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when I paused, toothbrush stuffed into my mouth, all I heard was a neighbor kid yelling at another neighbor kid somewhere in the distance.
    Laney College is an orderly assembly of buildings beside an estuary of ducks and a few spindly reeds. There is almost always a hot-dog stand—a cart on wheels and a man who will nab a wiener off a rotating grill with a pair of pincers. You can wander around the campus and never get the idea it is a school. The office windows have been treated with a gray tint so when you peer in to see what is going on inside, you see yourself hunching in to take a look. Even when you see something, it’s a box of paper clips or a computer and an empty desk. You never see anyone reading or punching away at a keyboard.
    This morning the campus was vacant, entirely, like during a bomb threat. The hot-dog stand was double-chained to a lamppost, padlocked shut. The GED exam was scheduled to be held in the cafeteria. I was there five minutes early, but the room was empty, vending machines of canned fruit juice and sandwiches against a far wall, tables ready for people, folding chairs ready, but no one around. The clock on the wall was the same size as a clock in a much smaller room, an ordinary black-and-white classroom clock looking tiny over the EXIT .
    The chalkboard, one of those brown boards in a wooden frame on wheels, had printed on it, neatly and so small it was hard to read: G ED TEST IN ROOM 111 . BRING PHOTO ID .
    I ran upstairs, passing door after door with no number, Computer Room, Counseling Department, Financial Assistance. This was a nightmare campus, ready for business, but all the human beings gone. I stood outside a door marked SECURITY and jiggled the doorknob. I thought I heard noises from within, but they were sleepy noises, someone rousing, stretching, wondering if that pounding was coming from the door.
    â€œRoom one-one-one,” said a campus cop when the door finally opened up. I had asked for room one-eleven, but the cop made it a little game, saying the three ones again. “You have to be in one-one-one in two minutes,” he said.
    â€œI’m afraid I got a little lost,” I said.
    He took me by the arm and stretched out a hand, a crooked finger pointing.
    â€œBut,” he said, “you better move.” He said move in a way that stretched out the word and indicated how impossible it was.
    I made it to the room just as a box of exams was being opened, shipping tape torn off a box stamped CALIF. STATE DEPT. OF ED . I handed over my driver’s license, out of breath. I counted out the money I had kept in a special compartment of my wallet.
    People lounged, chewing gum or fingernails. Someone read a sports section, someone plucked at a tangle of earphone wires, in no hurry, the knot a kind of hobby. My dad had called up and made the arrangements, letting me take the test with a group of people who were older than I was, a couple of them much older, heavy, gray-haired men. The myth about the GED test was that convicts took it in prison, and ex-cons, trying to get jobs in barber college and bartender school. The room was mostly men, picking pimples, sucking hangnails.
    It was a little like the time I was arrested and watched my fingers being rolled on the black gooey ink and rolled again over the space on a white card, each fingerprint spread out wide and flat. The room had that same stillness, another planet, a system that felt no love.
    I sat in the front, far from the door, where I could stare into a corner. A little empty bracket gleamed at one edge of the chalkboard, where an American flag was supposed to be.
    â€œI am your test administrator for today,” said a tall woman with a gold jacket and gold pants, round hoop earrings. She had dark hair pulled back in a frilly little bun and caramel colored skin, hot pink lipstick like a road flare. She said she would like to welcome each one of us and wish us a very good morning. She acted like