Somehow I didn’t think so, or else they’d been incredibly ineffectual at conveying that lesson to most of the students here so far.
The classroom was at the back of the second floor, one I hadn’t been in before. As I walked over, a couple of the other professors came stealing up the stairs—Hubert and a man whose name I didn’t recall who’d instructed us in seemingly random sketching techniques during my art class last week. Hubert glanced over at the art professor and brushed a sprinkling of pale gray dust she must have just noticed off her shoulder.
I knew that stuff. It ended up sprinkled on my clothes every time I went down to the basement for laundry duty.
Why would any of the professors have been mucking around in that dank space? I hadn’t poked around in the basement much because it’d seemed to be all maintenance-related rooms, nothing really to do with the students, but apparently I should give it a closer look when I had the chance.
For the moment, I had to focus on discovering what “Tolerance” meant at Roseborne College. I walked into the classroom and wavered just past the threshold, re-evaluating my expectations.
The room wasn’t set up like most with their rows of desks, or even like the art room with its larger tables shoved close together. This was a science lab. The high, black-topped tables with their little sinks and the stools poised behind them made that obvious, even if they were an older style than we’d had at my high school back home.
Why shouldn’t we have some kind of science class? I guessed that would make for a well-rounded education. But this wasn’t what I’d been picturing from the class name at all.
A few students were already perched on the stools. I took one at a free table, not sure whether there’d be enough of us that we’d need to share. Violet came in, glanced around, and picked the table next to mine, giving me her unburnt side in profile. Her expression was tight, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen her relaxed, so I couldn’t draw any conclusions from that.
“Hey,” I said. She’d bothered to talk to me a little before—maybe she would again. “What’s this class about, anyway?”
Violet turned to look at me, revealing the ravage down the middle of her face. Under the classroom lights, it was even more obvious that some of the smaller patches remained raw red. They weren’t just scars but not-yet-healed wounds.
“Just one more thing to trudge through,” she said. “You’ll get used to it.”
At that moment, the professor swept in. She was a petite woman with a full skirt that rustled over the floor, her salt-and-pepper curls pulled back from her rounded face by two tortoiseshell clips. She bent down by the desk that stretched most of the front of the room, twice as long as any of ours, and set out a row of plastic trays on its glossy surface.
“Let’s see how you all fare today,” she said with a brightness that felt more sharp than warm. “Come up and collect your supplies. As always, we’ll proceed by order of experience from least to most, so Miss Corbyn—” Her gaze found me from across the room. “You’ll begin. Your instructions and observation sheet are on your tray.” She tapped the one at the beginning of the row.
The other nine students got up as I did. I approached the front desk warily, but the contents of the trays didn’t reveal a whole lot. Mine held just a vial of clear liquid and a packet of beige powder. Most of the others had multiple vials or packets, none of them labeled. I guessed we were doing some kind of experiment.
My sheet was marked with the class and my name, followed by a chart for me to note the date and any observations I made at each of the numbered stages. Today was number one, obviously, and my very brief instruction sheet was labeled with a corresponding 1.
Mix the powder into the water. Swivel vigorously to mix (do not shake). Drink the entire contents and note any physical sensations that emerge after five minutes.
I was supposed to drink this stuff? My body balked before I’d even sat back down at my table. I hadn’t been counting on experimenting on myself. And what effects did Professor Marsden expect this mysterious powder to have on me?
“You may proceed, Miss Corbyn,” the professor said pointedly.
I opened the cap on the vial and then the powder packet with deliberate care to give me time to consider while I went through the motions. A sniff of the powder didn’t give me any concern—all I got was a faint salty whiff. It could have just been lightly colored, finely ground salt. Tolerance: a test of what unknowns we were willing to accept from the teachers rather than refusing?
If these were regimented steps like Marsden had indicated, then everyone else in this room had passed through this stage before with no obvious harm done. The guy at the table in front of mine was on the back side of his observation sheet, with the chart filled all the way to stage forty-seven. How bad could it be?
In a matter of seconds, the powder dissolved into the water with my swirling of the vial. The water looked just as clear as before. I gave it another sniff and set my jaw. I’d drunk, smoked, and snorted stuff from uncertain sources plenty of times in the past. Was I really going to chicken out and let the jerks around me think I really was the “tourist” Jenson had claimed?
Without letting any more doubts creep in, I tossed back the mixture.
It wasn’t a large gulp—all down in one swallow. The light salty flavor lingered in my mouth, noticeable but not unpleasant. Professor Marsden motioned to the clock beside the door. “Five minutes,” she reminded me. “Mr. Frum, you may proceed.”
A guy at the far end of the room who barely looked old enough to be in college poured the contents of one of his two vials into the other and then used a little wooden stick to stir in a white powder. He hesitated for a second and then threw it back like I had. From the grimace he made, its flavor had been worse than mine.
The next student got down to work. The minute hand on the clock was almost at my five-minute mark, and a faint tingling sensation spread through my stomach. Maybe that was just anticipation or a psychosomatic effect? The feeling sank a little deeper, morphing into mild queasiness, but nothing I couldn’t have ignored if I hadn’t been paying close attention to my bodily functions. I noted it down on the chart, since that was the only thing I had to report.
There. That hadn’t been so bad.
The boy who’d gone after me still had his mouth set in a grimace. As my queasiness faded, nearly as quickly as it’d come on, he scratched at the back of his neck and then his arms. His concoction had made him itchy? This had to be the weirdest class yet. I still didn’t get what the purpose was. To test how we tolerated various minor discomforts?
I hadn’t been paying much attention to the order the other students were working in. A girl at the front of the class, who I thought had gone third, jerked her hand to her belly, her shoulders going rigid. She held herself stiffly in place while I watched. A flush crept over her skin. After a few minutes, whatever she’d experienced appeared to fade. Her posture started to relax. She grabbed her pen and started to write on her chart.
And then the boy next to her started to wheeze.
All of us turned to look except Violet, who was mixing her various ingredients at the moment. The guy’s back shuddered with each wracking breath, which sounded as if the air was being dragged into his lungs through the thinnest and rustiest of grates. He wobbled on his stool, a bluish cast coming over his cheeks. My own lungs tightened in anxiety.