing serious. Bad questions. Good weather. The biology professor’s shoes. A rumour that one of the anatomy assistants had fallen asleep during a practical assessment and marked three students by reflex. It was probably false. We enjoyed it anyway.
I listened more than I spoke. That had once been a way of hiding. It was becoming something else, though not reliably. The table moved without me holding it. Mathis complained. Elise corrected him. Hanne translated everyone into insult. Saar ate the rest of her apple down to the core and placed it on a saucer as if it had completed a task.
A year earlier, I would have watched such a table from the edge and called exclusion proof of my nature. Now I sat inside it and still had to make myself believe I was not visiting.
That was work too.
The first results were not ours.
They came from schoolboys and girls whose names had filled Monday evenings and Wednesday afternoons, from kitchens with too much noise, from parents who hovered in doorways pretending not to listen, from students who believed chemistry had been invented to humiliate them personally. Secondary exams ended on their own timetable, and messages began arriving before the university had finished torturing us with silence.
I passed.
The message came from Jonas, who had spent three months treating stoichiometry as a foreign occupation.
Good. You worked.
My mother says thank you.
I put the phone down before I could answer the mother instead of the boy.
By evening, there were six messages. Four passes. One good mark from a girl who had stopped apologising before every answer in May. One parent who wrote three paragraphs and used the word miracle, which made my shoulders tighten. I deleted two replies before sending something plain.
She did the work. I am glad it showed.
The next morning, Saar found me in the library and dropped a folded sheet of paper beside my coffee.
“Lars has a retake,” she said.
I looked at the sheet. Lars. Sixteen. Too clever when he wanted to avoid effort. Good smile. Bad habits. A mother with tired eyes. “Which subject?”
“Chemistry.”
The word sat there, unhelpfully exact.
“He improved,” I said.
“Yes.” Saar pulled out the chair opposite me and sat. “Not enough.”
“I should have pushed the equilibrium work earlier.”
“He should have opened the book before panic became his only study method.”
Both sentences were true. That did not make either one comfortable.
Saar looked at my coffee, then at me. “Do not collect them.”
“I was not.”
“You were making shelves.”
I leaned back. “You are very cheerful for someone delivering failure.”
“I am telling you the count.” She tapped the folded paper once. “Four passed. One did not. They worked. You helped. Lars has a retake because he did not work enough soon enough, and because we did not reach him in time.”
“We?”
“Yes,” she said. “Since you like counting the victories.”
The library moved quietly around us. Pages turned. Chairs shifted. Somewhere, a printer began failing in small mechanical coughs.
“I do not like it,” I said.
“No one asked you to like it.” She stood. “Teach him for the retake if he asks. Do not drag him there by the collar.”
Then she took my coffee and drank from it before walking away.
I stared after her.
I did not like how little the count needed me at the centre of it.
Mathis barely survived waiting for a week.
He came to my room twice under the pretext of returning notes and stayed each time until the tea went cold. He did not ask me to predict his result again, which meant he wanted me to without making him responsible for wanting it.
“You remember the renal question?” he asked on the second visit.
“I remember you promising not to speak of it again.”
“That was before I remembered another mistake.”
“Then forget it again.”
“That’s not a method.”
“It is what you have left.”
He looked offended, then ate the biscuit Marieke had left there three days earlier. “These are good.”
“They are not mine.”
“I assumed. You buy food like nutrition is a disciplinary committee.”
He left half an hour later, still convinced of disaster, but less alone in it. That had to be enough.
Elise needed less company. She needed an enemy. For three days, the enemy was the phrasing of the third question, the way the programme weighted practicals, and the general cowardice of men who wrote exams without considering syntax. I let her have it. Anger was cheaper than reassurance and did less damage than either of us pretending the wait was easy.
Lizzy’s message came on a Friday afternoon while I was in the building with Peeters, Van Acker, and a contractor who looked at the stairwell as if it had insulted his family.
The building was not mine yet. That distinction had become less useful every week.
The final deed date had been set for the end of June. The bank had issued the last letter Mrs. Claes needed. The notary had asked for identification again because paperwork enjoys repetition. Peeters had produced a repair schedule with columns so narrow they made bad news look disciplined. Heating follow-up. Window in two. Gutter. Electrical inspection. Paint very last, written in a hand that somehow contained judgement.
Van Acker still had the keys, which meant every access request had to pass through him like a confession.
“You keep asking for entry as if walls enjoy visitors,” he said while the contractor measured the hallway.
“They need work.”
“They always need work. That is how they keep ownership interesting.”
Peeters made a mark on his clipboard. “End of June is close.”
“End of June is not today,” Van Acker said.
“No one is stealing your damp,” I said.
He looked at me. “You joke now because it is not yours yet.”
That one landed because it was practical, and practical wounds were Van Acker’s speciality.
On the second floor, Anja opened her door in a sweatshirt despite the warmer weather. The room no longer had the old cold bite. The radiator stood silent under the window like a sulking animal that had been forced to behave.
“It is better?” I asked.
She nodded. “It no longer sounds like a pipe is dying in the wall.”
“That is the standard we aim for,” Peeters said.
Anja almost smiled. Then she looked at the contractor. “Window?”
“Measured today,” I said. “Work after the deed.”
“Before rain?”
“Before rain if rain consults the schedule.”
This time she did smile, very briefly, then shut the door because warmth did not make her social.
In the stairwell, my phone vibrated.
Fien has labelled the cheese again.
I stopped halfway down the stairs.
Was it lost?
Apparently Gouda needs borders.
The building smelled of plaster dust, drains, and someone’s old frying oil. Van Acker was arguing with the contractor below about who had last damaged the skirting board. Peeters was pretending not to listen. In my hand, Gent opened like a window.
I think I passed.