Now I have never been skydiving, and with the state of things now, I doubt I will ever have a chance. However, I have a feeling that there is a significant similarity between the moment you step out of a plane and the moment you are told to begin the SAT. Turn off your cellphone, check. Make sure the door is locked, check. Gut wrenching nervousness, check. Gross sweat, check. The knowledge that what you do in the next few minutes will impact the rest of your life, check. The biggest difference is if you did something wrong in the plane, you don't wait three months to find out.

The only remarkable thing I can recall about the first half is the fact that a boy genuinely asked why he had to turn off his phone for the test. Blondie's only response, even more remarkably, was that she had forgotten her own phone and so no one could have phones. Because the rules don't exist, you know.

After Blondie passed out all of the papers and made sure none of us were using scary spy calculators or whatever, I took a deep breath and actually focussed on the test in front of me. The world vanished into a pile of language comprehension for forty-five minutes. I had studied throughout my entire high school career for this thing, but I couldn't tell you jack about it if you asked me now.

At break, we all had to stay in the room because, as Blondie so eloquently put it, "Don't want you to cheat."

One of the boys from the back of the classroom left to go to the bathroom, before proving he had not actually given a shit to begin with (pun intended) by staying there after the test started again. Blondie just sighed and locked the door again, writing something on the corner of the kid's test before bringing it up to the front. I'm kind of surprised she wasn't legally bound to immediately incinerate it or feed it to wolves, by the way they treat precision on the SAT.

Seeing that exactly nothing, nothing, and more nothing happened for about three hours, I'm going to skip to the part where life started to shift a bit from SAT-panic to skydiving-panic. Blondie was reading one of the scripted paragraphs from a swivel chair up front when there was a slamming noise outside of the door.

"What the fu--fudge," Alex said, doing the best mid-sentence swerve I have ever witnessed as Blondie stared her down.

"No talking."

Alex nodded. "Right, yeah. But care to figure out who's getting murdered outside?"

"I said no talking!" our proctor repeated, hands on her hips now. Even as she scolded Alex, though, she was on her way over to the door. "No one touch their phones while I'm out," she warned us with a glare before unlocking the door and slipping outside.

Now I am not, and nor have I ever been, a private Catholic school student. Or even someone who would consider my morals to be incredibly upstanding. But I would say that I have consistently possessed a decent amount of self-preservation. Looking back on it, I'm glad the same couldn't be said for most of the others in our testing room. After all, they went along with what happened.

The door clicked shut at about the same time as the boy nearest the door grabbed his phone from beneath his desk. There was a girl in the front row, she must have been a tenth grader, looking back when he did so.

"She said no phones. If you get us in trouble, I swear..." the girl muttered, voice not carrying very far beyond her seat. Still, it was a dead-silent room, and she was louder than a pin drop.

"Oh, no problem. She won't see," the older boy hollered back, and before the Sophomore could object, he had reached over to turn the door's lock. "Here, I won't even keep my phone out." He emphasized this by sliding it back under his desk.

I hadn't signed up and paid significant money for this bullshit, so I rolled my eyes and started towards the door to unlock it. The plan wasn't to confront him or anything, but I've come to the conclusion due to five or six years of experience that teenage boys are governed by very spur-of-the-moment choices. He turned the lock, but he probably had no intent to keep it turned.

Alex stopped me before I could get past her seat.

"Rory, chill."

I raised an eyebrow and pointed to the door, which was centered in the middle of a windowless wall. "How exactly is she going to get back in if we don't unlock it?"

"She'll knock. Chill."

I wasn't itching for a fight, so I sat down. Sophomore and Rebellious Teenager had a glaring contest, but after a moment, the sophomore simply crossed her arms and faced the front of the room again. There was a knock in the door a few minutes later, and Alex gave me the most obnoxious 'I told you so' look ever.

It wasn't Blondie that came in, however, but a man in his mid-to-late thirties. Muttering something along the lines of, "won't even stay for the whole testing time" and "can't find my damn phone," the man took a seat. He was a mess, quite honestly, especially when physically compared to Blondie from earlier. His hairline was receding, he kept coughing up a storm, and he was starting to go grey, which I'm quite certain is not supposed to happen before forty at least.

Rebellious Teenager kept his trap shut for the next hour or so, even when Receding Hairline left to go get his cough medicine or phone or whatever he left outside. The atmosphere of the room shifted in a perfectly smooth fashion away from thinking that a random noise from outside of the classroom would kill us. The most recent time, at that point, I had a fear that a noise would cause my death was when I was seven and hid from the creaking floorboards at night. Actually, it might have been the first time I got into Alex's hellscape of a car and it threatened verbally to fall apart then and there.

Instead of thinking like paranoid children, we focussed back on our tests. I was personally glad that Receding Hairline left for however brief his trip, because the gross hacking noises he made after blowing his nose were disgusting. I have recreationally participated in mud races at multiple points in my life, but that man sounded like he was infested with more germs than the entire Black Death.

The reason we noticed something had happened was Sophomore, who apparently had been keeping track of exactly how much time she had left on the section. At a quarter until noon, she looked around the classroom in such an exaggerated fashion that I noticed her from where I was doing my work. It was genuinely as though she was waving a red flag that said, "Please pay attention to me, I am trying to make you notice that I am confused."

"This section was supposed to end three minutes ago," she whispered when she caught my eye. Again, even whispering when in a dead room... Everyone looked towards her. "Should we look for our test proctor?"

"Nah, man, they can suck it. We supposed to leave already?" Rebellious stood up and grabbed his calculator and phone from under his desk.

Sophomore shook her head. "No, what I said was that this section--"

"Right, okay, man. Well, I'm out of here. Finally can check my texts once I get out."

He rushed over to the door, leaving his test on his desk, and left the room without a second thought. Not that he really seemed to care what the turnout of the SAT was, but I'm pretty sure his test would have been void.

No one followed him outside. No one touched his paper. I probably could have checked his paper, seen what his name was. Then I wouldn't be referring to his only as Rebellious Teenager. But by the time anyone could think of doing anything but freezing, shit got very real, very fast.

It started with a gunshot.