Betrayed at the Final Hurdle

It was the January of our final year in college. The Finance Project and our final exams were the last major hurdle to decide what kind of degree we were getting. We found out mid December that it was going to be a group project. Not ideal but not bad either , we had our four man group. I lived with my best friend Kenny. We did everything together aand projects were the included. Kenny was intelligent but lazy. He did enough to get the grades but he was the guy that could of got top marks. I had to put in a alot more effort. But I used to get there in the end.

Kenny , Myself and JP.

The other two in our group ran the show. JP who was older and wiser. He came back to college at 22, an old man in our eyes. He lived with us as well. Then there was Seamie. Seamie came from a farming background and was in the college library 24/7. He went to every lecture and didn't drink. He put in 100% effort and would start his project months before the rest of us. He was a bit of a nerd and it was obvious he got bullied in school really badly. He couldn't look you in the eye and kept his head down. If we had a question in say a maths workshop I would ask Seami if I got the right answer.

You might be right
Seami uttered with his head down.
But I have a different answer to you and I'm not wrong
Seamie would say.

Seami you can tell me I'm wrong by the way. It's OK like laughing.

I was friends with Seami because he was a nice lad and was always good for the notes when I missed the lectures. The nights we were not in the pub we played cards around ours. 110 was the game we played and we were addicted.It was the game 25's on steroids. 5 people could play. And it was better than poker. Seamie would come down for the company as he lived in digs on his own. One night JP tried to teach Seamie the rules of the card game. JP thought us so he was the expert.

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So the best cards you want to be dealt of the same suit is a 5 and then a jack.
The ace of hearts is a wild card so you want that too explained JP.

JP can I ask a question? replied Seami with his eyes peeping over his glasses.

Ask me anything Seami

Whats a heart?asked Seami

JP proceded to take the deck off him.

I don't think this game suits you Seamie

Seami and myself

Anyway back to the story. We managed for 3 years with the same project team and we got to the final year so all was good. Until one day. JP came home and sat myself and Kenny down. He said Seami and himself had decided to go with two other people for the finance project as they felt it was too important to leave the project to the last minute. The two other guys were on board to start straight away and they hoped there were no hard feelings. Myself and Kenny were not happy about it but we didn't show it then. Once JP left the house to get McDonalds Kenny started rocking in the chair.
The bastards! They dumped us! Final project and we're dumped Blanchy. Get your coat. How much do you have in your bank account?
50 pound.

Excellent. I will feed us by raiding the mothers pantry tomorrow if you buy the drink tonight
Deal, --------> to the watering hole.
By the time JP came back we were in the pub. Plotting, conspiring and licking our wounds. It was bad because JP was our third musketeer. The two guys that they joined with on the project were expected to get 1:1 degrees so we knew why they did it but it didn't sit well with both of us. We were the thick ones in their opinions. There was no getting away with it. It irked Kenny more than myself.
First we needed to get two more people to join us for the project. Nicky and Eddie were the first names on the list. Best friends since playschool they finished each others sentences and liked a pint. Said "Huh Hoooo" alot which was funny. Eddie had just fallen out of a back seat of a car which I didn't know could happen. He had a broken arm. Due to this little accident they wouldn't of had a project group planned out so we asked them and they were in.

Nicky and Eddie centre and right, always together
Kenny and I got to work early on this project. Out of all the group he didn't really like Seamie. Seami was too prize student for Kenny and he knew he had Seamie in the cleverness stakes.
JP made a mistake here. Seami spends all day in the library and learns nothing. He's one of them dopes.Just in the library for the sake of it. He thinks a spaceship is going to appear from behind the books and beam the information into that vacant brain of his moaned Kenny.

He was right. Right after the news of the project group split Kenny went on a session but had an assignment in strategic management to hand in on the Monday morning. He started the project drunk Sunday night, pulled an allnighter and managed to get 80%. Seami had spent a month on it and managed a grade of only 74%. Kenny wasn't long rubbing it in. This group split really put Kenneth in the fighting spirit and the Finance project was next on the list. The funny thing about it was we cared more about beating the other group now than even getting our degrees. It hurt and we would spend the next month really going after this project. If JP and Seami didn't snake off with the harlem globetrotters of project students then we probably wouldnt of put in the effort.
Nicky and Eddie took the mantle that myself and Kenneth usually had in the project background. They were happy to leave us to it as they knew we were on a mission. We met up a good few times and discussed how far we were and if we needed anything. We all knew what we had to do and it ended up being a great team. We handed in the final year project with a few days to spare which was a first. Kenny even got his mother, a school principal to proof read the whole thing before we got it bound. It felt weird to hand it in on time but we knew it was good.
A week after we handed in our projects we had our finance class and the lecturer looked really serious. He started out talking about plagiarism and he said that there was one project group that needed to come forward before he failed that project.If you failed then you failed that subject for the year which was not good for your average. Now we were fairly confident that it wasn't us but we sent Eddie up to make sure it wasn't us. He came down with the thumbs up.
Phew.
The final result would not be handed out until after we sat our finals. Our final final's and then that was it. Result. We achieved 88% in our final year Finance project which was one of the highest results of the year. We both got an honours degree in Business and we lived happily ever after.

No, of course that's not the end of the story. A couple of years later myself and Kenneth were at a hurling match in the big tree where we saw one of the guys from their project group. After a couple of drinks it came out the Seamie had plagiarised a whole section of his part. And what made it worse, they never admitted to it. Seamie and JP's group failed the project and year and as a result they all received pass degrees. This was a huge surprise as JP lived with us and never even uttered a word of this. On hindsight he never told us what degree he received. He just said he got what he wanted.
To this day I have never seen Kenneth smile for so long. He was so happy. Not because his friend got a pass degree but because we dodged a bullet. He told me he thought they got a higher grade than us in the project. He thought JP was hiding their result because it was way better than ours. Sometimes things happen for a reason and what was really hard to take at the time may have been a blessing in disguise.

The gods always shone on Kenneths side. He bought a racehorse for 20k last year and sold it for 900k this year. This is true by the way. Irish Vega is the horses name. So now he just purchased his younger sister Lady Vega in Austrailia and hopes to get the same return and knowing him he will. She runs next week in her first race. 18/1 by the way if you are interested!

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Kens former racehorse Irish Vega

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