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to Mr. Schneider’s homeroom, crawled inside and scrambled to his feet. “Cody!” he called out.
    There was no response.
    Jake slammed the door shut behind him and pressed his back against the wall. He locked the door but he doubted it would take the Proctor more than a second or two to kick it in. Anyway there was a glass window inset into the door and the Proctor could just break the glass, reach through, and unlock the door himself.
    “Cody!” Jake shouted again, “I need your help!”
He turned to look for his friend, who still wasn’t answering him. He realized how quiet the room was. It sounded as if it were completely empty. But that wasn’t the case—the students were all there, each of them sitting in a chair with an integrated wooden desk. Their bags and books were tucked neatly under their seats, and they were all looking forward, toward the front of the room, toward Mr. Schneider’s desk. Mr. Schneider sat there, just where he should be.
    Yet no one was moving. Their faces were slack, their mouths hanging open at the corners. Their eyes stared glassily forward and their arms hung loose at their sides. Jake checked one of the students and found that she was, in fact, still breathing, but no matter how hard he shook her shoulder or yelled in her ear, she didn’t come around.
    The doorknob rattled behind him. He could see the Proctor’s mask in the inset window, reflecting the horrible scene inside. The Proctor tapped on the glass with his gun, as if he were trying to point something out to Jake.
    Jake looked in the direction the Proctor was indicating and saw that one chair was empty. His own, of course. He was the only one missing from the room.
    The Proctor tapped on the glass again, and nodded.
    Jake licked his lips. He thought he knew what the Proctor wanted. Slowly he made his way between the rows of seats until he reached the empty chair, then he sat down in it and placed his hands on the wooden paddle-shape of the integrated desk.
    The Proctor nodded again, then turned and walked off. Jake breathed heavily, pulling oxygen into his lungs, gasping out the stale carbon dioxide. He had never been so scared in his life. He didn’t think it could be that easy. He didn’t think they would just let him go like that. Unless this had been the point of the test. Pick the right envelope—to demonstrate some ability to think outside the box—then survive to get back to homeroom. But it couldn’t be that easy, could it?
    The PA box mounted on the ceiling near the door squealed out a loud electronic noise for a second. Then a growling, animalistic voice—similar to the Proctor’s whispers but louder and much more aggressive—said a single word. It sounded like “Wake.”
    Around Jake mouths snapped shut. Arms lifted and students rubbed at their faces as if they were waking from a refreshing nap. Conversations started up in mid-sentence and someone passed a note forward from one desk to another.
    Jake stared around him, even more creeped out by this return to life than he had been by the sight of twenty-nine unconscious students. He was still breathing hard and sweat was rolling down his face.
    “What have you been doing, jerking off?” asked a fat kid in a black t-shirt on Jake’s left.
    “Ignore him,” Cody said. Cody was sitting on Jake’s right. He reached over and grabbed Jake’s arm. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
    “No,” Jake said. His voice sounded like a frog croaking. He glanced around and knew that if he told Cody what had happened, the other students would hear—and they would think he was crazy. “I’ll tell you later,” he said.
    Cody nodded but he still looked concerned. Just then the bell rang, announcing first period. Cody got up and grabbed his books up into his arms. “Meet me at lunch. You know where,” he said. “We’ll talk then.”
    Jake nodded gratefully. He was too shaken to formulate a plan himself, just then.
    He was too shaken to do anything. He had