GA Milestones EOG Practice Test 6

The Spider in the Corner

¹Everyone at the Juniper Street Arts Center agreed that Gemma Hale could paint. At fourteen she could mix a sky so true that people reached out to touch it, and she could catch a face in four quick strokes. The trouble, as her grandmother put it, was that Gemma agreed with everyone a little too loudly.

²"I taught myself," Gemma said whenever anyone asked. This was not exactly true. For two years Ms. Adeyemi, the center's director and the muralist whose work covered half the walls downtown, had stood behind Gemma's easel every Saturday, saying almost nothing, now and then reaching over to tilt a brush or to point at a shadow that had gone muddy. Gemma had decided those moments did not count.

³When the city announced a contest to design a mural for the new library wall, Ms. Adeyemi entered too. Gemma laughed. "If she's afraid of losing to a student," she told a group of younger kids, loudly enough to carry across the studio, "she shouldn't enter."

⁴That night her grandmother set down her mug of tea. "You know the story of Arachne?" she asked. Gemma rolled her eyes; she had heard it at every birthday since she was six. Arachne was a weaver so skilled that she claimed no goddess had taught her, and she challenged Athena herself, weaving a tapestry so perfect and so insulting that the goddess turned her into a spider. "The old storytellers say it's about pride," Nana Elsie said. "I always thought it was about forgetting who held the loom steady when you were learning."

⁵Gemma's design was flawless. It showed the city's history in seven bright panels, and in every panel, tucked among the crowds, was a tiny caricature of Ms. Adeyemi: dozing at an easel, painting by numbers, copying a student's sketch. The joke was clever. It was also, Gemma knew even as she painted it, a little cruel.

⁶The judges chose Gemma's design. At the ceremony she waited for Ms. Adeyemi to look angry, or hurt, or at least embarrassed. Instead the director studied each caricature with interest, the way she studied anything on a wall, and then turned to Gemma. "Your perspective in the third panel is excellent. Your shadows in the fifth are still muddy."

⁷The library hired Gemma to paint the mural that summer, and it hired Ms. Adeyemi to supervise. Every morning Gemma climbed the scaffold to find a small note taped to the wall: Cool your blues here. Watch the horizon line. Gemma ignored the notes for a week. In the second week the fifth panel began to go wrong, the shadows thickening into mud exactly where she had been warned, and she spent two afternoons scraping it down.

⁸In the third week she started following the notes.

⁹On the last day, when the scaffolding came down, Gemma noticed something she had not painted. In the bottom corner of the fifth panel, so small that only someone standing close would see it, was a spider, delicately drawn, hanging from a single thread. Beside it, in tiny letters, were two sets of initials: hers and Ms. Adeyemi's.

¹⁰Gemma stood in front of it for a long time. In the myth, the spider was a punishment that lasted forever. This one felt more like a question. She thought about the Saturdays, the tilted brushes, the shadow that had been pointed out to her a hundred times before she ever learned to see it herself.

¹¹That evening she went back with her smallest brush. She did not paint over the spider or the initials. Instead, one at a time, she painted out each tiny caricature of Ms. Adeyemi, and in each empty space she painted the director as she really was on those Saturdays: standing behind a young painter's easel, pointing out a shadow that had gone muddy.