by Don Aker
“Frankly,” Jared’s mom bristled, “my personal feelings are none of your business. Have you asked Mr. Keaton who it was that changed his mind?”
Mr. Wilcox frowned at the interruption. He paused a moment before replying. Finally, he replied coolly, “We have.”
“And?”
Mr. Wilcox leaned forward, and Jared could see that the assistant superintendent was growing even more impatient. “And he refuses to tell us. He says he promised that person he wouldn’t say anything.” The scowl at the end of his remark telegraphed how little he thought of that promise.
Jared’s mother leaned forward, too, and her eyes locked on Mr. Wilcox’s. “Let me make this perfectly clear to you and everyone else at this table. I made no such request of Mr. Keaton.”
“And how can we be sure of that?”
“Because I know who did,” came a voice from behind them.
Everyone turned to see Ellie Brejovic standing with her father in the doorway.
CHAPTER 25
Mr. Keaton stood and went to the door. “Ellie,” he said. “How did you—?”
“Papa heard it on the news,” she said.
The teacher shook his head. “You don’t have to do this. Really.”
Ellie smiled at him. “I know,” she said. Even from across the room Jared could see how blue her eyes were. Even bluer than the shirt she wore—
Jared blinked. Her shirt. Rafe wasn’t the one who’d been listening in the hallway that afternoon. It was Ellie!
Mr. Brejovic spoke to the superintendent. “I am sorry to be coming here with no…” He paused.
“Invitation,” Ellie prompted.
Mr. Brejovic smiled, his pride in his daughter evident in his eyes. “With no invitation,” he continued, “but my daughter, Illyana Brejovic, she has something to be saying about this matter. She goes to school for Mr. Keaton.”
Ms. Janes rose along with Mr. Wilcox and Mr. Malavi, and she motioned for Ellie and her father to sit down. Ellie did so, but her father remained standing by the door. “Ellie is the one with the something to be saying,” he explained. But Ms. Janes urged him to sit anyway, and Jared thought he detected relief in the big man’s eyes when he took a seat, easing his right foot under the massive table.
“Very well,” said Ms. Janes. She repeated the introductions and she and the two men took their seats again. “You have something to tell us, Ellie?” she asked.
Ellie nodded. “Mr. Keaton’s in trouble because of something I asked him to do,” she said.
“And what would that be?” asked Mr. Wilcox.
“I asked him to let Jared write a second test.”
Jared looked at her, his mouth open. Catching flies, his mother used to tease him when she saw him like that. He closed his mouth, but he continued to stare at Ellie. After what he had done, lying about cheating just so Rafe and the others wouldn’t know he’d spent time with her, Ellie had asked the teacher to give Jared a second chance. I wouldn’t do to my worst enemy what you did to Ellie. Steve was right. And look what Ellie had done in return.
“And what,” asked Mr. Wilcox, “made you think that you could change his mind?”
Ellie spoke clearly and firmly, and Jared recognized in her voice the same tone she used when she helped him with his math. She wasn’t going to go too fast; she wanted to make sure everyone kept up. He smiled to himself as she explained, “I tutored Jared in math three or four times a week this past month. He had some real problems at the beginning, but they weren’t as big as he thought they were. Mostly, he had just convinced himself he couldn’t do it. But, as Mr. Keaton tells us, everyone can do math. It’s just that some of us don’t have enough strategies. I just helped Jared see how the strategies worked.”
“Do you get paid for your tutoring?” asked Mr. Wilcox.
“It’s part of the extracurricular program at our school,” said Ellie. “Everybody has to take part in at least one out-of-class activity. I’m lousy at sports, so I tutor.” She nodded her head toward the teacher. “You know, it was Mr. Keaton who first came up with the idea of the extracurricular requirement.”
Jared was surprised to hear that. He looked at Mr. Keaton, but the teacher was looking intently at Ellie. He had the same look on his face that Ellie’s dad wore as he watched his daughter speak so confidently to these adults.
Ellie continued, “I heard our principal in the hallway one day telling Mr. Keaton how glad he was that Mr. Keaton thought it up, how it’s really helped a lot of kids. It helped me. When the school year started, I hated the thought of having to do something extracurricular. I’m kind of a loner.” Jared could hear her swallow before she went on. “But it helped me get used to talking to someone my age. I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s not an easy thing when you don’t have friends.”
Jared’s eyes widened. Not once had he thought about how difficult the tutoring might have been on Ellie. Not once.
Ms. Janes leaned forward. “This is all very nice, Ellie, but I still don’t understand why you felt you should ask Mr. Keaton to change his rewrite policy for Jared.”
“Jared knew that math. It’s just that he froze when he saw the test. I ought to know. I worked with him one on one for hours, and he made some terrific marks—”
“We heard about those marks,” interrupted Mr. Wilcox. “Rafe Wells told us that you helped Jared cheat on his quizzes to get those marks.”
Ellie looked down at her lap, her face crimson. Jared could feel his mother’s eyes on him, along with everyone else’s.
“Mr. Wilcox,” said Jared, “can I say something?”
Mr. Wilcox turned to him, the anger in his eyes enough to burn holes in Jared’s face. “Did you not tell Rafe that Ellie helped you cheat on your math quizzes?”
Jared nodded, and he felt his mother slump in her chair. “But I was lyin’. She didn’t.”
“Let me get this straight,” said Mr. Wilcox. “You lied to make people think that Ellie helped you cheat.” He turned to Ms. Janes and Mr. Malavi. “In my day, we lied to make people think we hadn’t cheated.”
Jared’s face felt as red as Ellie’s. “I know it sounds stupid, and it is. Real stupid. I was just embarrassed about spendin’ so much time with Ellie. I thought everyone would think I was…you know…”
“Friends with her?” asked Ms. Janes softly.
Jared nodded. “Yeah. Friends with her.”
“And you decided you’d rather have people think you were a cheater than a friend of the girl who had helped you do so well in math,” said Mr. Wilcox. He didn’t even try to hide the contempt in his voice.
Ashamed, Jared looked down at the table. “A friend ‘a mine told me to think how that musta made her feel.”
“And did you?” demanded Mr. Wilcox.
“I been thinkin’ about that a lot.” Jared turned to Ellie. “I’m real sorry, Ellie. I was such a jerk.”
Ms. Janes addressed everyone in the room. “It would appear that we’ve wasted everyone’s time here today. Worse than that, however,” and she looked at the teacher, “it appears we were intentionally misled in our understanding of the situation, Mr. Keaton. It’s clear from our interview earlier with your principal, Mr. Rideout, and from the comments of these students, that you are indeed a teacher of great integrity. Keeping your promise not to reveal Ellie’s part in your decision is an excellent example of that.” She turned to Ellie. “May I ask why you didn’t want anyone to know what you’d done?”
Ellie lowered her eyes. “I didn’t want Jared to have to worry about his friends finding out.”
Jared groaned inwardly. Despite the lousy thing he’d done to her, Ellie had still only been thinking about how he’d feel. He was ashamed of himself all over again.
“And,” Ellie continued, “I didn’t want him to have to lie any more about cheating. When he failed the first test so badly, it really did look like he’d been cheating on the quizzes.”
“Hey,” Jared said softly, “I made an eighty-eigh
t on the rewrite.”
Ellie looked at him and smiled shyly. “I told you you could do it, didn’t I?”
CHAPTER 26
The cheers were deafening.
When the whistle blew at the half, the Cougars were up by one. The score had ping-ponged between the Cougars and the Mustangs throughout the game, and every Cougar knew he had to come out for the second half with a clear head and an eye on the outcome.
It had been a remarkable season, and Jamieson had praised each player repeatedly in the final minutes before the championship game began, but here, he’d said, was where the rubber met the road. Jared had grinned when he’d heard the coach use that line. He’d looked at the stands and saw Ron—Jared now had to remember to call him Mr. Keaton in school—give him a thumbs-up, while his mother waved enthusiastically beside him.
Beside the teacher sat Ellie and Su Mei Hyun. Their faces were painted in Cornwallis Middle School colours, and Su Mei was laughing at something Ellie had just said. Jared thought for a moment about how little English the girl had been able to speak when she’d first arrived from Korea back in October and how much she’d progressed once Ellie had begun to tutor her.
Su Mei and Ellie had become inseparable, always chatting and giggling over one thing or another, and Jared was hard-pressed to decide which girl had benefited more from the relationship. Of course, the line between where tutoring ended and friendship began was a blurry one. Jared knew that himself. And, as he had predicted, Su Mei’s academic performance was now among the strongest in the class, but it was the change he’d seen in Ellie that pleased Jared more. Although still shy around everyone except Su Mei and Jared, Ellie had started to open up during class discussions and group work, and students had begun to recognize her wicked sense of humour and her willingness to help others. Seeing how she had helped Jared with his math, some of his classmates had gone themselves to ask her for help. Even, to Jared’s amazement, Pete Johnson. That was because Rafe Wells was no longer around to lend him a hand.
Rafe had transferred out of Cornwallis Middle School the Monday following the school board meeting. His father had enrolled him in an expensive private school in the city’s south end, and he’d immediately joined that school’s basketball team—apparently, there was never a full roster of players since most of the kids there were more into academics than athletics. The Cougars had played Rafe’s team once in an invitational tournament, and it had been pretty embarrassing. Rafe had played well but, as Coach Jamieson always told them, one person doesn’t win a game. Rafe’s teammates missed even the simplest passes, and their shooting wasn’t much better. Frustrated, Rafe had stalked off the court at the end of the first half and wouldn’t go back on. The Cougars won by forty-six points.
Rafe’s dad had suffered quite an embarrassment of his own—Skylar Wells had lost his bid for mayor. He’d been shaky in the polls going into the last few weeks of the election, and the whole school-complaint fiasco had ruined whatever slim chance he had. Jared figured voters found it hard to support a candidate who gave flowery speeches but couldn’t seem to get his facts straight.
And Jared and his mom ended up on television after all. Diana Barnes had been waiting for them when they came out of the meeting room, and she’d cornered them in the hallway with her camera and microphone and about a zillion watts of lights. Jared had been blinded for a moment and, caught off guard, he’d started answering the questions that people were firing at him. His comment I wouldn’t do to my worst enemy what Skylar Wells did to Mr. Keaton received a lot of airplay and even got quoted in the newspaper, to Steve’s utter delight. “You owe me, buddy!” he’d crowed. They’d even joked that maybe Steve’s future was in speech writing.
And speaking of futures, Jared was beginning to think that his interest in marine biology might not be an impossible dream, after all. For the most part, he seemed to have gotten a handle on the math thing. Every once in a while he came up against a brick wall that he thought he’d never get over, but he found that concentrating on what he could do rather than getting bogged down in what he couldn’t do helped put things into perspective. And he could always ask his friend Ellie for help when he needed it.
Now, waiting for the referee to signal the beginning of the second half, Jared glanced up at the bleachers packed with Cornwallis Middle School students, teachers, and parents. He saw Ellie turn to say something to Ron and his mom, and the two adults started to laugh. There’d been a lot of laughing when Jared told his mom that he’d thought she might be getting back with his dad. “Fool me twice, shame on me,” she’d said. Jared hadn’t known what she’d meant by that, but it was great to see her so happy. Of course, he’d taken some ribbing from the kids in 6K about his mom and Mr. Keaton, and the teacher now seemed to be twice as hard on him in class, but Jared thought that was probably fair. Things had a way of balancing out. You just had to give them time.
A jab to the ribs jolted him from his thoughts. “You snooze, you lose,” said Steve as the whistle blew and the players made their way onto the floor.
Jared grinned. “Who said anything about losin’?” he asked, positioning himself for the tipoff.
As the referee tossed the ball into the air, Jared leaped after it and raced the roar of the crowd down the court.
Acknowledgements
As always, my sincere thanks to my editor, Lynne Missen, and the rest of the team at HarperCollins for their tireless professionalism. And thanks as well to Paul Shaffner—Middleton’s own “Coach Jamieson”—for making sure I got the game right.
Copyright
One on One
© 2005 by Don Aker. All rights reserved.
Published by HarperTrophyCanada™, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
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One on one / Don Aker. – 1st ed.
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Don Aker, One On One