NJSLA Practice Test 7

Passage 1: The Map on the Refrigerator

¹The day the moving truck pulled away, Hana taped a map of her old town to the refrigerator. She had drawn it herself during the last week of fifth grade: the library with the crooked bench, the corner store where Mr. Dube saved her the last lemon ice, the creek where she and her friends raced leaf boats every spring. In the new apartment, the map was the first thing she saw every morning and the last thing she saw before bed.

²“You could make a map of this neighborhood too,” her father suggested one evening, pouring rice into a pot.

³“There’s nothing here to put on it,” Hana said. That was not exactly true. There was a bakery on the ground floor of their building that smelled like cinnamon at six in the morning, and a park across the street with a fountain shaped like a fish. But none of it was hers. A map, she believed, was a list of places where something had happened to you.

⁴On Saturday, a girl with a skateboard under one arm knocked on the door. She introduced herself as Imani from 4C and held out a paper bag. “My grandmother made too many dumplings,” she said. “She makes too many every week, on purpose, so I have to go meet people.”

⁵Hana laughed before she could stop herself. She invited Imani in, and Imani noticed the map right away. She studied it for a long time, tracing the blue line of the creek with one finger.

⁶“Leaf boats,” Imani read. “What are those?”

⁷Hana explained: you chose a wide, flat leaf, you set it on the water at the footbridge, and the first boat to reach the big rock won. Imani listened the way people listen to directions to a place they plan to visit.

⁸“There’s no creek here,” Imani said finally. “But the fountain in the park has a stone gutter that runs all the way around it. When it rains, the water goes fast.”

⁹It rained on Tuesday. Hana and Imani stood at the edge of the fountain in their raincoats and dropped two maple leaves into the narrow gutter. The leaves spun, caught, and spun again. Imani’s leaf got stuck behind a bottle cap, and she shouted at it so loudly that a man walking a dog stopped to watch. Hana’s leaf won. Then Imani’s won. By the time the rain stopped, they had raced fourteen times, and they had invented new rules about bottle caps.

¹⁰That night, Hana took a fresh sheet of paper from her desk. She did not take down the old map; instead, she drew a new one beside it. It showed the bakery, the fish fountain, the gutter, and a small square labeled 4C. Next to the gutter she wrote, in her smallest letters, Leaf boats (fountain rules).

¹¹Her father noticed the second map the next morning. He did not say anything. He just moved a magnet so that both maps would fit.

Passage 2: How a Street Becomes Yours

¹The first week, the street is only a name on the envelopes that follow us here, letters that know our address better than I do.

²The second week, it is a sound: the bus that sighs at the corner at 7:10, the dog two doors down who barks at nothing, at everything, at me.

³By the first month, it is a list of facts I could pass a test on— which sidewalk square is cracked, which mailbox leans, which porch light stays on all night like someone waiting up.

⁴I didn’t ask the street to teach me. I didn’t even want to learn. I walked it every day the way you walk through a song you don’t like, waiting for it to end.

⁵But somewhere in all that walking the cracked square learned my shoe, the barking dog began to wag, the bus driver lifted two fingers from the wheel the way you greet someone you’ve seen before.

⁶Now, when I turn the corner and the porch light comes into view, something in my chest unclenches, the way a hand that has gripped a railing all the way up a long staircase lets go at the top.