She had no doubt that she knew the
answer to every single question on the sheet in front of her. It had
always been this way. The trick had been how to hide it so that others
would not know. She glanced down, her eyes following the questions and
the answers dancing in front of her mind. 24. A equals 56. Square root.
Isosceles Triangle. It would be so simple just to fill in the ovals
with the answers and just be done with this nonsense. Yet, she didn't.
She couldn't. She remembered third grade, when she never even opened
the test and instead, she had illustrated a picture of her kitten by
using the bubbles as dots that could be connected. It was a very
beautiful rendition of Scuttle but the results landed her in the
Resource Room for the entire fourth grade. She learned to tune them
out. Her teachers. The other students. Her parents. Why? they would
ask.Why are you here? they would wonder. Tuning them out made
everything so much easier. She was feeling worn out by the game,
though, and the question of why had begun to creep into her dreams at
night. Why, indeed. And why not? The answer sheet crinkled in her
hands. The pencil felt cold. Her mind raced on, finding solutions as if
it were not part of her entity at all. As if she were separate from her
mind. One-million-twenty-five. Radius of a circle. Flip the diagram and
slide it right. Parallel lines. She laughed at the thought of what they
would all think if she did this test the way they wanted. If she
followed the rules. They would be stunned. No doubt, they would imagine
that it was somehow a mistake. Some error of the computer system. They
would not suspect a thing. She thought of her cat, all curled up at
home in the warmth of her bed, and she started to write.
