“Because even if I guess completely randomly, I’ll still probably end up getting some of the questions right?”
“No,” Skylar said. “Because all multiple-choice tests are subject to … the code!”
I must have looked as clueless as I felt.
“It is like this,” John Michael explained. “Multiple-choice tests are written by people, yes? And the people, they tend to write them in a certain way. The code is Darryl’s theory about the way the tests are written. And if you know how a test is written, you can pass it, even if you do not know the answers in and of themselves.”
“Seriously?” I asked.
Skylar nodded. “Darryl took the AP psychology exam last year, just for fun. He only missed two multiple-choice questions, and he never even took the class.”
Okay, that was kind of impressive.
“So what’s the code?” I couldn’t help lowering my voice to a whisper as I spoke. There was a certain solemnity to this moment.
“It’s pretty simple.”
It took me a minute to realize that Darryl was the one speaking. His voice was low in volume, but higher in pitch than I’d expected it to be, given his size.
“McCormick’s tests have four choices, A through D. One is the correct answer. Two are decoys. The fourth can be anything, except that it’s not related to the first three.”
I really wasn’t following here.
“All you have to do is figure out which answer matches up to two different decoys,” Skylar said. “So say you’ve got a test that asks you, I don’t know … what the color and consistency of a zombie’s tongue is.”
Genevieve giggled and then popped a french fry into her mouth. Clearly, she’d never been up close and personal with the walking dead, because ew.
“Ahem,” Skylar said, clearing her throat, but she spoiled the effect by reaching over and stealing one of Genevieve’s fries. “So, anyway, what is the color and consistency of a zombie’s tongue? (a) black and hardened, (b) black and rotting, (c) brown and rotting, or (d) blue and scabby?”
E, I thought, none of the above. Zombies didn’t have tongues. Like a caterpillar eating its way through its cocoon, the first thing Homo mortis did upon rising was eat the flesh out of its own mouth.
“Ummm … D?” I guessed, because I wasn’t about to share that little tidbit with the table as a whole. As far as the rest of the world knew, I didn’t have any more experience with zombies than the next girl. I knew that they existed. I knew to call Preternatural Control in the unlikely event that I saw one, but that was it. I didn’t know what a horde of zombies smelled like. I couldn’t feel them coming from a mile away. I’d certainly never snuck into my father’s lab and disemboweled twelve of them in one night.
“Wrong,” Darryl said softly.
Yeah, I thought back. Most people think what I do is very, very wrong. But then I remembered that, unless Darryl was psychic (and really, who believed in psychics these days?), he was referring to my answer, not my hunting habits.
Darryl smiled, as if softening the blow. “If the answer was ‘blue and scabby,’ what would the decoys be?”
Sensing that Darryl had just about reached his word limit for continuous speech, Skylar picked up where he’d left off. “When people write multiple-choice tests, they like to give you some answers that are almost right to keep you from picking the right one. Even if the teacher tries to write the answers randomly, it’s nearly impossible to do, so they end up coming up with at least a couple of alternatives that have something in common with the real answer. In this case, ‘blue and scabby’ is the complete oddball.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “So you throw that one out and you’ve got three choices left.”
“Right, so then you look and you find one choice that has something in common with the other two. In this case, the word black and the word rotting both appear twice.”
“So the ones that have black or rotting in it are the decoys, and the one that has both words in it is the answer?” I asked. The method didn’t seem foolproof to me, but it was probably better than my previous plan, which had involved playing eenie meenie miny moe.
“It does not always work,” John Michael said, echoing my thoughts, “but it is a lot better than guessing randomly.”
Again, I tried to place his accent, and again, I failed. Still, John Michael’s words had taken my mind off zombies. And hellhounds. And the other thirty-seven species of preternatural fauna identified since Darwin had gone public with the discovery of the Galápagos hydra, and mankind had started turning over stones better left unturned.