Pencils, Erasers, and Disqualifications
- Reynie Muldoon, age eleven, finds his way to the Monk Building in downtown Stonetown for a day of (hold on to your hat) testing.
- Sounds like punishment, right? Not to Reynie. We find out through a bit of backstory that he's there because he read an ad that asked, "Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?" (1.6), and Reynie is both of those things—gifted and looking for special opportunities. He and his tutor, Miss Perumal, who is a mother figure to him (Reynie's parents died when he was a baby), reply to the ad and get Reynie signed up for the tests that could lead to the special opportunities.
- Now back to the Monk building.
- These tests are weird. For one thing, they're administered by a woman who looks like a pencil—a "thin woman in a mustard yellow suit, with a yellowish complexion, short-cropped, rusty-red hair, and a stiff posture" (1.41)—and for another, both Reynie and the reader get the impression that he's being tested even when he's not being tested. Huh? It's like this: even when he's in between short-answer and multiple-choice exams, he still feels like he's being evaluated. Like it matters just as much how he behaves between tests as it does how he performs on the tests themselves. And the tests, just in case you forgot, are weird.
- But weird or not, Reynie passes two separate stages of testing. And kudos for him: each time he's the only child in his session to do so.