Chapter 45: Volume 1, - 45: The Notes Bia Keeps
The corridor outside Classroom 12 at Escola Secundária do Oriente smelt permanently of damp wool, industrial floor wax, and lukewarm milk from the morning break cartons. By eleven twenty, the sun was striking the frosted upper windows, turning the white plaster walls a blinding, chalky yellow.
Rayan sat at a double desk near the back, his knees jammed against the underside of the grey laminate frame. A blue plastic folder lay open between his elbows, bursting with loose lined pages, half-folded handouts, and corners torn from exercise books. Beside it sat two crumpled assignment task sheets he had spent the last five minutes trying to flatten with the palm of his hand.
"Idris gave you this?" Bia asked, without looking up from her own desk. She was uncapping a fine black pen with a dry click.
"On Friday," Rayan said. "He said he’d sorted everything by deadline."
"He did." Bia tapped the page clipped to the front of Rayan’s folder. "He organised when everything is due. He didn’t do any of it for you." She flipped through her own ring-binder, her handwriting small, clean, and perfectly upright in dark grey ink. "You have mathematics corrections, a history outline for Senhor Silva, geography portfolio work for Senhor Costa, notes from the Thursday you missed for the U17 assessment, and four examination dates to write down."
"I’ve been catching up since the matches, the injury, Joca’s filming, and then the U17 session," Rayan said, running a hand over his face. "Every time I finish one thing, something else is overdue."
"Senhora Santos said the mathematics corrections have to be in tomorrow morning," Bia said. "If you miss another deadline, it goes on your academic recovery record."
"Give me the sheet," Rayan said, reaching for her notebook. "I’ll copy the working down now before history starts."
Bia calmly slid her notebook four inches out of his reach.
"No."
"Bia, it’s twenty minutes until the bell."
"Copy mine now and you’ll still be stuck when Santos puts the same thing on the test Friday," she replied, her tone as neutral as a train announcement. She pushed a fresh piece of paper towards him. "Start with . The second equation is . Substitute for ."
Rayan took the pencil and wrote: .
"Good," Bia said. "Expand it."
Rayan worked through the line: , then . "Three," he said.
"Good. Now find yourself."
Rayan wrote out underneath, calculating the arithmetic in his head before writing at the bottom of the page. He double-underlined the final values in pencil.
While he completed the substitution, he looked sideways at what Bia was drawing in her sketchbook.
It was a rough site plan of the triangular concrete plaza directly outside the Gare do Oriente bus terminal. The cramped, wind-swept concrete wedge where students and commuters waited every afternoon under a rusting corrugated awning.
Her drawing was detailed. She had mapped the main pedestrian traffic coming off the metro stairs with dashed lines, marking where people bottlenecked near the ticket kiosk. Around the edges, she had drafted short rectangles labelled Shaded Bench, angled shapes marked Plane Trees, a widened kerb ramp, and an extra streetlight near the corner.
"What is that?" Rayan asked, leaning closer.
"The plaza by the bus station. It’s terrible," Bia said, filling in a section of cross-hatching. "Everyone coming out of the station cuts across here, but the bins sit right in the way. Move them, widen the crossing, put benches under the trees, and add another light near the corner."
Rayan studied the page. "Your bus shelter is too far from the road."
Bia frowned, checked her scale, and erased part of the line. "Fine. That bit’s wrong." She gestured towards her tree labels. "They lose their leaves in winter. You get shade now and more light when it’s cold." She looked up at him, her dark eyes steady. "It’s not about making it look pretty, Rayan. It’s about whether people can actually walk through it without knocking into each other."
"Like a midfield," Rayan said before he could catch himself.
Bia gave him a flat look. "It’s a bus stop."
Across the room, Idris dropped into the chair in front of Rayan’s desk, wiping a pastry crumb from his napkin. Joca and Mateus trailed behind him, Joca carrying a half-eaten ham roll wrapped in wax paper.
"You still alive, Rayan?" Idris asked, glancing at the blue folder. "I already gave you the deadline sheet. Don’t look at me when Costa asks where the actual geography work is."
"I finished the maths corrections," Rayan said, holding up the single page.
"Good. Silva’s checking the history work this week, and Costa wants the geography portfolios," Idris said, standing back up as Inês called him from across the aisle. "You still have to draft the map key for the Tejo river basin analysis, or Costa will reject the whole folder."
Rayan shuffled through the bursting blue folder, pulling out a creased outline map of the Tejo estuary. The edge of the paper was frayed, and the printed legend box at the bottom was entirely blank. He flattened it against the desk, turning over two sheets of lined history notes before locating the missing handout from last Tuesday.
"I’ve got the map outline from last week," Rayan said, scanning the printed margins, "but I’m missing the source label for the lower basin."
"I can lend you the legend symbols if you need them after school," Joca added, leaning over Idris’s shoulder.
"He doesn’t need legend symbols yet," Bia said without looking up from her sketchbook. "He needs to write the history paragraphs first."
Rayan grabbed his pencil and wrote Tejo Map — end-of-term project deadline: June 2 in bold lettering directly onto the master schedule Idris had drawn up for him, marking it in red beneath the four examination dates already on the sheet.
"Don’t get stuck in detention," Idris warned, moving away with Joca and Mateus as the chatter across the classroom grew louder.
Rayan looked down at his finished algebra sheet, then at Bia.
"Bia?"
"What?"
"Why do you really draw these?" Rayan asked, looking at her sketch.
"I draw these because every day I sit at that bus stop for twenty minutes and my feet get wet because the roof is three metres too short," she said flatly. "It’s badly designed."
She flipped to a page in her ring-binder. Her history notes and pointed to the top heading: The Constituent Assembly and the Revolutionary Period (1975).
"You need three main points for Senhor Silva," she said. "The provisional government, the land programmes, and the return of citizens from the former colonies. Write the first point in full sentences."
Rayan pulled his lined exercise book closer, took a breath, and began to write out the overview of the 1975 provisional government, summarising Bia’s clear bullet points in his own words. As he worked, he drew a tiny three-man passing combination with tactical arrows in the top margin of his paper.
Bia noticed. Without a word, she took her eraser, reached over, and rubbed the arrows off his page, leaving a small pile of rubber shavings on his desk.
"Arrows don’t get you marks in history," she said dryly. "Write about the provisional government."
He sighed and went back to the text, completing six lines on the political restructuring before moving on to the second bullet point regarding agricultural reforms.
By the time the bell rang for the start of the period, Rayan had completed the mathematics corrections, drafted the first two sections of the history outline, located his missing geography map, and noted down all four exam dates as well as the end-of-term project deadline on his calendar sheet.
Bia closed her own binder and pulled her geography notes back towards herself, leaving Rayan with his own incomplete pages.
"Finish the history paragraphs tonight," she said, zipping her canvas bag shut. "Eight twenty tomorrow, outside the library. Bring those and the mathematics corrections."
"You’re taking the notes?" Rayan asked.
"They’re my notes," she said. "Show me the completed work tomorrow and you can have the geography summary."
Rayan looked down at the unfinished pages in front of him, then pulled his blue plastic folder close, beginning to sort the loose papers inside into chronological order.