“Okay,” Luka whispered to himself. “I’ll invent it.”
He wrote fast: “Bijeli očnjak is about a dog… who is half-wolf… and he lives in the snow. He is very brave. He fights a bulldog named… uh… Čeljusti (Jaws). In the end, a man saves him and he becomes a good dog. The end.”
On the bus, his heart pounded like a drum solo. Each bump in the road felt like a countdown. When he entered the classroom, the clock showed 8:47. Three minutes until doom.
And then, something strange happened. He didn’t read his seven stupid sentences. Instead, he started talking.
Professor Marinić walked in at exactly 8:50. She placed her leather bag on the desk. Adjusted her glasses. Then she smiled.
Luka kept going. He described the bulldog fight. The final scene where White Fang bites a killer named Beauty Smith and nearly dies. He spoke for five minutes. He didn’t know where the words came from. Maybe from the cover summary he’d skimmed online. Maybe from a movie he’d seen two years ago. Maybe from luck.
When he finished, the professor stared at him for a long, terrible second.