I stared at the crossword puzzle, the confounded crossword, trying to force it to give up its last secrets, a textual criminal sweating under questions and heat lamps.

In any other circumstance, I would have put it down and moved on to some other amusement. 

I was at school, and this puzzle was my Human Geography final exam.

We had two hours to finish a damn crossword puzzle.

Mr. Rhodes, the sarcastic, wild soul of a man trapped in a teacher of the most banal of subjects, had had the good will to show us the crossword clues yesterday. The whole class, me included, copied them down with frantic tappings on a keyboard or artificial shutterings of a cell phone camera, or even the low-tech scratching of a pencil on paper, hissing if the pencil lead broke. I had written the clues, Googled the answers, and studied them the night before the test. I had felt calm and prepared all morning.

I was only just now discovering that one of my answers was wrong, and that another was missing entirely. Oh God.

Ok, ok, calm down, I could fix this. Do the missing one first.

17 down, “A ring of milk businesses around a city.” I felt that I knew this one, if I just mentally reached far enough.

What is it-?

Milkshed.

It fit. I wrote that in the blank letterboxes for 17, pleased for a brief instant before returning to the second clue that had somehow escaped me.

“Important source of energy in the 20th century.” 14 across. My answer had been petroleum, but on 14 there were eleven boxes; a “c” was in the 4th box and a “t” was in the 10th.

On seeing this discrepancy, a fluttering thought timidly suggested that could I stop here and call it good: after all, I had almost all of them filled. The suggestion was thrown out. “Almost” wasn’t good enough. Never good enough. This wrong answer was just bad luck. I would finish.

I just needed to think about it. This was easy. The twentieth century was recent. We still use whatever this is.

Oil.

Coal.

Steam.

Twentieth century.

Victorian England.

Natural gas?

No.

I glared at the puzzle, still as maddeningly almost-done-but-not-quite as before. Rhodes smiled at me. I wanted to kill something. I had to finish.

Ok, focus. Sources of energy.

Steampunk.

Steam-

Gas lamps.

Oil-

Coal-

Argh…

What was eleven letters long with a damn c in the middle of it anyway?

I threw up my mental hands in exasperation and defeat, and used my real hands to shove the misbegotten puzzle away as a lost cause and open my leisure book, The Hound of the Baskervilles. If I could not be a puzzle solver, fine. I could still be well read.

Inside the book was my sheet of hints and Googled answers. It only crossed my mind much, much later that bringing this could be construed as cheating, but to me just then it was useless. Useless except as a bookmark, but I read the list again all the same.

A longer clue, 6 Down, caught my eye: “London, Tokyo-” Tokyo was my filled in answer. My handwriting had never been very good- “and New York are the largest world cities in their region.”

Tokyo. Neon signs and skyscrapers. The headquarters of Nintendo. Awake even at night. Lit up buildings everywhere-

I threw the book down, my heart rate spiking, and snatched the puzzle back.

14 down.

It fit.

The clock announced that, from earlier, foolish complacency, only a half hour was left.

I scribbled the missing letters into the boxes, and crossed off the hint for 14 down in comforted pride. A second afterthought of a line was drawn down, slicing through that column of crossed-out clues to signify true completeness.

I slid the puzzle lazily away with a flick of the wrist, and retrieved Baskervilles to read and relax in the glow of the fluorescent ceiling lights.