The voice droned on and on. It didn’t matter what it was saying, because one thing was clear: we were going to be taking a test. The district had decided that we needed another test. Another assessment to determine our “skill level”. What fun.

We were not to leave the classroom without permission. We were not allowed to go to the restroom without a permission (and a pass). We were not allowed to get up without permission. We were not to talk or ask questions without permission. It was total control.

In other words, this was going to be one… eh… fun test.

The test quickly began after our teacher recited all the scripted instructions to us, then went into her rocking chair and glared at us with laser eyes. The building was eerily silent. Everybody was taking a test.

After a while, I felt the need to go to the restroom. The pass wasn’t there. I had noticed that each person who needed to go to the restroom was taking an exceptionally long time. And unless each person was having a bad day, I think there just had to be a reason.

I didn’t understand why every person had to take such a long time, and therefore, when the next person came, I quickly went up and grabbed the pass. I saw a few students standing up, but sitting down after I grabbed it. Finders keepers.

I was about to head straight into the restroom when I noticed that there was a boy tapping me on the shoulder. “There’s a line,” he told me, waving towards the line that had at least ten people, and which I had just found out.

I wanted to groan, but all I did was nod quickly at the boy, wave at the hall monitor who was staring at me over her glasses, and got in line. So this was what the school’s high-capacity restrooms were being used for.

Because the restrooms could easily hold ten people at the same time, the school had only bothered to build six of them, spread throughout the building. But here we were, being singled out, one by one.

Somebody tried to make conversation with another kid, but a teacher quickly stopped that. “This is a testing environment,” the hall monitor said angrily. “No passing of any answers is allowed.”

The kid had been talking about lunch.