A Projection

‘How does Shakespeare show the good and bad aspects of ambition and power in Macbeth?’

Elliott curses silently and rakes a hand through her hair, staring blankly at the paper in front of her. It should be filled with words, sentences, paragraphs as she waffles on about the good and bad aspects of ambition and power, yet it stays blank, the lines crossing it staring up at her dauntingly. She has to write something, but nothing comes to mind. Since when did Shakespeare talk about the good aspects of power? Or, for that matter, the bad aspects of ambition? She can’t remember anything and sits back in her chair with a sigh.

At the front of the room, an examiner looks up, alerted by her huff and gives her a cold stare before returning to pacing the rows and rows of students.

She should know this. She really should. Elliott knows she’s good at English, especially literature. It’s what she wants to do, yet she’s still staring blankly at the page, unsure whether Macbeth was really even written by Shakespeare or not.

She asked for this though, she supposes.

The run up to the exams was punctuated by books flying across her room at home in anger, by panic and by the realisation that she didn’t know anything. Should she have started studying earlier? She couldn’t be sure. She had thought that the months and months of preparation she gave for the exams would be enough. She was considered smart, considered one of the best at English, so she had put it to one side to focus on the other ones that she needed a while to get her head around.

Like biology. What even was biology? At what point did someone decide to send radiation through a person to see their bones? Or give complicated names to every tiny part of a cell, the only one that she could remember being mitochondria (the powerhouse of the cell, of course).

Like geography, because the amount of case studies that they threw in there was just short of ridiculous. Did she really need four different examples of regeneration in a nearby town? Or three different examples of violent volcanic eruptions in countries lower on the scale of economic development?

Like history. The details of the Vietnam war had only been taught to them a few weeks ago and she was still in the process of trying to cram her way through the finite details of the Mai Lai Massacre, the use of Napalm and the public’s opinions as to whether Richard Nixon had been a good president or not.

She’s close to giving up now. Elliott doesn’t see the point in being here anymore, especially seeing as she can’t answer the question. There are another three. She had answered all three of those perfectly. Full marks, she would presume or close to it. This is the big question though. She would be throwing away a full forty percent of the total marks for the paper. She had to write something, but nothing came.

She takes a deep breath and taps the paper, turning a sly glance to the rest of the room. She had promised herself she wouldn’t use the power, but if she isn’t going to walk out then what else is she going to do?

She had had the power for years. She couldn’t remember when she first found out that she could project things, but it had come in use so many times. Simple things, like projecting money into her palm if she wanted a freddo when she was little. Now, the simple things had become more complicated, but they stuck by the same principle. Every single exam, she walked in promising herself she wouldn’t, promising herself that the words would be her own. Every single time, she walked back out again with the knowledge that she had used the power again.

Well, not quite every single exam, but close to the mark. Then again, if it helped her, surely it was okay.

A superpower as her brother called it. She wouldn’t go that far, but it was certainly something.

That is why she loves English literature so much. So far, they are the only exams that she could ace without using the power. This will be the first.

Elliott takes another deep breath and glances down at her paper. White, grey lines, no words except for the dreaded title. ‘How does Shakespeare show the good and bad aspects of ambition and power in Macbeth?’

That is a good question, and one that she will be able to answer in a moment.

She picks up her pen and flicks it a little bit over the page as though writing, the rest of her hand splays out behind it, eyes closes. Behind her lids, she swivels her eyes towards the desk she knows is on the other side of the row and when she opens them again, words are splashed across her page, the desk, in a huge, holographic essay. Only she can see it. It’s her own private help sheet that doesn’t quite class as cheating because no one mentioned it in the list of things that counted as cheating. Or at least, that was what she tells herself to make herself feel better about it.

She glances over at the person. She recognises them a little bit from her maths class. Rick. Twenty percent from Rick.

The page flutters in front of her and she scans through the words. All valid points. All a little bit pointless. He is waffling massively. The titles he has chosen for his paragraphs are good starters though. His introduction is actually really good. Scratch that, it’s brilliant. Full marks right there for sure, and she knows the mark scheme. After that, it slowly whittles down to the fourth paragraph, still being written before her which, so far, might get half if the examiner is in a good mood.

He is losing it.

No matter.

Elliott skims his introduction a couple more times and then she starts writing, shifting the words around just enough that it wouldn’t quite be recognisable as someone else’s work. In the margin, she makes a note of his starting sentences, the points he is writing about, and then gives a long blink, shifting her eyes to the other side in the process. Rick’s essay vanishes and in its place is another.

Nope. No good. She can’t even read the writing.

She huffs, slightly too loudly and Rick gives her a side wards glance. She pulls an arm around her work lest he recognise the points she has scrawled and waits for him to get back to his own.

She scrolls through the hall again, this time choosing the person sat on the other side of Rick. She doesn’t know who it is, but the writing is beautiful – perfect cursive that rolls and loops over itself in swirls throughout the piece. Such a shame that the essay isn’t written well. There’s a point on it that Rick hasn’t considered and so she scrawls that in the margin, flicking across to the rest of the row.

Another unreadable one.

Another waffling one.

Another with the same points as Rick.

Another which is blank. Someone struggling like her, except without the help she has.

Another: a jackpot. A goldmine of a perfect introduction, perfect opening paragraph, perfect middle, perfect conclusion, all written perfectly.

Elliott watches the person finish the conclusion in front of her and grins. The urge to take all of it up from the essay is too tempting, but she manages to control herself enough that when her pen hits the paper, it starts with the second paragraph, in her own words. Halfway through it, there’s another example quote and this time, Elliott knows a better one and she finishes the paragraph herself.

Onto another.

She chooses the fourth one. This one talks about leadership involved in both ambition and power, using the three leaders as separate examples. Another paragraph that’s just too good. Another paragraph she has to fight herself to not copy word for word.

She glances up at the front.

Fifteen minutes.

She spent too long faffing about staring at the page instead of looking. She could have found this goldmine earlier but instead, she tried to rack her own brain, the brain which hadn’t helped her at all.

She takes another paragraph and then gets rid of the projection, her desk becoming her own again, the only words on it technically hers. None of them are print from others essays so she feels comfortable enough to call it her own.

She turns her attention to the points Rick picked out. Greed: she knows a quote for that. She can write a full paragraph on that one and it will all be her own words.

Fool proof.

She starts scrawling out, filling a page, the first two already crammed with inspiration from other people. The third unfolds into an elaborate nit-pick into every word, every pause in the quote she chooses. When she realises she needs another, she thinks hard, eyes closed and when she opens them, the book is on her desk. She turns the pages with flicks from her eyes, scanning them hurriedly for something to do with greed. She finishes the paragraph and looks up again.

Five and a half minutes – not enough time.

She could change that.

Projecting to other people was harder but she breaths out slowly, raising an eyebrow at the clock and it starts ticking backwards, adding time onto the counter until she has a full ten minutes left.

That would be enough for another paragraph and conclusion, maybe even a check over, though she already knows the work she has already written is flawless.

 ‘How does Shakespeare show the good and bad aspects of ambition and power in Macbeth?’

Elliott couldn’t tell you a thing about that. Her essay could though and she writes one final paragraph. It’s not as good as the rest and she knows that, but having one weaker paragraph makes it more believable that it’s yours. The clock is still ticking down. It reaches five and a half minutes again and she glances up, casting a new projection, this one stopping it completely.

To everyone else, the clock just broke.

It wouldn’t buy her much time – maybe a minute if she was lucky – but with just the conclusion left, that was more than enough time. Besides, she couldn’t afford to cast the time rewind projection again. People would start to work out that something was going on and would stop the exam right there and then. They might realise foul play was afoot.

They might do a check and find out. She hadn’t wanted to mention the power in her application. She would be dubbed as different from the very start, put in an exam room by herself, isolated and would have found herself in a very different situation from the one she was now in.

Everyone knew that some people had the powers. That didn’t stop most people without them being sceptical and cautious of those with. Her brother called them the Super People. He, sadly, was not one of the Super People. Elliott just called them people. There wasn’t really a difference between them all, unless someone flaunted theirs. That just made them arrogant though. Some of them went out to save others. Most of them stayed behind as normal people with a twist. That was Elliott’s plan. She didn’t intend to do anything with this thing.

With her last few minutes, Elliott scans across her paper. At home, she would type it up, go over it, see where she went wrong and work out her grade.

She has this nailed.