It’s a long way. I hope they won’t give you detention on your first day.”
“Is detention that bad?”
He nodded silently. “The worst. It’s . . . down there, you know? You don’t want detention. Trust me.”
He scurried away in the opposite direction and I started to run again. It was hot and stuffy here and the sweater was way too thick and itchy. I felt perspiration trickling down under my arms and checked to see what I was wearing under that sweater. Nothing. Not even a bra. And it appeared that I had not used any deodorant because I stank. What was the matter with me—who let me leave the house dressed like this? I reached the end of the hall and as I pushed open the swinging doors into a stairwell another smell hit me. The faint odor of rotten eggs. Probably the science lab, I thought. An experiment gone wrong or students playing a trick on the science teacher by mixing the wrong chemicals.
I started up the stairs. The staircase was in almost total darkness and I kept going, up and up. I would never get to the exam at this rate. What would happen if I failed it? Or if they wouldn’t even let me take it because I was so late? Would that mean I couldn’t go back to my old school, or I’d fail my college entrance exam? I counted the floors and came at last to what had to be the sixth. How come a school this large didn’t even have an elevator? It must take forever to get between classes. My feet echoed on the vinyl floor and back from the tiled walls.
“You, girl—what do you think you are doing?” she snapped. “Disturbing my examination.”
I glanced up at the door. The numbers 666 were now glowing over the door frame.
“I’m supposed to be here,” I said. “I’m to take this exam but nobody told me how to find the room. I’m sorry I’m late.”
“You will be sorry, if you don’t complete the exam in time,” she said. “What’s your name?”
“Amy Weinstein.”
“Ah, yes. We were expecting you.” The smile on her face was not welcoming, but instead expressed malicious delight. “Amy Weinstein who thinks a lot of herself. Thinks she’s the cat’s whiskers. Overachiever—am I right?”
“I’m a good student,” I said. “I worked hard for everything I achieved. My parents didn’t have the money to send me to a good college so I had to get a scholarship.”
I paused as I said the words. Had I already gotten into college? In which case this exam meant nothing and I didn’t have to worry about it.
“We’ll see how well you do here,” she said. “You’d better not waste any more time. You do have two number-two pencils, properly sharpened?”
“I have one,” I said. “The man at the door lent it to me. I didn’t receive any instructions. Or I might have done, but I’ve been in an accident and lost my memory.”
“That’s a poor excuse for failure, isn’t it? Go on in and take a seat at an empty desk. You’d better work fast because you only have an hour left. You wouldn’t want to find yourself in remedial classes, I’m sure.”
“Remedial? I’m in the gifted program. I’m in Advance Placement English.”
“At your old school, maybe. Here the rules are a little different.” And she smiled again. She took me by the arm and propelled me inside. Her fingers dug into my flesh like talons.
The room was much bigger than I had suspected from the outside. It stretched away into more gloom with row after row of desks at which students were scribbling furiously. Nobody even looked up as I passed them to take my place.
“Begin immediately,” the bird-woman said and I turned over the sheaf of papers that lay on the desk.
Algebra, the first one was headed. Algebra, I thought. It’s been ages since I did algebra. How long had it been, exactly? So long ago I couldn’t remember studying it at all. Why couldn’t they have told me the subjects in advance? Then I could have studied up.
I focused on the first problem. If x and then a squiggly sign I didn’t recognize to y, and then a + b in brackets, can we say that z is greater than x is? I blinked, stared at it again. It made no sense, even if I did know what that squiggly sign meant. Surely you couldn’t have so many unknowns in one problem. But the other kids seemed to be working away as if they weren’t fazed at all.
I moved on to the second question. Draw a graph to show that x/y might tend toward infinity in the circumstances z squared is less than 100. Again it made no sense to me. I had done well enough in algebra, surely, but I’d never encountered anything like this. The thought struck me that perhaps this was some kind of advance placement exam for math whizzes. Well, that wasn’t me, anyway. I’d never claimed to be a math whiz. My strengths had always been in the arts—reading, writing, history, languages, that was where I shone.
I turned over the algebra sheet and flipped ahead to see how much of the exam was math. Then I heaved a sigh of relief as I saw pages of writing ahead. World history. Good. I’d ace this part.
Discuss the treaty of Nebrachshazar in fourth-century BC and how it affected the development of cuneiform writing for the Babylonian people.
Are we justified in saying that there was peace in Persia in the year AD 731?
Which Chinese emperor did more to hinder the spread of the Taoist philosophy—Yin Fu Cha or Tse Wong Ho?
My heart was racing now. My throat was so dry I couldn’t swallow. I didn’t know any of this stuff. I’d never learned it. Our version of world history didn’t stretch much beyond the Spanish conquests in the New World and some more memorable kings of England.
Another subject. There must be another subject I could do. English. Right. There was an English paper.
Which little-known imitator of Shakespeare also wrote a play that took place in Windsor? In what ways was it similar to the Merry Wives? Discuss the passages that were borrowed from Shakespeare.
Give examples of seventeenth-century treatises with a Roundhead slant and contrast them to similar works favoring the Cavaliers.
Early-twentieth-century Bulgarian Romantic poets—what do they all have in common?
“This is stupid!” I almost said the words out loud, then swallowed them back at the last moment. There was not one question I could begin to answer. I was going to fail hopelessly. I would be put in remedial classes with all the dummies I so despised. I saw myself clearly—sitting in class while some idiot asked a dumb question and the rest of us had to wait while the teacher explained it all over again. Now I’d be in class with kids like that.
No, I wouldn’t. This had gone on long enough. I wasn’t going to stick around here one moment longer. I’d go to the office, call my parents and tell them to come and get me. I rose to my feet.
“Where are you going?” the bird-woman demanded.
“I’m not staying,” I said. “I don’t want to be here. This school isn’t right for me.”
“Not as smart as you thought you were, huh?” she said. “Fine. I’ll tell the principal that you refused to take the entrance exam. I’m sure she’ll be wanting to meet with you anyway. We don’t tolerate lack of cooperation here.”
“Ooh, she’ll get detention,” someone hissed.
“Who said that?” The bird-woman looked up sharply. “You, boy. Did I say no talking after the examination has started or not?”
“Yes, ma’am, you did.”
“Then take your things and go. Your chance to redeem yourself has just ended.”
“But I didn’t mean . . .” he stammered. “Just let me finish it. I almost had it finished this time.”
“Rules are rules. Go.” She pointed at the door.
“You can’t expect me . . . You can’t make me . . .” he blurted out. “It’s not fair, you know.” His face looked a picture of misery. No, more than misery, torment. But he dragged his feet all the way to the door and it clanged shut behind him.
“Anybody else have something they’d like to say?” She turned back to the room.
Heads went down and everyone scribbled frantically.
“I have something I want to say,” I said. “This isn’t the Dark Ages. You don’t get the best out of students by intimidating them.”
There was a collective gasp.
