Pass/Fail (2012) (18 page)

“Who are you?” he demanded again, staring into his own reflection.

“Jake,” the Proctor buzzed, like a fly trapped between two window panes, “it’s me.”

Jake reached down and pulled the mask off the Proctor’s face.

“It’s me, honey. It’s Mom.”

Jake’s face felt like it wanted to crawl off his skull. He was looking down at his mother, alright. He had just knocked his mother down and threatened her.

“Let me up, sweetie. I’ll go change and we’ll pretend this never happened. We’ll tell dad you had a bad dream. Alright? This doesn’t have to end badly.”

Jake sat back, aghast, and studied the mask in his hands. How was it possible? His own mother? How long—how long had she been working for the Youth Steering Committee? For Mr. Zuraw? How had they gotten her to—

Then something clicked in his head.

They’d had her all along.

“Get up,” he told her.

He was so not ready for this. He’d been operating on autopilot, setting his trap for her simply because he wanted to find out more, to understand what was happening to him. But he was barely able to think, barely able to plan beyond demanding answers to his questions. But maybe—maybe this was an opportunity. A real chance, and one he couldn’t afford to pass up.

He knew what he needed to do.

He handed her the mask. “You carry that, because I need my hands free. But don’t put it on. Right now we’re going downstairs. If we see dad don’t even look at him. I’ll do all the talking. We’re going to get into the station wagon and we’re going to drive to the township offices. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s where I want to go?”

“To the police station, to turn yourself in? I don’t think you want to go to the library right now.”

“I want to go where the Youth Steering Committee meets,” he told her. “Wherever that is, you take me there. They need to know that Mr. Zuraw has lost his mind. They need to stop the Curriculum.”

She didn’t say anything about that.

Jake picked up the envelope that was shoved halfway under his door. Then they headed downstairs together, Jake behind her, ready to grab her if she cried out or tried to run. They didn’t see Jake’s dad on the way. When they got to the car she turned around and raised her gloved hands. “Jake,” she said, “this really isn’t necessary. You don’t have to go there. I can take a message to them for you, if you like, but—”

“I don’t trust you at all,” Jake told her.

She looked hurt. It was hard to look at that face, her face, and not feel guilt crawling all over his bones, but Jake kept his face hard.

“Please, Jake. Don’t hurt me. I’m your mother.”

Jake grimaced. “No,” he said, “I don’t think you are.”

Chapter Forty

“What should I even call you?” Jake asked, when they were in the car.

“‘Mom’ always worked before,” she said.

He shook his head and watched the road. “You’re not my mother. I don’t think I even had a mother. I wasn’t born. I was grown in a vat, or—”

“It doesn’t work that way,” she told him. “It’s true I didn’t give birth to you. But I’ve cooked your meals. Done your laundry. Kissed your finger when you got a boo-boo. If that doesn’t make me your mother, what would it take? Jake, I want you to understand—regardless of anything else, I do love you.”

Jake clamped his eyes shut. “The way a scientist loves his favorite lab rat, maybe. It doesn’t stop him from dissecting it when the experiment is done.”

In his pocket, her telephone kept vibrating. He ignored it. Every fiber of his being was telling him how wrong this was. He had taken his own mom captive and was forcing her to lead him to the meeting place of the Youth Steering Committee. Yet he was right, when he said she wasn’t his mother. No real mother would stand idly by and watch her son be executed, would she? Much less watch it seven times. “How many times have you done this?” he asked. “Were you there for all eight of us?”

“Yes,” she admitted.

“And when they—died—didn’t you feel anything?”

“Of course I did. You can’t begin to understand how hard that is. But we have a, a way of thinking about it that makes it a little easier. We tell ourselves that no matter how many times you die, Jake McCartney lives on. He gets another chance.”

Jake closed his eyes. He was shaking. Then he realized it might just be the telephone in his pocket. He tapped it through the fabric of his windbreaker. “Is there any way to turn this off?” he asked.

“You could answer it.”

The last person he wanted to talk to was Mr. Zuraw.

“He’s crazy, isn’t he? Zuraw, I mean. Mr. Irwin told me that the stress of running this program has warped his mind. I can believe it. The stress of taking the tests has certainly warped mine. But he can’t be allowed to keep doing this. Is it true that the tests have changed? Gotten more dangerous?”

She shrugged. She didn’t look at him as she said, “They’ve certainly changed. In the first series, they were all logic puzzles. Like the one with the Proctor who only tells lies and the Proctor who only tells the truth, or the one where you have to find the heavy dodgeball. Have you had that one yet?”

He was surprised she didn’t know. He touched his pants pocket where his latest pale blue envelope sat, still unopened. He was afraid to look.

“There were no automatic failure conditions, back then,” she confessed. “And the original candidates were allowed to fail five tests, not three. But there are good reasons for those changes. Z has been very clear on that—the data we got originally wasn’t useful. The Pass/Fail candidates didn’t take the tests seriously. They thought of them as silly games. They couldn’t understand that they were working toward something special. It was Z’s great innovation to turn that around. There needed to be disincentives, he said. It’s part of modern educational theory. The student has to have a compelling reason to learn, or he won’t apply himself to his full potential.”

“It never occurred to any of you that I might learn better if nobody was shooting at me?” he asked.

“You’re wasting your time, Jake. The Youth Steering Committee has total faith in Z. They know he’s the right man for the job.”

Jake would have to see about that. He thought that if he explained to the YSC about some of the tests—about the galvanometer test, for one, which Mr. Irwin had called punitive—then they would have no choice but to fire Mr. Zuraw. And maybe, just maybe, let Jake go. Call off the Curriculum and let him just live his life.

More likely, he thought, they would kill him. He knew too much, now. But maybe it would be enough, Jake thought, to make things a little better for the next Jake. The one who hadn’t been grown yet.

Maybe he had an option, though. Was it to late to turn back? What if he told his “mom” to stop the car? What if he promised to be good, to keep passing tests? What if he was the one, the first one, to pass the Curriculum?

He turned to look at her. “What is this all about?” he asked. “Maybe if I knew that, what I was working toward, I might feel differently about it.”

“I can’t tell you the details,” she told him. “But it’s a great destiny.”

He took the pocket out of his envelope. She glanced at it curiously. Maybe she didn’t know what it contained. Maybe, as she had suggested, she was just a messenger. Jake tore the envelope open with trembling hands. He’d had a fifty-fifty chance at passing the dodgeball test. No, better than that—he’d almost had it. Maybe this was a—

Inside was a FAIL.

His second. His last, if he wanted to live. A disincentive, to make him take the tests more seriously. Well, it certainly had that effect.

He was considering his next move, still, when the car stopped and she said, “We’re here.”

Jake looked up and saw they were parked in front of the high school. “No, this isn’t what I asked for—”

“You said you wanted to meet the YSC. This is the way. Come on.” She switched off the car and led him inside the school. It was early in the morning and not even the custodial staff had arrived yet. The corridors were eerily dark and the silence in the classrooms gave him the creeps. Some of the hallways were closed off with thick metal grates he had never seen before.

Without a word she led him deep inside the school. They passed the room where he’d taken the galvanometer test and turned a corner—then stopped. Jake remembered Cody saying that when he’d chased the Proctor after that test, the Proctor had turned around this corner and just vanished. Now Jake understood why. There had to be a secret door here—a way for the Proctors to come and go without being seen by any students other than the Pass/Fail candidates.

Jake’s “mom” stepped up to a row of lockers and started turning the dials of their combination locks. She worked quickly and he tried to see what numbers she set the dials to but couldn’t, not in the gloomy hallway. When she was done four lockers slid forward silently, then shifted over to one side, revealing a very normal-looking door set into the wall behind.

A sign on the door read: ATTENTION PASS/FAIL STUDENTS: OPENING THIS DOOR WILL RESULT IN AN AUTOMATIC FAILURE CONDITION.

Chapter Forty-One

“You see?” she asked. “I told you this wouldn’t get you anywhere. If you open that door it means certain death.”

Jake considered that. “That’s why you’re opening it,” he told her. “Cheating is permitted.”

She grumbled a little but he took a step toward her and then she shrugged. “Alright,” she told him. “Just let me put my mask on.” She took it out of her purse and slipped it over her face. Once again she was a Proctor, indistinguishable from the rest. Without hesitation she turned the knob to the right. The door didn’t open immediately. Instead a tiny hatch set into the O in AUTOMATIC flipped open and a puff of yellowish gas spurted out. It sprayed across the Proctor’s mask.

Jake breathed through his sleeve as the gas dissipated around him. It stung his eyes and made the back of his throat burn. Maybe it was poisonous, or maybe it was just meant to put him to sleep until a Proctor could come and finish him off. He held his breath as long as he could, either way.

“Okay,” he said, when he had to breathe in again. He didn’t pass out or die so he thought he would be alright. “Okay. Open it, now.”

The Proctor hadn’t died either. Apparently there was some kind of air filter built into the mask. She turned the knob to the left and it swung open. Beyond lay a flight of stairs leading down toward a well-lighted corridor.

The Proctor started to walk through the door but Jake grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Oh, no,” he said. “There’s no way I’m going to let you go down there first. No chance for you to warn them I’m coming. In fact—you’re staying here. I’ll find my own way in.”

The Proctor said nothing. She just stepped to one side to let him pass.

Jake hurried down the stairs. They went down farther than he expected—maybe two floors down, maybe three, until he was below the level of the school’s basement. Behind him the door swung shut and clicked as if it were being locked behind him. This didn’t surprise him.

The corridor he found himself in was carpeted so his feet made no sound as he headed forward. It was long enough he couldn’t see where it ended. On either side, wide doorways led off the main hall, but they had neither doorknobs nor signs describing what lay beyond them.

The telephone buzzed in Jake’s pocket. He’d forgotten he still had it. He considered smashing it against the wall or just leaving it behind him but he supposed that would be a bad way to impress the Youth Steering Committee. He had to show them he was a mature, intelligent person worth listening to. He kind of wished he’d had a chance to shower.

Ahead of him the corridor was coming to an end. He’d been walking quite a while, though he had no good way of measuring how far he’d traveled. He thought he’d passed at least twenty of the featureless doors but he wasn’t about to go back and check.

When he reached the end of the hall with no sign of a secret meeting place of the YSC, he sighed and wondered if he’d been tricked. He would hardly put it past the woman who’d claimed to be his mother—she was a Proctor after all. Tricks and lies were their stock in trade. He turned around, intending to try the various doors he’d passed, without a lot of hope. Then he noticed that one of them had turned red. It hadn’t been red before—it must have changed while his back was turned. He approached it and saw that a row of red lights had lit up all along its frame, making it look as if it had changed color. Jake touched the door and the red lights went out again, but the door also slid open, disappearing into the wall, and a breath of cold air washed over him. The room beyond was completely dark so he couldn’t see what, if anything, it contained.

Maybe—maybe it hadn’t been a trick. Maybe this was where the YSC met, after all. Maybe if he stepped inside the lights would come on and he would be surrounded by men and women sitting around a horseshoe-shaped table. Maybe they would be wearing masks like Proctors, but gold instead of silver. Maybe they would ask him why he’d come, and he would tell them, and—

Jake frowned. He didn’t understand where any of that came from. Whenever he’d imagined the YSC before, he’d thought of them as a glorified and far more homicidal version of the PTA. The image of the gold masks had been so vivid, though. Was it something he’d dreamed?

He took a step into the room. The temperature dropped instantly and a cold, damp breeze blew through his hair. He took another step and—

—he was falling, dropping through empty space, nothing below him, nothing he could see on any side—

His hands caught the edge of a sharp drop-off and his body slammed against a wall. He looked up and saw the door he’d passed through as a rectangle of light in a back abyss. Below him—he couldn’t say. There had to be a floor down there somewhere, but how far down? A few feet, or hundreds? It was as if he’d walked into an empty elevator shaft.

The door started to slide closed again. It would crush his fingers and make him fall. Jake pulled himself up and rolled back into the well-lighted hallway just as the door slammed shut behind him.

The phone in his pocket started buzzing once more. Jake caught his breath, then flipped it open and held it to his ear.