ACT Reading — Literary Narrative — Drill 1

LITERARY NARRATIVE: This passage is adapted from the short story "The Tide Schedule" by Marina Osei (©2019). The summer Daria turned forty, she drove alone to the same stretch of coastline where her family had vacationed when she was nine. She had not planned to stop—only to drive past—but she found herself pulling into the gravel lot at the base of the bluffs as if the car had made the decision independently. The beach looked smaller than she remembered. Or perhaps she had simply grown into someone for whom the world had contracted rather than expanded, each year delivering not new territory but a clearer sense of its limits. She removed her sandals and walked to the waterline, where the surf broke in low, exhausted waves against a shelf of dark sand. She remembered standing in this same spot as a child, absolutely certain that the ocean went on forever. Her father had tried to explain the curvature of the earth, how even the largest things had edges if you traveled far enough. She hadn't believed him. She had been the kind of child who confused stubbornness with faith. A man nearby was attempting to fly a kite with his daughter, who was perhaps five or six. The kite—a red diamond shape—kept nosediving into the sand, and each time it fell the girl laughed with the same unguarded delight, as if the failure were the point. The father retrieved it patiently, adjusted the string, handed it back. Daria watched them for longer than was polite. There was something she wanted from the scene that she couldn't name precisely—not nostalgia exactly, more like a proof of something she had once known and misplaced. Her own daughter was thirteen now and no longer laughed at things that fell. She turned back to the water. The tide was coming in; she could feel it in the way the sand shifted under her feet, the ground less solid than it appeared. Her father had taught her to read tide schedules, to know when to stand your ground and when to simply step back and let the water take the shore. She hadn't thought of that in years. She stayed until the light changed.