INTRO and Chapter 1

Introduction

Name of the male lead – Jasper Parks

Name of the female lead - Janet Rosario

Name of a friend of female lead - Alice Everett

Name of a friend of the male lead – Emmett Parker

Janet and Jasper both are from different schools. Jasper is a confident boy with an athletic physique but is also quite good in studies. He has a good confident nature and is quite popular not only among the girls but also among his own friends.

On the other hand, Janet is a nervous and shy girl who likes to spend her time reading books. Although Janet is a shy girl, she can stand up for herself and her friends when the time comes. She didn’t really have much of a social nature ever since her mother passed away when she was ten.

Em is the best friend of the male lead who has been with him ever since they started school together. They know each other really well.

Among Jasper’s other friends are Andrew, Dave, Eric and Chris(twins), Karla and Stephanie.

Janet didn’t really have much talent in making many friends so she has got only one: Alice. They met each other when Alice got transferred to their school when Janet was around ten years old.

Author’s note

I am highly indebted to my one of my friends (a.k.a. Wendy) who really helped me out in designing this plot. I really want to credit her for this story. So, if you are reading this, thanks! 😊

This story is my first story that has been planned before writing it, so I hope that you all will like it!

CHAPTER ONE

It was about ten o'clock in the morning when all the high schoolers were asked to report to the auditorium. Our principal generally made announcements regarding competitive exams and field trips. All of us were pretty happy as we would normally be having our geography class during that time. The geography teacher makes us write a LOT. That is why it was quite normal for the students to be happy.

Our principal had indeed come to make an announcement for a talent hunt kind of exam. This year many exams were announced and many of the students were applying for those. This one was a good one considering the situation. The exam prizes were extremely generous.

From each school, a group of top five students performing well in the exam would be selected for a free Europe tour of eleven nights and nine days. On this declaration of prizes, many of the students sprung up as if mobiles and laptops had started raining from the sky.

There were three fields for the exam for which anyone could be chosen: English and sciences, Computer sciences and arts.

The thing is I was basically good in all of those. But if I wanted the free tour of Europe, I would need to think more rationally. Being good wasn’t enough. So, the thing was that I had to choose the subject in which I was good AND the others were not. Meaning computer programming.

I knew most of the students who generally participated in these kinds of exams, so, I was pretty sure there are not many students who are good at computer sciences. Our school was pretty big, that is, it had around five thousand

students, so the chance was quite less.

But even so, I was definitely not letting go of this opportunity. It would be quite interesting. It was an interschool thing so students from other schools were also participating.

The exam was conducted after a month. I basically had to learn two programming languages and more about different kinds of software and also about how different kinds of hardware work together. This was all done in detail.

I had no expectations of becoming first but I definitely wanted to be among those five students. Among the others, I know that Em is much better in programming than me, so I knew that he would secure a rank higher than me.

After the exam. The questions were of moderate level. Well, that wasn’t really moderate but after all these years of giving similar kind of exams, had made me used to them.

As I had expected most of the questions had come from programming but I could answer them.

Some others had taken up the English and sciences, as much as I heard later, the maths section had come extremely hard and more than half of the duration of the exam was spent on doing maths only, by most of the candidates.

The results would come after a month, meaning it would be November. To be more exact, the exam results are supposed to be released in the first week of November. All of the students were getting mad for the results, although many were quite disheartened and disappointed as they thought they would miss their chance to the tour due to not performing well in that test.

To tell the truth, even I thought that I might not make it.

3rd November…

The results were out by 10 a.m. The result sheets were put up on the bulletin boards. The names and roll numbers of the candidates were arranged up according to the rank they had secured. The candidates with high ranks had their names on the top.

I saw my name on the sheet. I didn’t even care to look at the rank and where my name was placed because I just thought didn’t make it, so I kept sighing. But Em came out from nowhere.

“Hey there Jay! Don’t you want to join the trip? Why is it that I think you didn’t look at the result sheet properly and didn’t notice that you came second after me and you are qualified for the trip?”

“What?!”

So that was it. I was going to Europe. Wait… Not yet. I hadn’t even informed my parents. This was a much bigger problem. I was talking about Europe and not some locality. They don’t even let me go out on the streets alone.

When I came home that day, dad was standing on the doorstep, and I could guess that he was waiting for me. I think he knew about the result as I had registered his phone number.

I didn’t expect him to allow me for the trip as I was the only son of my family. But the expression I saw on his face was quite different from what I had imagined. I thought he would start dancing. He told me that he had talked to my

mom and that they were both very impressed that I made it to the top five and mom actually thought that if I didn’t join the trip, it would be really bad for the other students who didn’t qualify as they would have been able to go to the

trip instead of me.

I guess you could say that they were happy. Dad told me that as a gift for performing well in that test they were actually going to allow me.

I definitely knew what was yet to come.

The trip would begin about a week later when we would have our winter break. But my parents made me listen to their two hours of guidelines and rules that I had to maintain while on the trip.

Leaving all of that behind I was really happy and I was going to tour Europe. That was all that mattered.

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