“What was she doing on a willow?”
“She was mad. For love.” Rocío glares at me. “And they say a woman’s heart is fickle.”
Right. “Sounds like a nice pool.”
“It’s like a Sir John Everett Millais painting. Except that swim caps are mandatory and medieval dresses forbidden.
Fascists.”
“Hmm. Maybe I should buy the membership after all.”
“You don’t need to, it’s free for NASA employees.”
“But not for contractors, right?”
“They didn’t make me pay.” She shrugs and pulls a GRE prep book out of her backpack. “Can we start with quantitative reasoning? Though parallelograms make me
want to drown myself in a Danish brook. Again.”
Half an hour later, the reason my intelligent, math-savvy, articulate RA has been scoring so poorly on the GRE becomes unmistakably clear: this test is too dumb for her. In related news: we’re about to murder each other.
“The correct answer is B,” I repeat, seriously considering ripping a page off the book and stuffing it into her mouth. “You don’t need to solve for other options. X is a factor of y squared—”
“You’re assuming that X is an integer. What if it’s a rational number? A real number? Or, even worse, an irrational number?”
“I guarantee you that X is not an irrational number,” I hiss.
“How do you know?” she growls.
“Common sense!”
“Common sense is for people who are not smart enough to solve for pi.”
“Are you implying that—”
“Hey, girls!”
“What?” we bark in unison. Kaylee blinks at us from above a very pink drink.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt—”
“No, no.” I smile reassuringly. “Sorry, we got carried away. We’re having some . . . issues.” She’s wearing a purple jumpsuit and heart-shaped sunglasses, and her hair is pulled over her shoulder into a fishtail braid that reaches her rib cage. Her purse is shaped like a watermelon, and her necklace is a pink flower with the letter K in its middle.
I want to be her.
“Aw.” She tilts her head. “Can I help?” There is something earnest about the way she asks, like she actually cares.
I ignore Rocío’s kicks under the table and ask Kaylee,
“Would you like to join us in fighting the hegemony of the Graduate Record Examination?”
I’m not sure what reaction I expected, but Kaylee huffing, eye-rolling, and pulling a chair up to our table was not it. “It’s an indignity. GRE, SATs, all these tests are institutionalized gatekeepers, and the extent to which graduate programs over-rely on them for student admission is obscene. We are two decades into the twenty-first century, but we’re still using a test based on a conceptualization of intelligence that’s about as outdated as the Triassic. Graduate school success depends on qualities that are not measured by the GRE—we all know it. Why aren’t we moving toward a holistic approach to graduate admission? Also, the GRE costs hundreds of dollars! Who has the financial solubility for that? Or for the prep courses, the materials, the tutors? Let me tell you who doesn’t: not-rich people.”
She wags her finger at me, precise and wildly graceful. I am mesmerized.
“You know who traditionally does poorly on standardized tests? Women and marginalized individuals. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: groups that are constantly told by society that they’re less smart walk into a testing situation
anxious as hell and end up underperforming. It’s called Stereotype Threat, and there’s tons of literature on that. Just like there’s tons of literature showing that the GRE does a terrible job at predicting who’ll finish grad school. But the heads of graduate admission all over the country don’t care and persist in using an instrument made to elevate rich white men.” She shakes out her hair. “Burn it down, I say.”
“Burn . . . what down?”
“All of it,” Kaylee says fiercely with her high-pitched voice. Then she sucks a delicate sip from her straw. I really want to be her.
I glance at Rocío and do a double take. She’s staring at Kaylee, breathing quickly, lips parted and cheeks flushed. Her right hand clutches the prep book like it’s the edge of a ravine. “You okay, Ro?” I ask her. She nods without breaking her stare.
“Anyway,” Kaylee continues with a shrug, “why are we talking about the GRE?”
“Rocío is taking it, and I was helping her out. With”—I clear my throat—
“mixed results. I believe we were about to shank each other over irrational numbers?” “Sounds about right,” Rocío mumbles.
“Oh”—Kaylee waves her hand airily—“you shouldn’t be talking about irrational numbers. The thing about the GRE is, the less you know the better off you are.” I give Rocío my best told you so look. She kicks me again. “If you take a prep class, they teach you little tricks useful to pass the test—
more so than actually knowing math.” “You’ve taken the GRE?” Rocío asks.
“Yep. This manager thing is a temporary gig—I’m starting my Ph.D. in education in the fall. At Johns
Hopkins.”
