A girl of eleven sits hunched over a test booklet, the cold room hushed around her. In her left hand she holds a pencil and beneath her forearm is a bubble sheet speckled with gray dots. A constellation of what she knows and doesn’t, can’t and can. Her elbows rest on either side of the open test. Framing her work, giving it bounds.

She starts to fill in the next circle but at the first soft scratch of the pencil her hand freezes in place. She frowns at the booklet. Because the answer can’t be C—

Or can it?

She glances up at the wall clock, hears its soft pulsing.

Two minutes left.

Another dart of pain shoots through her tummy. She erases the mark and reads the question again.

15. There are four boxes below and five figures to the right. The pictures in the upper two boxes fit together in a particular way. In the second row there is an empty box. Which of the five figures to the right goes with the pictures in the lower-left box in the same way the pictures in the upper boxes go together?

She stares at the lower-left box. The colored shapes swarm on the page.

A square, a circle, a trapezoid, a cone, a rhombus.

Blue, red, green, yellow, purple.

She twists a length of hair around a knuckle and tugs until a small patch of pain forms on her scalp. She imagines one of those coin- operated claws from an arcade reaching down into her skull to pull the correct answer from the jumble-jellied mess in her brain.

Her lower lip slips into her mouth. Taste of salt. Her teeth compress the soft ribbon of flesh. Hard. Harder, until it hurts.

But the answer won’t come.