Chapter 7

In the days following the Valentine's Day Dance, Lu was happy. She was seeing Anson every day at school, I assumed, and being her normal cheerleader self. She acted like Cinderella. I said 'Hi' and routine everyday things, but nothing significant. Frankly, I was pissed off at her for taking that asshole back. I mean, Anson had shoved her to the ground and I know that he would have done more! Not even counting what he did with her – tried to do to her – in private. That's no way to treat a girl. Mom and dad never told me that, but I knew it.

The weeks went by and I watched the Saturday nights pass. Not that I was checking up on Lu or anything ... Okay. I was checking up on her, but really I was checking up on Anson's treatment of her ... Okay. Okay. I was checking up on her because I still loved her. And I was jealous.

The week after V-day she came home almost delirious. She staggered in from her date with her blouse buttoned wrong and still had the "He ate me" look. The next week, she was a little more sedate. And her hair was seriously mussed up and her lipstick was completely gone. At least her blouse was buttoned right. She didn't have that dreamy look on her face anymore.

Something had changed, but I couldn't exactly ask Lu about it, could I? I tried with some normal conversation, like, "Hey Lu, how was your date?" or "Pass the corn flakes, and say, what did you do with Anson last nite?" and stuff. Not very subtle as I look back on it. She went from having a dreamy, happy expression on her face to an "It was okay, I guess" kind of attitude.

Meanwhile...

Mr. B. had me make an appointment with the school counselors for me to take the GED test. I know that it was for graduating high school, and the school authorities wouldn't like it at all. They'd have to make special arrangements with a proctor from the district's administration, 'cause of my reading problem. Mr. B. coached me on how to handle the math questions. If I had a reasonable try at an answer, I should give that answer. If I didn't have a clue, just answer 'C.' They were all multiple choice questions. He suggested I answer 'C' but I told him that I'd answer 'B' – after all, the B. family had been pretty lucky for me so far. He smiled.

So that was scheduled for next month. If I passed it, I'd be finishing high school – well at least getting my diploma – before Lu, even with her extra courses. She was like a junior-and-a-half with all the extra credits and her high standing in the class. But there was a chance that I'd get through high school before her. Me – fourteen and a half years old. That made me laugh. Of course, she'd finish with about a semester's worth of course credits at the U. Still, it was quite an accomplishment for a 'dummy.'

One day in early March, Mr. B. asked if I had ever worked anymore on the dream house designs.

"Yeah," I said. "It's about done. All I need to do is put in the landscaping around the outside and that's not really part of the house design. That's just stuff to make it look pretty."

"Well, give it the once over and make sure it's as complete as you can make it," he said. "I'm going to have the chair of our Architecture Department, Gaby Entroge, take a look at what you've done. She has some time to devote to little projects like yours, over spring break. She a famous architect, you know; she's designed famous buildings and she has her own company."

"Well, I'd be kind of nervous for somebody famous to look at it. I mean, I'm only a fourteen year old kid," I said. "I don't really know if it's any good at all. It's just a house that I dreamed up."

"We'll see. We'll see," said Mr. B. I think he was giving me more credit than I deserved. I just hoped that my crummy little fantasy house wouldn't be a total waste of time for a famous architect.

In the middle of putting the finishing touches on the house drawings, the school called and told me that the administration of the district had assigned a proctor for the GED test and it was going to be in three days.

I put everything on hold and began to re-review for the GED test. I studied up on Colorado history, U.S. history, and European history. I thought it was kind of stupid that – according to the practice tests and what everybody said – they never asked anything about Japanese or Chinese or Indian history, and the only thing they ever asked about Native American culture had to do with the fights the 'Indians' had with the U.S. Army. Anyway, this was about cramming for passing a test, not about what I thought.

I listened to summaries of famous books almost around the clock. Then I would listen to what famous people had to say about the books. I think I wore out the on-line course files at the U.'s library site. I didn't think they would ask about music, but if they did, I was a dead duck on pop music. Classical, now that was another story. But like I said, this was to pass a test, so I never even clicked on a music link.

And I spent about half my time going over math. I tried to concentrate on getting the answers to questions that I could understand. I totally gave up on algebra and fractions, too. I could do the simple arithmetic like 6.5 times 123.89. So long as I didn't have to show any work. My handwriting was like chicken scratch to anybody else. Well, Lu could always make it out, but nobody else could. It was just little abbreviations, like, for myself to figure out things that I couldn't do in my head. Like 6.5 times 123.89.

I was a whiz at geometry. It was my very strongest point. I could see the triangles and cones and surfaces and they made sense to me. Some of the trigonometry was okay, I learned, because it tied in to geometry quite a bit. Triangles and stuff. Some of it, on the other hand, was just Greek to me. Or worse. I didn't think they'd have much trigonometry on the test. Everybody said so.

I got the notice from the school guidance counselor on Friday. The test was scheduled for 10 a.m. on Monday.

If you can believe it, I didn't even try to keep track of how Lu's date on Saturday went. I just studied about twenty hours a day. On Sunday night, Mrs. B. said I had to quit. It was 6 o'clock on Sunday night, and she said I needed one more thing to be ready for the test on Monday: a good night's sleep. "You can't ever do well, if you're not well rested. Nobody ever had a good thought while they were yawning," she said. And she wouldn't take no for an answer.

She stood over me while I ate a good meal with plenty of fibre. Mrs. B. was big on fibre. Another thing she always said was, "You can't think right if you're constipated."

I don't know. But she was in charge of eating and going to bed on time. So I ate the meal full of veggies and a little steak, and then I took some enzyme tablets. That was another thing she believed in: enzymes after a meal. And then I went to bed by 7:30.

I guess I was pretty tired, 'cause I slept for twelve hours straight. When I woke up I had a large breakfast, including a bran muffin (Gotta love that fibre!). Then I went into the bathroom and did my duty there. I could tell that Mrs. B. was happy with that.

Well, I went in and met the proctor. They had set me up in a small lab with headphones and a special desk for language studies. They called it a carrel. Anyway, the proctor would read the question into a mic, and he could hear my answers or questions. I was supposed to color in dots on an answer sheet. A, B, C and D. I got used to that, 'cause the letters were always the same, and I figured that A would be the first circle, followed by B, C and D. That would only make sense...

I felt really good, because the test started with American History. Really it was U.S. History, not American History. Like the U.S. was the only country in the Americas? The proctor was reading the questions pretty slow, like I couldn't understand him. I spoke to him and asked if he could read at a faster speed. Usually, by the time he was finished with the question, I'd interrupt him going over the answers and just ask "Which answer is Andrew Jackson?" or whatever, 'cause I knew the answer.

After all those questions, he gave me a booklet with geometry problems. For these, I'd have to ask him about the answers too. They were really simple questions, like, "In this triangle, what is the longest side called. And they'd show a right triangle, so I'd have to ask him which answer was 'hypotenuse?' He'd tell me and I'd color in that answer.

They also had some basic math problems, and I asked him to read them to me. And then he'd read all the answers. I didn't want him to know that I guessed 'B' on every question I didn't know. I had to guess on about half of them, 'cause they were real concentrated on fractions. Oh well, maybe the answers were 'B.'

Then there was a lunch break. I was surprised that it was 12:30 already. Mrs. B. was waiting for me and we had lunch together. She had made me a lunch. It was mostly mac'n'cheese and some pieces of cold chicken and an apple. Oh, and orange juice. She told me to eat that all in the first fifteen minutes of lunch, and to make sure I went to the bathroom before I started the test again. She was big on bathroom breaks, too.

So that's what I did.

First after lunch was a whole bunch of questions about Moby Dick, which I thought was kind of a simple story about obsession and how it ruined a man. I hadn't reviewed that book in my recent cram sessions, but I had read it last fall, so I mostly remembered it. And then some on Shakespeare. Which were pretty easy, except that I had to keep the play, Othello, separate from the opera, Otello, by Joe Green (That's Giuseppe Verdi, if you didn't know. I called him Joe Green for fun.). But it was okay, 'cause the stories were pretty much the same.

The proctor, a Mr. Davis, said the last question was an essay question, submitted by the local school district. I never heard of that in any of the practice GED tests or anybody saying anything like that in the forums. But, what was I going to do? So I asked if he could please record my answer on tape; he said they would have done that anyway and that the whole GED test for me was on tape.

The essay question, I'm sure, was put together by the school's administrator and was a tougher one that any high school student would ever have to deal with in a normal situation. When I heard it, I laughed to myself.

The question was: "Discuss the controversy over Shakespeare's writings with regard to their possible authorship by Francis Bacon."

It wasn't ten days ago that I had a whole CD from the U. on this topic. It interested me. Well, actually, conspiracy theories interested me, and this was the oldest one I could find. Well, the CD was about Shakespeare and all the various claims for authorship of his plays and poems, not just Bacon. I had a good memory. I thought about my answer and all the information I had to work with for about a minute. Then I started.

I talked into the mic for about thirty minutes. I talked about Bacon, and the reasons that people thought he was the real author. I talked also about Christopher Marlowe, who some thought wrote some of Shakespeare's works. I even mentioned the Earl of Oxford, who I didn't think was a real contender but some people did. I think it was mostly the descendants of the Earl who were pushing that story, but who knows. Then I went into some of the lesser candidates, like the Earl of Derby. I spent the last ten minutes on a summary of which plays and poems that were the main candidates for Bacon's authorship, and then pointed out that Shakespeare was a real person, acknowledged at the time, and his claim of authorship was never disputed – while he was alive. It was only after his death and the passage of a couple of hundred years that some people thought he was too uneducated to have written these plays and other things. I said that it was the great conspiracy theory of the 19^th century, and I personally didn't give it much credence.