Pass/Fail (2012) (2 page)

She was beautiful, even though a chunk of hair was missing from one side of her face, and there was a patch of red skin behind her ear where she must have been burned. Her eyes were a deep, tranquil blue. Looking at them made Jake feel—

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he said back, too fast and too loud. He looked down at his shoes, then, thinking he’d made a mistake, back up at her face. She was looking at his shoes.

His shoes were not that interesting.

“Listen,” he said, “are you okay? That was a bad crash. And the fire—”

“I’m fine,” she said. “They kept me up pretty late at the hospital monitoring my breathing, but then they said I didn’t even get a day off from school.”

“That sucks!” Jake laughed.

“Yeah,” she agreed.

They nodded and smiled at each other for a while.

“I don’t know what else to say,” she said, with a noise that could have been a laugh but didn’t quite make the cut.

“No, I—I guess—no. I’m not very good at talking to girls. Not much practice,” he said, trying to explain. He would do anything to explain.

She nodded without looking up. “Here’s some advice,” she said. “The best way to get a girl to talk to you, is to not tell her you’re no good at talking to girls. It makes us wonder what’s wrong with you.” Then she walked past him, as if she were going to her own homeroom, and that was it.

He turned to one side and made a fist, thinking he would hit a locker hard enough, to make a sound loud enough, to deaden the roaring of the blood in his ears. He didn’t do it, though, because after a second she turned to look at him again. “Oh,” she said. “I thought of one thing to say, though.”

“Yeah?” he asked.

“Thank you,” she told him, and then disappeared around a corner of the hall.

Chapter Three

Jake never made it to homeroom that morning.

Mr. Schneider met him at the door and told him instead to go see the guidance counselor. He gave Jake a hall pass to get there. Fulton High School was built on the plan of a wide rectangle of corridors surrounded by classrooms, one half of which faced the road into town and beyond that, the football stadium and the ball fields. The other half faced an enclosed gymnasium, an assembly hall that many people thought resembled a flying saucer in shape (it had been added in the 1960s by an architect who wished to break up the school’s otherwise entirely right angles), and a long thin extension called the teacher’s wing, devoid of classrooms and used mostly as administrative offices and teacher’s lounges. The guidance office was at the far end of this wing, where a broad picture window looked out over an expanse of open Arizona desert and, in the far distance, a line of jagged mountains looming on the horizon.

It took approximately ten minutes for Jake to walk from one end of the school to the other, but he did not see another human being in the hallways the entire time. This seemed odd, when he thought about it later, but not too odd—classes were in session, the vast majority of the schoool’s population busy either lecturing or being lectured too. Without a hall pass, no one was allowed in the hallways. Jake had such a pass but there was no one to show it to.

He reached the end of the teacher’s wing and stood before the door marked Guidance in gold letters. Flyers and memos advertising college preparatory tutors and career aptitude testing covered most of the upper, glass portion of the door so that Jake could not see what lay in wait for him inside. He knocked, and when he was bid to enter, he did so.

The room was just big enough to contain one large desk, currently covered in papers and files, and two chairs. Behind the desk sat Mr. Zuraw, who Jake had seen only once before standing in the background at a school-wide assembly, at the end of Jake’s freshman year. Mr. Zuraw had been introduced to the students as the newest member of the faculty without further explanation. Jake remembered his face only because of the way he had walked to the front of the stage, studied the student body with a cold and calculating expression as if sizing up their college potential en masse, and the strode off the stage even while the Principal was still talking. As if he hadn’t seen any reason to bother even with respectful silence, based on what he’d seen.

Mr. Zuraw’s expression hadn’t changed much. He had frizzy grey hair, the color of new iron, that stuck out slightly from either side of his head and went thin at the top. His lips were almost colorless. He wore a three piece suit—not a sweater vest and tie, not a buttoned-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, like most teachers at Fulton. He wore a three piece navy blue serge suit that made him look like a businessman. The collar was buttoned very tightly around his throat. He also wore a pair of thin, black leather gloves, which made him look like he had some place to go and only had a few seconds to waste on this appointment.

There was a small object on the desk next to his left glove. It was made of plastic and it looked like a box about the size of a deck of playing cards but a little thicker. It had a hinge on one end as if it folded in half and a stubby antenna stuck up from one corner. It had the word NOKIA printed on its face. Jake wondered what it was—he’d never seen that word before, or anything like the little box. When he looked at it for too long, though, Mr. Zuraw grabbed it hurriedly off his desk and shoved it in a desk drawer.

“McCartney, Jake,” he said, and waved Jake toward the chair facing him. “Senior. Chess club, Science Fairs, French club. Very good grades,” he went on, as if reading from a dossier, though he wasn’t, “in fact, a 4.0 average. On his way to becoming class valedictorian, if he doesn’t screw it all up.”

Jake’s eyes widened a little, but he said nothing.

“No athletic accomplishments to speak of. In fact—nearly failed gym class his freshman year. This school promotes self-esteem and personal growth above actual achievement, which makes it extremely difficult to fail gym, even for the most feeble. When required to climb a rope he proved unable to do so even given support and encouragement by Coach Matthews.”

Support and encouragement had largely amounted to name-calling and expressions of disdain, Jake remembered. “My sophomore year I managed to get up the rope,” he claimed.

Mr. Zuraw tilted his head to one side, then the other. “Lost thirty-five pounds his sophomore year. Did a little better then. Shows he can improve if he tries hard enough. If the only option is failure.”

The guidance counselor sat back in his chair. He looked up at the ceiling for a long time, then brought his gaze down to focus on Jake’s face. Jake got the feeling the man had just opened his eyes after having them closed—though in fact they’d been open the whole time. “Hello, Jake,” he said.

Jake squirmed in his seat. “Hi. You… wanted to see me. Did you want to talk about college applications? Because I’ve already—”

Mr. Zuraw shook his head. “No.”

Jake nodded. “Okay. Then. Um, does this have anything to do with what happened last night?”

Mr. Zuraw smiled at him without any warmth. And waited.

Finally Jake thought to reach into his bookbag and pull out the pale blue envelope. The card with its PASS was still inside. “Is it about this?”

“You’re a very special child, Jake. Or so certain people believe. They think you might have potential no one has tapped yet. We’d like to see if we can tap it this year. For that reason, the curriculum has been changed for you.” He nodded at the envelope in Jake’s hand. He began speaking in a flat tone, very quickly, as if he were describing the side effects of a pharmaceutical. “From now until further notice, everything you do will be graded on a strictly pass/fail basis.”

Jake squinted at the man. “You mean my coursework, and—”

“Everything. You were presented with a test last night, and you passed it. There will be more of them, though no two will be the same. The number of tests is not something I’m going to share with you. They will happen at seemingly random times, and they will be evaluated according to not only whether you complete the tasks you’re given but in what manner you complete them. Cheating is permitted, and in some cases will be necessary to achieve a passing grade. There will be conditions built into each test that will result in automatic failure.”

“What are you talking—who decided this, my parent’s weren’t—”

“Jake, let me pause now to make one thing clear. None of this information will be repeated once I’ve finished. It is to your immense benefit that you pay attention right now and memorize everything I say.”

Jake started to speak again, then sat back in his chair and held his peace. He was getting angry—often enough, his reaction to deep confusion. He knew better than to think the anger would help him just then.

“You should avoid those conditions,” Mr. Zuraw went on, as if he had not been interrupted. “Once a grade has been awarded, either a PASS or a FAIL, it cannot be rescinded or changed for any reason. No appeals will be permitted. During the testing period you will continue to pursue your normal coursework, though the tests you take in class will not be graded.”

Jake shook in his chair. He grabbed the chair arms with both hands. He didn’t know what to think. This was no practical joke, he was certain. It wasn’t funny, for one thing. He’d worked very hard to maintain his 4.0 and to have it threatened now was obscene. There was something going on here, something he was not being allowed the time to take apart and understand.

“If you pass enough tests, you will be allowed to graduate from high school and you will return to this office, where you and I can discuss your very, very bright future.”

He stopped suddenly.

Jake bit his lip. He couldn’t stand the sudden vacuum of his words. He had to say something. “What if I fail?”

“You are allowed to fail any two of the tests without penalty. If you fail three tests, I will personally take you out behind the gymnasium and put a bullet in the back of your head.”

Chapter Four

Jake laughed. Okay, he thought.

This was some kind of joke, after all.

It had to be.

“What is this all about?” he asked. “Why would you do something like that?”

“It’s for your benefit, Jake. Everything I do is for your benefit. Beyond that I am not permitted to share with you the reason for the change in curriculum.”

“But—you’re not really going to shoot me,” Jake said.

Mr. Zuraw smiled again, that same humorless smile that pressed his lips together and drained them of all blood. Then he opened up a drawer of his desk, took out a large and very clean revolver, and placed it on the blotter between them.

Jake ran.

He leapt out of the chair, one leg swinging over its arm. He ran out of the guidance office and through the teacher’s wing. Mr. Zuraw made no attempt to follow him. Why would he? According to the rules he’d described, Jake could fail three more tests before Mr. Zuraw would shoot him.

That was accepting the guidance counselor’s logic. Jake refused to do that. Instead he believed a clearly deranged man with a gun was
inside the school.

He raced to the Principal’s office. It wasn’t far, just at the juncture where the teacher’s wing met the westernmost classrooms. Jake rushed inside the reception area even as the Principal’s secretary shouted “Hey!” and told him there was no running in the halls. He raced up to the Principal’s door and started pounding on it, even as he recalled that Mr. Zuraw had said “we”. This particular “we” had wanted him to tap his unrealized potential, and were imposing the ludicrous tests on him for that purpose. Jake wondered who this “we” might be. It might include other faculty members.

It might include them all.

As the door swung open, though, he realized he had to try. “Mr. Zuraw, the guidance counselor—has a gun,” he said breathlessly.

The Principal smiled and blinked. “Hello, Jake,” he said.

Standing behind him was a man in a three piece suit. A navy blue serge three piece suit, just like the one Mr. Zuraw wore, down to the black leather gloves. Except for one detail—he had a mask on his face. It was perfectly smooth and covered his entire face and it was as bright and reflective as a mirror, so that Jake saw a shrunken reflection of his own panicked face when he looked at it.

“Who…?” he asked, looking back at the Principal.

“This is one of your Proctors. One of the staff who will oversee your testing. They don’t have names. Not when they’re masked. That’s the point of the mask, you see.”

Jake didn’t stick around to ask any more questions.

His next stop was Mr. Schneider’s homeroom. He peered through the window inset in the door and saw Cody and twenty-eight other students lounging at their desks, some napping, some passing notes or just talking in low voices. Mr. Schneider was reading from a mimeographed list of announcements.

He stopped as Jake threw open the door. He looked up. They all looked up.

“Cody,” Jake said. “Come on. I need your help.”

Cody looked around and started to laugh. “What are you doing, Jake?” he asked. “I can’t just—”

“I’ve always counted on you before.”

Cody shook his head wildly. “I can’t leave without a hall pass!”

“I… think you can.” Cheating was permitted, and sometimes necessary, Jake recalled. He knew he needed some support just then. “Just, stand up. Just stand up.”

Mr. Schneider watched closely as Cody considered this, then, slowly, hands on his desk, started to get up. The homeroom teacher did not make any comment. Cody walked slowly toward the door, always facing the teacher, watching as if he expected to be told at any moment to stop this foolishness and sit down.

Mr. Schneider made no comment.

Was he part of this? Or did he just see the desperation in Jake’s face?

Out in the hall Jake tried to explain what had happened. “Guidance—gun—principal’s in on it—gotta get out,” he ended up saying. Cody told him he was talking too fast. Jake just shook his head and ran for the foyer by the road, where the school buses picked up and dropped off. Cody was enough of a friend to know to just follow and not ask any more questions.

Outside the sun was up. The white sidewalks were blazing and the dry air of late summer made Jake very aware of the salty sweat on his skin. He felt grimy and gross. He felt like he was about to start hyperventilating.