I just got in my car and left. As much as I hated to admit it, they might have a kernel of a plan, even if it was the product of their own enlightened self-interest. I could let them be the bad guys and get the girls of Lincoln High off my back. Then again, they were dumbasses.
◊◊◊
As I was driving home, Caryn sent me a text saying that she’d hired Kendal and Megan Crowley, aka ‘Mouse.’ That was the image that immediately came to mind when I’d first met her. She was timid and shy. She was the one at Tom’s office who’d gotten me the financial records I needed for the farm loan Uncle John had me get in the fall. Caryn planned to have her do several administrative jobs, including bookkeeping and handling the technical stuff.
Kendal’s focus would be on me. I was sure Caryn took great joy in handing her the recruiting phone. Kendal also had her law degree. She would take over the review of contracts for both my mom’s business and me. I expected that Kendal’s role would evolve as the operation expanded. And once I turned 18, she would no longer need to babysit me at photo shoots and the like.
◊◊◊ Saturday January 23
Today we were taking the SAT. Ms. Jaroslav, the school’s guidance counselor, had arranged for us to take the test. If we needed to retake it, the next date was in March.
I usually used the calculator on my phone when I needed one, but that wasn’t allowed. My mom had to dig a calculator out of a box of her old stuff, and I had to hurry to the drugstore to get a battery for it. I was ready to go with my sharpened number 2 pencils. The proctor came around, pointed at our smartwatches, and made us take them off and put them in our book bags. I guess they were smarter than our high school teachers were.
I looked around the room and saw that almost everyone in my junior class was there. Most everyone at our high school would go to college. They’d brought desks in to the field house. Many students from Washington joined us. We swapped with them as a testing location. If I needed to retake it in March, I would have to travel to Washington to take it. The lead proctor made an announcement.
“If you haven’t signed in, do so now. Let me give you the ground rules so we don’t have any surprises. Turn off all electronic devices. I had better not hear a phone go off during the exams. You aren’t allowed to use your phones or any electronic device that has Wi-Fi during the testing period, including breaks. So, if you have to text your significant other, do so now. You may also not have anything with a camera in it or MP3 players. If you are caught using any such device, it will be confiscated, and you’ll be asked to leave.
“If you need to use the bathroom, do so now. You can only use it during breaks. If you leave the room for any reason, your test will be collected, and it will be assumed you are finished with that portion of the test. If you leave the building, your test will be canceled, and your score will be zero. So smokers, you’ll have to wait until the test is done.
“You are only allowed to have a number 2 pencil on your desk. During the math portion of the test, you may use a calculator, but you must have your own; you may not share a calculator. Only battery-operated, handheld equipment can be used for testing. No power cords are allowed.
“We noticed some of you have smartwatches. Take them off now. If we see you have one on during the test, you’ll be asked to leave and receive a zero.
“The test will begin in ten minutes,” she announced.
I checked my book bag to make sure everything was turned off. It was fortuitous I did because I’d only taken off my smartwatch. To be safe, I powered it down.
The first portion of the test was reading. You read a passage and then answered multiple-choice questions. There were several types of questions. The first was to see if you had a command of the material. They wanted to know if you could find evidence in a passage that best supported the answer and identify how the author used that evidence to support their claims. Other questions focused on word context.
Ms. Jaroslav had warned us about absolutes in answers and said that they were most often wrong. Statements like, ‘John always or only does this or that’ were red flags. The world was rarely absolute, and there were exceptions to most rules. She also taught us to move on if we were stuck. If at the end, we didn’t have time to answer the question, we were to fill in something. You weren’t penalized for a wrong answer, and you had a one in four or five chance of guessing right.
I took my time to read the passages and then turned to the questions. There were a few where none of the answers seemed right, so I marked them and moved on. When I finished, there was about five minutes left, so I turned back and reread the ones I was worried about. On a second reading, most of them made sense. There were only a couple I felt I guessed at, but I could eliminate a few answers to give me a better chance of getting them right.
