NYS Grade 8 Practice Test 4

Out of True

¹The summer Inés Calderón turned thirteen, her mother dropped her off at Abuelo's bicycle shop every morning at eight and picked her up at five. Inés had protested, of course. Her friend Jada was spending July at a lake camp two hours north, and every evening Inés's phone lit up with pictures of canoes and campfires and a rope swing that hung over the water like a question mark. Inés, meanwhile, had a broom, a stool beside the cash register, and a grandfather who said about eleven words a day.

²"He could use the help," her mother had said. "And you could use something to do besides staring at that screen." Both statements were true, which only made them more irritating.

³The shop occupied a narrow brick storefront between a laundromat and a bakery. It smelled of rubber and chain grease, and on hot afternoons the warm sweetness from next door drifted through the back wall until Inés felt she was being punished in two ways at once. Bicycles hung from hooks in the ceiling like sleeping bats. Abuelo worked at a scarred wooden bench at the back, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, where they did no good at all.

⁴For the first week, Inés swept. She swept the same twelve square feet of floor so many times that she began to recognize individual specks of dust. When customers came in, Abuelo nodded at them, took their bikes, and wrote their names on paper tags in pencil. Inés rang up inner tubes and water bottles and tried not to look at her phone more than once a minute.

⁵On the second Monday, a woman named Mrs. Hadley wheeled in a blue bicycle whose front wheel wobbled as it turned, swinging side to side like a tired dog's tail. "My grandson hit a curb," she said apologetically. "Can it be saved?"

⁶Abuelo lifted the wheel off the frame, gave it a spin, and watched it for a long moment. Then he looked at Inés. "You," he said. "Come."

⁷It was the most he had said to her in days. She followed him to the bench, where he clamped the wheel into a metal stand with two small arms that nearly touched the rim. He spun it again. At one spot the rim swung over and brushed the left arm with a faint tick.

⁸"It is out of true," he said. "So we true it." He handed her a small tool shaped like a flattened key ring, with slots of different sizes cut into its edge. "Spoke wrench."

⁹What followed was the slowest hour of Inés's life. Abuelo showed her how the thin metal spokes ran from the hub to the rim, some pulling toward the left and some toward the right, and how each one ended in a tiny nut that could be tightened or loosened a quarter turn at a time. Tighten a spoke on the right, and that part of the rim drifted right. Loosen one on the left, and it did the same. Every adjustment changed the balance of the whole wheel, and every change had to be answered by another.

¹⁰"Quarter turn," Abuelo said whenever she reached for the wheel. "Only a quarter. Then look."

¹¹"Can't I just do a few full turns and get it over with?"

¹²He shook his head and spun the wheel. Tick. "Too much, and you fix this place"—he touched the rim—"and you break that place." He pointed to a spot on the opposite side. "The wheel is one thing. Not many things."

¹³Inés did not understand this, and she said so. Abuelo only shrugged and handed her the wrench again.

¹⁴By eleven o'clock the tick had become a whisper. By noon it had disappeared from the left arm and reappeared, faintly, on the right, and Inés groaned so loudly that the baker next door may have heard her. But Abuelo did not take the wrench. He sat on his stool and ate half a sandwich and waited, the way the shop itself seemed to wait, patient as brick.

¹⁵Somewhere in the afternoon, Inés stopped checking her phone. She did not notice when it happened. She was watching the gap between the rim and the metal arms, a gap so thin she had to tilt her head to see light pass through it, and she was listening for the tick, and she was thinking in quarter turns. When the light finally slipped through that gap evenly all the way around—no flicker, no scrape, just a steady silver line—she sat back and realized that her neck ached and that it was nearly four o'clock.

¹⁶Abuelo leaned over and spun the wheel. He watched it the way he had watched it that morning, for a long time, saying nothing. Then he pulled his glasses down from his forehead, settled them on his nose, and watched it again.

¹⁷"Good," he said.

¹⁸It was one word, and it should not have mattered as much as it did.

¹⁹When Mrs. Hadley came back the next day, she lifted the front of the bike and spun the wheel herself, and she smiled. "You'd never know," she said. Inés, behind the register, found that she was grinning and could not stop.

²⁰That night Jada sent a video of the rope swing: a long arc out over the lake and a white splash. Inés watched it twice and typed, Looks amazing. Then she added, I fixed a wheel today. She thought about explaining—the spokes pulling against one another, the quarter turns, the line of light—but none of it would fit into a text. She put the phone face down on her nightstand.

²¹In the morning, she was out of the car before her mother had finished parking. Abuelo was already at the bench. Without looking up, he slid a second wheel across the wood toward her, and beside it, the spoke wrench.