Settling the handbook in my lap, I opened it to page one and squinted to make out the words. I wished I knew where my glasses were. “Introduction,” I read aloud through my second mouthful of chocolatey ice cream. “It is widely understood that— “
Bling. Bling. Bling. I stopped to answer my phone. “What?” The word was muffled by the ice cream in my mouth.
“Are you always eating when you answer the phone or are you just always eating?” My sister’s voice drifted to me through the receiver and I instantly regretted not checking the caller ID before answering.
I swallowed to clear my mouth. “What do you want?”
“I want to go back in time and not let you talk me into taking this cat from you, Audrey.”
“I’m too busy for this.”
“Doing what? Eating ice cream?”
Of course she guessed I was eating ice cream. This is part of the reason I thought she was so annoying. Imagine having that around your entire life. “Ella, did you actually call me for something?”
“Mom told you about the vote, right?”
I sighed. “Yeah. How are you voting?”
“With mom, of course.”
“Of course.” Mom and Ella were two sides of the same coin. Of course they would vote together. And Dad would obviously vote for his own idea. Which left me as the vote that could decide a tie or give it to Mom.
“Well, I’ll see you at din— “
“Wait. Ella, you’re good at tests, right?” I immediately realized how stupid it sounded. Ella never forgot anything. Of course she was good at tests.
“Of course I’m good at tests,” she echoed my thoughts. “Why? Are you testing for something? Because you’re not good at tests.”
“Yeah. A, um, superintendent test.” The words stumbled out of my mouth before I could think whether it was the right answer. But once it was out, I just went with it. “Yeah, it turns out I need a license to manage a building. So my boss has me taking a test and I need to study. Any tips?”
“Sure. Remember when you took your Super licensing test? Remember how nervous you were about it and how we all thought you were going to fail?”
If only she knew how close to home she was hitting. “Get to the point, Ella.”
“Well, you passed. So I’d tell you to just do whatever it was you did on your Super test on your superintendent test. Whatever you did obviously worked.”
I rushed Ella off the phone and took a deep breath. Obviously, Ella was right. But I didn’t want her to be. Because the last time I passed this test, I cheated.
* * * * *
After I got off the phone with Ella, I had mixed feelings. As usually, Ella was right. As a slacker teenager, I’d passed the test by cheating because it was the only choice I’d had at the time. As a slacker thirty something, I didn’t even think it was an option. Miss Fine seemed to have it out for me. I doubted I could even pull it off if I wanted to. So I shoveled some more junk food in my mouth and went back to studying.
This time I got about an hour into it before being interrupted by a knock at my door. I reluctantly got up to answer it. On the other side of the door was little Cindy Pham looking at me expectantly. “Again?”
She nodded and pushed past me. “Did you get toilet paper?”
“Yeah.” I tossed a roll from the pack I’d bought a couple of hours earlier to her.
“And my mom wants to know when the toilet is going to be fixed,” she added as she closed the door to my bathroom.
“Soon,” I called after her. “The plumber is coming some time to— “
“Audrey, I need you to come down to the laundry room.” I turned to see Mr. Kortis was standing in my doorway. He lived across the hall from me in 1B. He was thin with longish brownish hair and dressed mostly in tweed suits. He was probably the tenant I spent the most time with. He always had something going on, whether it was a squeak in his bedroom door or a draft in his kitchen. Seeing him was never a good thing.
I tried not to look annoyed to see him. “Um, hi, Mr. Kortis. What seems to be the problem?”
“The problem is that one of the washers is malfunctioning,” he huffed.
“Ok, I’ll take care of that. For now, use a different washer.”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, of course. But I can’t do that because the washer won’t open. So now you see why I need your help.” His voice had gone up an octave in the short time it took him to explain.
“OK, OK. Go ahead back down there. I’m coming.” I ducked back into my apartment while Mr. Kortis hurried down the stairs to the basement. “Cindy,” I called out. “Hurry up. I have to go.”
“I’m trying,” she whined from behind the door. “It might be awhile.”
I groaned and grabbed my keys and tools. “Use the air freshener in there. And lock the door when you go.”
Downstairs in the basement, we had two washers and dryers for the tenants. There was also a janitor’s room off to the side with a mop sink and a toilet. When I got down stairs, I saw one of the Pham kids coming out of the janitor’s room. He waved at me and ran up the stairs. Mr. Kortis was standing next to one of the washers impatiently. “It’s this one, Audrey.”
I walked over and put down my toolbox. “Ok well let’s just see what the problem is here.” Inside, I could clearly see that wet clothing that I assumed belonged to Mr. Kortis. Yanking on the door didn’t help. It was locked tight like the machine was still in wash mode.
“I tried that already,” Mr. Kortis offered.
“Well it never hurts to try again.” I gave it one more yank and then stepped back. Then I pulled out some sort of screw driver and tried to wedge it into the door. It wasn’t fitting. I messed with it a little more but didn’t make any headway. Behind me I could practically hear Mr. Kortis steaming. I tinkered faster.
“I think there’s a release latch under the bottom” came a voice behind me. I turned to see Mike standing behind me. He was carrying a full laundry basket.
“Uhhh, right. Yeah, I get to that by. . .” I trailed off in hopes that he would finish my sentence.
“By moving the access panel,” he finished for me. “Here, let me see that.” He reached for my screw driver thingie and I gave it to him with what I hoped wasn’t an audible sigh of relief. He kneeled down and unscrewed something at the bottom of the machine. I tried to pay more attention to what he was doing instead of his butt and failed. Then he slid a panel from the machine and reached underneath. With a definitive click, the door to the washer popped open.
“Oh thank God!” Mr. Kortis cried. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!” He rushed over to the washer, grabbed all of his clothes, and ran up the stairs mumbling something about air drying.
Mike handed me back the screwdriver thingie. “These old machines have all sorts of quirks. You just have to keep an eye on them.”
“Yeah, I’ll remember that.”
Mike turned and started loading his own clothes into the washer without quirks. “I hope you don’t take offense to this but how did you even become a super?”
“You have no idea,” I mumbled.
He turned back to me. “Huh? What was that?”
“I said that I’m learning on the job,” I covered.
Just then, little Cindy Pham came running down the stairs. “Audrey, the plumber is here. He’s at your apartment looking for you.”
“The plumber’s here,” I announced to Mike. “I’m gonna take him to the Phams and then I’ll get him to look at your disposal.”
He gave me the thumbs up and a megawatt smile. “And I will definitely be waiting for you.” I tried not to blush, failed miserably, and finally ran up the stairs to meet the plumber.
* * * * *
The plumber wasn’t impressed by my work so far. In fact, he was downright dismissive when I offered to let him use my plunger and the tool I couldn’t name for a million bucks. But he was able to fix both of my problems with relative ease.
It was after nine before I got back to
my own apartment. As I collapsed on the couch, I was overcome with relief. Most of it was just knowing that I wouldn’t be getting any more bathroom visits from the Pham but part of it was satisfaction of fixing Mike’s problem, too.
The relief was quickly replaced by anxiety as my eye caught my handbook spread out on the coffee table on the introduction page just as I left it. Well, better get started, I thought to myself while grabbing a couple of Doritos and dipping them in the cream cheese. It looks like it’s gonna be an all-nighter.
Chapter 7
Lifting my head up hurt. It might have been the angle at which I had apparently been sleeping. I was still sitting on the floor between my couch and coffee table. The right side of my face felt funny and I realized why when I reached up and pulled off the notebook paper stuck to my right cheek with a combination of drool and chip crumbs. Looking at it, I realized it was a page of the notes I had taken down when I was studying the night before. Figured, I thought. The first rule about all-nighters is that you don’t fall asleep.
And that’s when I remembered I had to take a test this morning.
I looked at the time. It was just after six am. If I got going now, I’d make it to the test on time but just by the skin of my teeth. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that even though I had spent almost all night studying, I couldn’t remember anything. My mind was completely blank. I couldn’t have written my own name without someone walking me through it. I couldn’t take this test.
I saw Crash swimming out of the corner of my eye. “What am I gonna do, Crash?” He rushed into his castle and didn’t come back out. I guess he wasn’t going to be any help at all in this situation.
I took a deep breath. There was only one thing I could think to do.
Cheat.
Sitting in the waiting room waiting for Miss Fine to come out of her office, I was sweating like a prostitute in a church pew. Waves of guilt were radiating from my right sock, which is where I had stashed a few cheat sheets in hopes of passing. People walking by were giving me strange looks and I just knew they could see the word CHEATER branded into my forehead. I can’t do this, I thought. I have a better chance of running away and going underground than I do passing this test. I should leave. I should just leave.
Just as I was standing up to go, Miss Fine appeared. “There are you are. Ready?”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She motioned for me to follow her and walked back into the office maze. I reluctantly followed. We stopped in front of a nondescript office door and Miss Fine used a key to open it. Inside, there were several rows of student desks with a white board along the wall. It reminded me of the college classroom I’d never attended.
Miss Fine pulled two booklets from a cabinet—one with the questions and one for the answers—and handed to them. “Sit anywhere,” she instructed. I chose one of the closest desks to the door and got settled. “I’ll be back to collect your test booklet in two hours. Good luck,” she added but her tone made me question whether she actually meant it.
She left and closed the door behind her with a definitive click. I finally let out the breath I had been holding since I the waiting room. I had just flipped opened the test booklet when the door opened again. Miss Fine was standing in the doorway holding a small scrap of paper. Even from across the room, I recognized the chicken scratch handwriting as my own. My heart dropped into my feet—coincidentally near the location of the rest of my cheat sheets. “Audrey, does this belong to you.”
I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Inside my head though, I screamed Shit! Shit! Shit! over and over again.
Miss Fine spoke again. “Audrey, did you drop this?”
“Uhhhhhhh, yeeeeeeaaaahhhh.” It didn’t sound like me but I guess it was me saying that.
She crossed the distance between us. “Here. You’ll need it.” She placed the piece of paper on my test booklet and walked back to the door. Then, she turned back to face me. “You didn’t read the instructions I gave you, did you?” I didn’t say anything because I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there staring at her stupidly.
Miss Fine’s mouth turned up into a smirk. “If you had read your instructions, you would know that you could use reference sheets during this exam. You could have saved yourself the trouble of trying to cheat—trying to cheat badly at that.” She yanked open the door and stalked out murmuring “You’re making this too easy,” as she did.
Left alone in the room again, I felt stupid. But I had wasted enough time and I still had a test to take. I quickly reached down and grabbed the three other squares of paper from my sock. They were soaked in sweat. Gross. But I needed them. Arranging them all on my desk, I opened my test booklet again and started the test.
“Wrong.” Miss Fine used the word to punctuate her red pen darting across the page of my test answer booklet. “Wrong,” she spat out again. We were back in her office after I finished my test. She had begun grading it immediately. I sat in the chair across from her desk nervously biting my nails and jumping every time she spat out another “Wrong.”
Finally, her red pen stopped moving. She cleared her throat, added a few notes to her ever present clipboard, and placed my test booklet into a file. “You may go now,” she announced.
I was confused. “But how did I do?”
“The test is more about getting to know how you think. We want to know more about what you would do in certain situations and how your problem solved. There’s a lot to be learned when you analyze how a person thinks.”
“What do you think of my thinking?”
She pursed her lips. “Not much.”
“You may go now.”
“That’s it?” It was so anticlimactic. I expected to be given a grade or some sort of confirmation that I was on the right track.
Miss Fine shuffled some papers on her desk. “For now. Your next test will be on Friday in the field to determine how fit you are to perform in the field. I’ll let you know what time.”
She went back to making notes on her clipboard. I stood up to go but not before taking sneak peek at what she was writing. I couldn’t make out much except something that looked like “possibly illiterate.”
So far, it didn’t look like I was doing much to impress Auditor Fine. And the odds of that changing were looking less and less likely.
Chapter 8
For as long as I can remember, when the Harts had something to celebrate we went to Shogun, a Japanese steak house in midtown Manhattan. The chef cooks your meal right at your table and does all of these tricks with the food. A volcano from an onion. Getting each member of the party to catch a flying shrimp in their mouths. It was a lot of fun.
We went every time something great happened to us. Dad got another commendation from the Council. Mom’s alter ego received a promotion from the library foundation. Ella being accepted into Super school early. Ella receiving her first book deal. Ella receiving tenure at NYU. We went a lot for Ella, actually.
When I passed my Super test for the first time, everyone was surprised—including me. During my four years of Super school, I hadn’t displayed any aptitude for anything in particular. My grades were mediocre at best. I tended to be lazy and unmotivated—basically everything I still was in my thirties.
So when I got that letter in the mail from the Super Council that started with “Congratulations” instead of “Unfortunately,” we were all shocked. We went to dinner that night at Shogun as a family and for the first time we were there to celebrate something amazing I had done.
But my test with Miss Fine didn’t feel anything like that. First, because I hadn’t really won anything. I was just trying to keep something I already had. And secondly, my family wouldn’t be cheering me on because I hadn’t told them and I still had no intention of doing so.
“Audrey? Did you hear me?” My mother’s voice startled me out of my thoughts. She was sitting at one end of the table with a fork full of food and expectant look on her face. Both Ella and my dad wore similar
expressions.
“No. What did you say?” I shoveled some mashed potatoes from my plate and into my mouth. I need strength if I was going to pay more attention at this dinner.
Mom lifted a questioning eyebrow. “I asked what you did today. What’s going on with you?”
“Well, um, I had to get a broken window fixed. Rent is due tomorrow so I got a bunch of checks and I had to take them to the bank. I cleared some leaves out of the walkways. I helped Outside Bob get his kite out of a tree—”
“Who is Outside Bob?” my dad interrupted.
Ella answered for me. “Isn’t he that homeless guy that hangs out around your building?”
“He’s not homeless. Not exactly.”
“Does he live in your building then?” Mom asked.
I took a sip of my beer. “Well, no. But it’s not like he’s homeless. He just kinda lives outside. That’s the best way to describe it. That’s why we call him Outside Bob.”
Ella narrowed her eyes at me. “So how does a homeless guy get a kite?”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “He’s a pretty resourceful guy. I guess you have to be if you’re going to just stay outside.”
Mom put down her fork. “What an interesting job you have, Audrey. Do you have anything else you’d like to share with us?”
Oh shit. She knows. But I found the strength to eke out “Nope. My life is boring.”
Mom clasped her hands together. “OK then. Let’s get to the vote.” Me, Ella, and Dad groaned in response. A little piece of me was happy that I wasn’t the only one who saw how ridiculous the whole thing was. “We’ll do a simple vote by hand. Everyone in favor of—”
“Wait,” I interrupted Mom. “How about a secret vote?”
She didn’t even hesitate. “No. Now everyone for my idea of a glamourous New Year’s Eve theme, raise your hand.” Mom and Ella raised their hands. When she realized that I hadn’t raised my hand, Mom turned to me. “Audrey?” I looked down and concentrated on moving my peas and mash potatoes into a pattern.
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