by Claire Adams
“So I needed really good test scores, you know?” I nodded again, feeling a chill in the room. The hair on the back of my neck stood up as a suspicion started up in my mind. Test scores. The SAT; the ACT. Oh god, what did he do? I felt my throat tightening at the question. “So I paid someone to take the test for me.”
“You what?” My voice leaped out through my lips before I could restrain it, my words an almost shriek. I remembered as soon as I spoke that I had promised not to say anything until he explained all the way.
“I paid someone to take the test for me. I knew I’d never get a decent score. So someone took my ACT, and did well enough for me to get my scholarship, and get in here.” I stared at him blankly, horror filling my brain. This was so much worse than anything I had imagined, though I couldn’t think of why.
“You—you did what?” Devon shrugged, looking at me weakly.
“They found out somehow, and the academic standards committee said that I had to meet with the dean tomorrow.” He took a deep breath and sighed again. “I’m going to be suspended, starting tomorrow morning—first thing.”
I stared at Devon in complete shock. How was he not getting expelled for this? Suspended—he had not just cheated on his ACT; he had never even taken it! “If I’m suspended, I can’t play. I’m going to miss the tournament game.” I stood up, trembling all over, my shock turning into anger.
“You—you didn’t just cheat on the test, you—” I shook my head, thinking about how hard I had worked to be able to get in, how hard I had studied and prepared to get the scores I wanted on the SAT and ACT. All of the different things that the girls had said about Devon filtered through my brain: that he did whatever he wanted, that he would say whatever it took to get his way. I brought my hands up to my face and then let them fall to my sides, torn between complete shock and utter rage. “Do you have any idea how hard I worked to get in here? Do you—do you even care about the fact that—that you’re—that you didn’t even do any of your own work to get your spot?”
“I made grades!” Devon said, looking hurt. “And I trained harder than any other guy I knew.”
“That’s not even the point!” I clamped my teeth shut, realizing that I was shouting. I didn’t want anyone downstairs to hear me—it was bad enough already. “Not only did you totally just...just ignore the system. You—you risked losing everything! When you could have just studied and gotten a decent score on your own.” I shook my head in disbelief.
“I knew there was no way I could get a decent score—that’s why I did it.” I opened my mouth, but no words came.
“I can’t believe you,” I said finally. “You don’t even care about the fact that you’re a liar and a cheat—you only care that you’re not going to be playing.” I opened my mouth and shut it again, trying to process what was happening, trying to understand how I could have ever had feelings for someone who would do something so incredibly stupid.
“I can work it out, Jenny—” My hands tightened into fists.
“You are never going to fucking call me that again,” I said, my voice going low as my eyes started to sting and burn with tears. “In fact—in fact, I never want to see you again. I don’t want to talk to you. How could you be so stupid?” I heard my voice going up and made an effort to control myself. I was not going to make a scene—not there, not then. I swallowed. “I don’t date cheaters, Devon. It’s as simple as that. I can’t—I can’t even imagine wanting to talk to you ever again.” I turned on my heel and in an instant it seemed, I had the door open. Devon called out from behind me, begging me to wait, to let him explain.
I kept moving forward as if I couldn’t hear him, my feet carrying me down the hall, stumbling on the stairs, and to the front door. I looked straight ahead of me; I couldn’t stand the idea of how the guys in the living room were reacting. I couldn’t let myself see what their faces looked like. I closed the frat house door behind me and plunged into the darkness, not even certain of where I was going, only that I needed to be far, far away from Devon.
HOOPED #4
Chapter One
After about half a block, I wasn’t able to keep running; I slowed down to a walk, meandering in and out of the light cast by the safety lamps along the sidewalk, thinking about how incredibly stupid I was. “I mean, everyone warned you he was a liar and a manipulator,” I muttered to myself, kicking at a rock that had somehow found its way onto the path. I pretended it was Devon’s head, and watched it skitter and skid against the concrete, disappearing over the edge into the darkness. “You should have known better. It shouldn’t have even been a surprise that he would do something like that.” I shook my head at my own stupidity.
At first I wasn’t even sure of where I was going; I knew that I absolutely had to get away from the frat house, put as much distance as possible between Devon and myself. I couldn’t stand even the thought of seeing him right then—it made my stomach turn flip-flops inside of me. I took another few steps and my toe collided with another rock. I stepped back slightly and kicked at it, sending it sailing off into the grass.
“But at the same time…maybe I’m being too hard on him.” I knew I probably looked like I’d lost my mind—walking in the dark, talking to myself the way I was. If there were even a single person on the walkways leading through campus within a few yards of me, they’d probably veer off to avoid me. But somehow it didn’t seem right to just think the thoughts; I needed to say them out loud. The noise in my own brain was just too loud. “Obviously, he’s really passionate about basketball. I mean, I’ve never seen anyone having a better time than Devon does when he’s on the court.” I smiled to myself sadly. The two times I had seen Devon happiest were when he was playing, and when he was with me—but then, I thought, contradicting myself, I hadn’t exactly seen him in any meaningful way with other people, or doing very many other things.
But Devon obviously loved playing basketball. Of course he was going to do whatever it took to make sure he’d continue to be able to play; he had probably applied to a bunch of colleges, and he’d need decent test scores for any of them—he had needed a decent test score for the college we both went to. But god, what a stupid fucking risk to take! How had he really thought that he’d be able to get away with it? But he had—until now. Someone had obviously thrown him under the bus. Years after the fact, it wasn’t like anyone would be investigating test scores from previous years. It wouldn’t make any sense. The kids who had taken the test in that year had already gotten into the schools of their choice.
If it was so long ago that it didn’t even make sense to investigate it—until or unless someone had thrown Devon under the bus—then could I really hold it against him? He had come clean to me about being a player, about the fact that he had slept around with plenty of women. He had been honest about wanting to change his ways for me. And as far as I could see, he had. He wasn’t the immature, impulsive guy he had been; the guy who did whatever he had to in order to get what he wanted from a girl, and then dropped her. He actually cared about me. But maybe cheating, gaming the system, manipulating things is just his nature. I shivered. What did it say about my prospects of a real relationship with him for Devon to be that way? If he was just flat-out a cheater, then could I trust him about anything at all? A person couldn’t change their very nature, could they?
“Every time I think I’m settled and everything makes sense between me and Devon, something else comes up,” I said out loud, kicking a stick out of my way on the sidewalk. It wasn’t fair. Somehow it didn’t even really seem to matter anymore that he’d been involved with a bunch of other girls before me; he had come clean about that, and considering how hot he was and what frat he belonged to, I would have had to have been the most naïve person on the planet not to think that he’d sleep around with a bunch of different women. I could forgive him that—after all, he didn’t have any STIs, and he wasn’t about to cheat on me that I knew about. But something like what he’d just told me; the fact that he had gambled wi
th his future, that he obviously didn’t even take the academic part of school that seriously—that seemed so much more of a betrayal.
What do we even really have in common, then? We both liked basketball, and we both liked some of the same music and food. But if Devon didn’t take what he was learning in school seriously, that was a major—huge—difference. I couldn’t imagine myself being with someone who didn’t care about his actual education, who would cheat on something so important. He could have gotten caught so much sooner. “What an idiot,” I grumbled to myself. But then, who was the bigger idiot: the guy who gambled with his future? Or the girl who dated someone who would gamble on his future in such a stupid way? I frowned as I realized I was getting closer to the dorms; somehow I had meandered in that direction without even thinking about it. I sighed and decided that it was as good a destination as any. After all, I couldn’t just keep wandering around campus all night. I had to go somewhere. I took the left fork on the walkway and started in the direction of my building.
I walked up the stairs to the suite that I shared with Kelly, dreading the possibility that she’d be up still watching TV, and that I’d have to talk to her about Devon; the last thing I wanted was for her to tell me how right she’d been and how stupid I’d been. I lucked out; Kelly either wasn’t in or had already gone to bed—the room was dark, and the door to her side of it showed no light. I got into my own room as quietly as possible and turned the light on as I closed the door behind me.
For a moment, I wondered if I should text Devon; I thought that he was probably worried about me. After all, I’d run out of his room, and out of the frat house, probably about thirty to forty-five minutes before, and wandered around ever since then. It was the middle of the night. While there wasn’t a whole lot of crime in the area, nonetheless something could have happened to me. But I was exhausted, too. I didn’t even want to think about Devon, much less talk to him—and I was certain that if I even sent him a message that indicated that I’d gotten back safely, he’d try and explain, justify, get me to say that it was all right that he had cheated on his tests. I decided that he’d just have to accept that no news was good news—if he worried about my safety, then that was his issue, not mine. I was too tired.
I climbed into bed, turning off the lights. I didn’t even bother to take off my clothes before slipping underneath the covers. I would take a shower in the morning; I would think about this incredible mess of bullshit then. I closed my eyes in the darkness and hoped against hope that somehow I would wake up the next day and find out that it had all been a stupid dream, and that Devon and I were in great shape, with nothing keeping us apart.
Chapter Two
The next morning I woke up before my alarm even went off, still feeling confused and troubled and irritable. My head throbbed, and whenever I thought about Devon, I felt worse and worse about the whole situation. I just wanted to have some peace and quiet to think about things, but I knew that if any of my friends found out about what was going on, they’d want to talk to me about it. I didn’t know how many of my circle of friends knew about Devon—I hadn’t exactly told everyone about it, even when we’d started dating—but Kelly knew about it, and I hadn’t been keeping it entirely a secret that Devon and I were together, once he had gotten me to come around. Even if they didn’t know the fact that I was with Devon, they’d probably want to talk about the gossip just because it had to be one of the hottest topics on campus.
So I got out of bed quickly, turning off my alarm, and didn’t even bother with a shower; it might wake Kelly up, if she was still in the suite, and I didn’t even want to talk to her about the situation. I changed into clean clothes and tried to decide what to do with myself; I didn’t have a class for a good long while. I loaded the books I would need for my classes later into my backpack and decided that the only real option would be to go to the library. The dining hall I’d be sure to see someone, even at the early hour, and the student union had the same issue. I ducked out of my room as quietly as possible and hurried down the hallway to the stairwell.
I emerged from the dorm building and started off across campus to the Library. So early in the morning there weren’t very many people around; I didn’t run much of a risk of running into anyone at all, but I hurried nonetheless. I hadn’t slept very well, in spite of being utterly exhausted when I climbed into my bed. I worried at my bottom lip as I made my way along the walkway, glancing around to make sure no one was around. I felt stupid being so cautious, but I didn’t want to run into anyone. I had so many thoughts and feeling swirling around in my head that all I wanted to do was have a quiet place away from everyone where I could think things through. Everything was happening so fast; I had gone from simply going out to a party with some friends to losing my virginity to having and losing something like a boyfriend in a matter of a couple of weeks.
I made it into the library and showed them my ID card. “Are there any private study rooms available?” I asked the bleary-eyed girl behind the desk. She frowned, tapping a few keys on the keyboard as I glanced around the main area of the Library; it was almost totally deserted, only a few of the most studious kids at computers finishing up papers or looking up references in the free databases.
“Yep, here you go; study room three, all yours. If more people come in an hour from now, we’ll buzz you, but it’s so early practically no one is using any of the rooms right now.” The girl behind the desk handed me the electronic key card to the room and scanned my ID to reserve it for me. I wandered in the direction of the private study rooms, trying to decide what to do with myself once I got there. Well obviously you might as well study, I thought wryly.
I scanned the card at the door to the tiny room and closed the door behind me. I had used the study rooms before; the door locked automatically, keeping everyone else out unless and until the room was needed again. You could technically only reserve the room for an hour at a time, but when the hour was up, the front desk would call on the linked phone inside the room, and if there wasn’t anyone in line for a study room, you could stay there another hour. And then another, with the right circumstances. In theory, I could spend the entire morning until my first class of the day in the study room. Almost no one used them in the mornings except for the most dedicated students.
As much as I had wanted quiet, as soon as the door was shut behind me, and I had set my backpack down on the table, it suddenly seemed almost too silent in the study room. I sat down heavily at the desk and looked around at the walls; they were painted a pristine off-white that made me think that they might have tried pure white before—and found that it drove people nuts to be surrounded by plain white walls. A couple of posters with tips for how to find things in the library were tacked up, along with the Wi-Fi information. There was a small whiteboard along one wall, with a few dry-erase markers in the tray below it. I got up and started pacing the small room, feeling fidgety in the silence. I tried to pull up music on my phone, but the tiny speakers didn’t do much to put a dent in the wall of quiet that threatened to wrap itself around me like a scarf.
“So who do I believe, and what do I do?” I asked myself. I thought I had settled the matter of whether I trusted Devon overall; I had basically decided to give up on Kelly, because she had out-and-out lied to me, where Devon had technically been honest to me the whole time I had known him. Did the fact that he was honest with me about cheating on his test make it any less horrible that he’d taken the risk? Or was it just another symptom of a guy who didn’t take anything at all seriously except for basketball?
It rankled me to remember that of all the things Devon had said the night before, the only thing he had really seemed upset about was the fact that he was suspended from the team, pending the results of the investigation against him. Since he had admitted to me that he’d actually cheated on the test, it wasn’t difficult to imagine that they’d be able to find proof of it somehow—though I couldn’t think of any specifics of what method they could use. But he didn�
�t even seem to be all that upset at being kicked out of the school, which could also happen. He wasn’t upset about the fact that he had put his academic life on the line for a stupid test score. Devon wasn’t even a stupid guy, he was actually intelligent; he could probably have just put a little bit of effort into things and been just fine on the test, at least he could have gotten a good enough score to get in.
But in spite of the fact that Devon had been honest with me, how could I trust him anymore? He had lied to people who mattered a whole lot more than me. Was Kelly right about him? Even if she had lied to me, how much of it was because she knew what he was really like and wanted to spare me the pain of what could have been a much greater heartache, and how much of it was because she was hung up on him and saw me as a threat to her possibilities of getting him back? Did she actually want him back—or did she just want revenge? Something tickled in the back of my mind at that question, but try as I might, I couldn’t bring it up to the front of my brain.
I spent most of the morning in the library, occasionally pretending to use the study room for its actual purpose, but mostly either pacing or sitting down and thinking about the whole huge mess that my life had suddenly become. I had always been a fairly direct, straightforward person. When it came to my studies, I was even more up-front. Nothing was more important than doing my best and earning my grades; the thought of cheating was something I had always viewed as the worst possible thing you could do academically. I’d rather make an honest C than a lying A—and while I knew that there were plenty of other people who felt different, especially about college, it was hard for me to reconcile myself to the idea of actually dating someone who felt that way. If Devon thought that there was no problem in cheating in order to get what he wanted, then what would happen when he decided that what he wanted was some other girl? Would he drop me completely—or would he cheat on me? Which of those options would be worse?