Test Run

Neha had always been told to stay until the last moment of every exam, to scrutinize every line until it bled in her vision. She had been taught to triple-check, then quadruple-check, then check again. She had been taught to squeeze her mind like a lemon, to drench the paper with the last powers of its acidic truth-serum logic. Above all, she had been taught to waste not even one second on false confidence. Although, with her former strategies, confidence was inevitable.

Not so now.

The ink is swimming on the page in front of her, and she has a terrible wrenching knot in her stomach. She lifts her head.

The proctor is far below her, rifling through papers in front of him as if he has lost an exam.

Suddenly Neha has an idea. Keeping her eyes on the proctor, she turns slightly in her chair, takes her exam, and drops down on all fours.

Heart racing, she looks around.

Fortunately, she is in the back, high up and nearly invisible, if it weren’t for the proctor and his dark eyes already having identified her. No matter.

On all fours, she creeps along the row. There is no way the proctor can see her: the man whom she has never seen before, the man who looks stunningly like her.

She reaches the end of her row. She takes a breath. The door is just to her left and up two steps.

The lectern is far below her, but the sounds of paper shuffling have suddenly stopped.

She freezes. It's too late: she can’t risk it, not now.

Suddenly, a buzzer goes off and she hears someone clear his throat.

“Time is up. Turn in your papers.”

His accent is like hers.

She abhors him; abhors him for succeeding in this world that she is clearly failing in, abhors him for his smug superiority, abhors him even for his very presence.

Chairs scrape against tile, bodies rise, and sighs emanate from various places around the big room, an orchestra of surrender.

Neha scrunches further toward the front of her row, where the wood paneling is hiding her from view.

He can’t have seen.

Yet still, there is a pause.

“Are there any tests still out there?”

His voice has an edge to it now.

Neha clutches at her backpack, a last-ditch attempt to make things right. She could just get up now, say she dropped her pencil and ‘sorry here’s my test’.

But she doesn’t. Instead, she stays absolutely still.

She can almost feel the proctor’s frown.

“And there were no other students in here?”

Neha hears the sound of fabric rustling, students looking around as if to find who the culprit is, glad that for the moment it is not them.

Neha takes another breath. She could still get up. She could.

But her heart is pounding and her hands are rooted to the carpeted floor.

She can’t. She just can’t.

----Novel Excerpt---