Chapter 96: Scores
One week after Monica's birthday. Central Perk, mid-morning.
"Chandler. Hey. Chandler."
"What?" Chandler surfaced from wherever he'd been, blinking. "I didn't — what? What were we talking about?"
"Joey's audition," Andrew said. "The woman he met in the waiting room. You've been somewhere else for the last five minutes."
"I wasn't somewhere else. I was listening. She was — tall? Brunette?"
"Redhead," Joey said. "And she does commercials, mostly, but she's been doing some theater work on the side, and she has this laugh—"
"Great," Chandler said. "That's great, Joey."
Joey accepted this and continued. Ross had his coffee and was nodding along with the specific Ross expression of someone participating in a conversation about dating while privately filing it as less interesting than paleontology.
Andrew watched Chandler.
Chandler looked fine. Chandler was performing fine with some precision — the right responses at roughly the right moments, the deflecting humor arriving on schedule. But he'd been doing this for a week, ever since Monica's birthday, and Andrew had spent enough time in rooms with Chandic to know the difference between Chandler present and Chandler managing.
Something had happened.
Andrew didn't know the specifics. He hadn't been in the apartment when Ross and Joey were asleep and Phoebe was in Monica's room and the lamp was still on in the kitchen. He knew what the room had felt like when he left. He knew what Janice had said in the hallway before she walked down the stairs.
Whatever had happened after that was between Chandler and Monica, and neither of them had said a word about it in seven days.
Which was itself information.
'Chandler,' Andrew thought, watching him laugh at something Joey said, 'what exactly did you do.'
Chandler, as if feeling the weight of the observation, looked over.
Andrew looked back with complete neutrality.
Chandler looked away first.
"Andrew."
He turned. Christie was standing at the edge of the couch area, bag over her shoulder, expression carrying the specific flatness of someone who had expected something and not received it.
"Christie." He registered the situation immediately. "You're back."
"Two days ago," she said.
He'd forgotten her schedule entirely. The honest thing was to say so. "I forgot. I'm sorry." He reached into his jacket pocket and found the spare key — he'd been carrying it out of habit since changing the locks a few months back. He held it out.
Christie took it without ceremony and left.
Chandler watched this. "Why are you just sitting here with us instead of going to talk to her?"
"Nothing to talk about," Andrew said. He rotated his left shoulder, which had been complaining for three days. He'd gotten back into a proper training schedule after the SAT prep had ended — making up for two months of neglect — and his body was expressing its feelings about this clearly.
"Nothing to — Andrew, she's—"
"She's seventeen, Chandler."
Chandler paused. "I thought she was—"
"Seventeen," Andrew confirmed.
Chandler nodded slowly. "Nothing to talk about," he agreed.
Ross had been reading the paper. He looked up from it with the expression of someone who had just registered something.
"Andrew. You took the SAT last month, right?"
"Yeah."
"Scores are out." Ross turned the paper and held out a small item from the bottom of the Metro section. College Board SAT Results Available by Phone Starting This Morning.
Andrew took the paper, read it, set it down, and stood up.
"Gunther." He was already moving toward the counter. "Can I use the phone?"
Gunther looked at him, looked at the phone, shrugged in the specific Gunther way that meant yes but I'm not enthusiastic about it.
The line was busy.
Then busy again.
Then busy five more times in a row, which was apparently the College Board's approach to releasing scores — make everyone call simultaneously and let them fight it out. Andrew redialed with the patience of someone who had decided this was just a thing that was going to take as long as it took.
On the eighth attempt, it connected.
He worked through the automated system — social security number, date of birth, the specific bureaucratic gauntlet of 1994 score retrieval — and got the number.
He hung up.
His three friends had migrated to the counter area during the wait, which was very them.
"Well?" Joey said.
"1403," Andrew said.
Ross's expression cycled through something complicated. "That's — Andrew, that's genuinely not bad."
"For someone who crammed for a month, starting from essentially zero," Chandler said.
"It's not Columbia," Andrew said.
"No," Ross agreed, then caught himself. "I mean—"
"It's fine, Ross. I know what the Columbia average is."
The Columbia average for admitted students sat around 1530, 1540 — he'd looked it up. NYU was lower but still above where he'd landed. The gap between 1403 and competitive was real and he wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
What 1403 actually represented, though, was more interesting than the number suggested.
Three months of studying from a standing start — high school material he'd either skipped, forgotten, or never properly learned. One month of focused test prep. No tutors, no prep course, just the panel's test-taking skill set and his own consistent work.
The panel's Test Preparation skill had done what it was designed to do: strategy, pacing, elimination technique, how to allocate time across sections, how to manage the specific cognitive load of a four-hour standardized test. What it couldn't do — what no skill could do — was substitute for the underlying knowledge base. He hadn't had five years of consistent math instruction. The panel couldn't manufacture that from nothing. It could only help him use what he had more efficiently.
What he had had gotten him to 1403.
Given another six months of actual content review, the number would move significantly. He'd known going in that this sitting was diagnostic — a real score he could use, but also a baseline.
He'd estimated 1400 walking out of the testing center. He'd been right within three points.
That was actually the most useful data point of the morning.
"It's a solid foundation," Andrew said. "I'll sit again in the fall."
"How many times did you take it?" Joey asked Ross.
Ross opened his mouth.
"Don't," Chandler said.
"I was just going to say—"
"Ross, I love you, and whatever you're about to say is going to come out as a humblebrag about Princeton, and it's nine in the morning."
Ross closed his mouth. Then opened it again. "I took it multiple times. The score improved significantly each time. That's genuinely encouraging information for Andrew."
"How many times?" Joey pressed.
"That's not the point."
"Ross," Andrew said.
Ross sighed. "Six times."
"And your first score?" Andrew said.
A pause. "1470."
Andrew looked at him.
"Which is higher than yours," Ross added, helpfully.
"Go to hell, Ross," Andrew said, without heat.
"I'm just saying the trajectory is encouraging—"
"I know," Andrew said. "That's why I'm not upset about it."
He picked up his coffee, which had gone slightly cold during the phone odyssey, and drank it anyway.
Starting point. Not destination.
He was already thinking about the fall.
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