French, exchange smiles in their seats toward the back. The smiles seem forced, as if ghost-like hands are tugging at the corners of their mouths. I have it in confidence that the female Dr. Stone nearly suffered a breakdown after her last test. Dr. Chen, despite her envious ability to recall the entire periodic table of the elements, slips a pill into her mouth, chasing it with what looks like water but what I think might have slightly more numbing properties.
Everyone has a right to be on edge. The academic portion isn’t enough to freak out twenty-some people with terminal degrees, but the administrative section—five pages assessing our understanding and absorption of various new policies handed down from the federal Department of Education—is maddening. Our doctorates haven’t prepared us for Madeleine Sinclair’s ever-evolving plans for the future of learning. And the document I forged this morning only raises the stakes for my colleagues. I’m glad they don’t know what I know, that they have no idea the words I wrote—just a few little words—have the power to condemn them to something far worse than demotion to a green school. I try to swallow my guilt. It tastes bitter.
Normally, I would study throughout the month and pull a weekend-long policy cram session immediately before the test. Normally, I would not have put my daughter on a bus to a tier-three school twenty-four hours prior to a battery of grueling assessments. Even if I didn’t want to bomb today’s test of mental endurance, I know I’m grossly unprepared for a three-hour assault on my overworked brain.
Perhaps that makes things easier, having the decision out of my hands, especially since I don’t have a clue as to what the next few days will bring.
While we wait for the proctor to come in with stacks of blue books and the usual recitation of rules against collaboration, talking, and the use of electronic devices, I practice breathing in and out in a steady rhythm, and I think about my grandmother.
Oma didn’t reemerge from her room for dinner, although she called me in twice during the early evening. Each time, she seemed ready to tell me something. Each time, she started down a winding path of stories with an extensive cast of characters until my mother came in and insisted on rest.
I looked them up. Most of her stories were verifiable, although whether they were Oma’s stories or co-opted tales she’d cobbled together and made into her own is a different question. Mom insists it’s the latter, that Oma isn’t all there anymore. Were there institutions for the so-called feebleminded here a century ago? Absolutely. There were also Jim Crow laws and insane asylums, neither of which I imagine will be experiencing a renaissance. I put thoughts of prisons and Dickensian workhouses out of my mind, smiling a little at the ridiculousness of it all. Freddie’s in a boarding school, and I’m going to take her out of it.
It will be three short days before I realize how absolutely wrong I am.
TWENTY-NINE
I’ve been staring at the same blank page for over an hour. My pen, now with a mind of its own, writes one sentence.
There. That should get the attention of the assessment board.
Not that they’d care. There are plenty of would-be teachers lining up to take my place; plenty of people willing to switch tracks and sell their souls to snag a position at a silver school. If there aren’t enough willing souls, the Fitter Family Campaign will offer more money from its bottomless bucket.
The testing room begins showing signs of anxiety around eleven. Skirts and trousers rustle as legs are crossed and uncrossed. Leather shoe soles slide and tap underneath desks. Hands run through hair as if to stimulate brain cells or pick answers from the cobwebs of memory.
We’ve been here for two hours now.
The proctors have brought in small bottles of spring water, tissues, and energy bars. One by one, we’re escorted out of the room for turns in the lavatory. No one looks up from their blue books; no one exchanges a glance. We simply sit and shift, like bits of stew in a pressure cooker.
There’s a moment when I want to turn back the pages, fill in proper answers,