by Lauren Wolk
Rachel remembered feeling torn, then, between the urge to follow his advice (and start by speaking up to him) and her long-held conviction that being a good and patient girl was worth its price.
Sitting on her porch, Rachel thought about this decision. It was one she had made over and over and over again: to be the way she had always been. Even as an adolescent, curious and impatient, she had changed little, for she had really had no choice: everyone knew her as a certain kind of girl, and there was simply no way she could disappoint them. No worthy opportunity arose. No reason seemed good enough. And, in truth, she seldom felt the need to challenge the rituals she had practiced for so long. Until now. Somehow, the boys she’d known at college, and the death of her parents, and every other mean thing that had ever touched her life became twisted together and made it easy for Rachel to strip herself down and start all over again.
Her neighbors had noticed the change in Rachel as soon as she stepped off the bus early that Monday morning. She had not been rude or unkind in any way. But she had not reacted to them as they had expected she would. She had not cried on their shoulders. She had not bravely smiled. She had sought neither solace nor advice. She had been unmoved by the casseroles that they had tucked away in her fridge. She had been entirely too reserved for their liking.
What a waste of time, she thought again, sitting on her porch, her parents on their way to the sea. And energy. Who has the energy to keep all that up for long? Better to say what you think, mean what you say, do what you think is right, live how you want to live. No need to be cruel, she amended. Say the cruel parts to yourself. Or don’t say them at all. Do the cruel things in your head. Or keep still. Be disciplined.
It was a start. An anchor of sorts. One she carried with her back to school after she’d dealt with her parents’ remains and the tangled business of surviving them. When she arrived back on the familiar campus, she found that it took some effort to avoid backsliding into the rabbit girl she had been before, but clinging to this anchor, Rachel held her ground. Old friends, thinking she was still grieving, made allowances for her lack of social graces. Paul kept his distance and she hers. She made no new friends. Every now and then she went alone to the movies, consumed a sack of M&M’s, and wondered where her parents were.
At one point, on a beautiful spring morning when everything seemed suddenly to have changed for the better, Rachel did slip, although at first it felt so good to relax her guard that she did nothing to resurrect it.
Forsaking the library for the campus green, she chose a spot under a maple tree and began to read the sonnets that had seemed such perfect work for a morning like this one. But the breeze and the smell of new grass plucked at her attention, and finally she shut the book and set it aside. The sun felt wonderful on her bare arms. The grass was soft. She closed her eyes.
“Rachel.”
She opened her eyes. Adam Greenway, her history professor, had come up quietly and was crouching next to her. “I didn’t want to startle you,” he said, smiling.
“You didn’t,” she said. “How are you, Professor?”
“Just fine. You?”
“Okay. I’m afraid I shouldn’t have come out here to study though. It’s too hard to concentrate.”
“Which is why I no longer allow my teaching assistants to hold discussion groups outside, under the trees. It’s hard to pay attention when you’ve got spring fever. My students were writing exams without much meat to them. They were just giving me back what I’d dished out during lecture or what they memorized from the reading assignments. Not much original perspective. Disappointing.”
Rachel nodded, bemused. This was unlike Professor Greenway. He had never said so much to her outside of class before. He was watching her intently.
“Rachel, do you remember much about your midterm exam last semester, the one you wrote for me?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said slowly. “Do I remember the questions?”
“Your responses. Do you remember what you wrote about U.S. foreign policy during Turkey’s ’74 invasion of Cyprus?”
“I remember, more or less.”
“Do you remember quoting Henry Kissinger?”
“Yes, briefly.” The sun behind him made Rachel squint. “But it seems strange that you remember. There were over a hundred kids in that class, and we took that exam almost six months ago.”
Professor Greenway sat down next to Rachel. “Of a hundred and forty-two students, seven wrote similar exams. Disturbingly so. They all presented the same information, all within the same basic structure and, to a limited extent, even used the same wording. Your exam was a bit different—the structure of your essay was unique, but the information was basically the same and all eight of you quoted Kissinger in exactly the same way. Or almost: you punctuated the quote differently, but the other seven were identical. No one else in the entire class quoted Kissinger. Just the eight of you.”
“Are you accusing me of cheating?” Rachel said, blinking with surprise. “On an essay exam? In a class I loved and studied for until my eyes nearly blew out of my head?”
He put up a hand. “I know, Rachel,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’ve waited six months to bring this up because I wanted to investigate all other possibilities. But the same thing happened when I gave the final exam for that class. All seven exams were nearly the same.”
“The same as mine?”
“No. Not at all like yours.”
“So you realized I wasn’t cheating, even if they were.”
“I never thought that you had cheated, Rachel.” He smiled at her, as if to prove it. “But I’m sure that you were somehow involved for a while last semester, without your knowledge.”
They were both silent for a time. Then, “That was a long time ago, Professor,” Rachel said. “What made you decide to bring this up now?”
“Four of those seven students are in my class this semester, too. All four of their midterms were too much alike. So were two other exams written by students I’ve never had before. But I’m still not sure what’s going on, and I was hoping you could give this some thought.” He stood up and brushed off his pants. “Let me know if you come up with any ideas.”
“It would help if I knew who the other students were,” she said.
He thought about that one for a moment. Then he told her. All nine suspects were boys. One of them was Paul.
Rachel had been in such a wonderful mood that morning, felt the first bit of joy since her parents had died. If Paul had been the one to approach her as she sat under the maple tree, drowsing, she might have forgiven him, found a way to patch things up between them. She had begun to feel, recently, as if she had judged Paul too harshly. When she tried to put herself in his shoes, to feel the sort of pressure exerted by his peers, she did not entirely succeed, but this new willingness to see things through his eyes had made Rachel vulnerable to the sight of him walking across the campus green or sitting in one of her classes, intentionally removed. Lately, she had reminded herself of Paul’s warnings, admitted that he been right about Harry all along. She began, as well, to miss having a best friend, as Paul had been right from the start.
They had met before classes had even begun, their first year, during orientation week, when herds of freshman had been rounded up, driven down to their dormitory lounges, and forced to play the kinds of parlor games that make more ice than they break. Paired by a ruthless upperclassman, Paul and Rachel had been told to get acquainted and then, when it was their turn, to introduce each other to the rest of the group. “You have five minutes,” he said.
All around them, paired strangers were looking at each other in horror. But Paul looked at Rachel, Rachel at Paul, and with the kind of minute, flickering signals known to timber wolves and deaf-mutes, they made up their minds to escape. It was easy, really. The escalating panic of their classmates made good cover. And within moments the two of them were running along the corridor outside, twisted with laughter, f
ree. They had gone for pizza, survived the inevitable, occasional awkwardness of strangers, and become fast friends. Living in the same dorm that year had made it easier for them to be together at all hours, studying, escaping the relentless companionship of roommates who would never be friends, laughing at anything and everything, eventually baring portions of their souls.
Even after they had spent a summer apart, even after Paul had joined his fraternity and breathed its medieval air, even after Rachel had made other friends and found other diversions, the things that tied them to each other had not frayed. But much had happened since then. Everything had changed. And the things that Professor Greenway had told her that morning stiffened the softening regions of Rachel’s heart and sent her off in search of Paul for the first time since November, grim and suspicious.
She found him sitting on the concrete porch of the fraternity house with several other boys, an aluminum washtub stocked with ice and beer, an enormous can of tomato juice, and a few mangled lemons. They all wore crumpled shorts and sunglasses, nothing else. Behind her, on the grassy plot enclosed by the fraternity houses, other boys were playing breakball, taking turns batting a baseball at windows. Whoever broke the most windows won the game. The losing team paid to replace them. The game had always struck Rachel as senseless and inane. Today it seemed to her nearly criminal. She stood at the bottom of the porch steps and glared at Paul.
“Rachel,” he gasped, as if she had come back from the dead. He didn’t seem able to say anything more.
“Hi, Paul. I need to talk to you for a minute.”
“Sure, sure,” he said. The others watched silently. Paul worked his mug into the ice and grabbed his shirt from the back of his chair. “You want to come up here, have a red-eye?”
“No, thank you. Could you just come with me for a few minutes?”
“Sure,” he said, buttoning up his shirt. He looked around for some shoes but found none. There were millions of shards of broken beer bottles and window glass on the sidewalk that looped through the quadrangle. “You sure you don’t want a red-eye?” he said, smiling. At which Rachel turned and walked away.
Paul caught up with her before she’d left the quad. “Okay, okay,” he said. “Slow down.” She stopped but did not turn around. “My car’s right up the street. We can talk there.”
The sight of the Impala made Rachel’s heart hurt, but she opened the passenger door and slipped inside.
“I didn’t think you’d ever speak to me again,” Paul said, his hands on the steering wheel.
“I didn’t either,” she said. “Now I’m not sure how I feel. But I need to know something, Paul.”
“Anything,” he said, as if she should have known this.
“How did you do on the history midterm last semester?” she asked.
“How did I what?”
“You borrowed all my notes, remember? You said you’d lost your notebook somewhere. So I gave you everything I had. Notes from lecture, from section, from the reading. Everything.”
“Of course I remember. You saved my life.”
“Did you make photocopies?”
“Yes. It would have taken me forever to copy everything by hand.”
“Who else saw my notes?”
Paul opened the car door and put one foot into the gutter. “What gives, Rachel? Why all the questions?”
Rachel turned in her seat so that she faced him. “I want to know how it is that you and six of your friends all wrote midterms that were identical to mine. At least in some respects. And close enough in other ways to make it look like I was cheating.”
“Oh my God, Rachel, did Greenway say something to you?”
“Look,” she said. “I already know that you guys cheated, but I want to know how.”
“Are you nuts?” Paul snorted. “If I say one word, those guys will kill me. I’ll be out of the fraternity, probably out of school.” He looked at her and could not quite keep the smirk off his face. “There’s no way in the world that anyone can prove we cheated.”
It had taken Rachel a mere ten minutes to find Paul, but in those ten minutes she had come up against the truth. “Somehow, one of you guys got your hands on the exam questions last fall. And then, before the exam, you all prepared your answers. And you helped each other, of course. Shared your notes. Shared my notes.” Paul refused to look at her again. “But you were all too stupid to make sure you varied your answers. They were so much alike—especially with the Kissinger quote from my notes—that Greenway was immediately suspicious. And then you did the same thing during the final, only without my help. Didn’t you?”
Paul said nothing. Rachel waited. Then, suddenly, shocking her, “Get out of my car,” he said. “Every time I have anything to do with you I end up sorry.”
“So do I,” Rachel said when she was able. She suddenly found herself so tired of the whole thing, so weary, that she was barely able to open the door of the old car that had once given her a moment of freedom. It was the last time she ever spoke to Paul.
By the time she walked into Professor Greenway’s office the next day, Rachel had realized her mistake.
She told the professor about lending her notes to one of the seven, though she did not name Paul. She had decided to let him hang himself, as he had done before.
“So there’s the link to you,” the professor said, pleased.
She went on to suggest that the others had stolen the exam questions, although she did not know how they might have done so. And then she told him about her mistake, and theirs.
“At first I thought that they had memorized their answers, but then I remembered how similar all seven were. Nearly identical, you said. Especially the Kissinger quote, which they got from my notes. It didn’t seem possible that they could have produced several nearly identical answers purely from memory.” The professor watched her and did not interrupt. “They had to have collaborated on the answers and then actually written them out before the exam. Using my notes.”
“But how could they have prepared the answers ahead of time? Those exam booklets come in five colors, and nobody knows what color is going to be used until they take the exam.”
“They bought all five colors,” Rachel said. “You can get them at the bookstore. And then they wrote out their answers in all five booklets and snuck them into the exam. And then, when they saw which color you were handing out, they just took out the right one and switched it with the blank booklet you’d given them. And spent an hour doodling. I can’t believe it. If they had spent all that effort studying, they wouldn’t have needed to cheat.”
“Sounds pretty far-fetched, but I suppose it’s possible. It would be easy to do something like that, trade booklets I mean, if they sat in the back. It’s a big class.” Professor Greenway sighed. “Any idea how they got their hands on the exam in the first place?”
No, Rachel said. She didn’t know how they’d stolen the questions. And that, Rachel thought, was that. She thought she’d heard the last of it.
For the next few weeks Rachel did little more than study. With savage determination, she fueled her mind, distinguished herself in the process, wrote an impeccable set of final exams, and began to pack her things.
On the day of her departure for Belle Haven, set to catch an afternoon bus, Rachel went to the refectory for a final lunch. She was meeting some of the friends she’d barely seen since the fall. She missed them, as if they had gone away somewhere, or as if she had. They were waiting for her when she arrived.
She had sat here with these people hundreds of times before, making jokes about the food, agonizing over deadlines and syllabi, gossiping, passing the time before class. Today Rachel just wanted to be away. She had always thought of these friends as people she would remember fondly once she’d graduated and gone her own way, but looking at their faces around the table, Rachel felt as if she were already remembering them, as if they were locked in her past and could not join her in the place she now inhabited. She tried to think of a way to e
xplain this to them, to excuse herself from their chatter and find her way to the bus station, but then she looked across the table and saw her old friend Colleen pick up a shaker and pour salt all over the bowl of ice cream she had only begun to eat. It was a habit of Colleen’s, a wealthy girl from Connecticut, to break her perpetual diet with a forbidden sweet and then, before any real damage had been done, to thwart herself with a dose of salt.
Since Harry, since her parents’ death, since Professor Greenway had found her under the maple tree, Rachel had noticed a lot of things she’d missed before, or chosen to ignore. She had come to realize that far too many of the students on this campus—these friends among them—had an extremely rigid view of the world beyond, one that was rarely based on actual experience or sincere investigation, and that they were comfortable with their assumptions. She had come to feel like a stranger here, more an outsider than she had felt on her very first day of school nearly three years before. But it was the sight of her old friend ruining her food that finally made Rachel scramble to her feet and shock them with the brevity of her good-byes.
She met Professor Greenway on the sidewalk outside the refectory.
“I’m glad I ran into you like this,” he said, leading her to a bench in the shade.
“I only have a minute, Professor. I’m going home this afternoon.”
“I won’t keep you long. I just wanted to say good-bye. I hope I’ll see you in one of my classes in the fall.”
“I’m sure you will,” she said.
“And I also wanted to tell you,” he said, as Rachel began to draw away, “that we finally found out how those boys were getting their hands on my exam questions. Stupid, really. We made things far too easy for them. But once we figured it out, it was just as easy to catch them.”
“Was it your secretary?”
Professor Greenway looked at her sharply. “She didn’t knowingly participate, any more than I did, or you either for that matter. We all made the mistake of being too trusting, too naïve. I’ve always left my exam questions in Nora’s in basket, and she’s always left a set of typed copies in my pigeonhole, both places right out in the open where anyone could watch for the chance to help himself. But this time we did up a second exam, on the sly. I used the second one. Which all six boys flunked. And you were right about them preparing their questions in advance. One of the six was so lazy that he didn’t even look at the exam. He simply handed in the blue book he’d brought with him. The right answers to the wrong questions. Such a waste. None of those boys bothered to study at all, probably didn’t go to lecture or read a thing all semester. We’ll be more careful in the future.”