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Chapter Four: Testing Strengths

Lydia Rousseau

I always looked at tests as a way to boost my grade. I was always optimistic though my grade was never really raised more than one or two points. Anyways, on this test day, the first of many this year, I absolutely dreaded that five page packet written practically by the devil. This would be a test used to torture criminals into confessing all of their crimes. This would be a test used for executions. This test would be the death of me.

The math teacher was fifty years old (but acted have her age) and was fiercely unqualified.  Her skin was caked in make-up that did not match her skin tone and was just plastered onto her cheeks along with thick layers of a dark, dark red-orange bronzer and sharp crimson blush. Her jet black eyeliner was thicker than the width of her eyes themselves. They were a grayish blue and deep set, buried so deep in their sockets I almost thought the skin around her eyes blocked them, practically blinding her. Her peripheral vision was certainly nonexistent. Her eye shadow was crammed in between the disaster eyeliner and the painted on eyebrows. They formed two huge dark brown arches. As for her lips, they were fake. She must have had surgery and that surgery must have been botched. They were lopsided and unnaturally thick. She’d smudged on red lip liner and painted them the brightest pink I ever saw. I had a hard time understanding what was going on with her hair but after three days, I think I figured it out. It was different shades of blond. It was generally just flaxen at first glance but then you started to notice the sporadic patches of beach blond strands. Then I noticed brown at her roots and at the (split) ends. There were also some grays at the mess at her roots that I could easily tell she was desperately trying to hide. It was a sticky mess of heat damage and products. When she walked past me, I smelled all those different scented goops she rubbed into her scalp along with the violent perfume she always wore that smacked me in the face. My eyes watered and my nose stung. It might as well have been pepper spray. Her body was a collection of obvious plastic surgeries. This was too large. That was too thin. Those were too high up or whatever. It looked ideal. But let me tell you something about ideal: this ideal of hers made her look so uncomfortable that anyone who saw her felt her pain, thus . . . quite unattractive. At least the clicking of her high-heels above the roar of the students in the hallways gave you some type of warning that she was coming.

Prepare your noses! Her shoes seemed to scream above the students.

She passed out the test. I had a pencil, a highlighter, a bottle of water, and a calculator. I appeared ready. But I was not ready.

At every other school I’ve ever attended in my entire life, students took their test in utter silence while the teacher sat in judgment like a predator fattening up its prey. Though in truth, it was never really like that. Teachers and students worked together to conquer the knowledge and pass the damned test. At Ashworth, it felt like it was the students pitted against the teachers. All we could do was decode their tricks and find a way to use them against such enemies. Quizzes, tests, assessments, they were the battles and with each pass or fail meant another battle won or lost. And this was the first battle in a long war. I was unprepared. The pencil as my sword, I was destined for failure. I wrote my name and took a look at the first question with utter desperation.

*        *        *

Todd Wright

I shook off Chess Club and decided to relax over the weekend. I put off my homework until Sunday and come Sunday, I realized how much of a bad idea that was.

I would never do homework on a Saturday. That would kill me. I had always joked about how if I was ever forced to do homework on a Saturday, I would never be the same again; simple as that. Then I laughed and my friends laughed. Now it was becoming serious. After the first week of school, I was already considering the horror of something I never even had to think about before except as that really bad joke the annoying kid tells at lunch. I would rather be annoying and happy than never the same again as I predicted. What was I going to do?