MCAS Practice Test 12

from *Static*, a play by Gideon Archer

¹[A cramped radio booth at Larkin High School, 9:40 p.m. A red ON AIR sign is dark. LENA, sixteen, sits at the microphone sorting index cards. DEV, her co-host, leans against the doorframe holding a folded sheet of paper.]

²DEV: It came through the drop box. No name.

³LENA: [without looking up] Half of them come through with no name. That's why we have a drop box.

⁴DEV: Not like this one. [He hands it to her.] Read the second paragraph.

⁵LENA: [reading, then slowing] “. . . everybody knows the bus to the east side leaves before the late buses, so if you live past the river you can't stay for anything. No clubs, no tutoring, no games. Nobody on the school board lives past the river, so nobody fixes it.” [She looks up.] Huh.

⁶DEV: Right?

⁷LENA: It's not wrong.

⁸DEV: It's not wrong. That's the problem. Iversen's going to say we can't read it.

⁹[MS. IVERSEN, the station's faculty adviser, enters with a coffee mug and a stack of papers. She is tired but not unkind.]

¹⁰MS. IVERSEN: Can't read what?

¹¹[A pause. LENA holds out the letter. MS. IVERSEN reads it standing up, her coffee forgotten.]

¹²MS. IVERSEN: Where did this come from?

¹³DEV: The drop box.

¹⁴MS. IVERSEN: So we don't know who wrote it. We don't know if the facts are right. And it says, in so many words, that the board doesn't care about kids on the east side.

¹⁵LENA: The bus part is right. I checked last year, for the paper. The last east-side bus leaves at 2:50.

¹⁶MS. IVERSEN: The bus part, maybe. [She sets the letter down on the console, carefully, as if it might go off.] The rest is somebody's guess about what's in other people's heads. If you read it on the air, it isn't an anonymous letter anymore. It's the station saying it.

¹⁷DEV: So we just throw it out?

¹⁸MS. IVERSEN: I didn't say that.

¹⁹LENA: You kind of did.

²⁰MS. IVERSEN: [sitting down on the edge of the desk] Lena. Two years ago a kid on this show read a letter accusing a teacher of something. Turned out it wasn't true. The teacher left. The kid who read it—he didn't mean any harm. He just thought if it came through the box, it was news. [Beat.] I'm not telling you to be quiet. I'm telling you that a microphone isn't a megaphone. You don't just point it and shout.

²¹[Silence. The clock on the wall reads 9:52. LENA picks up the letter again and reads it through. Then she pulls an index card toward her and begins to write.]

²²DEV: What are you doing?

²³LENA: The facts. Bus leaves at 2:50, activities end at 4:15. I can say that—I checked it. [Writing.] Then I can say we got a letter from a student who can't stay after school, and we'd like to hear from the board about it. We can invite them on the show.

²⁴DEV: That's not the letter.

²⁵LENA: No. It's what the letter's about. [She looks at MS. IVERSEN.] Is that a megaphone?

²⁶MS. IVERSEN: [after a moment, almost smiling] That's a microphone.

²⁷[The ON AIR sign flickers red. LENA slides on her headphones. DEV takes his seat. MS. IVERSEN picks up her coffee and stays where she is, watching.]

²⁸LENA: [into the microphone] Good evening, Larkin. It's ten o'clock, and we need to talk about the bus.