Chapter 10: Fifteen Percent
1125 Words
Thursday arrived with the particular tension of a day that had something riding on it.
The in-class writing exercise sat at the back of everyone's mind like a stone in a shoe — not debilitating, but impossible to fully ignore. I had prepared as well as I reasonably could. Two nights of review, Ellis's lecture notes organized and re-read, the key frameworks written out until they felt natural rather than memorized.
I was ready.
Probably.
---
Prisca and I had fallen into a pattern without formally establishing one.
She arrived at Room 204 before me. I arrived early enough to still find her there. We sat in the same seats. We walked out together. Nobody had named it or made rules about it — it had simply become the shape of Tuesdays and Thursdays, settled into place the way good habits do.
This Thursday she was at the desk when I arrived, reviewing notes with focused calm. She looked up briefly.
"Ready?" she said.
"Ask me in two hours."
"Fair." She returned to her notes.
I sat down and did the same.
---
Ellis walked in at exactly two o'clock carrying a stack of printed prompt sheets, which she distributed without preamble or reassurance. The prompt was clean and direct — analyze a research methodology of your choice using the frameworks covered in the past three weeks, identify its strengths and limitations, and propose one specific improvement.
Forty-five minutes. Handwritten.
The room absorbed the silence of people thinking.
I read the prompt twice, chose qualitative interview methodology, and began.
---
Writing by hand in a timed environment has a specific quality — no backspace, no revision, just forward movement. The thoughts either come or they don't. Mine came steadily, which was a relief. I worked through the analysis in the order that felt most logical, kept the language clean, did not try to be impressive.
Halfway through I became aware, without looking, that Prisca had stopped writing briefly.
A pause. Then the pen resumed.
I did not look over. That felt like a boundary — the kind that exists without being stated.
At the forty-minute mark Ellis said "five minutes" and the room shifted slightly, everyone compressing their conclusions. I finished with two minutes to spare and read back through what I had written.
It was solid. Not brilliant, but honest and well-reasoned. I was comfortable with it.
Ellis collected the papers at the bell.
---
The room exhaled collectively.
Someone two rows back said "that was brutal" to nobody in particular. A few people laughed the short, relieved laugh of people coming down from mild stress.
Prisca capped her pen and sat back slightly. Not dramatically — just a small release of held posture.
"How was it?" I asked.
"Fine," she said. Then, with more honesty: "The conclusion felt rushed. I spent too long on the limitations section."
"What methodology did you choose?"
"Ethnographic observation." She picked up her things. "You?"
"Qualitative interviews."
She nodded. "Safe choice. Lots of established framework to work with."
"That was the idea." I stood. "Yours is more interesting though."
She looked at me. "More interesting or harder to argue cleanly?"
"Both, probably."
She considered that. "Yes," she said. "Both."
---
We went to Harlow Brew.
It had become the Thursday rhythm as naturally as the seating arrangement — class ended, we walked, coffee appeared. Prisca paid this time, efficiently and without making anything of it, sliding my black coffee across the table before I could object.
"You remembered," I said.
"I said I would."
She had. Three weeks ago, after the first coffee. She had said *next time I'm buying* and she had simply — remembered and done it.
I was learning that Prisca operated this way. She said things and meant them. Not dramatically, not with ceremony. She just followed through, as a matter of course.
It was one of the most quietly impressive things about her.
---
The post-exam coffee had a different quality than the others — looser, less structured, the shared relief of something completed creating an ease that had not quite existed before.
She told me about her methodology choice. Ethnography had interested her since a second-year course on media anthropology — the idea of immersing yourself completely in a subject's world rather than observing from outside.
"Most research keeps the researcher separate," she said. "Ethnography complicates that. You become part of what you're studying. That changes everything — the data, the ethics, the conclusions."
"Does that bother you? The contamination of it?"
She tilted her head. "I think contamination assumes there was purity to begin with. All research is positioned. Ethnography is just honest about it."
I looked at her. "You should have written that in the exam."
"I did," she said simply.
---
We stayed longer than usual — closer to an hour.
At some point the conversation moved away from class entirely, into the comfortable territory that had been expanding between us weekly. She told me about a documentary she had watched Sunday that had made her genuinely angry — a story about a community whose narrative had been taken and repackaged by outside journalists without consent.
"They thought they were helping," she said. "That's the part that's hardest to argue with. The intention was real."
"But the impact—"
"Was extractive," she said. "Intention doesn't change that."
I thought about that. "Do you want to work in media? After school?"
"Documentary," she said, without hesitation. "Long-form. The kind that takes two years and follows something real." She paused. "You?"
"Research, I think. Academic or policy-adjacent. Something that tries to translate data into something usable."
She nodded slowly. "You want your work to land somewhere practical."
"Don't you?"
"Yes," she said. "I just want mine to land emotionally first." A small pause. "Different entry points, maybe the same destination."
Something about that felt significant in a way I did not fully examine right then.
---
Outside Harlow Brew the afternoon had turned properly cold — the first real cold of the season, the kind that meant the year was turning.
She pulled her jacket closed.
"Ellis will return these in a week," she said.
"Dreading it or confident?"
She thought about it genuinely. "Neither. Somewhere between."
"That's where I am too."
She smiled — the full one, the real one. "Good. Company helps."
She started walking.
No half-turn this time either — she had stopped doing that consistently, which I noticed without commenting on.
She just walked, and occasionally glanced back, and that was better.
---
I texted Abdullahi that evening.
*Things are moving.*
His reply came after a characteristic pause.
*Slowly or well?*
I smiled at the phone.
*Both.*
*Good,* he sent back. *Those are the same thing.*
- Writer
