Pass/Fail (2012) (3 page)

“Where to now, Jake?” Cody asked, looking at him over the frames of his thick glasses.

Jake shook his head.

“Just tell me. I’ll go there with you, I promise.”

Jake tore off his hoodie and balled it up under his arm. He stared one way up the road, then the other. He stared across the street at the football stadium.

Behind the gymnasium. That’s where they would do it. On the other side of the school. Not in the football stadium. But he saw himself, standing on the fifty yard line, surrounded by his graduating class, surrounded by teachers and parents and just… just everyone in the town. He saw the gun, bright under the stadium lights. He heard it fire.

“Maybe we should go back,” Cody said. “Back inside.”

“No!” Jake said. Pick a direction, he thought. Either way is as good as the other. Then he thought of something. “The township offices are down that way,” he said, pointing south. “There’s a police station there. Come on!”

Chapter Five

Jake’s Dad had to come pick them up at the Fulton Township Police Offices.

Cody hung his head when they were marched out to the car, a policeman on either side of them. Jake stared straight ahead.

“Jake, don’t worry. I’m going to take you home and we’ll get this all sorted out.”

“Sir,” one of the policemen said, “we don’t take this so lightly. Making a false police report is a felony and your son could be tried as an adult.”

“Mr. McCartney,” Cody said. “Please—”

Jake’s Dad held up his hands for peace. “Officer, I’m sure my son didn’t mean any real harm. He just wanted to get out of school for a—for fun. Surely you skipped school yourself every once in a while.”

The other cop sneered. “I never bore false testimony against one of my teachers just so I could cut class. Do you know how much trouble he could have caused for this guy, Zuraw? He could lose his job. It could have gone a lot further than that.”

Jake’s Dad slumped forward, his hands dropping. “You never know,” he said. “Maybe it’s all true. Maybe the teacher did have a gun.” He didn’t make it sound like a convincing possibility.

“The school’s Principal checked himself,” the first policeman said.

“I told you, he’s in on it!” Jake demanded. “Maybe they’re all in on it! Maybe you’re in on it!”

There was considerable more discussion, but after that things changed tack. It seemed like the police were willing to believe that Jake wasn’t so much malicious as crazy. Eventually the police agreed to release Jake into his father’s recognizance.

They went back to Jake’s house, then. There were scorch marks up the side of one all and the ornamental cacti had been cut back severely, but Cody had no comment on how the house looked. Like Jake he hadn’t spoken since they left the police station.

“Cody can sleep over tonight,” Jake’s Dad said, after clearing it with Cody’s folks. Jake shook his head—it made him feel like he was ten years old again to have a sleep-over—but Cody said he thought maybe that was a good idea.

They watched some TV, or at least, Cody and Jake’s parents watched some TV. He spent most of the evening inside his own head, thinking about what had happened. Wondering how far it went.

When bedtime came and Cody went off to brush his teeth, Jake’s Mom helped him put sheets on the cot in Jake’s room where Cody would spend the night. “I won’t say I’m not worried,” she said. “Kind of scared, actually.”

Jake nodded, understanding. He felt that way, too.

“I don’t know if this has to… change things, though. Do you think it should?”

Jake looked up at her in surprise. What hadn’t changed?

“I mean, we don’t need to take you to a therapist. We don’t need to think about, well, medication. Just yet. I think that today was just about stress. Right? The stress of the fire last night. And having to go back to school right away. Jake. If you tell me this was just stress, that it was a one-time thing, nothing has to change.”

Jake considered what she was saying. But not for long.

He had no proof of what he’d claimed. Until he did, his parents had no reason to believe him. They trusted him normally, he knew. He’d never been a particularly dishonest kid up until now. But the story was too outlandish for them. Yet. He could get evidence, if this thing kept happening tomorrow, and the day after that, he could document it, build a case, and then they’d have to listen to him—

“Yeah, Mom,” he said. “It’s just stress.”

She kissed him on the forehead and sent him to brush his teeth.

In the morning there was a pale blue envelope under his door.

Inside was a card marked PASS.

“You see this, right?” he asked Cody.

“Of course I do. I saw the other one, too.”

“I need you to believe me. I need somebody to believe me!”

Cody grabbed his arm. “I do! I always did. I always will.”

Jake felt so much relief he fell backward onto his bed. He held the PASS card up to the light, studied it for any kind of clues but of course there were none. No watermark to say where it came from, no hairs accidentally trapped in the glue of the envelope. No fingerprint smudges anywhere—not that he would have been able to do anything with them if there had been. He didn’t have access to a crime lab or anything.

“What did I pass?” he asked out loud. “What kind of test? I tried to break out of their game. I tried to get them all arrested. You’d think that would be a fail. It would be something they didn’t want.”

Cody took the card away from him. “This suggests otherwise. It’s like they wanted you to try to escape. At least, at first.”

Jake nodded. He could see it. “They’ve got me in a cage. They expect me to act like an animal in a cage, and rattle the bars. See if it holds. I didn’t just accept the game the way it was described to me, I had to prove it was real, to myself. Okay.”

“I suppose that makes sense. It’s cheating to try to end the game before it begins. They expect you to cheat, right? That’s what Zuraw said.”

Jake nodded.

“It’s a game. They wouldn’t put you through this if they didn’t think you had a chance to make it, right?”

“That’s the impression I got,” Jake agreed.

“So maybe you just need to play along, now,” Cody suggested. He threw his hands in the air. “I don’t like that any more than you do. I think it sucks. Especially because it could mean you’ll get—you’ll—”

“Get taken behind the gym and executed,” Jake filled in.

“I don’t like that. But maybe it’s your best chance. To play along. Don’t try to break the game, because they’re ready to stop you if you do.”

Jake just stared forward, lost in his own thoughts.

Chapter Six

He showered. He got dressed. Made himself a bowl of cereal, kissed his mother’s cheek. Then he went to school.

Jake walked to school, as he did every morning—it was only about half a mile away, and it gave him time to think. It had been a week since he had been brought home from the police station, a week in which he had gone through his normal routine just waiting for another test to materialize. None had so far—otherwise he would have seen an envelope under his door, either a PASS or a FAIL, depending.

It would come, he knew. It was inevitable. He had to keep his guard up.

There were moments he thought it had all been a stress-induced breakdown. A hallucination or something. As he walked to school that morning, however, he’d never felt more paranoid. The sun had just come up and still dark blue shadows pooled between the closely-spaced houses. Security lights above garages and front doors cast long, sharp shadows across the sidewalk. A hint of mist crept along in the gutter. Somewhere a dog was barking, though nowhere nearby.

He felt like anything could be crouching, waiting, just around the next corner. So when he heard footsteps coming toward him down a side street, and saw a hunched figure pressing toward him, walking very quickly, he stopped and waited until she came closer.

She. It was a girl. It was the girl. The one he’d saved.

He hadn’t seen her all week, though he’d kept his eyes open in the school halls, watching for her. Hoping to see her again. Even though he knew if he did he would only put his foot in his mouth again—say something even stupider, so that the shallow goodwill he’d achieved with her so far would evaporate and she would flee him like a stalker.

He thought about saying nothing. Just letting her walk past. He could hang back, wait a while so she didn’t think he was following her. It might be easier that way—

“Hi,” he said, raising one hand and waving it like an idiot.

She stopped fifty feet away and stared at him. He couldn’t really see her eyes, just the shape of her hair, lifting a little in the morning breeze. Behind her the sky was orange and purple.

He walked closer, every step taking a certain amount of effort. Finally he was standing no more than five feet from her. She was biting her lip.

“Hi, yourself,” she said.

Jake was too nervous to laugh but he smiled. He tried to think of something to say but failed. Instead he lifted one arm and waved in the direction of the school, and the two of them started walking again. Eventually, she started talking, as if to fill the empty space. “My name’s Megan Gottschalk. We just moved here, like, two weeks ago. Just before school started. I had some friends in Chicago, that wasn’t so bad. But here I don’t know anybody. That’s where we’re from, Chicago. It was a lot different. It’s so hard, not having anybody to talk to.”

Jake nodded in sympathy. During the summers, when Cody was in Florida with his grandmother, he often felt the same way. Like part of his life was missing, like there were resources he needed and he couldn’t find them.

She went on about her life, her childhood, her parents. Trying so hard to make good grades in school, not because it seemed very important but because nothing else did, either, nothing seemed to make much difference but at least with grades you knew there was something to work towards. There was a concrete goal, and she liked that.

He did not choose to share his Pass/Fail status.

Finally she wound down, until there were pauses between her sentences, stretches where they did nothing but walk together in silence. It wasn’t nearly as awkward as the silence that came before, though. “This is kind of nice,” that little laugh that couldn’t, “it’s nice talking to you. You’re so quiet. I feel like you’re just listening, paying total attention to me. Most people when you talk to them they’re nodding and acting like they hear you but they’re actually thinking about what they’re going to say next. They aren’t really listening at all. That always makes me so crazy.”

Jake nodded again. He wondered if he should offer to carry her books or something, then thought better of it. Instead he asked, when it was clear she had finished, “What happened that night in your car? Why did you drive into my house?”

Her eyes flashed and he saw that deep blue again. He wouldn’t mind just looking at those eyes for a long time, he thought.

“It was just an accident. I got careless, I think.”

“You think?” he asked.

She shrugged as if the question didn’t make much sense. “I was going home. I’d been at the mall, buying some stuff for school. Just notebooks and pens and things, and a couple outfits, I guess. I was driving home, I mean, I don’t drink, so it wasn’t that, but there was this moment where my eyes were closed. It’s funny, I wasn’t even tired. I don’t remember being tired… I guess I must have been. My eyes were closed, just for a second, and then the car was headed right for a brick wall. That’s all I remember. I’m sorry. I wish I had a better answer for you.”

“That’s fine.” They reached the school a few moments later and walked inside together. “Listen,” he said, as they split up to go to their individual homerooms, “do you walk the same way every morning?”

She nodded, her eyes wide.

He was a little surprised himself. “Tomorrow, when you get to that corner, wait for me. Or I’ll wait for you. I want to—ask you some more questions.”

It was almost like he’d asked her out, Jake thought. It was very close.

She agreed to the plan and then went her way. Jake headed toward Mr. Schneider’s room—his head was spinning and he wanted to talk to Cody very badly, he needed to talk to Cody—but when he got there the door had a note on it telling him to go to a classroom on the other side of the school. By the time he arrived the bell had rung and the halls were deserted, but he figured he didn’t need a hall pass. Unless that was part of the test—he couldn’t rule that out.

This was it. It had to be. The next test. His palms started to sweat.

He reached for the doorknob of Classroom 187 but the door opened before he could touch it. Standing inside was a man in a navy blue three piece suit, wearing black leather gloves and a perfectly reflective mask. In the reflection Jake’s face looked terrified.

“Hello, Jake,” the Proctor said. “Are you ready to get started?”

Chapter Seven

The Proctor’s voice wasn’t electronically distorted, at least it didn’t sound that way. It didn’t sound human, either, though. It had a warm, buzzing quality, as if he were speaking through the whirling blades of an electric fan. The man behind the mask (if it was a man—it could just as easily be a woman in disguise) whispered, which didn’t help, and used no hand gestures or body language.

Jake stared into the reflective mask, stared at his own face, and figured he understood. There was no way for him to know who was testing him, so there was no way to know which of the school’s teachers were part of this messed-up game. The voice was distorted just to make sure he didn’t recognize it. The mask showed nothing but himself. The identical suits meant there could be one teacher behind the whole thing (the odds on favorite was Mr. Zuraw, the guidance counselor) or it could be dozens of them. It could be every teacher in the school, taking turns with the mask.

“Hello, Jake,” the Proctor repeated, patiently waiting for him to make some kind of response. “Are you ready to get started?”
Jake licked his lips. They were suddenly dry. This was his second test, and he still understood only a few basic rules. He would have to be on his guard. “Yes,” he replied. What would even happen if he said no? Would the Proctor just wait until he changed his answer? Or would he—