Science Gone Too Far!

The Never Ending Quest - Episode 82659

"Hello?"
"Hi, is this Josh Burbank?" a vaguely familiar sounding voice at the other end of the line asks.
"Last I checked, yes."
"Heh heh, you've still got your sense of humor, Josh. Anyway, this is Harry Olsen, your tenth grade science teacher, and I have some pretty big news..."
"Oh, hey! What kind of news is it?" asks Josh, suddenly interested.
"Well...I don't know how you're going to take this, Josh, since it has been fifteen years since you were promoted from the tenth grade, but the school was looking through old records, and well...we discovered that we have no record of you taking my final from that year."
"No record? I thought we fixed this problem!"

Josh Burbank's sophomore year ended early, but by no fault of his own. With a week to go before the end of the 1992-93 school year, Josh started feeling a little funny during lunch. Thinking nothing of it, he ignored it and finished the day, a decision he began to regret after he collapsed at home that evening after supper, requiring a hospitalization that lasted ten days. The stay was long enough that Josh missed all of his final exams, and his parents had to spend a lot of time on the phone assuring his teachers that he in fact, did not blow off the final week of school to "screw around", and he had a valid reason for his extended absence. Meanwhile, Josh was drifting in and out of consciousness for a few days due to his illness, which he refuses to discuss to this day, and he was in no shape to even think about school. It was decided that Josh would make up whatever he could in summer school, which he did, easily passing his exams with flying colors.

Or so he thought.

"I'm sorry, Josh," Olsen continues, "but my word wasn't enough this time. I do remember you making up the exam that summer, but the school's records say you didn't."
"Fifteen years later, and I'm supposed to come back to take one test about a bunch of science that I probably forgot as soon as I went home that day?"
"Sadly, Josh, if this test isn't made up in the next 30 days, it's going to officially invalidate your high school diploma, which in turn, is going to also void your degree from Northwestern."

Oh my god, thought Josh. He had busted his ass to attain that degree from the famous Big Ten university, only to foresake it one night during a drunken bash in which he, under the influence of more than a few brewskis, agreed to rescue Scott from his 'peculiar situation', which began in earnest back in '95 when he first settled into the staircase room. Here we are in 2008, and Josh is no closer to his goal of 'saving' Scott from himself than when he was when they finally met face to face back in 1999, despite having grown up in the same suburb, and gone to the same schools.

"Scott, you have ten days to let us know what you're going to do," Olsen said.

  1. Josh takes that science exam over.
  2. Josh blows it off, invalidating his last two years of high school, and all four years at Northwestern.
  3. Josh decides that all of this is Scott's fault.
  4. Just then, every single teacher from Josh's sophomore year begins calling him about skipped tests and projects. Looks like tenth grade was Josh's worst year in school, hands down.

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Ben McClellan

10/8/2008 9:31:40 AM

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