Jessica raised her hand. The proctor pretended not to notice. He had his head down, his bald spot clearly visible as he stared at a thin sheaf of papers and made very occasional marks with a red pen seemingly at random, but Jessica could tell that he could see her. He was just ignoring her. She fumed silently, but the sign behind the proctor reminded her of the consequences of speaking up. 'TALKING WITHOUT PERMISSION WILL RESULT IN AN AUTOMATIC FAILURE'. The words locked Jessica's voice behind an iron gate of apprehension, leaving her waving hand the only visible sign of her impatience.
She waggled her pale fingers urgently, waved first her forearm and then her entire arm from side to side in growing irritation, but it did no good. The proctor's eyes narrowed slightly in annoyance behind his glasses, his thin lips tightened as though he'd just noticed a particularly unpleasant smell in the room, but he continued to act as though he couldn't see Jessica or her wildly swaying limb. He looked as though he was determined to pretend nothing was happening even if the building caught fire, and Jessica was tempted to test that hypothesis.
Finally, though, a sudden 'coughing fit' made him look up. "Yes, Miss Lagorio?" he asked, an expression of irritation wrinkling his light brown face. Jessica lowered her hand slowly, the force of his stare almost enough even from three rows back to make her suddenly question the wisdom of trying to get his attention. She knew intellectually that he couldn't just throw her out or flunk her for asking questions, but decades of treating teachers as unimpeachable sources of authority had left her easily cowed by classroom glares.
She stood up and walked swiftly up to the front with her test, setting it down in front of the proctor and putting her hands behind her back. "I, I was hoping to get some clarification," she said softly, glancing down at her paper to break the connection with his narrowed, imperious stare. Her long, dark brown hair fell in front of her face, but she brushed it back with a practiced gesture and continued speaking. "On, on questions 67 and 68. They're, um... they're not making a lot of sense to me."
The proctor looked left and right theatrically. "This is a test, Miss Lagorio, is it not?" he asked, his consonant sounds pronounced so precisely that Jessica could almost picture them wearing dress uniforms. "The entire purpose, I believe, is to determine whether you understand the questions. Allowing you to simply raise your hand and ask for the answers would almost certainly defeat that purpose."
The icy disdain in the proctor's voice was almost enough to send Jesscia scurrying back to her desk with her tail between her legs, but when she reached down for the paper, she felt it again. That sense of surreal, dizzying oddness that made her feel as though her body was listing ever so slightly off-balance, that bewildering sensation as though she was missing something obvious and it was messing with her head. "I, I know, sir," she mumbled, swallowing half her words nervously, "but... but question 67 doesn't make any sense."
The proctor sighed. "Let me see," he said, turning the paper around and squinting dramatically at the words. He even pretended to mouth them as he read silently, putting his index finger on the page and tracing the line of text from start to finish. "No," he said at last. "No, I believe this makes perfect sense. It's grammatically complete, it has a clear and easily comprehensible main clause, and it's certainly relevant to our presence here today. Do you somehow fail to understand it?"
Jessica looked at the page again, easily reading it even upside down. "I... no, I understand it," she said helplessly, trying to express a confusion too vast and inchoate to be easily given in words. "I just don't understand why it's there. I, I mean... 'How long have you been sitting here?' Why would you even ask that? Why would you want to know that?" Her voice sounded plaintive, almost desperate in her ears, the cry of common sense in the instant before it was extinguished.
"Miss Lagorio," the proctor said, in tones of calm condescension that were probably the closest he could get to sympathy. "We don't want to know the answer to any of these questions. If we didn't already know, we wouldn't put them on the test in the first place. We want to know if you know. The question is there to test your knowledge. If you don't know, just skip it for now and move on to the next question."
"B-but-" Jessica felt helpless in the face of such utter, enormous miscomprehension. She felt like it would take hours just to explain to the proctor where he'd totally failed to grasp the point she was trying to make, assuming he didn't keep following himself further and further down the path of patronizing obliviousness. She didn't even know where to begin correcting him, and she felt uncomfortably aware that every moment she sputtered and stammered made him ever more convinced that she had no point to make. Finally she managed to blurt out, "But question 68 doesn't make any sense either!"
"Oh dear," the proctor said, the corner of his mouth curling into a tiny, mirthless smile. "It does sound like you may have come to class a bit unprepared today, Miss Lagorio. Please understand, I'm sure you're a very bright girl, but this isn't high school. You can't simply walk in here and expect to do well in your examinations on the basis of your intelligence alone. It takes diligence, preparation, and conscientious attention to your instructor to be a good student here. I do believe you're capable of that, but you have to agree with me that simply walking up to the front of the class and demanding the answers doesn't exactly demonstrate it, don't you?"
Jessica squirmed in agonized frustration like a schoolgirl requesting permission to use the restroom. Her words felt tiny and inadequate in the face of the proctor's calm, implacable insistences, and for a moment she almost gave in to despair and trudged back to her seat to continue struggling with the impossible examination rather than try to budge him. Challenging authority figures had never come naturally to her, and she felt a hot, tingling flush of shame suffusing her cheeks at the primal, subconscious awareness that she was breaking the rules. She wanted to stop. She wanted to be good.
But. "I, I don't want the answers, sir," she murmured, the words barely escaping her tightening throat. "It's, it's just... it's an impossible question. 'Where are the other students?'" She looked around, suddenly and acutely aware of the emptiness of the room and its row upon row of unoccupied desks. "I, I don't know how I could possibly know where people go when they finish the test and leave, sir, and I don't understand how it could possibly matter!" She struggled to keep her voice level, even as some part of her insisted that she didn't need to keep quiet anymore if nobody but her was still working.
Everyone else had finished before her. She'd been so intent on her paper she hadn't even noticed them leave, and now she was the last person still working on the test. That had never happened to her before, not ever. Jessica felt a tiny stab of embarrassment twist in her gut.
"And if you were designing the test," the proctor said, the mildness in his tones cutting her with razor sharpness, "that would be relevant. But you're not. It's your role to demonstrate that you know the material we're testing you on, and it's my role to create a test that adequately determines your understanding of the class topic. If you're having difficulties with that, you might wish to refer to question 72. Sometimes a student can find help by reading the entire test before they begin."
Almost against her will, Jessica found herself turning the paper back around and flipping to the next page. She read the question in befuddled silence, her eyes flicking back and forth and back and forth over the brief sentence and feeling like she was getting no closer to understanding it. "I, I don't... I mean, it's..." She stared in blank, bewildered incomprehension, her head almost pounding with confusion.
"Well?" The proctor leaned back in his chair and folded his arms, waiting with patience so affected that it circled back around into stifling, irritated anticipation. "If you'd like to read it out loud, I certainly won't mind. Neither will the rest of the students. Because there aren't any at the moment."
Jessica felt something go out of her in that moment, some tiny spark of defiance melting into defeat as she softly recited the question on the page. "'What class is this?'," she said, already anticipating the proctor's response and her response to the response. She felt a wave of heat wash over her, a tingling flush of embarrassment that somehow seemed to settle down between her thighs with distracting intensity. She didn't know why it was happening. She just knew that she was being a naughty, foolish little girl in front of teacher and she couldn't control herself. And her body acted like it couldn't control itself either.
