Pass/Fail (2012) Read online

  There was a small object on the desk next to his left glove. It was made of plastic and it looked like a box about the size of a deck of playing cards but a little thicker. It had a hinge on one end as if it folded in half and a stubby antenna stuck up from one corner. It had the word NOKIA printed on its face. Jake wondered what it was—he’d never seen that word before, or anything like the little box. When he looked at it for too long, though, Mr. Zuraw grabbed it hurriedly off his desk and shoved it in a desk drawer.

  “McCartney, Jake,” he said, and waved Jake toward the chair facing him. “Senior. Chess club, Science Fairs, French club. Very good grades,” he went on, as if reading from a dossier, though he wasn’t, “in fact, a 4.0 average. On his way to becoming class valedictorian, if he doesn’t screw it all up.”

  Jake’s eyes widened a little, but he said nothing.

  “No athletic accomplishments to speak of. In fact—nearly failed gym class his freshman year. This school promotes self-esteem and personal growth above actual achievement, which makes it extremely difficult to fail gym, even for the most feeble. When required to climb a rope he proved unable to do so even given support and encouragement by Coach Matthews.”

  Support and encouragement had largely amounted to name-calling and expressions of disdain, Jake remembered. “My sophomore year I managed to get up the rope,” he claimed.

  Mr. Zuraw tilted his head to one side, then the other. “Lost thirty-five pounds his sophomore year. Did a little better then. Shows he can improve if he tries hard enough. If the only option is failure.”

  The guidance counselor sat back in his chair. He looked up at the ceiling for a long time, then brought his gaze down to focus on Jake’s face. Jake got the feeling the man had just opened his eyes after having them closed—though in fact they’d been open the whole time. “Hello, Jake,” he said.

  Jake squirmed in his seat. “Hi. You… wanted to see me. Did you want to talk about college applications? Because I’ve already—”

  Mr. Zuraw shook his head. “No.”

  Jake nodded. “Okay. Then. Um, does this have anything to do with what happened last night?”

  Mr. Zuraw smiled at him without any warmth. And waited.

  Finally Jake thought to reach into his bookbag and pull out the pale blue envelope. The card with its PASS was still inside. “Is it about this?”

  “You’re a very special child, Jake. Or so certain people believe. They think you might have potential no one has tapped yet. We’d like to see if we can tap it this year. For that reason, the curriculum has been changed for you.” He nodded at the envelope in Jake’s hand. He began speaking in a flat tone, very quickly, as if he were describing the side effects of a pharmaceutical. “From now until further notice, everything you do will be graded on a strictly pass/fail basis.”

  Jake squinted at the man. “You mean my coursework, and—”

  “Everything. You were presented with a test last night, and you passed it. There will be more of them, though no two will be the same. The number of tests is not something I’m going to share with you. They will happen at seemingly random times, and they will be evaluated according to not only whether you complete the tasks you’re given but in what manner you complete them. Cheating is permitted, and in some cases will be necessary to achieve a passing grade. There will be conditions built into each test that will result in automatic failure.”

  “What are you talking—who decided this, my parent’s weren’t—”

  “Jake, let me pause now to make one thing clear. None of this information will be repeated once I’ve finished. It is to your immense benefit that you pay attention right now and memorize everything I say.”

  Jake started to speak again, then sat back in his chair and held his peace. He was getting angry—often enough, his reaction to deep confusion. He knew better than to think the anger would help him just then.

  “You should avoid those conditions,” Mr. Zuraw went on, as if he had not been interrupted. “Once a grade has been awarded, either a PASS or a FAIL, it cannot be rescinded or changed for any reason. No appeals will be permitted. During the testing period you will continue to pursue your normal coursework, though the tests you take in class will not be graded.”

  Jake shook in his chair. He grabbed the chair arms with both hands. He didn’t know what to think. This was no practical joke, he was certain. It wasn’t funny, for one thing. He’d worked very hard to maintain his 4.0 and to have it threatened now was obscene. There was something going on here, something he was not being allowed the time to take apart and understand.

  “If you pass enough tests, you will be allowed to graduate from high school and you will return to this office, where you and I can discuss your very, very bright future.”

  He stopped suddenly.

  Jake bit his lip. He couldn’t stand the sudden vacuum of his words. He had to say something. “What if I fail?”

  “You are allowed to fail any two of the tests without penalty. If you fail three tests, I will personally take you out behind the gymnasium and put a bullet in the back of your head.”

  Chapter Four

  Jake laughed. Okay, he thought.

  This was some kind of joke, after all.

  It had to be.

  “What is this all about?” he asked. “Why would you do something like that?”

  “It’s for your benefit, Jake. Everything I do is for your benefit. Beyond that I am not permitted to share with you the reason for the change in curriculum.”

  “But—you’re not really going to shoot me,” Jake said.

  Mr. Zuraw smiled again, that same humorless smile that pressed his lips together and drained them of all blood. Then he opened up a drawer of his desk, took out a large and very clean revolver, and placed it on the blotter between them.

  Jake ran.

  He leapt out of the chair, one leg swinging over its arm. He ran out of the guidance office and through the teacher’s wing. Mr. Zuraw made no attempt to follow him. Why would he? According to the rules he’d described, Jake could fail three more tests before Mr. Zuraw would shoot him.

  That was accepting the guidance counselor’s logic. Jake refused to do that. Instead he believed a clearly deranged man with a gun was inside the school.

  He raced to the Principal’s office. It wasn’t far, just at the juncture where the teacher’s wing met the westernmost classrooms. Jake rushed inside the reception area even as the Principal’s secretary shouted “Hey!” and told him there was no running in the halls. He raced up to the Principal’s door and started pounding on it, even as he recalled that Mr. Zuraw had said “we”. This particular “we” had wanted him to tap his unrealized potential, and were imposing the ludicrous tests on him for that purpose. Jake wondered who this “we” might be. It might include other faculty members.

  It might include them all.

  As the door swung open, though, he realized he had to try. “Mr. Zuraw, the guidance counselor—has a gun,” he said breathlessly.

  The Principal smiled and blinked. “Hello, Jake,” he said.

  Standing behind him was a man in a three piece suit. A navy blue serge three piece suit, just like the one Mr. Zuraw wore, down to the black leather gloves. Except for one detail—he had a mask on his face. It was perfectly smooth and covered his entire face and it was as bright and reflective as a mirror, so that Jake saw a shrunken reflection of his own panicked face when he looked at it.

  “Who…?” he asked, looking back at the Principal.

  “This is one of your Proctors. One of the staff who will oversee your testing. They don’t have names. Not when they’re masked. That’s the point of the mask, you see.”

  Jake didn’t stick around to ask any more questions.

  His next stop was Mr. Schneider’s homeroom. He peered through the window inset in the door and saw Cody and twenty-eight other students lounging at their desks, some napping, some passing notes or just talking in low voices. Mr. Schneider was reading from a mimeogr
aphed list of announcements.

  He stopped as Jake threw open the door. He looked up. They all looked up.

  “Cody,” Jake said. “Come on. I need your help.”

  Cody looked around and started to laugh. “What are you doing, Jake?” he asked. “I can’t just—”

  “I’ve always counted on you before.”

  Cody shook his head wildly. “I can’t leave without a hall pass!”

  “I… think you can.” Cheating was permitted, and sometimes necessary, Jake recalled. He knew he needed some support just then. “Just, stand up. Just stand up.”

  Mr. Schneider watched closely as Cody considered this, then, slowly, hands on his desk, started to get up. The homeroom teacher did not make any comment. Cody walked slowly toward the door, always facing the teacher, watching as if he expected to be told at any moment to stop this foolishness and sit down.

  Mr. Schneider made no comment.

  Was he part of this? Or did he just see the desperation in Jake’s face?

  Out in the hall Jake tried to explain what had happened. “Guidance—gun—principal’s in on it—gotta get out,” he ended up saying. Cody told him he was talking too fast. Jake just shook his head and ran for the foyer by the road, where the school buses picked up and dropped off. Cody was enough of a friend to know to just follow and not ask any more questions.

  Outside the sun was up. The white sidewalks were blazing and the dry air of late summer made Jake very aware of the salty sweat on his skin. He felt grimy and gross. He felt like he was about to start hyperventilating.

  “Where to now, Jake?” Cody asked, looking at him over the frames of his thick glasses.

  Jake shook his head.

  “Just tell me. I’ll go there with you, I promise.”

  Jake tore off his hoodie and balled it up under his arm. He stared one way up the road, then the other. He stared across the street at the football stadium.

  Behind the gymnasium. That’s where they would do it. On the other side of the school. Not in the football stadium. But he saw himself, standing on the fifty yard line, surrounded by his graduating class, surrounded by teachers and parents and just… just everyone in the town. He saw the gun, bright under the stadium lights. He heard it fire.

  “Maybe we should go back,” Cody said. “Back inside.”

  “No!” Jake said. Pick a direction, he thought. Either way is as good as the other. Then he thought of something. “The township offices are down that way,” he said, pointing south. “There’s a police station there. Come on!”

  Chapter Five

  Jake’s Dad had to come pick them up at the Fulton Township Police Offices.

  Cody hung his head when they were marched out to the car, a policeman on either side of them. Jake stared straight ahead.

  “Jake, don’t worry. I’m going to take you home and we’ll get this all sorted out.”

  “Sir,” one of the policemen said, “we don’t take this so lightly. Making a false police report is a felony and your son could be tried as an adult.”

  “Mr. McCartney,” Cody said. “Please—”

  Jake’s Dad held up his hands for peace. “Officer, I’m sure my son didn’t mean any real harm. He just wanted to get out of school for a—for fun. Surely you skipped school yourself every once in a while.”

  The other cop sneered. “I never bore false testimony against one of my teachers just so I could cut class. Do you know how much trouble he could have caused for this guy, Zuraw? He could lose his job. It could have gone a lot further than that.”

  Jake’s Dad slumped forward, his hands dropping. “You never know,” he said. “Maybe it’s all true. Maybe the teacher did have a gun.” He didn’t make it sound like a convincing possibility.

  “The school’s Principal checked himself,” the first policeman said.

  “I told you, he’s in on it!” Jake demanded. “Maybe they’re all in on it! Maybe you’re in on it!”

  There was considerable more discussion, but after that things changed tack. It seemed like the police were willing to believe that Jake wasn’t so much malicious as crazy. Eventually the police agreed to release Jake into his father’s recognizance.

  They went back to Jake’s house, then. There were scorch marks up the side of one all and the ornamental cacti had been cut back severely, but Cody had no comment on how the house looked. Like Jake he hadn’t spoken since they left the police station.

  “Cody can sleep over tonight,” Jake’s Dad said, after clearing it with Cody’s folks. Jake shook his head—it made him feel like he was ten years old again to have a sleep-over—but Cody said he thought maybe that was a good idea.

  They watched some TV, or at least, Cody and Jake’s parents watched some TV. He spent most of the evening inside his own head, thinking about what had happened. Wondering how far it went.

  When bedtime came and Cody went off to brush his teeth, Jake’s Mom helped him put sheets on the cot in Jake’s room where Cody would spend the night. “I won’t say I’m not worried,” she said. “Kind of scared, actually.”

  Jake nodded, understanding. He felt that way, too.

  “I don’t know if this has to… change things, though. Do you think it should?”

  Jake looked up at her in surprise. What hadn’t changed?

  “I mean, we don’t need to take you to a therapist. We don’t need to think about, well, medication. Just yet. I think that today was just about stress. Right? The stress of the fire last night. And having to go back to school right away. Jake. If you tell me this was just stress, that it was a one-time thing, nothing has to change.”

  Jake considered what she was saying. But not for long.

  He had no proof of what he’d claimed. Until he did, his parents had no reason to believe him. They trusted him normally, he knew. He’d never been a particularly dishonest kid up until now. But the story was too outlandish for them. Yet. He could get evidence, if this thing kept happening tomorrow, and the day after that, he could document it, build a case, and then they’d have to listen to him—

  “Yeah, Mom,” he said. “It’s just stress.”

  She kissed him on the forehead and sent him to brush his teeth.

  In the morning there was a pale blue envelope under his door.

  Inside was a card marked PASS.

  “You see this, right?” he asked Cody.

  “Of course I do. I saw the other one, too.”

  “I need you to believe me. I need somebody to believe me!”

  Cody grabbed his arm. “I do! I always did. I always will.”

  Jake felt so much relief he fell backward onto his bed. He held the PASS card up to the light, studied it for any kind of clues but of course there were none. No watermark to say where it came from, no hairs accidentally trapped in the glue of the envelope. No fingerprint smudges anywhere—not that he would have been able to do anything with them if there had been. He didn’t have access to a crime lab or anything.

  “What did I pass?” he asked out loud. “What kind of test? I tried to break out of their game. I tried to get them all arrested. You’d think that would be a fail. It would be something they didn’t want.”

  Cody took the card away from him. “This suggests otherwise. It’s like they wanted you to try to escape. At least, at first.”

  Jake nodded. He could see it. “They’ve got me in a cage. They expect me to act like an animal in a cage, and rattle the bars. See if it holds. I didn’t just accept the game the way it was described to me, I had to prove it was real, to myself. Okay.”

  “I suppose that makes sense. It’s cheating to try to end the game before it begins. They expect you to cheat, right? That’s what Zuraw said.”

  Jake nodded.

  “It’s a game. They wouldn’t put you through this if they didn’t think you had a chance to make it, right?”

  “That’s the impression I got,” Jake agreed.

  “So maybe you just need to play along, now,” Cody suggested. He threw his hand
s in the air. “I don’t like that any more than you do. I think it sucks. Especially because it could mean you’ll get—you’ll—”

  “Get taken behind the gym and executed,” Jake filled in.

  “I don’t like that. But maybe it’s your best chance. To play along. Don’t try to break the game, because they’re ready to stop you if you do.”

  Jake just stared forward, lost in his own thoughts.

  Chapter Six

  He showered. He got dressed. Made himself a bowl of cereal, kissed his mother’s cheek. Then he went to school.

  Jake walked to school, as he did every morning—it was only about half a mile away, and it gave him time to think. It had been a week since he had been brought home from the police station, a week in which he had gone through his normal routine just waiting for another test to materialize. None had so far—otherwise he would have seen an envelope under his door, either a PASS or a FAIL, depending.

  It would come, he knew. It was inevitable. He had to keep his guard up.

  There were moments he thought it had all been a stress-induced breakdown. A hallucination or something. As he walked to school that morning, however, he’d never felt more paranoid. The sun had just come up and still dark blue shadows pooled between the closely-spaced houses. Security lights above garages and front doors cast long, sharp shadows across the sidewalk. A hint of mist crept along in the gutter. Somewhere a dog was barking, though nowhere nearby.

  He felt like anything could be crouching, waiting, just around the next corner. So when he heard footsteps coming toward him down a side street, and saw a hunched figure pressing toward him, walking very quickly, he stopped and waited until she came closer.

  She. It was a girl. It was the girl. The one he’d saved.

  He hadn’t seen her all week, though he’d kept his eyes open in the school halls, watching for her. Hoping to see her again. Even though he knew if he did he would only put his foot in his mouth again—say something even stupider, so that the shallow goodwill he’d achieved with her so far would evaporate and she would flee him like a stalker.