English Language Arts: Character Analysis (TEKS.ELA.9-12.7.B) Practice Test

Elena watched the book club split into small constellations around the living room, conversations glittering and dimming as easily as the ice in their glasses. June stood near the mantle, smiling too brightly while someone joked about "forgetters" who never repay loans. Elena's throat tightened. She alone knew June had returned the money early that morning by sliding an envelope under their hostess's door, hoping to avoid spectacle. Elena kept still, cupping her glass to warm it as if coaxing truth out of it. The room's laughter thinned into a silence that felt like a dare. Elena's mother had once been humiliated over a grocery bill at a crowded counter; the memory, sharp as citrus, made Elena fearful of public disclosures that masquerade as honesty. Her choice not to speak fanned the group's doubt; glances hardened into judgments, and June's smile faltered. When the hostess reappeared, waving the found envelope with confused relief, the tension didn't break; it curdled. Elena finally stepped forward, voice quiet, and told a story not about the debt but about how tenderness can be ruined by an audience. She framed June's secrecy as care, not concealment. The room exhaled. People nodded. June's smile, this time, reached her eyes.

In the heat-shivered noon of South Texas, 1919, Tomás traced a line through mesquite and chalked caliche, his survey stakes angling toward a family cemetery fenced by weathered cedar. The oil company's map said the pipeline should run straight. Tomás's own map, etched behind his ribs, bent wide. The foreman, a man sparse with words, grunted that a curve meant money spilled into the dust. Tomás nodded and moved one stake anyway. He remembered his grandmother's hands, how they taught him to read the names on tilting stones as if they were prayers. That evening the rancher and the foreman argued under a hanging lantern. The foreman accused Tomás of sentiment; the rancher worried about neighbors. Tomás said only that the bend followed higher ground, less flood-prone. The argument hardened into threat: straighten the line or be replaced. At dawn a storm shouldered the sky and broke it open. Water hurried the gullies, dragging branches and one careless stake downslope. The cemetery fence held. When the foreman returned, boots mud-cuffed, he didn't apologize so much as squint at the surviving stakes and say, "Mark it your way." The pipeline arced, the rancher signed, and Tomás walked the bend, counting names he didn't need to say aloud.