Brain Freeze by Philip Hoy
Amanda moved up
the ramp along with the rest of the AP United States History students, shuffled
through the open door, and slid into the seat of the first available desk. She’d
never been in this classroom before and with the bulletin boards covered over with
butcher paper it was hard to tell what subject was taught in here. The man at
the front of the classroom calling names she recognized: Mr. Delano. He had
been her sophomore English Honors teacher. She saw the look of recognition on
his face when he got to her name on the roster, and she smiled back at him when
he handed her an answer sheet.
After listening
to the necessary warnings and instructions and bubbling this and signing that,
the plastic wrap on the exam booklets was removed and the test began. The first
reading was from the Brown v. Board of
Education decision. Amanda breathed a sigh of relief. She knew this one.
She had studied it religiously. She read the first question carefully: This decision most directly reflected a
growing belief after the Second World War that the power of the federal
government should be used to, A: promote greater racial justice, B: defend
traditional visions of morality, C: foster—
And then it
happened. The air conditioner turned on.
Amanda tore her
eyes away from her test and turned her face toward the ceiling and the air vent
directly above her.
When the rooms
weren’t too hot they were too cold, and despite the fact that the covers on
these vents were meant to disperse the air in four separate directions, a single
column of icy wind blew down upon the heads of whomever had the misfortune of
sitting directly beneath them.
Some people
didn’t mind. They found the blanket of frost comforting. Amanda hated it. It
gave her brain freeze. Not the sudden immobilizing pain that came from
swallowing too much ice cream too quickly, but a slow, steady, chill induced,
coma. First her neck would begin to ache, then her temples would pound, and
finally, she would pillow her head in her arms, lay it on the desktop, and fall
asleep.
Sonia Sotomayor herself
could be standing before her and it wouldn’t matter. Her brain would be
useless. It just wouldn’t work.
Whenever she
found herself beneath one of these cold zones she had to ask the teacher to
please move her. Most teachers did so the very next day, if not immediately. While
others, like her AP U.S. History teacher Ms. Foster for example (the kind of
teacher who struggled to comprehend a classroom with even one student not
sitting in alphabetized order), needed a phone call from Amanda’s parents to
the principal to force the seating change.
Maybe that’s why
Ms. Foster hated Amanda, why she sat her in a lone desk pushed up against the far
wall near the back of the room, why she never called on her in class, why she at
least once a week marked her absent by mistake, why she never scored any of her
essays higher than a B, and why she either dismissed or failed to acknowledge
any observation Amanda attempted to contribute during class discussions.
If
multiple-choice tests weren’t worth sixty percent of Ms. Foster’s overall
grade, Amanda could never have earned the A she had in the class now. Ms. Foster
might want to deny her existence, but she couldn’t ignore Amanda’s near perfect
test scores.
Except that
yesterday when Ms. Foster had announced she had baked the class cupcakes in
honor of their big AP exam the next morning, and she had walked up and down the
aisles placing a cupcake on the corner of each student’s desk, she had somehow
forgotten to give one to Amanda.
When someone in
the class had pointed this out, Ms. Foster frowned in Amanda’s general
direction, peered down into the foil-lined cardboard box still in her hands,
and said, “Well, lucky for Amanda, I thought to bring an extra one, just in
case.”
Mr. Delano must
have noticed her staring at the ceiling because he walked over and asked
quietly, “Are you okay, Amanda? Is the air bothering you? Do you need to sit
somewhere else?”
She looked down
at her test. A dull ache had already begun to spread across her forehead and
the words on the page were beginning to blur. She turned to Mr. Delano. She
liked him. He had always been respectful and fair with her. “No,” she said.
“I’m good right here.”
