Moral Disorder - Margaret Atwood [24]
Once we had written them, the exams would be centrally marked by a hand-picked team of markers, and then, one day in August, the final grades would be published in the newspaper, brutally, without warning, to be seen by everyone – our friends, our enemies, our families. We dreaded this. It would be like having someone yank open the curtain when you were taking a shower.
The grades in the newspaper would determine whether we would go on. Going on meant going to university. Our school was not for rich kids – they went to private institutions. It didn’t matter so much to their lives whether they did well in high school, because a place would be made for them somehow. Neither was it for the poor: we lacked the freedom of being considered too stupid to go on. The dropouts, as we called them, had left as early as they could, but not before they’d tortured us with taunts of “brainer,” “brown nose,” “show-off,” and “suckup,” and had jeered relentlessly at anyone who actually did homework. They’d left us with an ambiguous opinion of ourselves. “Think you’re so smart,” they’d sneered, and we had thought we were smart, smarter than them at any rate; but we didn’t altogether approve of our smartness. It was like having an extra hand: an advantage for opening doors, but freakish despite that.
Nonetheless we would have to live by our deformity. We’d have to use our wits, work our way up the ladder provided for us, make something of ourselves. The boys were expected to become doctors, lawyers, dentists, accountants, engineers. As for us girls, we weren’t sure where we were headed. If we didn’t go on, we’d have to get married, or else become old maids; but with a good set of grades, this dismaying fork in the road could be postponed for a while.
We would sit the exams during a three-week period in June, in the gymnasium. It would be – said Miss Bessie – a turning point in our lives, but if we were well prepared we need not fear this test, which was a test of our characters, not merely of our intelligence. To succeed we would need courage and a steady nerve, and if those qualities were present it would simply be a matter of setting down the right facts and observations in the right order.
Nonetheless we frightened one another with stories about potential disaster. There was no air conditioning in the gym, and if there was a heat wave – as there usually was in June – we would all cook, stew, and fry. Girls had been known to topple out of their desks in a cold faint; other girls had unexpectedly got their periods, and had found themselves sitting in puddles of blood, which – in the more squalid renditions – actually dripped off the seat of the desk onto the floor, plop, plop, plop – a mortifying prospect. Boys had had nervous breakdowns, and had started shouting and swearing; others had lost their nerve, and everything they’d memorized had vanished right out of their brains, and at the end of the exam it was found they’d been writing nothing but their own names, over and over. One boy had drawn a perfect isosceles triangle on every single page – meticulously, it was emphasized. Meticulously was a chilling touch: meticulousness, we knew, was just one step away from full-blown lunacy.
After school I walked home across the football field, a locale that had once been frightening to me, and forbidden, and significant in some way I couldn’t define, but which had now shrunk to an irrelevant stretch of muddy grass. A couple of younger