Pass/Fail (2012)

by David Wellington

  “Jake, buddy, I love you, but not like that,” Cody joked. “I’m just saying she might not be exactly what she appears to be.”

  “That,” Jake said, trying to stay calm, “is one the craziest things I have ever heard. You’re suggesting what, exactly? That she works for Mr. Zuraw? That she’s a mole, watching me and reporting back to him my every move?”

  “Ah.” Cody looked stricken. “I didn’t want—”

  “What, Cody? What didn’t you want?”

  Cody took off his glasses and rubbed at them with the hem of his shirt. “I didn’t want to say that out loud. Not until I was sure.”

  Jake stormed off angrily, headed anywhere but near Cody. If he wasn’t careful he was going to punch his best friend. But Cody didn’t seem aware of how close that was. He chased after Jake, almost dancing around him, trying to talk to him.

  “Hey, we need to think clearly at all times, right?” Cody asked. “If you’re going to survive these tests we need to pay attention. We need to not miss anything that might be out of the ordinary. I was simply being—”

  “—Paranoid?”

  “—Cautious,” Cody insisted, his voice very soft. “You know they’ll do anything to manipulate you. Anything at all. Do you really think they wouldn’t stoop to using a mole to get to you, to find out what your plans are?”

  “Go away, Cody. Be smart and shut up now.”

  But he wouldn’t. He kept at it. “That day we broke into Mr. Zuraw’s office,” Cody said, “she had an appointment with him. She was there to talk to Mr. Zuraw about something. What could it have been?”

  “Maybe where she’s going to college?” Jake suggested, bitterly. “He is the guidance counselor.”

  “Then, when the Proctor said ‘sleep’, she didn’t. Before now we were operating under the notion that whenever they said ‘sleep’ the whole school passed out—except for you, Jake. Now it turns out she’s immune, too. Then there’s this story that she just transferred here from Chicago,” Cody went on. “Kind of convenient, huh? That would explain why nobody here ever saw her before. I think there’s just too much evidence against her. At least too much for me to be comfortable with her around—”

  Jake grabbed Cody by his shirt and slammed him up against a row of lockers. Not hard enough to hurt him—Cody was nearly as big as he was, and Jake wasn’t that strong—but it made a huge clanging noise that had every student in the hallway look up in surprise.

  “Don’t just ignore me because you don’t want to hear this,” Cody said. There was fear in his eyes but he couldn’t seem to stop.

  “I’m going to ignore it because if I don’t, I’ll have one less friend,” Jake told him. “You’re talking about Megan, Cody. They were going to let her burn to death in a crashed car. Just to get my attention. When I wanted nothing more in the world than to ask her on a date, but I couldn’t, because I was too scared, she was the one who walked me through the process. Now, when I find out that I’m not even human, or whatever, the only thing in the world I want is somebody to hold me, and kiss me, and tell me it isn’t true. That I’m normal and that there’s nothing wrong with what I am. But I can’t have that. Oh, no. Because you decided that she wasn’t right for me.”

  “She’s suspect,” Cody said, his voice very small.

  “She’s the girl I love,” Jake replied, surprising even himself.

  He’d never used that word before, not even when he was thinking about her. Not even when he was alone at night in bed, thinking about her.

  Jake’s rage swelled up suddenly and he couldn’t take it any more. He punched the locker right next to Cody’s face, hard enough to hurt his hand. More than hard enough to make Cody flinch. Then he stalked off, pushing his way through the crowded hallway, not looking at anyone. If he ran into the fat kid who always wore black t-shirts, the kid was in trouble, he thought. Even if the kid had been right in front of him, though, jeering and mocking, Jake wouldn’t have seen him. He couldn’t see anything. It was like he was blind.

  “Sleep,” the public address system said.

  Jake kept stomping forward, even as dozens of bodies all around him fell lifeless to the ground. He stepped over a freshman girl in a hoodie, then walked around a pile of football players wearing their jerseys. He only stopped when he felt a buzzing presence in front of him, a weird, electronic vibration.

  He looked up and saw himself. He looked pissed. It took him a while to understand he was staring into the mask of a Proctor.

  “Hello, Jake,” the Proctor said. “Are you ready for your next test?”

  “Sure,” Jake told him. “Why the hell not?”

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Proctor led him into the gym. Jake’s shoes squeaked on the blonde wood boards, but the Proctor made no sound at all. In the middle of the gym floor, where a black line had been painted right down the middle of the basketball court, twelve red dodegballs sat arranged in a perfect circle. Jake walked over to one and picked it up. Its rubbery smell made him remember all the painful times he’d had one of these slammed into his body by a sadistic lacrosse player. The gym was not his favorite place.

  “Each ball weighs exactly six ounces,” the Proctor told him, droning on in that dispassionate electronic voice they all shared. “Except for one, which—”

  “Who are you?” Jake asked. “I know you’re one of the teachers. Is that you, Mr. Dzama? Or maybe it’s Ms. Holman in disguise.”

  The Proctor waited for him to finish. Of course it wasn’t going to answer. They were given specific questions they could answer, specific scripts they could deliver to explain the tests, and that was all they ever said. Mr. Irwin had said that when he put the mask on all emotional distractions went away. He wondered if that was just a psychological effect or if the mask had some real ability to deaden emotions.

  He could really have used something like that.

  “Except for one,” the Proctor said, “which weighs six and one half ounces. You may pick them all up and examine them if you please, but we have determined you will not be able to tell which ball is heavier by feel alone. Do you wish to examine the balls?”

  Oh, what Cody could have done with a line like that. Cody. Who had betrayed Jake when he needed him the most.

  Jake closed his eyes. He couldn’t afford this, right now. He needed to focus, needed to pay attention. Too many distractions! “No, I’ll take your word for it,” he said. Which was probably a mistake. He knew how tricky Proctors could be.

  “To pass this test,” the Proctor told him, “you must identify which ball weighs seven ounces. You may weigh the balls in any manner you please. However, you may weigh them only three times. Weighing a fourth time will result in—”

  “—An automatic failure condition? Seriously? You’re going to kill me just because I weighed some balls too many times?”

  “You may begin now. I will observe but may not assist you in any way, nor may I answer any further questions.”

  Jake stared at the silver mask. He wanted to hurl the ball in his hand at it hard enough to crack it. He wanted to pelt the Proctor with so many dodgeballs it would beg for mercy.

  But that wouldn’t accomplish anything.

  Fine. He had to weigh some balls. He looked around for a scale, assuming one would be provided. The gym was empty, however. There weren’t even any mats on the walls. Well, Jake knew there was a scale in the boys’ locker room. The wrestlers weighed themselves on it obsessively. He strode over to the door leading to the locker room—and found that it wouldn’t open.

  He glanced back at the Proctor, wanting to know what it was up to, but of course it had already said it wouldn’t answer any questions. He tried the door to the girls’ locker room. A place every teenage boy wanted to break into, right? But that door was also locked. So was the door he’d entered the gym through, and the doors leading out to the athletic fields. Only one door was open, and it was a dead end—it led to the equipment room, where all the medicine balls and baseball bats and fiel
d hockey pads were stored. There was no way out through that room, not even a window, and—

  Ah.

  Jake got it, then. He didn’t just have to weigh the balls. He had to build a scale, too. He could use anything in the equipment room to that end.

  “Pretty sneaky,” he called, talking to the Proctor because it was the only person around and he was too agitated not to talk to somebody. He leaned out through the door of the equipment room and looked at the Proctor. “Hey, are you Ms. Delessandro?”

  The Proctor didn’t flinch, or even turn its masked head. He hadn’t really expected it to.

  “I’m just assuming you’re a teacher,” he said, scanning the racks of volleyball nets and catcher’s mits. “For all I know, you’re the captain of the cheerleading squad. Or maybe you’re Megan. Cody thinks Megan’s a spy. Maybe she dresses up like a Proctor when she wants to feel tough.” He pulled down a cardboard box off a high shelf and found it was full of bowling pins. Useless. “Of course, Cody’s full of it. Isn’t that right? I know she’s not in on this. She can’t be.”

  She couldn’t. She just… couldn’t.

  But when the PA said sleep, she didn’t fall asleep.

  It seemed awfully convenient, too, that when Jake had decided to convince her he was telling the truth, Mr. Zuraw had improvised a test on the spot that would not only convince her but make him think she’d saved him from certain death.

  No. No, no, no! Jake refused to think like that.

  Anyway, he had to concentrate on the test. He couldn’t afford a FAIL. He only had one free FAIL left. If he failed this test and another one, he would be shot dead.

  “Okay,” he said, to himself this time. “Think! Think scales.”

  Eventually he emerged from the equipment room with a variety of objects. He had a ten foot long pole, used for pole vaulting. He had a couple of jump ropes, and a couple of mesh bags that had been used to hold soccer balls. He went back and made a second trip to push out a stack of hurdles, several dozen of them it looked like.

  This might work, he thought. If he got it just right.

  First he had to find the balance point of the pole. He set up a hurdle in the middle of the gym. It came to just below waist height. He laid the pole perpendicularly across the top bar of the hurdle. It immediately started to fall off, of course. Carefully he slid it back and forth until it was balanced perfectly, tipping slightly one way, then the other, but not falling off the hurdle. He tied the jump ropes around the balance point, careful not to let the pole slide in either direction even a fraction of an inch. The balance had to be perfect or this just wouldn’t work.

  Then he hung an empty mesh bag from either end of the pole. He could put as many dodgeballs as he liked in either one—the bags would easily hold all twelve balls. The problem was they sagged across the floor. The hurdle just wasn’t high enough.

  The hurdles weren’t very sturdy. As a safety feature they were designed to come apart if you hit them the wrong way. They wouldn’t hold much weight, but the pole was hollow aluminum and not very heavy, and the dodgeballs were pretty light, too. Carefully, taking his time as best he could, he built a scaffold out of the hurdles, stacking them crosswise to give them as much structural integrity as possible. Finally, reaching up on tiptoe, he lifted his hurdle/pole/bags contraption to the top and let it fall into place.

  When he was done he had a balance scale about six feet high. The mesh bags were still almost touching the ground, but that was okay—they just had to be suspended a few inches off the floor. The pole wobbled back and forth but eventually settled down until it was as level as it was going to get. He was ready to weigh the dodgeballs.

  There was only one problem: it seemed impossible to weigh twelve balls with only three measurements. He just couldn’t see how it would be done.

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Jake watched the Proctor but it didn’t move. It didn’t even shift from one foot to the other. He had no reason to expect it to—they were like robots when they wore the masks. Yet this one made a convenient target for his anger and he found himself trying to provoke it again and again.

  “The way I heart it, Mr. Zuraw’s becoming unstable. You ask me—he’s royally messed up. Crazy. Maybe the Youth Steering Committee will have to replace him, huh? You got any opinion on that? No, I guess not.”

  Jake studied the makeshift balance scale before him. It would work, he thought. He had to believe it would work. There was no way to test it—that would count as one of his three weighings, and he definitely couldn’t afford to waste even one.

  He had to figure out which of the twelve dodgeballs weighed seven ounces, when the rest of them weighed six. His first thought had been pretty simple: break up the twelve into two groups of six each, then weigh the two groups against each other. One group would weigh thirty-six ounces total, and one would weigh thirty-seven. It would be enough to tip the scales, and that would eliminate half the balls right away. Then with his second weighing he could take the heavier group of six and split it into two groups of three, and weigh those groups against each other.

  Which left him with three dodgeballs, and only one measurement left. It wasn’t enough. “Goddamnit!” he yelled. “Can’t you idiots ever make one of these tests make sense? Can’t it just work the first time?”

  But no, of course not. That wasn’t the point. You had to use lateral thinking to solve these tests. You had to see what everyone else would miss.

  Jake studied the dodgeballs carefully. He picked up a pair of them and tried to sense if one was heavier than the other. He was so keyed up he didn’t think he’d be able to tell, even if one weighed twice what the other did—they were both so light and they tried to roll out of his slippery hands.

  Two groups of six, then two groups of three, then two groups of one… which left one ball unweighed. There was no way to weigh all of the balls with three weighings. That meant in the end he could only have a probability of being right, not a certainty, because he would have to guess about the last three balls. There was no concrete solution, it seemed. But there had to be, there had to be some solution. There always was.

  “I’m going to beat this,” he told the Proctor. “Even if I end up guessing. I’ll guess right. I swear it! Maybe I can’t measure all the balls, but—”

  But he didn’t have to.

  He saw it, suddenly, so clearly in his head that he actually calmed down for a moment. The elegance of the solution almost made him smile. He didn’t have to weigh all of the balls, and he didn’t have to guess at all.

  Instead of two groups of six, he divided the balls into three groups of four. Then careful not to upset the unstable scale, he fed each of the groups into one of the two mesh bags hanging from the end of the pole. If one side went down, even slightly, that would mean it contained the heavy ball. There was also a chance that the two bags would be evenly balanced, meaning that the heavy ball wasn’t in either one. That was fine—that just meant the heavy ball was in the group of four he hadn’t weighed. Either way, he had reduced the number of balls that needed to be weighed by two thirds.

  The pole tilted first left, then right. It tottered back and forth for a while with Jake swearing under his breath—but then it started to settle down, with one bag touching the floor and the other still a few inches in the air.

  “Yes!” Jake crowed, and immediately started taking balls out of the bags. He kept the four from the heavy group and pushed the other eight to the side.

  When he split the four balls into two groups of two and started feeding them into the bags for the second weighing, the stack of hurdles started to sway ominously. Jake froze in place and desperately willed the scale to hold together. When the structure had stopped moving he fed the balls into the bags and took a step backwards to watch.

  With aching slowness, the pole started to tilt to one side. Jake held his breath.

  One of the bags settled to the floor.

  Jake didn’t dare cheer this time. He could see the pile
of hurdles starting to buckle. Before long it was going to collapse no matter what he did. If it could just hold together for one more measurement…

  He removed the balls from the bags and discarded the ones from the light group, just as he had before. He was left with two balls, one of which was the heavy one. With utmost care, he put one of the balls into the bag on the left. And then he did something stupid. He let go of the bag without putting anything in the other one.

  The pole tilted wildly to the left and the bag hit the floor. The dodgeball inside bounced a little, then settled down. Jake looked up just in time to see the pole rolling around on the top hurdle, then to jump out of the way as the stack of hurdles collapsed with a clattering crash. Hurdles skidded across the floor. The pole made a metallic thud as it struck the wood floor of the gym. There were dodgeballs everywhere.

  Jake surveyed the wreckage and wanted to tear his hair out. He wanted to scream profanities. He wanted to go somewhere and hide under a rock. But it could be fixed. He could rebuild the scale, he could even make it better next time, he could—

  “Jake, have you made you determination?” the Proctor asked.

  It was standing right behind him. Jake screamed.

  It seemed to make no difference to the Proctor at all.

  “Wait,” he said. “I’m not done yet! I only got to do two measurements. I’m not done!”

  “The balance moved. You weighed one ball against zero balls. That was your third measurement,” the Proctor said, as calm as if nothing depended on this.

  If Jake failed this test it would be his second FAIL of three. If he failed now, his next FAIL would be a death sentence.

  “Give me one more chance,” he begged. “Please.”

  “Hand me the heavier ball, Jake. You have thirty seconds to choose.”

  Rage and sorrow and suffering and fear and loneliness burst inside Jake’s head all at once. He stared at the ball at his feet, the one that hadn’t made it inside the bag. He stared at the Proctor. Then he kicked the ball as hard as he could at the stupid silver mask. When he got to the door of the gym it was unlocked, and he stormed out without another word.