Just ahead of me and to the left, a girl from our class had finished bubbling in the multiple-choice section and was now scrawling furiously across the essay sheet with a pink pen.
She was our class's arts representative, and her face was lit with absolute confidence.
A proctor passed by her desk, brow furrowed, clearly on the verge of saying something. But seeing how absorbed she was, he shook his head and moved on.
I knew that at this very moment, scattered across other testing rooms in our school, even at other testing sites across the city, my classmates were like seeds flung to the wind, sowing that absurd shade of pink across the answer sheets that would decide their futures.
In my previous life, I had fought tooth and nail to swap those pens back to black. I saved every one of their scores. And at the celebration dinner afterward, they laughed as they shoved me off the rooftop.
"You were just jealous of Loretta, so you ruined it for her on purpose!"
"We wanted to use the pink pens. Why did you have to go and switch them?"
Those vicious words looped in my ears like a curse that never faded.
I pulled my gaze back to my own desk and poured every last drop of emotion into the tip of my pen.
The moment I set down the final period, the bell rang.
"Everyone stand! Pens down!"
The proctors began collecting answer sheets.
When one of them picked up the arts rep's sheet, covered top to bottom in neat pink script, the expression on his face was priceless.
After the exam, classmates gathered outside the testing center in clusters, buzzing with excitement.
"The people in my room were staring at me like I was from another planet!"
"Same! They were probably thinking, wow, kids from that school are so next-level!"
Loretta stood at the center of the crowd, beaming with pride.
"I told you it was my magic! We said we'd be one of a kind, and we are!"
Henry ruffled her hair, grinning like she'd hung the moon. "Our Loretta's the best."
I stood outside the circle, watching them in silence.
A few days later. The state grading center.
Thousands of graders sat in front of computer screens, scoring the scanned answer sheets one by one.
The quality-control supervisor was running random spot checks on the scanned images from the back end.
He stopped. His brow creased.
In the endless river of crisp black-and-white answer sheets, one image looked wrong.