“You bet it does,” Luke said. “Hey, can we get dessert?”
4
With the essay included, the SAT test lasted four hours, but there was a merciful break in the middle. Luke sat on a bench in the high school’s lobby, munching the sandwiches his mother had packed for him and wishing for a book. He had brought Naked Lunch, but one of the proctors appropriated it (along with his phone and everyone else’s), telling Luke it would be returned to him later. The guy also riffled through the pages, looking either for dirty pictures or a crib sheet or two.
While he was eating his Snackimals, he became aware of several other test-takers standing around him. Big boys and girls, high school juniors and seniors.
“Kid,” one of them asked, “what the hell are you doing here?”
“Taking the test,” Luke said. “Same as you.”
They considered this. One of the girls said, “Are you a genius? Like in a movie?”
“No,” Luke said, smiling, “but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”
They laughed, which was good. One of the boys held up his palm, and Luke slapped him five. “Where are you going? What school?”
“MIT, if I get in,” Luke said. Which was disingenuous; he had already been granted provisional admission to both schools of his choice, contingent on doing well today. Which wasn’t going to be much of a problem. So far, the test had been a breeze. It was the kids surrounding him that he found intimidating. In the fall, he would be in classes filled with kids like these, kids much older and about twice his size, and of course they would all be looking at him. He had discussed this with Mr. Greer, saying he’d probably seem like a freak to them.
“It’s what you feel like that matters,” Mr. Greer said. “Try to keep that in mind. And if you need counseling—just someone to talk to about your feelings—for God’s sake, get it. And you can always text me.”
One of the girls—a pretty redhead—asked him if he’d gotten the hotel question in the math section.
“The one about Aaron?” Luke asked. “Yeah, pretty sure I did.”
“What did you say was the right choice, can you remember?”
The question had been how to figure how much some dude named Aaron would have to pay for his motel room for x number of nights if the rate was $99.95 per night, plus 8% tax, plus an additional one-time charge of five bucks, and of course Luke remembered because it was a slightly nasty question. The answer wasn’t a number, it was an equation.
“It was B. Look.” He took out his pen and wrote on his lunch bag: 1.08(99.95x) + 5.
“Are you sure?” she asked. “I had A.” She bent, took Luke’s bag—he caught a whiff of her perfume, lilac, delicious—and wrote: (99.95 + 0.08x) + 5.
“Excellent equation,” Luke said, “but that’s how the people who make these tests screw you at the drive-thru.” He tapped her equation. “Yours only reflects a one-night stay. It also doesn’t account for the room tax.”
She groaned.
“It’s okay,” Luke said. “You probably got the rest of them.”
“Maybe you’re wrong and she’s right,” one of the boys said. It was the one who’d slapped Luke five.
She shook her head. “The kid’s right. I forgot how to calculate the fucking tax. I suck.”
Luke watched her walk away, her head drooping. One of the boys went after her and put an arm around her waist. Luke envied him.
One of the others, a tall drink of water wearing designer glasses, sat down next to Luke. “Is it weird?” he asked. “Being you, I mean?”
Luke considered this. “Sometimes,” he said. “Usually it’s just, you know, life.”
One of the proctors leaned out and rang a hand bell. “Let’s go, kids.”
Luke got up with some relief and tossed his lunch sack in a trash barrel by the door to the gym. He looked at the pretty redhead a final time, and as he went in, the barrel shimmied three inches to the left.
5
The second half of the test was as easy as the first, and he thought he did a passable job on the essay. Kept it short, anyway. When he left the school he saw the pretty redhead, sitting on a bench by herself and crying. Luke wondered if she’d bricked the test, and if so, how badly—just not-gonna-get-your-first-choice badly, or stuck-with-community-college badly. He wondered what it was like to have a brain that didn’t seem to know all the answers. He wondered if he should go over there and try to comfort her. He wondered if she’d accept comfort from a kid who was still your basic pipsqueak. She’d probably tell him to make like an amoeba and split. He even wondered about the way the trashcan had moved—that stuff was eerie. It came to him (and with the force of a revelation) that life was basically one long SAT test, and instead of four or five choices, you got dozens. Including shit like some of the time and maybe so, maybe not.
His mom was waving. He waved back and ran to the car. When he was in and belted up, she asked him how he thought he’d done.
“Aced it,” Luke said. He gave her his sunniest grin, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the redhead. The crying was bad, but the way her head drooped when he pointed out the mistake in her equation—like a flower in a dry spell—had somehow been worse.
He told himself not to think about it, but of course you couldn’t do that. Try not to think of a polar bear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, and you will see the cursed thing come to mind every minute.
“Mom?”
“What?”
“Do you think memory is a blessing or a curse?”
She didn’t have to think about it; God only knew what she was remembering. “Both, dear.”
6
At 2 AM on a morning in June, while Tim Jamieson was night-knocking his way up DuPray’s main street, a black SUV turned onto Wildersmoot Drive in one of the suburbs on the north side of Minneapolis. It was a crazy name for a street; Luke and his friend Rolf called it Wildersmooch Drive, partly because it made the name even crazier and partly because they both longed to smooch a girl, and wildly.
Inside the SUV were a man and two women. He was Denny; they were Michelle and Robin. Denny was driving. Halfway along the curving, silent street, he shut off the lights, coasted to the curb, and killed the engine. “You’re sure this one isn’t TP, right? Because I didn’t bring my tinfoil hat.”
“Ha ha,” Robin said, perfectly flat. She was sitting in the backseat.
“He’s just your average TK,” Michelle said. “Nothing to get your undies in a bunch about. Let’s get this thing going.”
Denny opened the console between the two front seats and took out a cell phone that looked like a refugee from the nineties: blocky rectangular body and short stubby antenna. He handed it to Michelle. While she punched in a number, he opened the console’s false bottom and took out thin latex gloves, two Glock Model 37s, and an aerosol can which, according to the label, contained Glade air freshener. He handed back one of the guns to Robin, kept one for himself, and passed the aerosol can to Michelle.
“Here we go, big team, here we go,” he chanted as he gloved up. “Ruby Red, Ruby Red, that’s what I said.”
“Quit the high school shit,” Michelle said. Then, into the phone, crooked against her shoulder so she could put on her own gloves: “Symonds, do you copy?”
“Copy,” Symonds said.
“This is Ruby Red. We’re here. Go on and kill the system.”