"Oh God, Sue! God! I've never…" My body suddenly felt like all the bones had melted away.
When I could feel something again, I said, "Can you do that again?" He moaned.
I knew the test for high school placement was going to be hard but I really didn't realize some of the complications. I started with the assumption that I wanted to be a sophomore, in keeping with my age. Second, I didn't want to give away my rather special abilities and knowledge -make myself a freak. Finally, I didn't want to seem stupid. This presented real problems in taking the test.
First, I had to answer a representative number of questions that would express the right level of knowledge. Second, I had to hit near the top of the age group so I could be thought of as intelligent and get into the accelerated courses with the more intelligent kids. Third, I had to psych out the test so I wouldn't answer some questions beyond what my knowledge level should be. And finally, I had to take up the majority of the time allowed. All of this, I had to do in the same small office with the school district counselor who could, at any time, glance over and see not only what I was doing but how I was doing it.
Experience, they say, is the best teacher and I had more experience than anyone on earth. I'd seen major disasters. I'd lived all of recorded history and much more. I'd had personal acquaintanceship with science, both personally and as a casual interest. I had to study governments, current affairs, and the happenings of the few years before my current incarnation just to survive and, often, for my own reasons. I knew and fluently spoke most of the languages of the world because I'd used many of them on a daily basis at one time.
The easy way to do the test would have been to purposely miss what I'd think would be a reasonable number of questions, then go through it again and answer the others correctly. But what were the correct answers? For instance, I knew the Normans hadn't conquered England in 1066 because I was there with them two years before. And it hadn't been anywhere near that date anyway because the Gregorian calendar hadn't been invented at the time.
So I had to know the answers the test writer wanted, not necessarily the correct answers to the questions.
Of course, zoology was quicksand for me. Half of the things spouted as gospel I knew from personal experience were just plain wrong. Much of the rest was just oversimplification. For instance, often leadership of a wolf pack was fought for by the adolescent males in competition with the grayed male. But, as often, the gray gave it away to the most competent for simple lack of interest in always being the disciplinarian or because he just wasn't terribly good at it.
Therefore, I not only had to know the answers to questions, I had to know the current answers and whether the test I was taking had caught up with current knowledge.
I could have taken the test in half an hour. I had to spend two boring hours. Instead of immediately marking the answers incorrectly that I knew I shouldn't know and then returning to the ones I should know, I had to go through it from the beginning to the end, keeping a mental count in each subject area so I wouldn't seem brilliant in one area and an idiot in another.
It was, I'll say, good mental exercise.
Miss Taylor made it a little easier. When I wanted to waste a little time, looking at her made it easy.
She was camouflaged but poorly camouflaged. She wore a rather severe blue pin- striped suit. But it was a little too well tailored to her diminutive waist and full bustline and she wore no blouse under the jacket. The skirt was hemmed too short so her gorgeous legs sprang to full view. Her stockings were too sheer and too expensive. Her high heels were just a little too high.
She wore her hair in a tight bun but played with a loose lock that fell in front of her ear. She wore glasses but they provided little correction and served primarily to slightly magnify large, gorgeous green eyes. She wore little makeup but her pouting lips needed very little and her long eyelashes none at all. She worked on a serious cast to her mouth and eyes but her natural happiness brimmed through any serious look.
And she smiled too easily and laughed sweetly for almost no reason. The small lines in her face were all laugh lines.
Her long fingers were artistically feminine and sprouted from soft hands.
When she sat behind the small desk, I could see her tightly crossed knees but also the way she wrapped the foot of the lower leg around the chair leg and pointed the toes of the free foot.
I finished the test and rechecked my answers before giving it to her. With quick flicks of her wrist, she marked the wrong answers and then put a mask over the answer sheet that let her count the subject answers and code them onto a graph. In a few efficient moments, she looked at me through those glasses.
Okay, she said, turning the graph for me to follow, pointing out the items as she came to them.
"You're at 11.5 in science," she said. Too high. Ouch. I quickly scanned across the rest of the graph points and saw that only the math score was in the 10 range. Damn. Too high. "A little weak in math skills but that can be brought up with a little work. English is 12.0, languages 12.4, history 12.9, and social studies 11.8." She looked at her sheets again and rapidly totaled the areas.
"That would indicate the lower range of twelfth grade. You and your parents can make a decision. You can either work very hard as a senior this year or, if you've got a lot of extra- curricular activities planned, take it a little easy academically and go into the junior year."
"Oh, no," I said without thinking. She looked at me, waiting for what I was going to say, as I tried to make my complaint seem reasonable to her. "I'm 15, ma'am. I was hoping…" How to say this. My mind was racing. She looked startled.
"Oh! You, ah, look much older." I saw her look at the front of my tanktop. "When's your birthday?"
Sidetracked and not thinking very well I blurted out the day I'd incarnated. "May second, ma'am."
"Miss," she said in passing in response to the ma'am. "That's different. You should be a freshman this year for your age group. Well," she smiled. "You're a very intelligent young lady. I'm impressed.
"Oh, but now there's another problem, isn't there?" I hoped she'd come up with a reasonable sounding reason for me. "You'd be leaving all your middle school friends behind, wouldn't you?"
"Ah, yeah," I stumbled. That really wasn't an issue since I hadn't been in school here before and she would soon see it. She was even quicker than I thought she might be.
"No, that's not a problem since you weren't here last year." She smiled again. "Since you'll be making new friends in any case, the question returns to what you want to do." I started to say something but she held up her hand.
"At your last school, how well did you do studying? Did you have a hard time getting the work done on time?" I shook my head. That wasn't the problem.
She looked more closely at me then, her face as close to serious at it seemed capable of.
"You've still got a problem. What is it, sweetheart?" She was very perceptive. I decided she must be very good at her job. She stood then and rounded the little desk to squat beside my chair. The action made it impossible for me to ignore her. The way she poised, I could see down into her jacket to her breasts, laid open on the silk lining to the nipples. And at the same time, her knee tipped up toward me so I could see down the length of her thigh to the narrow white stripe of her panties between her legs. She looked up into my eyes.
"I guess I don't want to be a freak. The class brain or something," I said, trying to put it in a patois that would make it believable.
"Oh, I don't think that would be a problem. I mean, you wouldn't even have to mention your age if you didn't want. And, I said, you look older." Again her eyes went to my breasts through the tanktop. Her hand was on my bare knee below the hem of my skirt.