I'm not really sure which prompt this would fit best it. Any help (structural, ideal, grammatical) is highly appreciated! Also, I'm not sure what to title it. Thank you!
---------------------------------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------------------------------- "Honey, I just got off the phone with the school. It's about your test."
At once, a sticky hot wave of panic crushed my ability to form cohesive thoughts. She knew. My extremities tingled and I mentally lunged for the plan I had crafted nervously, days earlier. My mouth began to construct a series of stalling-type vowels (uh, um, oh, ah, etc.). The plan was nowhere to be found, buried in the avalanche of mounting anxiety still tumbling out of my frantic chest. Stuck physically, I gave the ever-slowing kitchen clock a glance and for the first time began to question the validity of my intentions. I had done something objectively wrong. I was going to pay the price. Slow seconds crawled. My hands turned suddenly more damp and shaky as my mom stood and formed herself an intimidating-parent-genre pose, hands stiffly on hips, eyebrows narrow and cocked inward.
A week prior I had for the first time experienced a similar state of worry. When my third-grade year was coming to a close my parents decided to pull me out of my beloved school, against my high-pitched will. A school switch alone was not particularly upsetting. What most disrupted my pleasant year-end train of thoughts was the new school's funding and administration structure: public. Some of my classmates had previously attended public school and whenever the topic arose at a lunchtime conversation they showed no reticence to share their wide-eyed stories. The kids are poor weirdos. Teachers too. The grass is poorly kept. The janitors didn't go to college. One teacher ate a student. All of this, to a third-grader with no sense of B.S., was terrifying. I couldn't do it. Public school was too strange and zoo-like. Determined, I made a lengthy blackboard-flowchart-based plan that would (almost) certainly prohibit me from attending public school.
The crux of my plan: blow the placement test. Before officially enrolling in the new school all students were to take a multiple-choice entrance exam that determines their class placement. I, not intimately familiar with the philosophy of public schools, reasoned that a poor enough grade on the test would leave administrators no choice but to deny my enrollment.
Test Day came and I stumbled nervously over a patch of disturbingly unkempt grass, bid my mom a stuttered goodbye and entered the testing room. When I went to sharpen my spanking new no. 2 pencil my hands trembled with a prohibitive Brownian motion and I abruptly understood the term "trainwreck" in a single-human context. I hadn't wrecked my proverbial train before. Tests were fun to me. Put a third-grade me in Wimbledon with a 30-page spelling test and he would know everything but the definition of "nervous." This was different. It wasn't the pressure of the test crushing me. And despite the overwhelming physical sensations of don't do this I followed through. I found the correct answer on each question and selected the palpably wrong answer on every other question.
"The school says you placed well below average on the test. Do you know why?"
I couldn't make sounds anymore. The only signal I could give to feign innocence was a rapid and discernibly bogus shake of my head. My mom, now several stories taller than me and moving slower in a kitchen-clock fashion, relaxed her pose and eyebrows. My small shoulder was comforted and she graced, "I understand. I'm sorry you have to leave your school." Tears soaked my quivering vision, and a thought trickled into my mind: I am physically incapable of significant deceit.
I don't think this totally fits right into any of the prompts, but once you pick one you could probably tweak it a little bit to make it more applicable to the question. You might be able to put in in the one about experiencing failure, though that's not the focal point of the essay, so it seems like it would bets fit the one about the background/story because you talk about how failing the test reveals a lot about you.
Overall, your essay is well-written, and I like the funny parts. I have some tips on your writing, though they are kind of personal preferences:
-"My mouth began to construct a series of stalling-type vowels (uh, um, oh, ah, etc.)." I would either re-word or take out this sentence.
-"the new school's funding and administration structure: public. " This feels kind of wordy and cumbersome to me.
