Chapter 91

“If you don’t have answers to your problems after a four-hour run, you ain’t getting them.”
—Christopher McDougall, Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

The National Service Readiness Exam (NSRE) took the place of the old ISTEP test that was legislated out the same year National Service began. Of course, the powers that be took five years to draft a new test and this was the first year it was in use. I discovered right away that there was a big difference between this and any exams I’d taken before. I hadn’t realized it in the practice exam. First off, it was computerized. Overnight, the entire gym had been converted to a computer lab with enough seats for a third of the class. We were given a workstation and the test booted up. We were allowed to have pencil and paper beside us and a calculator. Otherwise it was entirely onscreen. We had two hours to complete the unit exam.

Secondly, there was a lot of advanced math. Under normal circumstances, high school sophomores were expected to have completed Algebra I and a semester of Geometry. It seemed like there was an awful lot of more advanced crap on this test. I’d been in the first flight and didn’t realize what was going on until I sat at lunch with my pod. Beca and Brittany were in the same flight I was and Desi wasn’t until afternoon. Of course, our older girlfriends didn’t need to worry about this test since it was all sophomores.

“I couldn’t believe the amount of Trig and Calculus on that test,” I sighed as I sank down at the table. “What are they trying to do to us?”

“You must have worked really fast or something,” Beca said. “I didn’t get to anything past basic Geometry.”

“I hate math,” Brittany said. “I barely got through the Algebra section.”

“You need to have Jacob study with you,” Rachel said. “He got me through Algebra II and this semester in Trig/Pre-Calc.”

“You don’t suppose they changed the test based on what courses we’ve taken, do you?” I asked. “That would be mean.”

“Adaptive content,” Joan said. She had a faraway look in her eye. “They’ve been working on this test for five years. That’s plenty of time to write a computer program that will give you more advanced problems based on what you’ve answered correctly. I’ll bet it adapts the content to the student answers.”

“Shit! That means they must think I’m way advanced in math. This test is just supposed to target what we need to work on, not trigger placement in the Service, isn’t it?” I said.

“So they say,” Beca said. “If they’re tricky enough to use adaptive content, I wouldn’t trust anything.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I breathed. Everyone looked around to see if there was a monitor near enough to hear what I’d said. They relaxed so I didn’t look.

“What do we have tomorrow?” Beca said.

“US History,” Brittany answered. “You should do well in that.”

“Yeah. Right.”

I couldn’t have told you if the history test the next day was adaptive or not. I’m pretty sure I failed it miserably. How seriously bad is that? The one subject I should have been able to depend on V1 memories for, and it was just enough different that I was never sure if I was answering for this reality or the other.

On Friday, I thought I’d at least be able to do well on the English portion of the exam. Having been a reader for seventy years, I’d read at least three times as many books as any of my contemporaries. But it didn’t make a difference. Almost none of the exam had to do with literature. There was no poetry. Instead, it was nearly all grammar and spelling. And I was aware of when the test started to change levels this time. I could detect the level of difficulty and sophistication in the questions. I really wanted to excel on this test and at the end of two hours, felt like I’d done well.

“I had to fake it some when I got to the part about the twelve tenses,” Brittany said. “I know the definitions, but writing a sentence in one of the tenses isn’t as easy when you’re thinking about it as when you are just writing the essay.”

“What essay?” I asked. “I thought I’d never get through the spelling exam. The words kept getting harder and harder, then they’d pop a word up that I was sure I’d spelled twenty words ago and I wouldn’t be sure of the spelling anymore.”

“Adaptive content,” Joan nodded again. “That confirms the theory. You got stuck on vocabulary. Brittany was writing essays.”

“I didn’t have an essay but I didn’t spend that long on vocabulary and spelling, either,” Beca said. “I wish we knew what this test means.”

I didn’t have much time to think about what the test meant. It just meant the government was getting deeper into my private life. I had two more classes to attend in the afternoon and then track practice before our first big meet on Saturday.

“Okay, Jacob,” Jock said. “Coach Daniels wants you to run the 4x800 relay second leg for the varsity.”

“Really? My time isn’t that great in 800 meters.”

“Yeah, well, the problem is the limitation of registration. Every participant is limited to two events. With four relays and four running events, we don’t have the depth to cover all the slots.”

“What about the 3200?”

“That, you’ll run on JV. Two events, one JV and one Varsity. I want you running at varsity level consistently by the end of the season,” Jock said. I sighed and went out to practice baton handoffs. It was cold outside but at least our track was dry. I wished we were practicing at The Plex. It was different running these races on the short 200-meter indoor track than on the 400-meter outdoor track.

“Hey, varsity man,” Sue said as she ran up beside me.

“Wow! That news traveled fast.” Sue had been an intense flirt during cross country season but I hadn’t seen much of her during the winter.

“I was hanging out with Livy when we overheard the coaches setting up the running order for tomorrow,” she said.

“Hanging out?”

“Um ... Just outside the coach’s office. Yeah. Eavesdropping. We wanted to make sure we were running our events.”

“Livy’s running 3200, right?” I said. “Are you?”

“Nope. I’m a bunny. It’s why I have so much trouble in cross country. I have a fast start but can’t sustain it all that long. I’m running the sixty-meter dash. Seven seconds of the best fun a girl can have.”

“Wow! You’re even faster than I thought.”

“Yeah, but I can’t keep running. You could catch me before too long. Then we could ... well, make like bunnies.”

“You’re too much, Sue. Good luck tomorrow.”

We were on the buses at eight Saturday morning. It’s not all that long a trip down to Marion, but with the number of competitors in this qualifying event, the coaches wanted to allow plenty of time to get organized before the ten o’clock start.

There were over 600 competitors in this meet. It was limited to twenty-four schools, each fielding varsity boys’ and varsity girls’ teams. About three-quarters had JV teams competing. Even with the limited number of events, it would take a long time to get through them all.

I didn’t have time to worry about it. They ran qualifying heats for the 60-meter dash and the 60-meter high hurdles. Then the first event was the 4x800 relay. There are eight lanes on the Wesleyan track which means we ran three heats. Not all the schools had relay teams at this distance, so we ran six teams per heat in order to get eighteen teams through the race. They rotated through the boys’ varsity, girls’ varsity, and JV teams. There were only two heats for the girls and one for JV. This is a tough race and most schools focus on the shorter relays before they get runners for the long ones. I guess that’s how I ended up running varsity.

Our team was in the second heat. These weren’t qualifying heats like the dashes. Each team ran for time, so you couldn’t really tell if you were doing well by looking at any of the other teams. You might be able to tell you were ahead of the team running next to you, but you didn’t know if they were the fastest team in the meet or the slowest. You just have to pound your heart out on the track and hope. On this short track—even on a full 400-meter track—it’s a staggered start, too. That means the lead runner for the team has no concept how near or far their closest competitor is. They have to stay in their lanes for a full lap. By that time, the runners start to string out as they move to the inside rail, like in a horse race.

Eight hundred meters is four laps. Coach Daniels was on the green watching the runners on the last turn of the first leg.

“Hopkins! Lane 3!” he yelled. That meant our runner was in third place on the curve and would hand the baton to me in the third lane. I lined up and checked to make sure my feet were completely inside the exchange zone. Shorter relays have an acceleration zone before the exchange zone, but they aren’t considered necessary for relays where each runner runs more than 200 meters. I saw Brett Michaels pounding down the straightaway and moving into my lane. When he was about thirty meters out, I started moving, just holding my hand back for the exchange and trusting he’d slot it in. I was about five meters from the end of the zone when I felt it hit my hand. I grabbed the baton and took off. Another runner had moved ahead of me during the exchange, so I was in fourth as we moved around the first turn.