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The colorful spines of the library books shine in their plastic-covered dust jackets—a crosshatch of blues and greens and reds as Jimmy moves along the aisle, scanning the white stickers on their bases.
In his ears, Albert van der Berg talks about logical reasoning in the same dry monotony that’s been the soundtrack to his life for the past couple of weeks—or that should have been the soundtrack to his life, anyway, if he didn’t keep putting it off and putting it off and slamming the damn Mastering the LSAT textbook closed every time van der Berg asked him to pause the tape and have a go answering a question himself. Even now, as Jimmy doubles back to check the spines he’s just passed, he knows he’s not really listening to the explanations in his ears, knows he’s just going through the motions.
There’s still enough time before the exam, anyway, still enough time to learn how to navigate these skull-numbing multiple choice answers, learn how to spot paradoxes and flaws in arguments. Still enough time to go through this next book, too, the one he’s finally found on the shelf: a collection of old exams for him to work at over the next few weeks—timed, and in test conditions, as Albert van der Berg keeps suggesting.
Jimmy slips the book off the shelf and lets it fall open in his hand, leafing through. Half of the questions are marked-up with old pencil markings the previous student didn’t bother to erase, diagrams and underlinings of key words. But he snaps the book closed and tucks it under his arm, heading back down the row.
The lights that had flickered on as he navigated the maze of shelves earlier have already dimmed again, but as he walks back down to the main room he re-triggers the sensors, and book-lined passages illuminate before him. He weaves between a cart and a stepladder, then heads out into the narrow room along the side of the library. Flanking the outer wall: students at carrel desks, huddled shapes against the white windows.
Jimmy reaches the checkout desk and slips his headphones off. Van der Berg’s droning voice is still audible, barely, as they hang around his neck.
He slides the book across the counter and smiles to the librarian. It’s the same wan woman who spoke with him last time, though from her blank expression she doesn’t seem to remember.
She plucks his library card from him then looks between it and him pinchedly. It’s a recent photograph, taken at the start of summer. The card’s good for a year. Jimmy raises his eyebrows and gives a forced grin to match his smiling mug on the square of plastic.
She hands him his card back, then slides the exam book towards him, too. “You can’t check this out.”
Jimmy frowns. “What?”
She pushes the book an inch further towards him, then pulls her hand back from it gingerly.
He almost laughs. “Why not?”
She sniffs, and pulls open a drawer down near her hip. She flicks through the line of densely-packed cards inside with swift fingers, then withdraws one. She shows it to him: it’s the card for his Mastering the LSAT book. “This is overdue.”
“What? Already?” Jimmy says, and it can’t have been three weeks—
But she just makes a tight, humming noise.
“Okay,” he says. He thinks of the enormous textbook waiting on the kitchen table in his apartment. “I don’t have that on me, can’t I just get this for now?” He rests his hand on the exam book between them, then slowly slides it back towards her. The plastic dust jacket hisses over the wooden countertop. “And I’ll bring the other one back tomorrow?”
She makes another small noise. She takes the exam book off the counter—but instead of opening it and withdrawing the checkout card, she leans to her right and stacks it on a cart marked ‘Shelf Returns’.
“Okay, great,” Jimmy says.
She smiles. “Return the outstanding book, and pay your late fee—”
“—late fee—”
“—and then you can check out whatever book you’d like, Mr. McGill,” she says. “But until then, unfortunately, I’m afraid not.”
Jimmy picks up the cardboard notecard from the countertop. Mastering the LSAT, it says in close, type-written letters, and then, at the bottom of a long list, his own name. “What if I need this one for longer?” he asks, showing her the card.
“You can renew it when you return it,” the librarian says shortly. “Unless anyone requests the book before then.”
Albert van der Berg makes a particularly loud exclamation from his headphones at that—and Jimmy can’t even pretend to guess what the man could suddenly be excited about. Maybe something about Mary and Steve and their different ideas about which car they should buy.
Though Jimmy should know, really. He’s tried to listen to this tape before, even tried to follow along with the textbook. Some time over the three weeks that he’s spent telling himself he’d study properly tomorrow, as he sat in his kitchen, slowly getting buzzed on beer, then calling it a night.
“Mr. McGill?” the librarian prompts.
He picks up his library card and clacks the plastic edge on the counter then pockets it. “Fine,” he says. He turns, heading back out of the high-ceilinged main room, snaking between the long lines of attached corral desks. The desks are punctuated with students, sitting here and there, each one swaddled in their own stacks of notes and colorfully-spined books, the wooden partitions rising like fortress walls.
Jimmy lifts his headphones back up and fits them over his head and ears just as Albert van der Berg, previous excitement once again gone, says, “—and so of course we now know it can’t be the third option, because that would be out of scope…” and Jimmy steps out through the main doors and into the shocking August sunlight of the CNM campus, squinting.
From the other room in his apartment later that night, the sound of the television. It’s low and comforting, though Letterman's monologue is inaudible over the dry voice in his headphones talking about how to spot trap answers. Jimmy knows he’s listened to this section before, too—he can remember writing almost the same notes, can remember zoning out in almost the same place.
As he does again now, staring down at his yellow legal pad. A clean red line divides his page vertically. One third on the left, two thirds on the right.
Beside the notepad is the Mastering the LSAT textbook. If he wants to, he can follow along with the tape almost word for word, can stare at the paragraph-long questions as van der Berg dully recites them to him. Can pause the tape as instructed and try to figure out which of the five multiple choice options is the reason why Lei and Vance disagree with each other about recycling solutions.
Jimmy drums his pencil on the paper, seesawing it between his pointer and middle fingers.
There’s an open packet of batteries on the other side of the table, sitting next to the Walkman itself. Beside them, an empty carafe and and almost empty mug of coffee, probably responsible for the headache pressing on his temples—that, or the small lettering, or the dull questions, or the hours and hours of just trying to get this all out onto the paper before tomorrow, just in case.
He doodles a few twisting spirals, then makes a guess at the answer to the question. Presses the play button on the Walkman.
His answer was wrong. He pauses the tape again.
He stares at the red line down the notepad. Stares at it as if it has the secrets to what answers are right and what are wrong. What notes are helpful, and what not helpful. Taps the end of his pencil beside it, leaving soft grey dots on the surface.
He stares at the line as if expecting it to do something, to rise up off the yellow paper, shifting blurrily with the haze of sleep and coffee and headaches. It doesn’t. The TV plays informercials in the background, now, coming muffled through his headphones, the sound of distant people talking.
It’s like a damn heart monitor, Jimmy thinks suddenly, there on the notepad—flat lining. Silent.
Like the machine beside his bed in a Berwyn hospital. The monitor had flickered constantly with his pulse. It hadn’t made a sound at all. Hadn’t beeped, not like in the movies. Just a steady movement.
His knee had ached beneath the covers, then—a kind of cold, bone-deep ache that hadn’t gone away after the surgery, that had only changed to something more muted and flat and constant, even beneath the painkillers. He can still remember the sound of the television in the room next to his, always reruns of Happy Days, or something else bright and relentless. And visitors, during the day. They were bright and relentless too.
And he remembers another heart-rate monitor.
That one probably hadn’t beeped either, he thinks, but in his memory—in his old, flawed memory—it always has. A constant undercurrent to the small room with the white-green sheets and unshaded light bulbs and ever-present smell of unfamiliar, salty food.
“Doing okay?” his mother asks, as Jimmy plops down into the hard-backed chair beside her.
He peels open the snack-sized packet of Jays with a crinkle of plastic, then stares inside. Gives the chips a little shake, then looks back up and flashes her a grin. “Yeah, ‘course.” He pops a chip into his mouth and crunches.
Ruth’s lips shift—a smile, almost. She looks away, and over to the bed.
The beeping of the heart monitor continues steadily.
“You’re a lot like him, you know,” she says.
Jimmy shakes his hair back out of his eyes. He looks to the bed, too—and then tears his gaze back just as quickly, glancing out into the hall, where he can see the corner of the vending machine. “No, I’m not,” he mutters.
His mother is silent.
He rustles the bag of chips again. Stares inside, then picks out another one and eats it. He offers the bag to his mother. She shakes her head.
He slowly finishes the packet, then he scrunches it up, the plastic loud and horrible in the quiet room. He shoves the wadded ball into his jacket pocket, beside a couple of cardboard slugs—round, heavy discs, about the weight of a quarter. Jimmy sniffs. “I’m nothing like him.”
“Sure thing, honey,” his mother says, throwing him a sideways look. “What do I know? I’m just some lady.”
Jimmy shoves his hands deeper into his jacket pockets, slouching in the stiff chair. He grips his lighter, rubbing his thumb over the serrated sparkwheel without turning it.
More time passes. His mother pours two paper cups of water from the pitcher nearby and hands him one.
Jimmy takes a sip—it’s lukewarm and tastes of lemon. He swallows, then looks to his mother again. “Anything from Chuck?”
She nods. “He’s on a flight tomorrow.”
He makes a quiet noise at the back of his throat. “Tomorrow?” he says. “Sounds familiar.”
“Jimmy.”
“Yeah,” Jimmy says softly. “I know.” And his stomach tightens, tightens with the thought of just how much he wishes Chuck would get here, because if Chuck would only get here, with his perfect job and his perfect grades and his perfect words, then everything else would fall into line with him.
Like how rubbing on a paper clip with a magnet makes the paper clip magnetic, too.
And so Jimmy sits there, waiting for something to change, waiting for a shift in the magnetic poles, and all the time just watching the line on the monitor move up and down, and that beeping, that beeping that can’t have really been there, but he hears it so clearly in his memory, on and on and on—
Jimmy comes back to himself in his Albuquerque apartment. He’s clutching his pencil tightly, white-knuckled, and he forces his fingers to relax.
He stares at the notepad before him, at the flat red line down the page.
He rewinds the tape.
The harsh blue light of the 24 hour copy shop burns into Jimmy’s retinas as he steps through the automatic doors late the next night. He’s moving a little awkwardly. His bad knee is still sore—from rushing over here, yes, and from wedging himself behind a copier to fix a jam today, but mostly from drifting off to sleep at his cramped kitchen table the evening before, from waking that morning a minute before his alarm, with his headphones twisted around his neck, silent, the soporific voice of Albert van der Berg long since finished.
Jimmy peers down the aisles of stationery in the copy shop. He’s still out of breath, but there’s a pulse of excitement under his skin, strumming rhythmically.
He reaches out and lifts off a packaged X-Acto knife. Tilts it under the bright light, the blade gleaming, then dumps it in his basket.
Across the room, a copier beeps. A staff member takes sheets of paper from it sluggishly.
In the next row, Jimmy finds packets of tracing paper, and he unhooks one and adds that to his basket, too. He rubs at his eyes, feeling the buzz of the enormous fluorescents above him, squares of light that lie flush with the white ceiling. It feels almost like a dumb joke, like the universe is trying to make up for earlier in the day—
—earlier in the day when, stood over a copy machine, mindlessly feeding documents into the tray, the mailroom lights had flickered off and his copier had ground to a halt.
Because he’s still wearing his headphones, because Mastering the LSAT still pounds dully into his ears, it takes Jimmy a second longer than normal to click. He slips the headphones down to his neck and looks around the dark basement, staring over to the shapes of Henry and Kim. “Power cut?” he says, dumbly.
Henry shrugs. “Looks like it.”
After a moment, the emergency lights illuminate in the corners of the room—old yellow bulbs that seem like they haven’t been replaced since the place was first built.
“Bet it’s that construction next door,” Henry says. He moves around the workstation, a shadowed, slightly-hunched shape. “I’ll go up and check what’s going on, you two sit tight.” He pats his hand on the tabletop as he leaves.
It’s quiet when he’s gone, just the mumbling voice coming from down near Jimmy’s neck. Jimmy pauses the cassette and lifts the headphones off his head completely, setting the Walkman down on the table. He remembers the pursed expression on the librarian’s face, the doubtful eyebrow she raised when Jimmy said he’d bring it in tomorrow. He might still make it after work, if he can just really listen for the rest of the day, really knock it out, but…
In the corner of his eye, he sees Kim reach forward and touch a copy machine with her fingertips. After a moment, she says, “This is going to jam when the power comes back on.”
“Mm, mine too,” Jimmy says lightly. “Bunch of sheets halfway through.” He opens the front casing and peers at the darkness inside, then shrugs. Closes the case with a snap, then turns back to the workstation and clears the documents away, then hops up onto the table, twisting to sit with his legs dangling over the edge. He rubs at his knee, trying to loosen the tense muscle.
Kim glances over, but she doesn’t say anything.
Neither of them do, though they stay there in the darkened mailroom. The dim emergency bulbs wash everything in soft yellow, giving off more heat than light, wasting the energy of the back-up generator with their hungry filaments.
Jimmy shifts his weight off his bad knee as he waits for the graveyard-shift worker to amble back to the counter in the copy shop.
The guy is thin, with deep-sunk eyes—Brad Dourif in Cuckoo’s Nest. He scans and bags the X-Acto knife, then a little pottle of black paint. “Miniatures?” the guy asks, as he shoves the paint into a blue plastic bag that’s almost transparently thin.
“Huh?” Jimmy says.
“You painting miniatures?” the guys says.
Jimmy blinks. He looks down at the tub, then back. “I mean, it’ll stick to plastic, right?”
The copy shop worker clears his throat, then nods. “Yeah, should do.”
There’s a beat. “Okay,” Jimmy says, finally. He cracks open his wallet, hunting through for the right amount of cash. “Then perfect.”
Kim leans against the wall beside her frozen copier, her arms crossed. Her head is tipped forward slightly, and in earlier days Jimmy would’ve wondered if she was catching up on sleep. He swings his legs back and forth. Tucks his fingers under the edge of the table.
He wonders why she doesn’t just leave, why she doesn’t just head upstairs with Henry, with Bruce and Clara and all the others she’s going to be joining any day now.
Whenever that day is. He doesn’t actually know when she’ll find out her results for sure. Can’t remember the date, if he ever knew it. Every morning, he arrives in the mailroom half expecting to not find her there at all. To run into her as he makes his rounds instead, somewhere on the third floor—see her from behind, sitting in one of the cubicles. See her as he’s delivering her mail, as he’s reading her name printed on the envelopes as they arrive for sorting, as they sit in his cart, as they land on her new desk.
He rubs his knee again, flexing his leg forward.
“Bad today?” Kim asks, looking over to him. It’s hard to see her expression in the darkness. In facing him, she’s turned away from the light.
“Mmm,” Jimmy says. “Think it’s getting worse every year.” He gives a small chuckle. “Must be old.”
“Yeah,” Kim murmurs. “Ancient.”
He gives another soft laugh. He moves his weight a little, shifting back so the undersides of his knees are pressed right up against the edge of the table. After another long stretch of quiet, he gestures between them. “Hey, here we are again. Standing and talking.” He smiles. “Well, not so much standing.”
Kim nods, the dark shape of her head shifting. “And not so much talking.”
“No,” Jimmy says. “No, guess not.”
And then they return to silence. The light coming in through the square windows is grey today. Flat and harsh and not enough of it.
Jimmy taps his palm on his leg, then traces a line with his finger down the top of his thigh. He twists, facing Kim a little better. “So…” he starts, and then he clears his throat. “So I’ve officially upgraded from some-college to college-graduate.” He pauses.
Kim is silent.
“Next time a pollster calls, I get to be a college-educated white.”
She snorts. There’s a heavy quiet, and then her voice comes, small and sincere: “Congratulations, Jimmy.”
“Thanks,” he says softly.
He taps his hands on the edge of the table. One, two, three.
He picks up his headphones and turns them around in his hand, then sets them back down again.
The sun from outside is flat and pale.
Jimmy cups his hand against the glass window of the storefront, peering into the darkened interior. Behind the racks of shirts and jackets, behind the old ornaments and antique furniture, he almost thinks he can see a light on in the back. He blinks and peers closer, looking for movement, but there’s nothing.
“Can I help you?”
He turns. In the soft wash of very early morning, a woman stands on the curb beside him. She holds a travel cup in one hand and a set of keys in the other.
“Do you work here?” Jimmy asks, pointing to the store.
“It’s my shop,” the woman says mildly. “So, yes. Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” Jimmy says, and he steps back, gesturing for her to move in ahead. A blue plastic bag swings from his hand, heavy with tracing paper and X-Acto knives and paint.
“First time for everything,” she mutters, unlocking the door and flicking on the store lights.
He follows her inside as they twist through the cramped interior and make their way to the counter. She sets her purse and travel cup down then bustles around behind the register.
Jimmy shoots her a winning smile, but he spots a rack of cassette tapes and moves over to them instead. He sorts through. They’re all collectibles, all actually decent stuff, here to make the woman a profit.
He stifles a yawn behind his hand. He’s not actually tired anymore, he hasn’t been tired since he left for the copy shop—and definitely not since he guzzled a gas station coffee while waiting for this thrift store to open, burnt and bitter and not sweet enough.
He picks up another tape and opens the case, peering inside, and then he closes it and slides it back into the rack. He wanders over to the counter again, where the woman is slowly drinking from her travel cup and flicking through a newspaper.
“D’you have more tapes?” Jimmy asks. “Like, a bargain bin, maybe?”
“Uh, sure,” the woman says. She folds her newspaper back and lowers it, then leaves for the storeroom.
Jimmy rubs his thumb over his lips and stands there waiting, shifting on his feet again. It’s a big store, though still crowded. Rows of clothes on their hangars and kitchenware on shelves. VHS tapes in makeshift towers. It smells like these places always smell—trapped air. Jimmy breathes it in.
The owner comes back a few minutes later with a cardboard box that’s bulging at the bottom and held together with brown masking tape, and he grins. She dumps it on the countertop. “Quarter each.”
“Quarter?” he says.
She nods firmly. “Quarter.”
He agrees. For the next ten minutes he sorts through them, pulling out handfuls, opening the cases, studying the tapes. He discards most of them, dropping them back into the box, but some he sets aside: a careful stack of a dozen or so white cassettes.
The woman watches him curiously, sipping her coffee, her eyebrows high.
He grins. He hands her the cash and then pauses. “And, uh, d’you have any big old books?”
Jimmy’s eyes have adjusted to the darkness of the mailroom now, adjusted enough that he can tell the rare moment when a cloud passes in front of the sun from the way the grey light shifts behind the high windows. He still sits on the workbench, his legs crossed beneath him now.
It’s probably only been about twenty minutes, but it feels like longer, the silence between him and Kim stretching out unnaturally.
In a movie, he thinks, there would be a clock ticking. Counting down to high noon.
Kim scrunches up her sandwich wrapper. She’s sitting in the alcove beside her copy machine. She stretches forward to drop her trash into the can nearby, then settles back again, leaning against the wall. She reaches up and presses her fingers into her forehead, a pose so familiar that even in the darkness Jimmy feels like he can suddenly see her as clearly as if she’s been hit by a spotlight.
He clears his throat. “So, when do you hear about the bar exam? You haven’t yet, right?”
She looks to him. There’s a glow of yellow in her eyes. A pinch down her brow.
“Hey,” he says. “You’ll do great.”
Her head shifts a little. Then she murmurs, “You know, I hate when you do that.”
He frowns. “Do what?”
“Pretend I’ve said something I haven’t,” Kim says. She waves a curving hand. “Read my mind.”
“Your mind?” Jimmy says, and he gives a little laugh. Tilts his head. “It’s right there, Kim. On your face.”
“Jimmy, it’s like, pitch black in here.”
“Ah, well,” he says. “Guess you got me.”
But Kim shakes her head, chuckling.
“But you’ll tell me when you know, right?” Jimmy says. “About the bar.” He moves again, unfolding his legs and hanging them off the edge of the table, looking down at her. “I mean, after everything.”
Kim is quiet.
“It doesn’t need to be like—” Jimmy starts. “You can just tell me at work.”
She does speak now, two short words: “Of course.”
“I didn’t…” He sighs. “You don’t need to call me. I know I kept stepping over those lines last time.” His lips are dry suddenly, and he wets them, then adds, “That’s over.”
“Over,” Kim echoes.
“Yeah,” Jimmy says. He stares at the darkened shape of her, the soft yellow glow in her eyes as they look up. “I’m not gonna do that anymore.” I can’t do that anymore. “Like we said.”
“Okay,” Kim says. She leans forward, folding her arms around her knees. She glances away, down to the side. Her profile is soft, even softer than usual. She almost seems to fade into the wall. Then her eyes snap back to his. “Jimmy,” she says, and there’s a pause, another silence that stretches impossibly long, before she adds: “I’m really sorry.”
He inhales sharply.
Kim’s expression flickers at his reaction. She tilts her head, one of her braids hanging over her shoulder. Tightens her hands on her elbows.
Jimmy gives another smile, small and closed mouth. He rubs at his knee. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, me too.” He lets out a small, shaky breath.
He hears, more than sees, her nod.
And barely above a whisper, he says, “I’m sorry, too.”
Nothing.
It would be better with that clock in here, better if he knew just how much time was slowly passing, in this dark space before her response. But then—
“Okay,” Kim finally says, slightly thicker than usual.
“Yeah,” Jimmy murmurs.
Kim shakes her head, braids flicking. “So,” she adds brightly, “do you think Henry and the boys are out there waiting for us to ki—waiting for us to make up?”
“Hah.”
“And they’ll come busting in now, cheering—”
“Yeah, exactly,” Jimmy says, and he chuckles. “If only I knew that’s all it’d take to move on. I would’ve just gone upstairs and cut a wire somewhere.”
“Right, right,” Kim says. “Yeah, just cut a wire.”
There’s a long moment of quiet, and Jimmy taps his palm on the table. Rubs at a little stubborn stain near the outside seam of his slacks, scratching his thumbnail against the fabric. There’s people moving right above them now, heavy footsteps and muffled chatter.
“So, what are you gonna do now that you’re a college-educated white?” Kim says lightly. There’s something hidden beneath her voice that Jimmy only just catches, something thin and breakable.
He pretends he hasn’t heard it. “Oh, you know…” he begins, and then he stops. He lets out his breath slowly. A long, drawn-out exhale.
She’s still and silent.
“I…” he says, looking away briefly. He sighs. “I want to see if I can do it for myself first. Before I tell you.” He swallows. “Is that okay?”
Kim gives a strange nod, almost automatic looking.
“I will tell you,” Jimmy says. He chuckles. “I mean, friends, right?” My only one in Albuquerque, he thinks. He doesn’t say that.
“Friends,” Kim says.
Jimmy sighs. It doesn’t feel like friends. He doesn’t know what it feels like.
But they sit there, listening to the people moving above them, waiting for the lights to come back on.
Jimmy hunches over his kitchen table, surrounded by fumes. He dips a cloth in rubbing alcohol again. Wipes it over the white plastic shell of the cassette tape. The lettering disappears slowly, the track list of Wings’s Greatest Hits gradually vanishing under the damp cloth.
He works slowly and carefully until eventually the shell is completely clean, and then he sets it off to the side with the others. The alcohol dries fast, but he leaves them alone for a while, as he lays a thin sheet of tracing paper over the first LSAT cassette, cutting an indent around the raised sections of the shell so that the paper lies flush enough for him to neatly trace some outlines.
He removes the tracing paper and presses it firmly to the table, then picks up the X-Acto knife. He starts precisely carving along the pencil markings: Side A.
Jimmy hunches over his kitchen table, surrounded by papers. He’s mirroring his position from last night, his red-lined notepad, the Mastering the LSAT textbook.
He presses play on his Walkman and stands, heading over to the other room and then back, stretching his knee out so that it doesn’t cramp up like before—but it just seems to be getting worse and worse, feeling stiffer every time he puts his weight on it. And he wasn’t even on his feet much, today: the power had been out in the mailroom for an hour, in the end—though maybe he’d made things worse wrangling with the jammed machines for the next while.
He listens to van der Berg’s explanation of parallel flaws, and then sits back down at the table to stare at the practice question as the man recites it. Pauses the tape.
The silence in his ears his thick. No television tonight.
And Jimmy tries to channel all his focus down onto the page before him, glancing between the multi-choice practice question and the yellow legal notepad. He’s jotted some notes at the top today, key words that he wrote down more because Albert van der Berg seemed to deliver them with extra emphasis than because he understood why they were useful.
He’s drawn the same red line down the page as last night, too, the same red line he’s seen Kim mark her notepads with hundreds of times. One third of the paper to the left of it, two thirds to the right. He taps his pencil.
He’s never been sure what’s supposed to go on either side of that line. He never asked Kim. Never asked her what made some words worthy of one side or the other. Never asked her what the red pen meant versus what the green pen meant. Why she highlighted some things in yellow and others in pink.
He could call her and ask her now, in the middle of the night—
—but he’s not doing that anymore.
He makes a rough noise at the back of his throat.
The expectant silence of the paused cassette tape grows thicker. He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to get all the information out of these dozen tapes and this enormous book and into his brain, or even down onto his notepad.
He reads the current question again. Reads the answers one by one, and then picks the third option, picks the one he thinks is the flaw.
He presses play.
Van der Berg runs through the possible answers, dismissing them one by one. Not the first option, not the second option, not the third option—
And Jimmy hits eject, the tape folding up out of the Walkman. He takes it and drops it onto the notepad, and it falls onto the red line, half to the left and half to the right. His wrong answer is right above it. Right next to the dumb system he doesn’t understand, the system that clearly isn’t working for him, anyway, and he knows that every day he keeps these damn tapes he’s just going to have to pay more and more in late fees, in late fees for something he wasted his time with, that he didn’t even figure out how to use right, and—
He picks up the tape. Flips it over in his grip. Examines the back, then the front. He feels something in his chest like a balloon inflating, and almost laughs—and then he does laugh, wry and thin. He’ll need, he’ll need…and as the list grows in his mind, he grins wider, and looks over at the clock.
It’s late, but he knows somewhere that’s open.
It’s mid-morning, a Saturday, and even though Jimmy’s sleepless Friday night is catching up with him, he pushes through the doors into the CNM library buoyantly.
It’s not the wan librarian from Thursday morning, it’s some kid with a round face and thick eyebrows that crawl up towards his curly hairline as he waits for Jimmy to speak.
“I’m here to return these,” Jimmy says. He gestures with the book and tape collection.
“Just put ‘em in the slot, sir,” the kid says, pointing with his thumb.
“Right,” Jimmy says. He makes to move over to the return slot, then pauses. “I, uh, think I have a late fee to pay.”
“Oh, right,” the kid says. “Okay, sure. We can do that.”
So Jimmy hands the Mastering the LSAT book over to him. The dust jacket is folded tightly around the binding, and the pages look a little older than they should, really, for a book published only a couple of years ago, but he doesn’t think anyone will notice. He slides over the plastic case of cassettes next, each one nestled snugly in its holder.
“Tapes rewound?” the kids asks.
“Yup,” Jimmy says brightly. And then: “Didn’t even get a chance to listen to ‘em actually.”
The kid nods, barely paying attention. He takes a couple of bucks from Jimmy and turns away, and when Jimmy comes back a few minutes later with the book of practice exams, the kid barely looks up from the open comic book in front of him—just stamps the checkout card and slides it into the filing box.
Jimmy takes the new book and heads back out the door, swinging his backpack around to the front as he steps out into the courtyard. He unzips it and nestles the book inside, then rifles through the dozen-or-so individually-cased cassettes that are gathered, loose, at the bottom. He pulls out a red one—Rush. Opens it and slides the tape into his Walkman then presses play.
Today I will cover how to identify the different types of questions in the logical reasoning section of the exam. Some of them are more common than others, but you’ll want to be familiar with all of them…
And Jimmy grins.
He settles his backpack onto his shoulders again, then walks out through the enormous parking lots of the CNM campus, the sun rising in waves from the cement.
The morning feels big, and light, and van der Berg’s voice is a familiar soundtrack to it all—or almost familiar. It will be soon. He’s got time.
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