"I knew it," she said. "I want you to know that. I knew all of it. I could sit right there"—she pointed at the dining room table, at the place under all my shoeboxes where she used to sit with her flash cards—"I could sit right there and do every problem in the book. Equilibrium. Acids and bases. Gibbs free energy. I could do it in my sleep. I did do it in my sleep, I used to wake up doing it. And then I'd go into Hammond for the exam and they'd hand it out and I'd look at the first question and my hands would go."
"Go," my mother said.
"Like this." Krista held up her hands. They were shaking right then, a little, but she meant more than that. "And then I couldn't breathe right. I'd breathe and it wouldn't go all the way down. And everybody else is writing, you can hear three hundred pencils, and the proctor's walking up and down, and there's a clock on the wall that's really loud, and I'd look at the question and it would just be marks. Like I'd never seen it before in my life. It would just be marks on paper." She laughed, which was awful. "Like a roof."
The first exam she got a forty-one. She'd never gotten below an eighty-eight on anything in her life. She told herself it was a fluke. The second exam she went in and sat down and the same thing happened, only worse, and about twenty minutes in she got up and walked out and threw up in the bathroom on the second floor of Hammond and sat on the floor of the stall until the exam was over. She got a zero on that one. She went to the student counseling center the next week, and the woman at the front desk gave her a clipboard and a form and told her the wait for an intake appointment was six weeks. She filled it out. They called her for the appointment in finals week. She didn't go, because she had a final.
"Did you fail the final," my mother said.
"I didn't take the final."
"Krista."
"I went. I went to Hammond. I stood outside the door. I could see them all in there, getting their pencils out. I stood there for the whole two hours."
She failed Gen Chem Two with a twenty-something. She got D's in two other classes, because by April she wasn't sleeping and couldn't go into any classroom without her hands starting, and she got an F in a stats class she'd simply stopped attending. Her GPA for the semester was a 0.9. It pulled her cumulative under the 2.0 that the university required, never mind the 2.5 that Lake Promise required, and in June the letters started coming.