“Please calm down. I already told you I bombed it,” I say. I’m not nervous about my score—it will be, no doubt, embarrassingly low. That’s what happens when you eeny-meeny-miny-moe half the questions. I’m only nervous about how my parents will take the news. After all the money spent, the countless hours of private tutoring, and a testing accommodation, these results will confirm for them their deepest, quietest suspicion: that their eldest daughter is, in fact, a moron.

I don’t want to watch that disappointment play out on their faces in real time. I don’t want to see the inevitable sag and the exhale, and worst of all, their attempts to hide it all so they can protect my feelings. There will be hugs and tears and a reflexive need to comfort me; all the while I’ll know they’re making eye contact over my head and having their own terrible conversation.

“Stop being so negative, sweetheart. I bet you did great,” my dad says in a voice I recognize from childhood, the one he’d use after I fell, when he’d scoop me up so fast that I wouldn’t have time to notice the hurt. I’m sitting in front of what we call the “home computer,” which is the desktop in the playroom, although we each have our own laptops and iPads and iPhones. Between us, there are at least twelve other gadgets I could have used that would not have required me to sit here, with my parents standing behind me, so close I can not only smell but also feel their hot coffee breath. Their bodies tent over mine, as if to shield me.

I should have done this in the bathroom, before they woke up, behind a locked door. I could have stepped straight into a steaming hot shower to scream afterward.

I want to remind them that the SAT isn’t a group sport. Neither is college admissions. But that will only make things worse. I know my parents. They will take this score like a punch.

I want to ask them to please not scoop me back up this time—no conciliatory hugs—that we should each retreat to our corners after to lick our own wounds. I don’t know how to say this without hurting them.

I sign in to my College Board account and take a deep breath.

“Right there, honey. Click there,” my mom says, pointing with a long, blue-polished fingernail to the results link. She’s the only person in the world over the age of twenty-five who can get away with blue nail polish. “I’m so nervous and excited. I’m nervited!”

“Mom,” I say.

“I’m excervous,” my dad says.

“Stop, guys,” I say.

“Relax. This is going to be so great. Click it already!” my mom says.