“Do keep up,” said the secretary, without turning or even breaking pace. “You’ll be late if you don’t.”
Lennon hastily tore her gaze from the window and kept walking. The corridor forked and she followed her guide down a narrow hall to the right. Here the floor began to slope downward more severely; the ceiling and its skylights seemed farther and farther away. For a long time, there was nothing but the sharp rataplan of the secretary’s heels striking the marble floors. Lennon wondered, absently, how old she was and how she’d come to work at a place like Drayton. Surely they didn’t host job fairs or run ads online or in the papers.
“This is where I leave you,” said the secretary, stopping so abruptly that Lennon very nearly ran into her. She motioned to a small mahogany door near the hall’s end. “Good luck.”
Lennon dragged the door open and took in the lecture hall that lay beyond it—the walls paneled with hickory, the stairs steep. There were about two dozen students seated there, equipped with pencils and slim test booklets.
A petite man approached her, dressed in loose linen pants and a tunic shirt, embroidered with a tangle of brown vines along the collar. He motioned to a nearby desk. “Do sit down. The exam will begin shortly.”
Baffled, Lennon took a seat beside a strikingly pretty young woman with platinum-blonde hair and a silver ring pierced through her left nostril. She was rapidly typing something into her cell phone, muttering—with a raspy vocal fry that made her sound like a pack-a-day smoker who’d come down with a particularly nasty cold—about the fact that there was no reception. Then, as if called by name, she abruptly looked up and smiled at Lennon, and Lennon, a little embarrassed to be caught staring, smiled back at her. She decided then that if they both passed the exam and stayed at Drayton, they would be friends.
She surveyed the others. There was a person with a shaved head and thick eyebrows who sat near her, scowling. A boy with an overgrown military cut sat grumbling Russian curses through his gritted teeth (based on the two semesters of rudimentary Russian Lennon had taken as part of her core curriculum in college, he seemed irritated that the test was taking so long to begin). An impeccably dressed woman—bronze skin, high cheekbones, sharp eyes—chatted in a rapid-fire exchange of whispers with the curly-haired redheaded man who sat beside her. Both looked like the kind of fashionably erudite academics Wyatt would’ve liked to be friends with.
At the front of the room, a panel of six proctors, split evenly into two groups of three, sat at long tables on opposite sides of the lectern. All had the demeanor of professors fresh off a long sabbatical andpossessed a kind of sharkish, academic curiosity that put Lennon ill at ease. One, a sleek-haired man in a perfectly tailored tweed suit, smoked a fat terra-cotta dudeen pipe and passed it to one of his peers, a dark-skinned woman who vaguely reminded Lennon of her own mother. She accepted the pipe and took a long toke and moments later spit a lively burst of fat, dancing smoke rings.
A blonde woman seated among the proctors rose and stepped up to the lectern. She wore an off-white button-down the color of pale flesh, tucked into the waistband of a dark tweed pencil skirt. Her hair was ice-white and cut into an overgrown, but elegant, bob.
When she spoke, the room fell quiet. “My name is Eileen, and I am the vice-chancellor here at Drayton, as well as one of the six proctors of today’s entry exam. It’s a pleasure to welcome you to our school.” A brief pause and Eileen lowered her head, as if trying to decide what she wanted to say next. “Our entry exam begins at birth, and everyone takes it. The test being administered today is merely the final step in your lifelong application process. And I warn you, it will be the most challenging.”
A thin boy, who Lennon later discovered was a math prodigy from Iceland who’d bagged his first PhD in number theory at just sixteen, tapped her on the shoulder and passed her a surprisingly heavy metal mechanical pencil and a manila test booklet.
“The final portion of the entry exam is split into two phases. First, the written exam, which is before you now. It’s composed of forty-five multiple-choice questions. The second and final phase of the exam is the expressive interview, wherein we will assess your ability to complete a task of our choosing. This portion of the test is not timed, though it will end at our discretion.”
Lennon glanced at her peers, wondering if they found this ordealas bizarre as she did. All of them appeared relatively calm, apart from one frail boy loudly hyperventilating in the front row.
“The fact that a pool of applicants the size of a global generation has been narrowed down to you, who sit before me now, is a remarkable triumph. Should you fail to pass this exam—and most of you will, in fact, fail—then I do hope you’ll remember it as such.” Eileen extended both hands to the test takers. “You may now begin.”
Lennon pumped her mechanical pencil twice and opened the test booklet. There, she saw the grainy image of a young boy with tears in his eyes, taken from the shoulders up, in the style of an ID photo.
What is Nihal’s predominant emotion?
Yearning
Rage
Shock
Resignation
None of the above