Five More Minutes

My mom dropped me off at the corner like she always does, which gave me four minutes to walk the rest of the way, doing the thing where I try to absorb an entire unit on quadratic word problems through pure proximity to my backpack. It wasn't working. It's never worked. (Studies have shown — by which I mean I have personally shown, repeatedly, since third grade — that knowledge does not transfer through canvas.)

The test was first period. Specifically, it was the kind of test that has a question starting with "A boat travels upstream," which is a sentence I have never trusted in my life. I don't know why boats need to be involved. I don't know why the current is always working against the boat and never, for once, in its favor. I had a whole theory about this that I'd been meaning to bring up with my math teacher, mostly as a delay tactic, and I was still mentally drafting it when my mom rolled down the window and yelled "good luck, love you, text me how it goes" — and then she was gone, and I was thinking about boats, and none of this — none of it — felt important yet.

The walk to school took the four minutes it always takes, during which I solved exactly zero word problems and instead developed a fully formed grudge against a hypothetical boat captain who, in my imagination, kept making bad decisions on purpose. By the time I got to my locker, I'd basically written him a one-star review.

First period started the way it always does — Mr. Halloran writing the word "REVIEW" on the board in a way that suggested it would not, in fact, be a review of anything I remembered learning — and I texted my mom test is first period wish me luck because that's just a thing we do. My stomach did this small thing when I hit send, this little flip, which I registered and ignored, because obviously that was just test nerves. That's what test nerves feel like. I know what test nerves feel like. This was that.

Mr. Halloran passed out the test. "You may begin." I read the first problem — something about a boat, obviously, there's always a boat — and my stomach did the thing again, slightly harder, and I thought, okay, weird, but fine, that's two flips, that's allowed, and I started reading the problem again from the top.

She's driving. People don't text while driving. This is good, actually — proud, even — and I tried to feel proud, and instead my stomach dropped about an inch, like the floor had shifted, and I thought oh, and then immediately thought, oh, stop, and then thought about the eighteen-minute drive, and the eighteen minutes turned into the light by her office, the bad one, and the light turned into someone running it, and before I'd even finished that thought it had already mutated into a different car entirely, a truck, and the truck wasn't even on the road anymore, it was somehow on the sidewalk, which doesn't make sense, trucks don't drive on sidewalks, but my stomach didn't care that it didn't make sense, my stomach was already three scenes ahead of my brain and twisting itself into a knot about a truck on a sidewalk that I had personally invented four seconds ago.

I put my pencil down.

And then it wasn't even cars anymore. It was — what if she choked on her coffee, what if there was a gas leak at her office and everyone's already being evacuated and her phone's in her bag on her desk, what if she got mugged in the parking garage, what if there's a guy in the parking garage right now, what if — and I want to be clear that none of these thoughts waited for the previous one to finish, they were just all there at once, all happening at the same volume, like someone had opened every tab in my head simultaneously, and my stomach was doing something I didn't have a word for, this churning, clenching thing, like it was trying to physically squeeze the thoughts out of my body and they would not leave.

Question four was something about a rectangle. I read the word "rectangle" and then read it again and it meant nothing, it was just a shape made of letters, and meanwhile some part of my brain was already on the phone call — the school office calling my house, no, calling me, pulling me out of class — and I could see it so clearly, Mr. Halloran's face doing the careful thing, everyone looking up, and I thought about who'd drive me home, and which way they'd go, and whether they'd take the long way so I wouldn't —

And then I caught it. The part of me that was already picturing my own face. Already rehearsing how I'd look, finding out. Like I'd cast myself in it before anything had even happened, like some awful little director in my head had already called places, and that was the thought that actually made me feel sick — not the crash, not the truck, not any of it — just that. That I'd done that. That some part of me had been ready.

I put my hand flat on my stomach under the desk, which did nothing, obviously, but I did it anyway.

Question seven was the boat one. The upstream one. Rate plus current, rate minus current — I know this, I've done a hundred of these — and I sat there with my pencil on the paper and my stomach still doing its slow, horrible roll, and I could not make a single number move. It wasn't that I forgot how. It was that there was no room. Everything in me was just — listening. Waiting. Braced.

I don't remember eight through ten. I think I wrote things down. The math equivalent of nodding along to a conversation you stopped following ten minutes ago.

"Five more minutes," Mr. Halloran said, and that's when my backpack buzzed — not loud, just enough, that specific vibration-against-fabric sound that only your own phone makes, the one your body somehow recognizes before your brain does —