Lep was the boy who had looked at her sympathetically in class today. He wore the T-shirt with the Replico logo a lot—more often than any of the other kids ever wore one particular shirt. She had figured he must be too poor to have very many clothes, and hadn't thought much else about it. She had never thought much about him at all—until now.
His English had been terrible at the beginning of the year—he was obviously new in this country. And this year English was more important than ever, because unless you passed XCAS, you didn't graduate from high school, no matter how well you did in your regular subjects. If you didn't pass XCAS, you had no hope for the future.
Wells frowned every time Lep—Fingernail—wasn't there for attendance. Ann couldn't remember how many times that had happened, since until now there had been no reason to pay any attention to Lep at all. Except that Wells belittled him a lot, because he was afraid Lep would fail XCAS, and that could get Wells in trouble.
English! She hated it so much! It wasn't that she hated reading. Of course she watched TV more than she read books, but she still occasionally did find an interesting book over the summer. And if English class had been like her parents said it was when they were in high school, she might even have liked it, and done well. They read whole books then! And they had conversations in class about the personalities of the characters, their motivations, why the bad guys weren't just evil, but had reasons for the things they did. They had also, apparently, talked about exactly what the author did to manipulate the readers' emotions to make them care about some characters and dislike others. That would have been interesting, even fun, sort of like psychology.
English wasn't like that now. Every minute of English was preparing to pass XCAS. You didn't read whole books by famous authors. You read little selections, a few paragraphs long, rewritten by people at the test publishing company. The paragraphs were too short to be stories about interesting and unusual people having adventures and emotional experiences. Reading was a formulaic exercise. You had to concentrate hard on each word, and all the different things it could possibly mean, because you knew that at the end there would be a list of questions—multiple-choice or essay questions about boring things like the point of view, the main meaning, details, inferences. Your grade depended on how you answered those questions. And some of the questions didn't make sense.
This year they'd had to write an essay on what they did on their snow days, and there had been no snow day at all—and the kids from Haiti and Ethiopia and Thailand had never seen snow. It almost seemed like the whole thing was designed to fool you, on purpose. And the people who wrote the paragraphs were very good at fooling you. Ann was not good at seeing through them. She usually got as many of the questions wrong as she did right.
Ann was a whiz at XCAS preparation in all her other subjects—she often recorded the teachers' lectures with the recorder she always carried in her bag. English was her only real problem at school. And this year it was deadly serious. Because a 50 percent grade wouldn't pass XCAS.
And passing XCAS was the only way out of the traffic.
If you didn't pass senior XCAS you got thrown out of school, which meant you didn't graduate. And if you didn't graduate from high school, you couldn't go to college. And if you didn't go to college, there was no hope of getting away from the traffic.
Mom's alarm clock went off at three A.M. She had to get up that early because she had to be at the hospital by seven on the dot, and with the traffic, it could take hours, and she had to be sure. Their apartment had thin walls, and often her mother's alarm woke Ann up, but she could usually get back to sleep until her own alarm went off at five thirty.
The day after the incident with the motorcycle she couldn't go back to sleep. She lay there for two and a half hours, thinking about the motorcycle, remembering the man's abrupt and violent gesture. She wondered about Replico, and if the threats to her were going to continue, and what her father could do if they did.
It was scary to be singled out by a company as big and powerful as Replico—a company that was clearly above the law if they expected to get away with making threats like that. What if they stopped just threatening her and actually did something to her? Even in bed now, she didn't feel safe.
She might be safe if her father quit that job. But then how would they get by? And if she somehow graduated and got into college, how could they possibly afford it? They had trouble making all the payments they already had without college tuition and loan expenses, even though her father did have the best-paying job he could get.
All this worry made Ann go from scared to mad. She'd always had trouble controlling her temper. She already felt victimized enough by Wells and XCAS. She wasn't going to let some punk on a motorcycle control her life and upset her parents.
And what about that boy Lep and his T-shirt with the same logo as the motorcycle? What did he have to do with all of this?
Mr. Wells arranged the seating in his English classes in order of the students' test prep scores. Wells knew the students' exact averages. After all, English class consisted of reading the little selections, answering the questions about them two or three days a week, and being graded right or wrong on each question. So from the first day there was an order of students. Of course their exact test prep scores fluctuated all the time, but Wells didn't waste a lot of time moving the students around. He only went through the long process of changing their positions every Monday. This week Ann was about in the middle—where she usually was—and her friend Randa was directly to her right, in the row lower than hers. Now that Ann was paying more attention to Lep, she noticed with some surprise that he wasn't in the very last place in the English class. In fact, he was in the first seat of the last row, the one to the right of Randa's row. Suddenly he seemed to be doing better in English than she remembered.
He was wearing a frayed white T-shirt, with no logo on it.
"There was a fight on the bus yesterday," Randa told Ann when she sat down just before class was about to start.
"What do you mean, a fight?" Ann said. "What about curity?"
There was always a security guard next to the driver and another one in the back of the bus. "The traffic was so bad they both fell asleep," Randa said, and giggled. Everybody always loved it when security screwed up. "I was right behind these two junior skanks sitting across the aisle from each other, and one of them accused the other one of flirting with her boyfriend. I was lucky to be close enough to hear—they were whispering, of course, so they wouldn't wake up curity. They were hissing every dirty name you could think of at each other—those little girls!—it was the funniest thing that's happened on the bus in ages. And then one of them reached over and just pulled out the other one's pierced earring. A big round one. She shrieked and hit the first one so hard her mouth started bleeding—a bloody mouth and a bloody ear!" Randa was enthralled. "Of course curity was onto them one second later, and had them cuffed, and that was the end of all the fun. Still, it killed a few minutes. And then it was back to reading this drivel." She gestured contemptuously at the photocopied sheets with the English paragraphs on them.
Ann knew all about fights on buses. She had been in a few herself in the days when she had ridden the buses. Her temper frequently got her in trouble. "Of course they'll get detention and points deducted from XCAS scores," Ann said, glancing idly where Randa was gesturing.
Because of where Randa's hand was, Ann noticed it there for the first time, inconspicuous, at the bottom of the test page, very small. The three reptilian shapes squirming together to form the egg.
The logo from the motorcycle that had threatened her.
She felt almost the same icy thrill that had gone through her when the driver made the gesture at her. Her mind flashed back to the conversation at supper the night before. Dad said he had seen the same logo on notices at Grand Diamond. He also said that Replico—Mr. Warren's group of companies—was into publishing. Government stuff. That's what XCAS was, government stuff. He had said Warren was good buddies with the president, that they were both into oil. And everyone knew the president was one of the main driving forces behind all the XCAS testing.
Publishing XCAS would make Replico a lot of money, since it was the law that every state had to give the tests. That meant buying them from Replico.
The buzzer clanged and jangled. If an electric shock had a sound, it would be the sound of the school buzzers. All the students instantly stopped speaking and came to order. Any hint of misbehavior, any slowness in responding to the buzzers, could mean points deducted from XCAS scores—scores that determined the course of the rest of your life. School was an orderly place these days.
But Ann had made a decision, now that she had seen the Replico logo on the XCAS papers. There were a few minutes between classes—enough time to walk the long hallways to go however far away your next class was, without running, which was of course not allowed. She hadn't been at all sure before, but now she knew she had to talk to Lep during that time. And nothing was going to stop her.
As regimented as school was—students following the buzzers, being seated in order of their test prep scores—the teachers also had tricks up their sleeves. You could never relax because you never knew whether any given day was going to be a practice test day, meaning you had to study the paragraphs every night, just in case you'd be tested on them the next day—or maybe several days later. Today was not a test day, it turned out. So Ann might have wasted her time reading and concentrating on yesterday's deadly dull paragraphs about two men dropping masks from bullet trains going at different speeds in opposite directions, and trying to figure out how far the masks would go and if either man would be able to catch the other man's mask. Of course, everybody knew you couldn't open the windows of bullet trains, but the people who wrote the XCAS paragraphs didn't care about that—accuracy was not their concern. Trickiness was. Ann had puzzled over the paragraphs for a long time, wanting to ask her father for help but not wanting to disturb him as he dozed over his book. So they weren't going to have to answer questions about those paragraphs today—but that didn't mean the questions might not be flung at them unexpectedly sometime next week, when they had forgotten about the bullet train paragraphs.
Today, instead, Wells was passing back the last sets of questions, the wrong answers clearly marked in bold red slashes. It took time to pass the papers back, because of the way Wells did it. He gave the whole pile to the first student in the first row, the one at the head of the class for that week. That student looked through the papers until she found hers, and then passed them back to the student directly lower. That way the ones who did best got to see all the mistakes of the ones who did the worst. Yes, it took some time, but Wells seemed to feel the humiliation of it was of worthy test-score-improvement value.
And the better Wells's students did on XCAS, the more highly regarded Wells would be by the administration. And if his students didn't do well, he'd be in trouble. It might affect his salary—or even his employment at the school. Being so insecure, he couldn't afford to let any kid disgrace his good name. Ann was sort of surprised that Wells hadn't thrown Lep out of his class at the beginning of the year, when he had been in the last seat, because his low scores would bring down the class average. But recently, oddly, Lep seemed to be doing better.
Ann wasn't sure she liked it that Lep was getting better so unusually fast. She didn't want anybody getting ahead of her. And someone moving up as quickly as he was could possibly push her back.
The paragraphs being passed back now weren't about bullet trains, they were about golf, equally boring to Ann, but—everyone knew—beloved by the president. Golf was just the kind of thing a rich businessman like Warren would probably love too. The funny thing was the really rich kids—the ones who might play golf with their parents—didn't take XCAS, because they went to private schools. Ann, who had never set foot on a golf course, dreaded to see how badly she had done on these. Was there any hope at all of her passing the English XCAS?
She was seated thirteenth out of twenty-five this week. When the papers finally came to her and she found hers, she was surprised to see that she had gotten eight questions right out of ten; she had thought she had done much worse on the golf questions. Would her position in class improve next Monday? Maybe there was hope of her passing the English XCAS after all.
Then Wells droned on about the stupid mistakes the lowest ones in the class had made, and explained how totally obvious the correct answers were, and hinted at the dangerous consequences of being at the back of this class—there was no lower senior English class, and if you got bumped from this one, there was no hope. He also complained about how their teachers last year had not prepared them adequately for XCAS—the test pitted teacher against teacher. There were even stories about teachers cheating for their students so that the students would do better, and the teacher would look better. Some teachers hadn't come back this year. Had they been fired because their students hadn't done well enough on XCAS? Was Wells afraid that would happen to him?
One time when Ann was passing the teachers' lounge, she overheard Miss Donovan saying to Wells, "I'm glad to be retiring. There's no joy in teaching anymore."
While Wells ranted, Ann and Randa occasionally exchanged scornful glances, but very, very surreptitiously; Wells had sharp eyes, and neither of them needed any points deducted.
Ann wasn't thinking about what Wells was saying. She was going to have to be fast after class to have time to talk to Lep. And she was thinking hard. She knew she would have to come up with an explanation for Randa. And it wasn't going to be easy.
The buzzers singed the air at the end, and Wells stopped abruptly in mid-sentence. The students all stood up and quickly gathered their papers together. Randa started to walk out of the room beside her.
"Listen, Randa, I've got to go talk to that kid Lep," Ann said.
"Huh? What in the world do you have to say to him?" Randa wanted to know, as Ann had expected. Lep was not exactly the coolest person to hang with.
She had come to the decision that she couldn't tell Randa about the Replico incident. Of course Randa would tell everybody they both knew, even though she would first swear to secrecy, and then all those people would tell everybody they knew. It was just too crazy and violent a story, and had so many weird implications, for anybody to be able to not tell it to everyone they could. But Ann didn't want it getting around the whole school. She already felt too exposed.
"You know how my mother gets on these kicks and won't lay off. She thinks I'll do better on the English XCAS if I help somebody even worse than me. And who could be worse than him? You know they're going to make him take the same test as everybody else, even though he's foreign and can hardly even speak the language. And Mom got a bonus at work so she's going to pay me, so why not? Anyway, he'll probably say no; I'm counting on it." She flashed Randa what she hoped was a reasonable facsimile of a smile and took off after Lep.
Of course there was no danger that Lep would spread her story around the school. He didn't know anybody who mattered, as far as she knew, and nobody knew him.
He was already out in the corridor, walking fast. She brushed past other students in the crowd and caught up with him. "Hey, Lep, wait a second," she said, just behind him.
He turned around, surprised, frowning a little. Almost all boys her age were taller than she was, but he was short, the same height as she. "Yes? Ann?" he said, the dark eyes in his brown face squinting in suspicion. She hadn't expected him to know her name. And she realized, for the first time, that she didn't even know what country he came from.
"Look at this," she said, pointing at the logo at the bottom of the page of English paragraphs.
He didn't understand, the logo was so small. "The English paper? What about that?" he said.
"It's not the paper I want you to see. It's this. This…" She didn't think he would understand the word "logo." "This… design here." She moved her finger around it. "I've seen it before, this design." She took a deep breath. "Don't… don't you have a T-shirt, a black T-shirt, with this design on it in red?"
He just stared at her, still puzzled. Was he dumber than she had expected, or what?
"Lep, this is important," she said, aware that they had very little time and trying not to be impatient. "Yesterday, when I was on my way to and from school, a man on a motorcycle followed me. This same design was on his motorcycle and his helmet. The same design that you have on that T-shirt. And then the man threatened me!"
His expression still didn't change. It was as though she were speaking to a statue.
"Lep, the man with this design on his motorcycle went like this to me!" She repeated the throat-slashing gesture. "And I knew I'd seen this design someplace before, and then I remembered it's on your shirt. And I just wondered if you knew—"
"I don't know! Not my fault! I don't do anything!" he said, angry and defensive. And he took off down the hall, immediately lost in the crowds of students.
She couldn't believe it. This poor skinny boy from some Third World country, who nobody wanted to be friends with, was running away from her?
And on her way home from school that day the black motorcycle with the red logo followed her again. She tried not to look back, after the first time she saw him, but she couldn't help it. And as soon as she did, he made the throat-slashing gesture.
