About two hours later, I’m working my way through the third section of the exam while Proctor Dan sits behind a desk and noisily reads a newspaper. Each time he turns a page, the crinkling disrupts my focus. Couldn’t he read the news on his phone like everyone else?

The “math, no calculator” section is the part that always trips me up the most. I see Linda’s floating head on FaceTime: First identify the kind of question. Okay. This is what they call “passport to advanced math.” Now what? The equation—numbers and letters and symbols I don’t understand—swims on the page. My heart pounds, loud and arrhythmic, and my chest tightens. I wonder about the mechanics of the human body. If my blood can break free of my throbbing veins and drown me. I put my head down on the desk and close my eyes to stop the undulating.

I try some of the box breathing I learned from my meditation teacher. In for four, hold for four, out for four. Or something like that. Even that information has been wiped clean.

“You okay?” Proctor Dan asks, but I don’t answer. My body is slick with sweat, and I have the adrenaline shakes that always precede my puking.

I cannot throw up on the SAT. How do they even score an exam that’s drenched in vomit? No. Not going to happen. I’m better than this. I box breathe some more. I channel Isla, Shola too, their coolness under pressure. Their shared ability to stuff the fear away, into a pocket that can’t be reached.

“Chloe?”

I nod, though my head is still down. I lift one hand, a single finger, as if to say as politely as possible without words Give me a second, please.

“It’s okay. We have unlimited time here. Take as much as you need. No rush,” he says, so calm, I wonder if maybe he has a stash of those gummies from next door. Clearly he’s talked hundreds of students like me through panic attacks. I wonder why I couldn’t have had Proctor Dan the two previous times I took the test. I didn’t freak out then like I am now—mostly because I didn’t know how badly I’d bombed until I got back my score—but I could have used the general support. Maybe I needed this accommodation after all. “Just skip what you don’t know, and you can always go back to it later. Not a prob.”

I lift my head and wipe my forehead with my sleeve. Sniff at my wrist, where my mom rubbed some lavender essential oil she bought off Goop to relax me. The question rearranges itself into a normal-looking equation. Still, no amount of time or essence from the Provençal region is going to give me the answer. The SAT is written in a language I don’t speak.