To Catch a Cheat

by Varian Johnson

  “Already on it,” she said as she rewound the video. She froze it at the spot where Rob flashed the test at the camera. “The first four answers are A, D, C, A.”

  “What do you know? A match.” Dr. Kelsey turned to Jackson. “Let’s see them.”

  Jackson held up his hands, showing off his bare brown skin. “I’m happy to roll up my sleeves as well if you’d like.”

  Before Dr. Kelsey could respond, the NVR started beeping. Then both Mr. James’s and Dr. Kelsey’s phones began beeping and buzzing.

  Mr. James punched in his PIN. “According to this, someone has tried to access the system remotely,” he said, his face close to the phone.

  The phone in the security office rang, and Dr. Kelsey picked it up before Serena could grab it. “Yes,” he said into the receiver. “I see.” Another pause. “Yes, we just received that message.” One more pause. “Okay, thank you.”

  He hung up the phone. “That was the security company. They’re tracing the access point now — they should be able to pinpoint the exact location where someone tried to log in.”

  “I knew someone was trying to hack the system!” Serena said, banging on the desk.

  “They’re still running their diagnostic, but so far, they’ve been able to determine that another NVR is remotely tied to our system. They’re going to pull the serial number from the device and use that to trace the billing statement.” Dr. Kelsey looked at Jackson and Victor. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you want to tell me?”

  Jackson straightened his tie. “Like I said before, I have no idea what any of this is about.” He turned to Victor. “What about you?”

  Victor let out a deep, long sigh. “I think it’s time I called my parents.”

  Thirty minutes after school ended, Serena sat on a bench outside the main building, staring at the street. The entire day had been a blur. She had won. She had caught the cheaters. She had proved that someone was indeed trying to steal Mrs. Clark’s test.

  But it wasn’t Jackson Greene. She had been sure — positive — that he and his crew were the cheaters. How could she have been so wrong?

  Maybe she should volunteer to be an office helper. She sure seemed good at jumping through hoops for Dr. Kelsey. And she certainly wasn’t cut out for the Honor Board.

  She was still sitting on the bench, watching cars pass the school, when Lincoln dropped onto the seat beside her.

  “Got a few minutes?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “My sister will be here soon.”

  “It won’t kill her to wait for you.” He stood, then held his hand out to her. “Come on. I promise it’ll be worth it.”

  She frowned, but allowed him to help her to her feet. “I thought you’d be mad at me,” she said. “I was wrong about Jackson.”

  He chuckled. “I don’t know if I’d use the word wrong,” he said. “Maybe … misguided.”

  “That makes no sense,” she said. They stopped at the entrance to the social studies hallway. “We can’t go down there. We don’t have a meeting today, and we don’t have a pass.”

  “Serena, for once, let’s bend the rules a little.” He opened the door, and after a second, she slipped into the hallway.

  She thought they were headed to Mr. Pritchard’s room, or even Mrs. Clark’s room, but instead they stopped at the newsroom. Charlie, Hashemi, Megan, and Bradley looked up as Lincoln opened the door.

  “I knew you guys were behind it!” Serena yelled.

  Charlie rolled his eyes. “Are you sure we have to explain it to her?”

  “It’s either that or have her tailing you for the rest of the year,” Lincoln replied.

  “Hold on.” Megan raised her arms. “Want to check our hands again before we start?”

  Serena tightened her grip on her book bag straps. She had personally checked the hands of each member of Gang Greene after discovering the ink on Victor. Rob and Thom had smudges of ink on their hands as well, although it appeared that they’d tried to lick the answers off while they were waiting in Dr. Kelsey’s office.

  “So tell me the truth,” she said to Charlie. “Did you steal the test?”

  “Maybe we should back up,” Charlie said. “The only reason we got into this mess in the first place is because Victor was trying to blackmail us. He’s the one who flooded the school and stole the hard drive.”

  “Rob and Thom confessed,” Lincoln said.

  “They also said that you helped them steal the test, and then you double-crossed them,” Serena said.

  Charlie smiled. “Jackson never planned to let those guys cheat on the test. But the only way to clear our names was to catch them in the act of stealing it.”

  “So you admit it,” Serena said. “You did steal it.”

  “We helped Rob and Thom steal it,” Charlie said. “There’s a difference.”

  “That’s quite a technicality.”

  “But it’s true. Thanks to Megan and Bradley, the rest of us were able to avoid looking at any of the test answers.” Charlie rose from his chair. “We originally planned for Rob and Thom to use disappearing UV ink during the test — the answers would fade away before they even sat down at their desks. Once we figured out what Victor was really up to, we came up with a new plan to have the UV watches short-circuit during first period, in the middle of the exam. But we knew that Victor would ask Kayla Hall, his tech guru —”

  “Guru? Ha!” Megan said.

  Charlie sighed. “That he would get Kayla, his … whatever … to check the watches.”

  “Once Kayla connected the watches to her desktop and checked the code, we realized it would only be a matter of time before she found the program we’d installed to shut down the UV light,” Hashemi said. “However, while she was deleting that software, we were able to remotely upload a program to her desktop to crack her password.”

  “That only took twelve hours to crack, thank you very much,” Megan added.

  “That allowed us to access her computer and the NVR that Victor purchased for her, and initiate the log-in to the school’s security system,” Charlie said. “That’s what happened while you were in the security room this morning. Which, of course, you realized when all the alerts started going off.”

  “But how?” Serena let her book bag slide to the ground. “You all were in class.”

  Hashemi pulled out the MATE. “The Most Awesome Tablet Ever, Version Four, is the most technically astute, progressive —”

  “Hashemi!” Charlie, Bradley, and Megan yelled at the same time.

  He cleared his throat. “Megan and I developed a voice-activated program and script that would automatically access Kayla’s computer, her NVR, and the lamps in the security office via the MATE,” he said. “Charlie placed a stripped-down version of the MATE and the UV lamp in the security office yesterday afternoon, then plugged the lamp into a special dongle that connected it to our system. After that, all it needed was a voice command to start the sequence.”

  “Jackson activated it?” Serena asked.

  “No, Victor did,” Hashemi said. “When he said Jackson’s name.”

  “We’re not rats,” Charlie said. “But we weren’t going to stop Victor from ratting on himself.”

  “But wait … When did you get into the security room yesterday?” she asked. “I was there the entire time….”

  “Except when we turned off the cameras so you’d rush to the other side of the school,” Bradley said. “Charlie was hiding in the storage closet —”

  “Where I also stashed a box of high-powered fluorescent lights,” Charlie said, “and added a work order for Mr. Hutton to install them in Mrs. Clark’s room.”

  “Fluorescent lights?” Serena asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Again, remember, we never planned to let Rob, Thom, and Victor cheat on the test,” Charlie said. “Bradley tricked Rob and Thom into using disappearing ink when they wrote down the answers in the first place so they wouldn’t be able to memorize them o
vernight, and then we created a room so bright that they weren’t able to read the writing on their hands with the UV watches. We figured that would be enough to ensure that they didn’t cheat.”

  Serena glanced at the window. Her sister was probably outside, but she could wait all day for all Serena cared. She needed more answers.

  “So back to the video of Rob and Thom sneaking into Mrs. Clark’s room. How did you get that onto the hard drive?” She’d checked the serial numbers — it really was the same hard drive that had been stolen two weeks ago.

  “Well, Victor had Kayla doctor the video of Rob and Thom flooding the school so it looked like all of us did it,” Charlie said. “Jackson and Victor came to an agreement — the doctored video for the test answers. And Victor wasn’t lying — Jackson really did place the hard drive in the shed. But Victor didn’t know that Megan was also in the shed, waiting to replace the doctored video with the video of Rob and Thom.”

  Serena slumped against a desk. “How did you guys even pull this off?”

  “We got a little help from the Environmental Action Team, and I was able to convince the Herald staff to let me borrow the newsroom for a while.” Charlie ran his fingers through his hair. “And … we needed an Isabel Lahiri.”

  Serena blinked. “A who?”

  “Didn’t you ever watch Ocean’s Twelve? It’s not as good as the first and third movies in the series, but —”

  “Maybe you should get on with the explanation,” Lincoln said.

  “Okay. Sure,” Charlie said. “We needed someone who Mr. James and Dr. Kelsey would trust to review the video. Someone who would follow up on the leads and figure out that Victor, Rob, and Thom were involved as well. Someone who would be relentless in pursuing ‘justice’ … even if it meant making a deal with Keith Sinclair so he could buy a new hard drive for the school.”

  “You’re talking about me,” Serena said. “You’ve been playing me the entire time.”

  “Well, not the entire time,” Bradley said. “Just from the point where you saw everyone in the garden, after Charlie told Jackson how you’d been keeping tabs on us.”

  Serena didn’t know whether to be amazed or disgusted. “How did you even know I’d follow up? That I’d fall for it?”

  “Well, the Environmental Action Team weren’t our only silent partners,” Charlie said.

  Serena followed Charlie’s gaze until she landed on Lincoln. “You were in on this as well?”

  Lincoln shrugged. “You were always dead set on trying to catch Jackson. I just did a little nudging … making sure you stayed on the right path.”

  “So I’d make a fool of myself.”

  “No. So you’d catch the right person.” Lincoln looked back at Gang Greene. “What can I say? Sometimes it takes a thief to catch a cheat.”

  “So why are you telling me all this?” she asked. “I could turn you all in, you know.”

  Charlie grinned. “Well, first — you won’t turn us in. You don’t have any evidence except for a tablet tucked away in a dusty corner of the security room — a tablet that has already been remotely wiped and reformatted.”

  “MATE, Version One,” Hashemi mumbled. “She served us well.”

  “And we’ve already destroyed our copies of the keys to the security room, Mrs. Clark’s classroom, and her file cabinet,” Bradley said.

  “We’re telling you because we want you to know we weren’t the bad guys here,” Megan said. “We were only trying to clear our names, and stop a few cheaters in the process.”

  “Jackson and his crew really are the good guys,” Lincoln said. “If you’re going to be Honor Board chair next year, you’d better learn who you can trust around here.”

  “You think I can be chair?” Serena asked.

  “Maybe. You certainly have the drive for it. Let’s see how the second semester goes. We need to work on your people skills a bit.” Lincoln rubbed his hands together. “So, any more questions?”

  Serena looked back at the group. “Where’s Jackson?”

  They all broke into smiles, but no one spoke.

  “Let me guess,” Serena said. “The Infamous Jackson Greene has one last job to pull before he rides off into retirement.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Charlie said. “Why? Interested in making a bet?”

  While the rest of Gang Greene talked with Serena in the newsroom, Jackson headed down the deserted hallway toward his locker. He had spent the last twenty minutes in the garden, clearing away all the trash and filling it with potted chrysanthemums and tea candles. It had taken almost four months, but he’d finally come up with the perfect plan for kissing Gaby. Now he just had to figure out how to get her outside without tipping her off.

  He slowed as he reached his locker — the padlock was missing. Everything inside was as usual, except for a wrapped gift and a tin of mints sitting on top of his books. He grinned as he glanced at the camera pointed toward him, and for a second wondered if Gaby had used it to figure out his combination. Then he shook his head. Out of everyone in the school, Gaby was the last person who needed a camera to open his locker.

  He grabbed the gift and the mints and shut his locker, then jogged down the hallway and turned the corner. Sure enough, Gaby stood by her locker. She pulled her hair back from her face and smiled broadly. “If it isn’t the Infamous Jackson Greene. Tell me the truth — you loved being back on the job.”

  “I’m not the one who just broke into an innocent student’s locker,” he said. “Weren’t you scolding me two weeks ago about breaking into Hashemi’s shed?”

  “A lot can happen in two weeks.” Gaby pulled the padlock from her pocket and tossed it to Jackson. Then she nodded at the gift in his hands. “Open it.”

  He started to peel away the paper. “I think you have this backward. Your birthday is on Monday. I’m supposed to be giving you a present.” He held up the new red leather notebook. “Thanks. I was almost out of pages in my old one.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said.

  He leaned back. “You looked in my notebook?”

  “Why, are you worried? It’s not like I can decipher your code,” she said. “And in case you were wondering, I love Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

  Jackson coughed a little. “I wanted to get the Sonia Sotomayor one as well, but it was on back order and —”

  “Here’s what I really want for my birthday,” she said. “I want you to come to my house this weekend. I want you to watch my game with me and my dad. He promised to be on his best behavior.”

  He gulped as he loosened his tie, but nodded.

  “And a nice biography to go with the Chia Pet wouldn’t hurt either.”

  Jackson laughed. “Okay. I’ll be busy with Charlie on Sunday, but I’ll come by on Saturday afternoon.”

  “What do you two have going on?”

  “Samuel was able to get his hands on a layout of Riggins,” he said. “And Bradley has a friend there who coated the keypad lock with UV powder. And we have Megan’s password program that she’s dying to use again.” He shrugged. “What can I say? Charlie’s one of my best friends. And it’s his birthday too.”

  “He always gets the good gifts,” she mumbled. Then she crunched on something — and Jackson realized he’d never opened his tin of mints.

  “Oh, wait …” He pulled the tin from his pocket and started to fumble with the clear plastic wrapper.

  Gaby reached out and stopped him. “Jackson, enough.”

  Before he knew it, she stepped forward, placed her arms around his neck, and rose up on her toes.

  It was the best two seconds of Jackson’s life.

  When she pulled back, he realized that his hands had come to rest on her hips. He dropped them, then looked around.

  “You’ve broken, like, a thousand rules this week,” she said. “And you’re worried about the one against public displays of affection?”

  “No … I mean, yes … I mean —”

  She kissed him again.

  When th
ey finally pulled away for air, they were both grinning. She dropped her hands and took a few steps back. “Now what?” she asked. “Want to head to Hashemi’s?”

  Jackson rubbed the back of his neck. “Actually, I was planning to take you to the garden. I had decorated it and everything. It was part of my master plan to … you know …”

  She picked up her book bag and slung it over her shoulder. “Okay, let’s go.”

  “But … We already … I mean, this was great. I mean, really, really great. There’s no point in —”

  “Jackson Greene, don’t be silly.” She looped her arm through his as they started down the hallway. “This was just a practice exam.”

  * * *

  * * *

  VIZZINI’S CHALLENGE (GABY AND JACKSON SCAMMING ERIC CAAN BY PLAYING A VIDEO GAME WITH BROKEN JOYSTICKS): In The Princess Bride, the outlaw Vizzini challenges the Dread Pirate Roberts to a battle of wits. Agreeing, the pirate takes two goblets of wine and laces one with iocane powder, a tasteless, odorless poison. After a brief conversation where Vizzini tries to deduce which goblet holds the poison, they both drink. Vizzini falls dead, and the pirate reveals that both goblets were poisoned — Roberts had spent years building up an immunity to iocane powder. Jackson and Gaby defeated Eric in a similar fashion — by spending their two-week winter break learning how to play Ultimate Fantasy IV with broken joysticks.

  THE MUTARA NEBULA (THE INSTALLATION OF THE NEW NVR HARD DRIVE): In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the Enterprise flees toward the Mutara Nebula while battling an enemy ship with greater speed and firepower. Saavik warns Spock that the static discharge and gas in the nebula will cloud the Enterprise’s visuals and render its shields useless. “Sauce for the goose,” Spock responds. “The odds will be even.”

  HAN VAN MEEGEREN (THE MATES): Dutch painter Han van Meegeren dreamed of becoming an established artist, but his work was criticized for being unoriginal and imitative. He managed to turn that criticism to his advantage and emerge as one of the most prominent art forgers of the twentieth century. Van Meegeren duplicated the work of Frans Hals, Johannes Vermeer, and other artists with such cunning skill that renowned art critics claimed his art was the bona fide original.