ACT Reading — Literary Narrative — Drill 3

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the short story "Night Shift" by Rosa Tran (©2023). The laundromat on Clement Street was open until two in the morning, and Phuong had been coming here on Tuesday nights for four years. She liked it for the same reasons other people disliked it: the fluorescent lights that made everyone look slightly ill, the industrial smell of warm lint and detergent, the particular loneliness of sitting in a plastic chair watching your clothes tumble in a porthole of glass. Tonight a teenager sat across from her, earbuds in, drawing in a sketchbook with a focused urgency that Phuong recognized as the need to get something out of your head before it disappeared. She had been like that once—a painter, briefly, during college. Now she repaired medical equipment for a hospital system and found the work satisfying in a way that painting had never quite been. There was a right answer. You either fixed the thing or you didn't. Her phone buzzed. Her sister again: the same argument they had been having in slow motion for six months, distributed across texts and voicemails, about whether their mother should move into an assisted living facility. Phuong typed and deleted three responses, then set the phone face-down on the plastic seat beside her. The teenager had stopped drawing and was staring at the ceiling with the drained, satisfied look of someone who had just finished something. Phuong felt a small, irrational warmth toward her. She wanted to say something but understood that the moment was not for her. Her washer stopped with a thunk. She moved her clothes to the dryer, fed quarters into the slot, and pulled her book from her bag—a novel she had been reading for three weeks in fifteen-minute increments, carrying the characters with her the way you carry a worry, always there at the edges. She was almost at the end. She had been slowing down, she realized, not because she was busy but because she didn't want it to be over. Outside, the street was mostly quiet. A bus passed, nearly empty, its windows yellow in the dark. Phuong watched it go and thought, for no particular reason, that her mother used to sing on long car rides.