“Excuse me,” I said when she gave me mine. “What is this?”
“It’s a bubble sheet. To mark your answers.”
“How does it work?” I said.
“It’s the same as any other bubble sheet.” She began to move away
from me, visibly irritated, as if I were playing a prank.
“I’ve never used one before.”
She appraised me for a moment. “Fill in the bubble of the correct
answer,” she said. “Blacken it completely. Understand?”
The test began. I’d never sat at a desk for four hours in a room full of
people. The noise was unbelievable, yet I seemed to be the only person
who heard it, who couldn’t divert her attention from the rustle of
turning pages and the scratch of pencils on paper.
When it was over I suspected that I’d failed the math, and I was
positive that I’d failed the science. My answers for the science portion
couldn’t even be called guesses. They were random, just patterns of
dots on that strange pink sheet.
I drove home. I felt stupid, but more than stupid I felt ridiculous.
Now that I’d seen the other students—watched them march into the
classroom in neat rows, claim their seats and calmly fill in their
answers, as if they were performing a practiced routine—it seemed
absurd that I had thought I could score in the top fifteen percent.
That was their world. I stepped into overalls and returned to mine.—THERE WAS AN UNUSUALLY hot day that spring, and Luke and I spent it
hauling purlins—the iron beams that run horizontally along the length
of a roof. The purlins were heavy and the sun relentless. Sweat dripped
from our noses and onto the painted iron. Luke slipped out of his shirt,
grabbed hold of the sleeves and tore them, leaving huge gashes a
breeze could pass through. I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing anything
so radical, but after the twentieth purlin my back was sticky with
sweat, and I flapped my T-shirt to make a fan, then rolled up my
sleeves until an inch of my shoulders was visible. When Dad saw me a
few minutes later, he strode over and yanked the sleeves down. “This
ain’t a whorehouse,” he said.