The enormity of the brick walls, the towering ceiling they held up, shrunk me. I was in a warehouse, the subject of some kind of experiment. I felt it was by accident that I had gotten there and the knowledge that I had not been nominated for the test compressed me. Someone had thought my little brother was “highly capable,” and so I had a right to be tested, too—to be skipped over for the plays, the writing workshops and speaking events, too. Across the table from me was my cousin Kelly and three of her friends. They had all received their own nominations, as my cousin reminded me, and felt that they deserved to be there. I was too spacey, too forgetful. I was a mouse wearing a human disguise.

Most of the test was what I had expected. There were problems we needed to solve, some math, some thought. I weaved my pencil through the puzzles. I twisted strands of hair through the fingers of my left hand. I bounced my right knee until I noticed and could stop. If I could only concentrate… But then each of the ten of us were handed sheets of paper, a grid with one-inch squares. We were told to use our pencils to draw whatever we wanted, filling as much of the page as we could.

The grid lines fell away. I pictured a tree in the foreground, taking up the left side of my view so that it expanded past the limits of the page. Slightly behind it would be a fence and just past that, a neighbor’s house. Above the fence and house, the sky would be cut by a telephone cable and the flight of a small, black bird. I glanced, guilty, toward some of my test-mates’ papers. I could make out that they were drawing individual pictures to fill each box. I thought they were probably right, that those had been the instructions. I felt the tension in my jaw as I chewed over the problem—to trust the other students or my own creative intuition?

“I am unique,” I told myself, not because I knew it but because I had so often been told.

So, I drew my picture filling the whole page. I textured the leaves, the wood of the fence, the shingles of the house. I shaded where I thought shadows would fall. It was just me and my art.

Time was up; it had been the last section of the test. I placed my hands on top of the old, poorly finished desk. Stains of indigo, peach, and green here and there made me think it must have been used for an art class. I thought it was perfect. Looking around, I noticed the windows were grand but not looming. The brick was wise but not decrepit. And a rare, bright Bellingham sun fell across the art tables, their navy blue plastic chairs, and me.