CHEWED UP

“You have one hour remaining, remember to save enough time to review your answers before handing your test in.”

Despite the usual temperate and kind nature of Mrs. Grant, right now her voice might as well have been nails on a chalkboard. The cold classroom air combined with the pale blue paint on the brick made the entire room feel like ice. Katie’s leg would not stop bouncing, both from nerves and a futile attempt to warm up as she continued through the math portion of the standardized test. She was well ahead in her reading and that portion of the test had nearly put her to sleep. But math was literally a different subject and one that Katie happened to be terrible at. Even now, she was only on question number three and her brain felt like a car crash.

“Forty-five minutes remaining.”

Katie wished she could tell Mrs. Grant to shut up but she would not enjoy the butt whipping she would get at home for that. She continued working through a question asking her to turn the fraction 45/100 into a fraction, questioning why anyone would ever use that kind of fraction, let alone asking a sixth grader to know it off the top of their head.

“Twenty-five minutes left everyone.”

What?! Katie’s eyes darted up to the clock, a painful drop hitting her stomach as the timepiece confirmed the horror. Where had all of the time gone? She still had twenty math problems left and even if she had the entire day there would be no way she could get them all done. Reciting the curse words she knew from Caleb in Ms. Harrison’s class in her head, she began to try to speed through the remaining questions.

“Ten minutes.”
Katie’s leg was practically an earthquake under her desk as she finally gave into her only option left. She took one second to look at the question before blindly guessing. Her heart and head were pounding in time with her leg as filled in the bubbles furiously. The spots where she had to erase eerily glaring back at her as if to mock her for her sporadic answers. She could already hear her parents, their perfectionist standards disappointed at her halfhearted attempts. She heard her father’s condescending,
“Maybe we should look at getting you a math tutor instead of letting you join the tennis team.”

“Five minutes, make sure you’ve reviewed your answers.”

Yeah right, Katie thought bitterly as she continued through the last four questions just filling in the bubbles based of a quick glance, before trying to figure something out for the last questions. Who gave a ‘frick about integers anyway? The four answers on the paper made no sense and were clearly just there to send middle schoolers into an existential crisis. Finally choosing C as her sister always told her,

“If you don’t know, just pick C.”

“And that’s time, pencil’s down, and turn in your scorecards to the desk please.”
Nearly shaking as she placed the scorecard down on Mrs. Grant’s desk, she weakly attempted to return the beloved teacher’s smile of assurance. Katie prayed that the reading scores would carry her enough to keep from being the lowest score. She returned to her desk, bitterly wondering what the point of all this was. Clearly the Department of Education were testing out torture methods in middle schools that could be used in places like Guantanamo. Finally, as class was dismissed, she gathered up her gear and filed out of the classroom with the rest of the mentally drained zombie hoard that made up her peer group. The only thing left to remind her of the awful trauma that had just occurred was the taste of rubber on her tongue and the chewed remains of her number two pencil.

Meghan E. Bell lives in Abilene TX and is looking to forward her career as a writer.