Pass/Fail (2012) (17 page)

Two groups of six, then two groups of three, then two groups of one… which left one ball unweighed. There was no way to weigh all of the balls with three weighings. That meant in the end he could only have a probability of being right, not a certainty, because he would have to guess about the last three balls. There was no concrete solution, it seemed. But there had to be, there had to be some solution. There always was.

“I’m going to beat this,” he told the Proctor. “Even if I end up guessing. I’ll guess right. I swear it! Maybe I can’t measure all the balls, but—”

But he didn’t have to.

He saw it, suddenly, so clearly in his head that he actually calmed down for a moment. The elegance of the solution almost made him smile. He didn’t have to weigh all of the balls, and he didn’t have to guess at all.

Instead of two groups of six, he divided the balls into three groups of four. Then careful not to upset the unstable scale, he fed each of the groups into one of the two mesh bags hanging from the end of the pole. If one side went down, even slightly, that would mean it contained the heavy ball. There was also a chance that the two bags would be evenly balanced, meaning that the heavy ball wasn’t in either one. That was fine—that just meant the heavy ball was in the group of four he hadn’t weighed. Either way, he had reduced the number of balls that needed to be weighed by two thirds.

The pole tilted first left, then right. It tottered back and forth for a while with Jake swearing under his breath—but then it started to settle down, with one bag touching the floor and the other still a few inches in the air.

“Yes!” Jake crowed, and immediately started taking balls out of the bags. He kept the four from the heavy group and pushed the other eight to the side.

When he split the four balls into two groups of two and started feeding them into the bags for the second weighing, the stack of hurdles started to sway ominously. Jake froze in place and desperately willed the scale to hold together. When the structure had stopped moving he fed the balls into the bags and took a step backwards to watch.

With aching slowness, the pole started to tilt to one side. Jake held his breath.

One of the bags settled to the floor.

Jake didn’t dare cheer this time. He could see the pile of hurdles starting to buckle. Before long it was going to collapse no matter what he did. If it could just hold together for one more measurement…

He removed the balls from the bags and discarded the ones from the light group, just as he had before. He was left with two balls, one of which was the heavy one. With utmost care, he put one of the balls into the bag on the left. And then he did something stupid. He let go of the bag without putting anything in the other one.

The pole tilted wildly to the left and the bag hit the floor. The dodgeball inside bounced a little, then settled down. Jake looked up just in time to see the pole rolling around on the top hurdle, then to jump out of the way as the stack of hurdles collapsed with a clattering crash. Hurdles skidded across the floor. The pole made a metallic thud as it struck the wood floor of the gym. There were dodgeballs everywhere.

Jake surveyed the wreckage and wanted to tear his hair out. He wanted to scream profanities. He wanted to go somewhere and hide under a rock. But it could be fixed. He could rebuild the scale, he could even make it better next time, he could—

“Jake, have you made you determination?” the Proctor asked.

It was standing right behind him. Jake screamed.

It seemed to make no difference to the Proctor at all.

“Wait,” he said. “I’m not done yet! I only got to do two measurements. I’m not done!”

“The balance moved. You weighed one ball against zero balls. That was your third measurement,” the Proctor said, as calm as if nothing depended on this.

If Jake failed this test it would be his second FAIL of three. If he failed now, his next FAIL would be a death sentence.

“Give me one more chance,” he begged. “Please.”

“Hand me the heavier ball, Jake. You have thirty seconds to choose.”

Rage and sorrow and suffering and fear and loneliness burst inside Jake’s head all at once. He stared at the ball at his feet, the one that hadn’t made it inside the bag. He stared at the Proctor. Then he kicked the ball as hard as he could at the stupid silver mask. When he got to the door of the gym it was unlocked, and he stormed out without another word.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Sleeping bodies littered the hallways. They looked dead, to Jake.

If he looked closely enough he could see they were still breathing. The drool on their lips was still wet, and every once in a while one of them would blink, but they saw nothing, heard nothing. He tried shaking one or two of them awake but it didn’t work, and he felt creepy just touching them so he gave up trying.

At any moment, he supposed, the PA would crackle on and a weird voice would say “wake” and the school would come to life again, but for the moment he was alone. Utterly, devastatingly alone.

He searched the halls for Megan but couldn’t find her. Outside the biology lab he did find Cody, curled in a fetal ball in the middle of the hallway floor. Jake squatted down next to his friend and studied his face. Cody’s glasses had been disarranged when he fell down. It made him look like he’d had a fit or maybe even a stroke. It was disturbing to see him like that. Jake, careful not to touch Cody’s face, pushed them back into a more comfortable position.

Then he just waited. He didn’t know what was taking the Proctors so long to wake everybody up. Maybe they cleaning up the gym—Jake had left the ruins of his sporting good scale all over the wooden floor, left dodgeballs scattered everywhere.

He didn’t mind the wait so much. He had a lot to think about, and a few minutes’ peace was not unwelcome. When the command to wake did finally come, he sighed in regret. In a second the hallway would be full of noise and activity again, as students went about their normal, sane lives.

Cody sat up slowly as if waking from a pleasant dream and turned around, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. Then he saw Jake and squeaked in surprise. “You weren’t there a second ago,” he said, warily.

Jake nodded. “I just had a test.”

“Really? They’re coming more frequently now. I wonder what that means? What kind of test was it? How did you do?”

With a shrug, Jake expressed how little he cared. “I suppose I owe you an apology for getting so rough before,” he said. Trying to summon some remorse. “It was a pretty crappy thing you did to me, though.”

“It had to be done.” Cody watched his face carefully. Maybe he expected Jake to start hitting him at any moment. “It was in your best interest.”

“Really? Because it messed with my head so much I think I might have just got my second FAIL.” He told Cody briefly about the dodgeballs and the collapse of the scale.

“The Proctor didn’t tell you whether you passed or not?”

Jake shook his head. “I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. I was too
distracted
.”

Cody got to his feet. His bookbag was lying on the floor next to him and he picked it up while never letting his gaze stray from Jake’s face. “Your second fail, and you barely seem to care. I think if you needed any proof that Megan’s got you all messed up, there it is. She’s dangerous to you, Jake. You need to concentrate. Now more than ever. You need to not make any more mistakes.”

“I need to make my own mistakes,” Jake told him. “Don’t do anything like that again. I want you to promise.”

Cody lowered his head. “Alright. I promise I won’t mess with your love life anymore. Is that enough? Are we good?”

Jake was still righteously angry but he knew he needed his best friend. If he couldn’t have a girlfriend then he needed somebody, anybody he could trust. “We’re good. And I am sorry I grabbed you like that before.”

“It’s alright. What are you going to do now?” Cody asked.

“I’m going home. There’s a whole period left in the school day, but I don’t think anybody’ll say a word if I just walk out of here.”

They didn’t. He walked home and said hello to his mother. She was making meatloaf. Jake couldn’t imagine eating any. He climbed the stairs to his room and threw his knapsack in a corner before falling face-first onto his bed. He was tired. Exhausted. He also knew he wasn’t going to sleep for a long time.

He managed to choke down some dinner, and even make some small talk with his dad at the table. When he was done he asked to be excused and went back to his room. He had something he felt he needed to do. From his knapsack he took an X-acto knife and a black sharpie marker, and then he crawled under his bedside table.

The row of initials was still there. JM, repeated seven times. Below the seventh one he scratched in another set of the initials with the knife, then went over the cuts in marker to make them stand out.

His name was Jake McCartney. They had all been named Jake McCartney. He wondered if the rest of them had put their initials there after failed tests, or when they knew the end was coming. He understood the urge that drove them, now. The initials weren’t a clue in a mystery you were supposed to solve. They were memorials. You wanted to leave something behind. Some evidence you’d been there at all.

When Jake was gone—when MCCARTNEY, JAKE H was gone—Mr. Zuraw would go around the town finding any evidence of his existence and he would wipe it out, scrub away any messages he tried to leave, hypnotize people into thinking they’d never met him before, take his name off all the permanent records and files and roll books. The initials would be all that remained.

Eventually, that night, he fell asleep.

Not for long, though. Voices woke him. At first he thought he was dreaming of Proctors. Then when his eyes opened on the darkened room he realized that it wasn’t a dream at all. He was hearing a conversation—there were two distinct voices, one of them a Proctor’s distorted buzz, the other a normal human voice that sounded familiar, though not enough for him to recognize it. The voices were faint, coming up through the air conditioning vent in his floor. He could only make out a little of what they were saying but he could tell they were talking about him.

“—disordered thinking. Emotional complications—”

“H is exhibiting all the classic signs. It always happens like—”

“—you have the envelope?”

“Here.”

“It won’t be long now, until—”

“And then we’ll have a long and pleasant break. Before the next round of tests begins.”

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Just after five o’clock in the morning, a Proctor in a blue serge suit, black leather gloves, and a reflective mask climbed the stairs and entered the short hallway leading to Jake’s room. It had a pale blue envelope in one hand, and it didn’t make the slightest sound as it walked, didn’t even make the steps creak.

The Proctor stopped outside Jake’s bedroom door. Perhaps remembering the last time it had delivered a pale blue envelope, the Proctor paused then and tilted its head to one side. Perhaps it was listening for the sound of him breathing on the other side of the door. A moment passed and then the Proctor knelt down and placed the envelope in the crack under the door. With a gentle motion it quietly pushed the envelope under the door. Then it turned and, still keeping silent, started walking back towards the stairs.

It was at that point that Jake threw open the bathroom door and jumped into the hall. He’d been watching the whole thing, staying perfectly silent himself. He had even held his breath as the Proctor walked by.

“I’ve been waiting in there since four,” he told the Proctor, taking a step closer. “Waiting for you.”

The Proctor stood very still. Then it glanced from side to side. There was a linen closet to its left. Jake’s room lay behind it, with the door still closed. The Proctor seemed to be evaluating its options.

In the same second that the Proctor started turning to run for Jake’s room, Jake jumped forward and grabbed its arm. He yanked backwards and up in a way he hoped caused the Proctor some pain, and then with his free hand pushed its masked head into the wall.

The Proctor didn’t struggle. It stayed very still as Jake held it in that position, unsure of what to do next. Then, very slowly, it lifted its free hand and started reaching for the inside pocket of its jacket.

Thinking it might be going for a gun, Jake knocked the hand away and then reached inside its jacket and grabbed what he found there. It wasn’t a gun. It was a mobile telephone. It buzzed in his hand like a beetle and he nearly dropped it, thinking it might bite him—thinking it might explode.

He spared a glance down at the thing, intending to throw it behind him as hard as he could. What he saw made him stop. There was a tiny television screen set into the outer shell of the phone, and on it was the message: SILENT MODE. VIBRATE ONLY. INCOMING CALL FROM CODENAME Z.

If he opened the phone and put it to his ear, Jake knew, he would hear Mr. Zuraw’s voice. Codename Z—that must be what the Proctors called him. Just like they must call Jake Codename H, or just H for short.

“What does he want? Can he see me right now? Can he hear us, does he know how much trouble you’re in?” Jake pulled on the Proctor’s arm again.

“No,” the Proctor buzzed.

Jake shoved the telephone in his own pocket. He was fully dressed, and even wearing a jacket against the morning’s chill. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen next but he wanted to be ready.

He grabbed the Proctor’s shoulders and pulled it backwards, then kicked the back of its left knee. Not hard enough to do any damage, but enough to make the Proctor fall down on the floor. Jake had never been much of a fighter but his body was singing with adrenaline and some things just come naturally when you’re desperate.

He dropped down on top of the Proctor. “So who are you?” he asked, his face only inches from the mirror-surfaced mask. “Are you Mr. Schneider? Maybe Ms. Holman?”

From downstairs Jake heard the sound of someone getting out of bed and turning on a light. His dad, probably, wondering what was going on upstairs. Jake had only a few seconds before he was interrupted.