Ecce Romani I Final Exam

Convention: Part Two (Pompey)

Romain, Stuart, and I walked around the Convention Center for a while after lunch, exploring its vast, escalator-separated levels and hallways. There was a second skywalk on one side of the Convention Center, with a beautiful structure adorned with rectangles of colored glass, designed to look like a double helix, twisting across the ceiling. Lights on the sides of the skywalk, combined with the brilliant sunlight streaming in through its towering glass-paned sides, set the spangled hues scintillating and sparkling against the ceiling. It was a very pretty effect. We nicknamed the skywalk the DNA Hall. ( Scene : A huge, roaring crowd of Latin students, mobbing the closed doors of Exhibit Hall A. The mob of classics enthusiasts is so dense, you can barely pick out individual students. It's comparable to the structure of Bose-Einstein condensates. Despite this compactness, the crowd is wild, rabid with delight. They pump their fists in the air, screaming alternately in Latin and English.) A running joke at convention exams is the coughing. It is a hilarious epidemic that takes hold in about 2.5 seconds and spreads like wildfire throughout the entire Exhibit Hall. Normally, such mischievous behavior is frowned upon and threatened with punishment, but at convention, it's such a thing of tradition that all teachers acknowledge it with amusement, even after attending exam sessions and witnessing the same prank for years. The coughing epidemic begins with one very impish student, usually in the back of the hall, who starts it off with a quiet " cough, cough, cough ." Instantly, his friends and those in the vicinity take it up, coughing with more exaggeration and gusto. In seconds, hundreds of other students register this occurrence, and they all begin clearing their throats lustily. It takes only such a short period of time for the entire Exhibit Hall—a critical mass, indeed—to all be hacking energetically, until the sound is resonating deafeningly against the walls: "COUGH, COUGH, COUGH!" It was around six p.m. by the time we left. The sky outside had deepened to a rich ink-black. I returned to the column, only to find it deserted, but for one of the Latin teachers. She gave me my card key for my hotel room, which I was sharing with three other girls at the Marriott that was connected to the Convention Center by the skywalk.

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