The Bull Cake Has Been Finished

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Unfortunately the only reason I have time to write this now is because I can't physically sleep, not through an entire night anyway. Every time my head hits the pillow my eye falls on the Spanish subjunctive review and the Ted Hughes quotes I have stuck to my ceiling (which, I guess, was the entire point of sticking them to the ceiling), and out of that follows an frantic mental review of operatic terms. Suddenly, my mind is whirring so incessantly that sometimes I even have to start reading my Chemistry textbook in order to get myself to fall asleep. I could easily blame the elaborate ceremony that is End of Codes for irrevocably interrupting my sleep rhythm; if I described my past week in terms of Higher Level Music terminology, it would be a compound metre, stopping and starting and switching the emphasis on every downbeat, written by Stravinsky.They purposefully scheduled the beginning of first-year exams on Friday to prevent us doing anything too humiliating to them on our final actual day of codes, however this just meant that the festivities began on Monday instead of Tuesday. Distracted from writing an English past paper on Monday morning, being the shortest was actually an advantage as I could duck behind the buttresses while lobbing water balloons at the first years from the castle roof on Monday morning; Seb and Robby were not so lucky and got caught wet-handed with water pistols by the World Religions teacher, who hadn't yet been awake long enough to be lenient. Throughout the week, Main Drive was actually busier at midnight than by day, with a neverending parade of yelping national groups blindfolded or tied up by their second years and led down to a very creative variety of 'secret locations' in order to be humiliated and then fed. It is part of the ritual, of course, to give your first-years biscuits or fondue or pancakes after you've thrown them in the sea, stolen all of their right shoes, locked their closets and/or made them attend all their classes dressed in a bright-red CAVRA boiler suit and black satin elbow-length gloves (the last being the stylish outfit that we three powerful and oh-so-mature second years of Dorm 8 put together for Gala. This being after we gathered all of the umbrellas from the entire girls corridor and hung them around her bed). The Higher Level Music students were forced to jump different time signatures and watch a 17th-century opera. At six on Thursday morning we gathered all our supplies of waterproof eyeliner and permanent pens in order to write 'Mission Accomplished' on every groggily consenting American first year's forehead, then leading them down to top lawn in order to answer intentionally impossible questions on American laws and history ("In Minnesota it is illegal to dye ducklings what colour?" "Blue, unless there are more than six ducklings and they are not for sale"),with a wrong answer or a guess naturally meriting a hit from one of our water balloons. Naturally, we followed it up with a pancake breakfast in the dining hall, blueberries and strawberries for a red-white-and-blue theme accompanied by deafening table-pounding renditions of 'If You're Happy and You Know It' and of course the national anthem. Hoping to catch up on sleep that night, I found myself in the Powys dayroom the next morning at 5:45 with Nat and Rosie, blowing up balloons to hang up all around the castle and running round the academics department with masking tape with signs proclaiming 'You Know You're In The IB If...' (for example) '...you clean your room and find a bed' or 'you've convinced your parents that the 1 you got on the exam is actually the top 1%!o(MISSING)f all students taking the IB'. The janitor who seemed to be following me around on his route to unlock all the academics departments that morning said, chuckling, that when he first saw me dashing around he thought he was just having a bad dream. Which is understandable, as by that point I was already wearing electric blue leggings under neon-green inside-out shorts with a leotard and polka dot wedges, which I think perfectly complemented my Easter-egg purple wig. Oddly enough, under the wig and my green sunglasses no one could actually tell who I was, in the best possible way; after being around the same group of people for at least a year, it was immense amounts of fun to completely disguise my identity (that is, until I opened my mouth). My last day of classes was a day of classes only in the fact that the teachers just loosely supervised us while we ate. I started with banana pancakes and apple fritters in English, followed by tea and crumpets in music (the first time we actually listened to our own music teacher's compositions, one of which was played on the radio by the BBC Philharmonic), and in my final code of maths even Kai just gave up and told us that we could all go outside and dance if we'd rather not review vectors again. There was so much neon and spandex and sparkle that campus could probably be seen from space that day. For our evening code of Spanish, Bogi and I meticulously crafted a bright red chocolate cake in the shape of a bull's head, outlined in melted chocolate with dried cranberries for a ring around the nose, and though the code was only supposed to last an hour we stayed until about seven, learning the Macarena in Spanish and listening to Nidal virtuosically play his harmonica. Finally, it was time to open my diary and make a huge, definitive X through Friday with a black ink pen, into a night of disconcerting fluctuation between total elation and sickening dread, "Hooray no more codes" with a massive looming BUT as an overhanging shadow at the end. Everyone else seemed to be straightforwardly, carefreely celebrating, but as I picked my way through the woods from the watchtower down to the seafront in a purple wig and a traffic-cone orange jumper I felt like something should be mourned for at the same time. Every day now I feel I'm evaporating, becoming slightly but inescapably more translucent every hour. By May 22nd (and hey, at least I don't have to accept the fact yet that I am leaving at the end of this month), I will have disappeared completely, with only the occasionally wafting vapour of memory to show that I was ever even here. I have a few more weeks to be significant, and though I'll be taking the IB I refuse to live as just another number. Though it may be the only thing that defines me in the stack of examination papers which land with a thump on the desk of the IB moderators in Cardiff in early June, I am not Candidate 0017161.

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