Prove: “Age is just a number.”

Problem One:

2𝑥 + 𝑦 = 6

5𝑥 + 3𝑦 = 6

Find x. Prove: “Age is just a number.” Vomit, frothed yellow from the cafeteria’s lunch, spewed over her uniform. Her plaid skirt, stained with blood. Sweat and chalk, the hum of the song she learned today to memorize the fifty states tickling her throat. Maybe it was all okay. He was older. He convinced her. He loved her.
Whether he sang Alabama, Alaska, Arizona or Arkansas...
Nobody had to know.
She just has to obey. To trust him. To slip into silence and drown in their little secret because he said secrets weren’t meant to be shared and promises weren’t meant to be broken. She just has to listen to his sweet, sticky voice, recall his tender finger to her mouth, and pretend it didn’t even happen. She wakes up with nightmares anyway. Show your work.

Problem Two: 𝑥2 − 8𝑥 − 84 Find all x > 0. Trapped in the bathtub, a towel thrown over her. His eyes flash wild like a rabid animal cornering its prey. But unlike a rabid animal: he knows what he’s doing. She thought only strangers did these things, to girls walking alone to their cars at dawn; faces sketched in graphite, broadcasted on the news after leaving their victims in wheelchairs. But this was her first boyfriend. Her first party. Her new dress, with a slit up her thigh, a neckline skimming her collarbones. A flirty one. Feminine, when she tried it on in her living room. Now ripped apart on the floor. When her friends point out the new handprints around her throat, they joke about it being the first time she wasn’t the “good girl”. They say it was her finally deciding she wanted to belong. It all haunts her. Was she asking for it, by wearing pink? Was she blinking in too much glitter? Was she somehow glowing in the dark, telling the world to come take her as it pleases? She brushes the bruise around her neck. It licks her fingertips with blood. Show your work.

Problem Three: Preemies have a length of 14 and a wrist-to-wrist width of 10.5. Find the area; divide by one-third of its gestational age to find its mother’s age. Round down. The baby she holds in her arms. The baby she did not want. A product of the memory that tears her apart from the inside out. Before he was born, he had homed himself in her embarrassment, her guilt, and the marks smearing the lower half of her body. Now, looking into his eyes, months’ worth of weight lifts from her heart for the first time since it happened. When her parents found out, they branded her with crude titles laced with shame—the last words she’d hear before they sentenced her to the streets. She convinced herself that if her parents didn’t believe her, the police wouldn't either. So she survived without their help. But then he was born early. The first appearance of light, a rise to a new beginning. And once her parents saw his tiny body, they took her back in without meeting her eyes. She was supposed to live a fairytale. But where was her prince charming? The one to save her from the dragon who left the insides of her legs sticky, her limbs sore from her struggle to slip from his grasp? She thought for certain that this thing, once buried inside of her, would grow up to be a monster. Now, she’s not so sure.
Show your work.

Problem Four: 𝑦 = 𝑥22 Find y'(1).
She will never walk to her car alone again. Her lawyer sits beside her sister, a blur of clasped hands coated in latex. They write down things she cannot hear. Numbers. Names. Far-fetched ideas. She cannot speak. Not for herself. The technician swabs her swollen skin. Tenderly, the touch of a mother to the hair of her sleeping child. But the slightest brush sends water sluicing down her lungs instead. It’ll mire in her body for months, allowing something ugly and bitter to grow inside her. They cannot find him. Some days, she wonders if they’re even trying to. She draws his face on paper anyway, over and over, each line a stroke of her masterwork. She cannot forget him. Not while he is out there. Her sister looks at her with pity. Her throat, held together by plastic. Her legs, useless in her wheelchair. But when he is found, everything will invert. She’ll shed herself of his existence, free, and he’ll be the one stuck in time, corroding in the memories of what he did to her, drowning on land.
Show your work.

Problem Five: 𝑦=𝑠𝑖𝑛216𝑥 +16𝑥 9 Find 𝑦'(π/72).
She cannot deny her boss. His hands are slimy to the touch. The sensation writhes in her mind every time she closes her eyes. Every time her bedsheets brush her skin. Every time someone stands too close in an elevator, their breath slithering down her back. What else has she left to give? She refuses to boil herself in helplessness. But she must take precautions. In secrecy, she works with three other survivors, her coworkers, to dethrone him. They strive for a sentence where he cannot reach them again. Slowly, a photo of his grimy, green-tinted skin against an orange jumpsuit becomes his only legacy, a sight they first see on television. Years later, they sit together in a circle with an old lady at the center, talking them through the cork of fear buried within their brains, teaching them how to unscrew it out of the way they think. Here, she is not alone. As she sits here, she is safe. Maybe it’s time to tell her mother. She closes her eyes and lets her sky saturate with color for the first time. Her future stops to wait for her to rejoin it. Show your work.