Nine Inches

The Test-Taker

THE TEXT ARRIVED LATE ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AT the last possible minute.

Tomorrow morning, it said.

I cursed under my breath. I’d been planning on getting drunk that night, but work was work, and Kyle expected us to be available. You’d have to have a pretty good excuse for saying no, an infectious disease or a death in the immediate family. A potential hangover wasn’t going to cut it.

I stopped by his house around five to find out who I was and where I was going. Kyle was a junior at MIT, but he ran his business from home, while also doing his laundry.

He was down in his basement lair, playing Call of Duty on a humongous wide-screen with two ridiculously hot sorority girls — spray tans, frosted hair, glittery Greek letters on their tank tops — flanking him on the couch, watching the video-game action like they actually gave a crap what happened. I had no idea where Kyle found these girls — they didn’t look like they went to MIT — but there seemed to be a never-ending supply of them at his disposal.

“Yo, bro,” he said, glancing away from the screen for a millisecond. “Nice pants.”

“Thanks, man.” I was rocking my bright red skinny jeans from BR; Kyle owned the exact same pair, but they looked better on him, sleeker and more natural, like they’d been designed specifically for his body.

“Ladies,” he said, “this is my boy Josh. Josh, meet Emily and Elise.”

The girls said, Hi, Josh, in these bored, superior voices. I was just a high school kid to them, a primitive life-form. They probably figured I was there to buy some weed, or maybe score a few Adderall, both of which were among the many products and services offered by Kyle, Incorporated. They had no way of knowing that, far from being a customer, I was actually a valued, highly compensated employee, one of a small group of trusted insiders.

Kyle handed the controller to Emily, the smaller and blonder of the pair.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “Don’t fucking get me killed.”

I followed him into the laundry room at the other end of the basement — it was where we always conducted our business — and waited while he emptied the dryer. It smelled good in there, fabric softener and warm clean clothes. Kyle stood up and dangled a pair of panties in front of my face like a hypnotist trying to make you sleepy. They were pink with little blue hearts.

“Elise,” he said, in answer to my unspoken question. “The ladies appreciate it when you do their laundry. It makes them feel loved and respected. Gratitude is an aphrodisiac, dude — remember that when you get to college.”

I told him I’d keep it in mind. That was how we rolled — Kyle gave me advice and I took it if I could or filed it away for future reference. It had been like that ever since we’d met at the Pendleton School Summer Day Camp all those years ago, when I was a fifth-grader and he was a Future Leader, the most junior of the junior counselors. On the very first day, he told me that I needed to get myself some acceptable swim trunks, because the ones I had were totally ridiculous, billowing around me like a bright green oil spill when I stepped into the water. In the years that followed, he’d contributed a steady stream of big-brotherly suggestions and helpful hints: Dude, you need to start working out… . Ever think about getting yourself some contact lenses?… I hate to say it, bro, but your vocabulary is pitiful… . Don’t you think it’s time to start making some real money?

“How you doing?” Kyle tossed the panties into his mesh basket and eyeballed me up and down, the way my aunts and uncles sometimes did when they hadn’t seen me for a while. “Keeping outta trouble?”

“Pretty much. Just cruising until graduation.”

“Senior year.” He nodded with nostalgic approval, one eye partially obscured by his floppy hair. He had recently started wearing oversize hipster glasses that made his sharp, handsome features look even more delicate than usual. “I hope you’re getting your dick sucked. That’s what the sophomore bitches are for, right?”

I felt myself blushing and tried to will the blood away from my face. Despite my upperclassman status, I was not getting my dick sucked; as a matter of fact, I wasn’t getting much of anything except a bunch of frustratingly mixed signals from Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, this artsy junior on whom I was nursing a severe unrequited crush that kept me awake at night, not that that was the sort of update I was going to share with Kyle.

“I’m doing all right,” I assured him.

“That’s my boy.” He ruffled my hair like I was still in middle school. “You worked hard. Now it’s time to get paid, am I right?”

“Absolutely.”

That was it for the small talk. He stood on his tiptoes and retrieved a lumpy manila envelope from a shelf above the washing machine, otherwise occupied by a jug of detergent and a box of dryer sheets.

“Thanks for bailing me out,” he said as he pressed the envelope into my hand. “Things got a little complicated this time around. I had to do some big-time juggling to make it work.”

“No problem.”

“Get a good night’s sleep, yo.” He held out his fist and I gave it a bump. “And don’t forget to sharpen your pencils.”

I WAITED until I got home to open the envelope. It contained a stack of crisp twenties — my usual fee of five hundred dollars — along with an admission ticket for tomorrow’s test, a fake photo ID, and directions to the testing center. It was all pretty routine, except for the ID, which I couldn’t stop staring at.

I’d taken the SATs seven times so far, twice for myself, and five times for Kyle’s clients. Up to now, the kids I’d impersonated had all been strangers from nearby towns. Their names had meant nothing to me, and their bogus school IDs — accurate though they may have been — always struck me as cheap and phony, props in a half-assed game of make-believe.

This time, though, the ID came from my own school, Greenwood High. It looked totally official, a dead ringer for the one I carried in my backpack. It even had the same unflattering picture of me — a pudgy nerd with a pained smile and a touch of bedhead — plastered above the bar code. The only difference was the name beside the photo: Jacob T. Harlowe. That was the thing I couldn’t stop staring at.

Jake Harlowe was in my AP psych class. He was a junior jock, a football and lacrosse star, one of those popu­lar, good-looking kids everybody knows and likes. The Harlowes were Greenwood royalty; his older brother, Scott, had been an all-county quarterback a couple of years ago — Scott had since gone on to Amherst, where the family had some kind of crazy legacy, five generations or whatever — and Jake had stepped right into his shoes, another square-jawed scholar-athlete, humble and easygoing, varsity starter in his sophomore year.

For a couple of minutes, I thought about calling Kyle and trying to back out, maybe asking him to switch me with someone else, but I knew it was hopeless. He wouldn’t have had time to make the new IDs and wouldn’t have said yes even if he did. Kyle wasn’t that kind of boss. And besides, I wouldn’t have known what to tell him, how to articulate my misgivings about this particu­lar assignment.

It wasn’t that I was worried about getting caught. The test was being administered at a private school about a half hour away, where I didn’t expect to run into anyone I knew. I’d never tested there before — Kyle tried to avoid sending us to the same place twice — and I couldn’t imagine that the proctors would know Jake Harlowe or have any reason to suspect that I wasn’t him. All they ever did was glance at the ID and make sure it matched the name on the admission ticket.

And it wasn’t like I’d come down with a sudden attack of conscience, either. I honestly didn’t mind cheating for strangers. If somebody wanted to pay me to help them get into a good college, I didn’t see any problem with that. It wasn’t all that different from hiring an expensive tutor, or getting a doctor to diagnose a learning disability so you could buy yourself some extra time. That was just the way system worked. If you had the money, you got special treatment.

My only problem was the client. Jake Harlowe didn’t seem like the kind of kid who needed to cheat. I always figured that everything came easily to him, the grades as well as the girls and the games, and it troubled me to discover that this wasn’t true. I felt like I’d been peering through his bedroom window and seen something I shouldn’t have, a shameful secret I wished he’d kept to himself.

WHEN KYLE hired me, I’d agreed to follow a strict code of professional conduct. It made sense: people were paying us good money to provide a service, and we owed it to them to fulfill our mission with the highest level of competence and discretion.

You will be on time, Kyle had instructed me, reading straight from the rule book. You will have proper documentation on hand, along with an approved calculator and several sharpened Number Two pencils. You will dress appropriately and never behave in such a way as to draw unnecessary attention from the proctors or your fellow test-takers. Misconduct of any sort is punishable by fine and/or dismissal.

Kyle’s code extended beyond the test day into the rest of our lives. We were not to flash our cash or make extravagant purchases or say anything that might lead others to suspect that we had an illicit source of income. And we were never, ever, to mention Kyle’s name or the services he provided to anyone, under any circumstances. If someone we knew was struggling with the SATs, or thinking about hiring a tutor, our job was to pass this information up the chain to Kyle — nothing more, nothing less. He would investigate the lead, and if he determined that the individual was a potential client, he would reach out on his own terms. I had no idea how he contacted them or how he arranged the payment. There were other mysteries as well: I didn’t know how many other test-takers he employed, what he charged for his services, or even if there was a bigger boss above him, and I wouldn’t have dreamed of asking, because this sort of information was only dispensed on a need-to-know basis. These operational safeguards had been put in place for everyone’s benefit, employees and clients alike. The less any individual knew, the less risk of exposure there was for everybody else.

You just fill in the bubbles, he told me. I’ll take care of the rest.

Given the strictness of the code, it went without saying that partying on the eve of a test was totally prohibited, but Kyle said it anyway: You will not drink alcohol or take illegal drugs on the night before a test. You will be home in bed by eleven p.m. I’d never violated this rule before and didn’t plan on starting now.

After dinner, I put on my sweatpants, turned on my Xbox, and started campaign mode on Bioshock 2, doing my best not to think about the party I was missing, a party I’d been looking forward to all week. I would’ve gotten through the night just fine if not for the text I received around nine o’clock. It was from Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, the first one I’d ever received from her, and it put me in an awkward position.

Tequila is here!!! it said. Where the fuck r u???

I’D BEEN overweight as a kid, academically gifted but terrible at sports, and middle school had been a nightmare. As a result, I tended to be mumbly and apologetic around girls I liked, as if I had no business wasting their valuable time. With Kyle it was the other way around: he always acted like he was doing the girl a favor, honoring her with the blue ribbon of his attention, allowing her to tag along on his amazing adventures.

But I don’t want to make myself sound too pathetic. Things had definitely gotten better in the past year. I’d been working out pretty regularly and was finally starting to show some definition in my arms and chest. I’d acquired a new wardrobe, closely modeled on Kyle’s, and had started driving to school in my mom’s Toyota Matrix.

I wasn’t even a virgin anymore. I’d had my first girlfriend in the fall, or at least my first semiregular hookup. It was all on the down-low, just a once-or-twice-a-week, after-school sex break with Iris Leggett — my former lab partner in AP bio — who had the biggest breasts in all of Greenwood High. This wasn’t as sexy as it sounds: Iris was short and stocky, but her breasts were enormous, way out of proportion to the rest of her, and they caused her a lot of discomfort, both physical and emotional. The first time we took our clothes off, I said, Holy shit, and she started to cry.

I look like a cow, she told me. I used to love playing soccer, but then I got these and had to stop. And forget about the beach. I can’t go anywhere near it.

We only hooked up five or six times before she called it quits, but it was fun and informative while it lasted and definitely boosted my confidence. If it hadn’t been for Iris, I would never have dreamed of talking to Sarabeth Coen-Brunner, let alone flirting with her. She was totally out of my league — a freakishly limber, cheerfully bisexual dancer with eyes like Mila Kunis’s — definitely one of the Top Five Hottest Girls in the Junior Class. But one day in the Art Room, I just walked over to her easel and told her how much I liked her painting, this nocturnal scene of a girl in a black cocktail dress standing beneath a streetlight in the rain.

“She just looks so vulnerable,” I said. “Like there’s nothing to protect her from the elements.”

“Tell that to him,” she muttered, nodding at Mr. Coyle, who was sitting at his desk, reading a graphic novel with his usual expression of scowling concentration. “He hates it.”

Mr. Coyle wasn’t wrong; the painting definitely had problems. The girl didn’t have much of a face, and the raindrops looked like golf balls, but I chose to focus on the positive.

“I like what you did with the streetlight. And the busted umbrella’s a great detail.”

“Thanks.” I could see how pleased she was. “I worked really hard on that.”

We got to be pretty good friends over the spring semester. On Monday mornings she liked to tell me all about her wild weekends: Oh my God, Josh, I’ve got to stay away from the tequila. I always end up making out with the wrong person. Sometimes the wrong person was a guy in our school, sometimes another girl, and sometimes a man in his twenties or early thirties she met at a club (she had a fake ID that never failed her; I wondered if it was one of Kyle’s). It would have been pretty excruciating for me, listening to these confessions, except that she always stood really close when she made them, so close that her breasts would sometimes brush against my arm. It was hard to feel jealous when all I could think about was the way my arm seemed to glow where she grazed me.

We’d never spent any time together outside of art class, so it had been a pretty big deal when we realized that we were going to Casey Amandola’s party. We’d been joking about it all week — I said I wanted to drink tequila with her, to find out if the rumors of her bad behavior were true, and she said she’d trade me shot for shot until I was a puddle on the floor — but I wasn’t sure it was for real until she sent me that text.

Where the fuck r u???

I knew I’d never be her boyfriend, never take her to the movies or walk down the hall with my arm around her shoulder, and I was okay with that. I just wanted to be the wrong person she made out with at a party, a mistake she could confess to her friends on Monday morning, and I had a feeling this was the best chance I’d ever get.

I’ll be right there, I texted back. Don’t start without me.

WHEN I’D imagined getting drunk with Sarabeth, I pictured an intimate, romantic scene, just the two of us off by ourselves, someplace dark and quiet. In front of a roaring fireplace, say, with a big bed nearby and a door that locked from the inside. I certainly hadn’t pictured us crowded into a bright kitchen, surrounded by a pack of drunken jocks, with hip-hop blasting in from the living room. In my fantasy, Sarabeth was giving me her undivided attention, laughing at my tragic tequila faces, closely monitoring my slide toward intoxication. In real life, though, she was all the way across the room, standing by the sink, too busy checking her phone and talking to Casey to notice the faces I made when the shots went down.

She looked great, though — at least that part of my fantasy remained intact — casual but festive in a tight white camisole and short black skirt, ruffled at the bottom, that showed off her impressively muscled legs. Her arms were slender and toned, her hair gathered in a sleek ponytail that swayed when she moved, providing periodic glimpses of the tiny, green-tufted carrot tattooed on the back of her neck (when I’d asked her about it in art class, she just shrugged and said she liked carrots). As far as I could tell, she wasn’t wearing a bra, and you could see the outline of her nipples pressing through the stretchy fabric of her top, two emphatic dots that commanded the attention of every guy in the room. Brendan Moroney, this ginger-haired lummox who’d been the bane of my middle school existence, nudged me with his elbow.

“Yo, dude, is it just me, or is it getting a little nippy in here?”

I smiled politely, not wanting to offend him, but not wanting to encourage him, either. Brendan was a total jackass, one of my least favorite people in the world. Back in fifth grade, he and his Pop Warner buddies had decided it would be amusing to call me Fosh, a ridiculous nickname I found deeply humiliating (I was pretty sure it stood for Fat Josh or Fag Josh, or maybe a combination of the two). They kept it up for a full year before moving on to the next target. I still hated him for that, though I got the feeling that he barely remembered my real name, let alone the insulting substitute that had made me so miserable.

“Last week she made out with Emma Singer,” he informed me. “Capaldo got it on his cell phone. So hot. Like a fucking porno movie.”

“I heard about that.” Emma Singer was a sophomore who’d gotten kicked out of private school for some kind of scandalous offense — arson, drugs, or sexting, depending on whom you asked. Last Monday, Sarabeth had told me she was a lousy kisser.

“I think Emma’s here tonight,” he said. “If we’re lucky, we’ll get an encore.”

I didn’t answer because Sarabeth was heading our way, passing out lime wedges for the next round. When she got to me, I smiled and asked how she was doing, but she didn’t seem to hear the question. She was looking up at Brendan, shaking her head in mock exasperation.

“You’re such a pig,” she told him, but her voice was sweet and friendly, as if pig were a compliment.

“What?” Brendan raised both hands in self-defense. “What did I do?”

“You know,” she teased him. “Don’t even try to deny it.”

Casey Amandola followed close behind Sarabeth, pouring tequila into our plastic cups. When everybody was ready, Sarabeth counted to three, and we all drank at once, tossing back the shots and sucking on our limes.

“Goddam!” Brendan said, punching himself hard in the chest. “That shit is poison!”

AFTER A while, Brendan got bored and drifted off, to my great relief. I probably should have left, too — three shots of tequila are enough for anyone — but I didn’t want to let Sarabeth out of my sight. I figured that sooner or later we’d get a chance to talk, and I was planning on coming right out and telling her how pretty she was, just state it like an obvious fact and see how she reacted.

In any case, the kitchen wasn’t the worst place to be. All sorts of people drifted in and out — there was a keg on the back patio — and I found myself hugging a whole bunch of them, including some I barely knew, and one or two I didn’t especially like. Most of us were seniors who’d already gotten our college acceptances — I was heading across the country to Pomona — and a generalized cloud of goodwill was in the air, that sense of connection that comes from having a shared past and one foot out the door.

One of the few people who didn’t hug me was Iris Leggett. She just sort of materialized by my side while I was recovering from shot number four, which had gone down easier than its predecessors and then detonated like a fireball in my stomach. I had to close my eyes and wait for the uproar to subside.

“You okay?” she said, tugging gently on my shirtsleeve.

“I think so.” I blinked a few times, getting the world back in focus. “Just a little wobbly.”

After that there was an awkward pause. Despite our promise to remain friends after the break-up, Iris and I had been avoiding each other for months, and now here she was, squinting up at me with an expression that seemed to hover somewhere between amusement and concern. I was also a bit distracted by her shirt, so tight and low-cut that it could barely contain her breasts. In school she always covered up, usually with an extra-large hoodie that hung down to her knees.

“I know.” She nodded ruefully, following my gaze down to her impressive cleavage. “Holy shit, right?”

I winced and mumbled an apology. I still felt bad about blurting that out, making her cry the first time we had sex — the first time for both of us.

“It’s okay,” she told me. “I’m trying to own it, you know? I’m sick of hating my body.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s a really healthy attitude.”

“Fuck it, right?” There was something a little off about her smile, or maybe the tone of her voice. “If guys want to stare at my tits, who am I to stop them? I’m like, Here they are, dudes. Knock yourselves out.”

“Are you drunk?”

She raised her red plastic cup, tilting it to show me the contents. It was pretty big, at least twenty-four ounces, and more than halfway full. “Turns out I like beer,” she said, shrugging in a who-woulda-thunk-it sort of way.

“You should try some tequila. That’s pretty good, too.”

“Maybe,” she said, but her attention had shifted from me to Sarabeth, who was taking a selfie by the sink, making a supermodel face for the camera. It seemed like everybody in the room was watching her.

“She’s pretty,” Iris observed. “But she’s such an exhibitionist.”

“She’s nice,” I said. “She’s in my art class.”

Casey joined Sarabeth for the next picture, the two of them posing with the tequila bottle. On the one after that, they gave each other a playful kiss. Some guys started cheering for more, but Casey pulled away and gave them the finger, telling them to dream on.

“I should’ve gone to more parties,” Iris said. “I used to act like they were stupid, but that was bullshit. I pretty much wasted the past four years pretending I was above it all. But the joke was on me, you know?”

“You didn’t waste it,” I told her. “You worked your ass off and got into a great college. I bet you’re gonna love it at Northwestern.”

“I’m gonna go to more parties, that’s for sure.” She swirled the beer in her cup as if it were fine wine. “I just wanna have some fun for once.”

There was a disturbance just then, a bunch of football players scuffling in the hallway. From the sound of it, I thought it might be a real fight, but they were just goofing around, Brendan and Chad Capaldo and Dontay Williamson tugging on one of their buddies, dragging him forcibly into the kitchen.

“Get this man a shot!” Brendan shouted as they spilled through the doorway. “It’s his birthday next week!”

Dontay was blocking my view of the birthday boy, but then he moved and I saw that it was Jake Harlowe. He looked sweaty and a little flustered, his blue oxford shirt rumpled and askew.

“I can’t drink tonight,” he said, realigning the buttons on shirt. “I have to take the SATs tomorrow.”

I was impressed by the smoothness of the lie, the note of regretful sincerity in his voice. And that look on his face, so anxious and innocent, like he didn’t want to be a party pooper, but couldn’t help it.

“Fuck the SATs!” Capaldo hauled off and punched him in the arm, pretty hard. “You only turn seventeen once!”

Jake frowned and rubbed his shoulder. Some guys started chanting, Birthday shot! Birthday shot! Birthday shot!

“Really,” he said. “I can’t.”

“Come on,” Dontay taunted. “Don’t be a pussy.”

I turned back to Iris, shaking my head like I couldn’t believe what a bunch of immature assholes they were, but she wasn’t even looking at them.

“Just so you know,” she said in this melancholy, thoughtful voice. “I don’t hate you anymore.”

I laughed, though it didn’t sound like she was joking.

“Why would you hate me?”

“Why wouldn’t I? You came to my house, you fucked me, and then you left. You never said anything nice, never took me out, never called to ask how I was doing. You acted like it was your job or something.”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “That was your idea. You wanted to keep it casual.”

“I know.” She nodded for a long time, accepting her responsibility. “But you weren’t even grateful.”

Drunk as I was, I knew she was right, knew that I owed her an apology. But for some reason I was looking at Jake again, watching as he accepted his birthday shot from Casey with an attitude of reluctant surrender, a good guy defeated by peer pressure. Smiling sheepishly, he toasted the onlookers and tossed it back to widespread applause.

“He really shouldn’t be doing that,” I said, but Iris was already slipping past me, shaking her head in disgust as she veered toward the hallway.

I WAS a conscientious employee, you have to give me that much. Even with a splitting headache and a broken heart, I managed to drag myself out of bed at six-fifteen the next morning, force down two Advil and a cup of black coffee, and drive out to the Brackett Academy, an exclusive prep school that had a nicer campus than some of the colleges I’d visited. I trudged into Winthrop Hall and joined a long line of nervous-looking kids waiting to take the most important test of their lives.

Getting through security wasn’t a problem. The proctor just made the usual cursory inspection of my ticket and ID before waving me inside. When the room was full, he passed out the test booklets, recited the rules and regulations, and told us to get started. My forehead was clammy and there was an ominous sloshing sensation in my stomach; I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it through the next three hours without passing out or throwing up.

I’d known that fifth shot was a mistake even as I was bringing it to my lips, but by then I didn’t care. I’d already realized what was happening between Jake and Sarabeth, seen the way she’d chosen him, the way she pressed her body against his arm and whispered in his ear, the way he laughed at whatever it was she told him. All I could do was watch from across the room, my face burning with a rage that felt like shame, or a shame that felt like rage.

Fuck my life, I thought, and I swallowed that last gulp of poison.

At least it got me out of the kitchen. They had just started kissing when I rushed for the door and staggered out into the fresh night air. I wanted to make it to the grass, but it was too far away, so I barfed on the slate patio, right in front of a group of weed-smoking juniors who thought it was hilarious and couldn’t stop marveling at the amount of awfulness that was spewing out of me.

SICK AS I was, my mouth still sour from last night’s vomit, I could still manage the test without too much trouble. Most of the questions were ridiculously easy, as if they’d been designed for idiots. For example, Question #1 in the Critical Reading section was a sentence — A man of _____, he never went back on his word — that we were supposed to complete with one of the following options:

The correct answer was obviously B, but Jake Harlowe, fool that he was, chose D. And he kept doing that, question after question, always picking the wrong answer, often the wrongest one possible. But it served him right, I thought, going to a party the night before a big test, getting drunk and hooking up with a girl he didn’t even deserve.

I knew Kyle would be furious, but I didn’t care about him. I was just sorry we’d ever met, sorry I’d accepted his job offer, sorry I’d let him turn me into the kind of person I’d become.

I wasn’t all that worried about Jake, either. He’d get another shot at the SATs in September, and I was sure he’d do better the next time around. Maybe not good enough to get into Amherst like his brother, but so what? There were a lot of schools out there. In the meantime, he was going to have to suffer through that humiliating moment when his scores arrived; they were going to be a big disappointment. I could imagine the sense of helpless failure that would overwhelm him, the knowledge that something terrible and unfair had happened that he couldn’t even complain about. I thought it might do him some good, just this once, to feel the way I’d felt the night before, the way I was feeling at that very moment, darkening those bubbles with my Number Two pencil, making one stupid mistake after another.