MCAS Practice Test 3

Text 1: “Inventory” by Lena Carrow

¹The night before Emil left for college, he asked me to help him pack, which was a lie. He had been packed for a week: two duffel bags and a plastic crate by the door, everything folded with a neatness I had never seen from him in fourteen years of sharing a bathroom. What he wanted was company. I knew that, and he knew I knew, and neither of us said it.

²So I sat on his bed and made an inventory. That was my job, he said—to write down everything in the crate so that Mom would stop asking whether he had remembered things. Phone charger. Extension cord. Three towels, blue. A box of granola bars he would finish by Tuesday. The ugly lamp shaped like a lighthouse that he had claimed to hate since he was ten.

³“You're taking the lighthouse?”

⁴“It's ironic,” he said. He did not look at me.

⁵I wrote it down: Lamp, lighthouse (ironic). Then I kept writing, because the list felt like the only thing in the room that was under control. I wrote down the sound of the dryer in the basement. I wrote down the poster he had already taken off the wall, and the four pale rectangles where the tape had been. I wrote down the way he kept picking up his old soccer trophy and putting it back on the shelf—not packing it, not leaving it, just checking that it was still there.

⁶“That's not on the list,” he said, reading over my shoulder.

⁷“It's my list.”

⁸He laughed, and then he stopped laughing, and he sat down next to me on the bed so that the mattress tipped us toward each other. For a minute we just looked at the rectangles on the wall.

⁹“You can have the room,” he said finally. “If you want it. It's bigger.”

¹⁰I did not want the room. I wanted the room with him in it, being annoying, playing music too loud through the wall. But I said, “Maybe,” and wrote it at the bottom of the page: Room (maybe). It was the closest either of us came that night to saying what we meant.

Text 2: “The Morning Train” by Hester Bancroft

¹Katrin was to leave on the six-fifteen, and so the whole house rose in the dark to see her off, though there was nothing for most of them to do. Pa hitched the wagon by lantern light. Mother wrapped bread and cold chicken in a dish towel and then unwrapped it to add an apple and then wrapped it again. Jakob, who was twelve, was told to carry the trunk, and he carried it with tremendous seriousness, as if it held something that might break.

²It did not. He had watched her pack it: two dresses, her good shoes, a hairbrush, the Bible with her name inside the cover, and a stack of letters from Cousin Ada describing the mill town—the electric streetcars, the boarding house with a bathtub on every floor, the wages paid in cash every Saturday. Katrin had read those letters until the folds went soft.

³On the drive to the station nobody spoke. The fields were gray and then silver as the light came up, and Jakob found he was counting fence posts—forty, forty-one—so that he would not have to think about the empty place at the supper table, or the quiet in the loft where they had whispered after the lamp was out.

⁴At the platform Katrin hugged Mother and then Pa, who held her a moment longer than Jakob had ever seen him hold anyone. Then she turned to Jakob. He had planned to say something; he had practiced it on the drive, between fence posts. But the train came in loud and steaming, and the words went right out of him.

⁵“You'll write,” Katrin said. It was not a question.

⁶He nodded. She pressed something into his hand—the stub of her best pencil, the one she would never let him borrow—and climbed aboard.

⁷All the way home he held the pencil in his fist. He did not use it for a week. When he finally did, it was to begin a letter, and the first line he wrote was the one he had meant to say on the platform: I am counting the days, but only the ones until you come back.