7th Grade Reading Quiz
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Read the memoir excerpt and answer the question.
My older cousin Marisol used to run track, and she talked about training the way my friends talked about phone upgrades: with certainty that improvement was inevitable if you followed the right steps. When I visited her one August, she invited me to jog with her. I agreed because saying no felt like admitting something I didn't want to name.
At dawn the neighborhood was still sleepy. Sprinklers clicked on and off, and the sidewalks glistened as if they had been freshly painted. Marisol set an easy pace, but my lungs argued immediately. After two blocks, I started counting mailboxes the way you count minutes in a boring class—trying to make the effort feel smaller.
"You don't have to win," Marisol said, noticing my face. "Just stay with it." She pointed to a stop sign at the end of the street. "Let that be your only job." The stop sign looked ordinary, yet it became a lighthouse: a single, reachable thing in a sea of discomfort.
When we reached it, I expected relief to arrive like applause. Instead, Marisol turned us around. My frustration rose, hot and sudden. She must have seen it because she slowed down and said, "This is the part people skip when they tell the story later. The turning back."
That sentence followed me into the school year. Whenever homework piled up or friendships got complicated, I remembered the stop sign and the turn. Progress, I realized, is not a straight line. It is a willingness to begin again while you're still tired.
Question: In the context of the excerpt, what does the "stop sign" most likely represent?
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