by Ariel Kaplan
“Try her birthday,” I suggested, less than helpfully.
She stopped typing and shot me a look. “I’m afraid I forgot to send her a card this year.”
I pulled open the top drawer and sifted through its contents.
“What are you looking for?” She was still typing random combinations of numbers. “What if it’s her social? UGH.”
I hit pay dirt—the card the rest of the faculty had signed for her last birthday. I showed it to Emily, who said, “That would be helpful, if it had a DATE on it.”
I scanned the card. Mr. Bronstein had written in one corner Happy seventy-fifth!
“Maybe it’s the year,” I said. “Try 1943.”
She typed it, then slumped. “That’s it. We’re so late. We’re 200% screwed.”
She entered the second password from the phone into the computer. “We’re in.” She opened up the IGradeBook software and pulled up the database.
“Here we go,” she said. “Okay. Here’s the database.” She tapped the screen with her finger. “Blanchard Grades. And—wait. There’s a second one. Blanchard University Admissions.”
I frowned. “Why would they have two different sets of data?”
She opened the admissions database. “It looks like this is simplified,” she said. “It’s just end-of-year grades, plus the first-quarter grades from this year.”
“Couldn’t they just extract those from the regular database?”
“They could,” she said. “Maybe they’re doing it this way to make it easier on Mrs. Hadley. I don’t think she’s the most tech-savvy person on campus.”
She opened the first database and pulled up my record. “There you are. Does that look right?”
I scanned it, A after A after A. “Yeah, that’s right. Except…”
“What?”
I pointed to a field on the far right of the screen, called “RANK.” “Why is my rank so low?” Mine was 118. “Isn’t that class rank?”
“It sure looks like it,” she said. “But what’s that one?” She pointed to the next field, which was “PFC AMT.”
“It’s a test-score aggregate?” I suggested.
“I’m not sure,” she said. She sorted the database by RANK. Meredith suddenly became number one.
She ran her finger from the PFC AMT to the RANK. “They’re inversely connected,” she said. “The higher the AMT, the lower the rank. That makes sense, if it’s a test score. Maybe there’s something to do with the AP scores? Or, like, it’s SATs, SAT IIs, and APs all together somehow.”
She went back to Explorer and typed, PFC AMT formula. “Maybe I can figure out how they’re calculating it.”
No results.
I scowled, trying to think of what test we’d taken on which Meredith had done so well and I’d done so poorly.
She cleared the search and went back to the database. “Doesn’t matter anyway. It doesn’t seem to affect the grades. See? Here’s Meredith.” She pointed at the top entry. “B+ in freshman English. Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That seems accurate.”
“It looks like the grades in the main database haven’t been messed with,” she said. She clicked over to the college admissions version, which was a lot easier to scan through since it wasn’t broken out into quarter grades. “Here you are again.”
And there was my messed-up transcript, in all its unholy glory. “That’s what I saw at Revere,” I said.
She opened Meredith’s. The freshman English grade had suddenly turned into an A.
I thought of Meredith, with her little tiny smile, telling me she was smarter than me, when all along, she’d been cheating.
I wanted to claw her face off.
I muttered. “That smug little—”
We heard the footsteps of burly firemen outside the door. “Back in the box,” she hissed, and we dove back inside, Emily pulling the flaps shut just as the doors opened.
We heard the firemen walk the perimeter of the room.
“This one’s clear,” one of them said.
“Someone left the computer on,” the other one said.
Emily whispered something under her breath. A prayer, maybe, that they wouldn’t notice what was glaringly up on the screen and get suspicious, because there was no way a staff member would have left those files open and walked out of the room.
“Let’s go,” the other one said.
We waited until we were sure they were gone before we jumped back out of the box.
“We don’t have much time left,” she said. She bolted back to the computer and typed a few things I didn’t see. “I want to check Amy Gregston, too, but this is faster.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m making a new database,” she said. “Using the final grades from both. I want to compare them without having to go one line at a time.”
“You think someone else has changes?”
“I think it’s possible.”
She hit enter, and a new page opened up.
“This has the final grades for all the seniors across all subjects for freshman through junior year,” she said. “It’s set up to flag any changes between the two databases.”
“Right,” I said. “There’s Amy.”
“Hang on—I haven’t sorted it yet.” She clicked to sort it by her flag.
We stared at the screen.
“Holy crap,” she said.
Her flag was either a 0 or 1, and she’d sorted it so that the 1s—the people with changes—were all at the top of the screen.
The entire screen was full of row after row of 1s.
“That can’t be right,” I said. “You must’ve done that wrong.”
“I didn’t do it wrong.”
“You must have. That’s too many people.”
“Mischa—”
“Emily, that’s too many people!”
“It’s not wrong,” she insisted. “Whoa. How many is that?”
I scanned the list, counting in my head. “Nineteen,” I said.
She let out a low whistle.
“Meredith wouldn’t have done all that. She doesn’t even like nineteen people.”
“It must have been a ring,” she said, scrolling down the list. “Some kind of a grade-changing ring. Jesus Christ.”
“How many of these people had grades that went up?” I asked.
“Sixteen,” she said. “And three went down. Including you.” She read the other two names off the list. “David Chu and Lisa Mann.”
“I don’t—” I started, and then I stopped, because I’d just read the next name on the list.
Nathaniel Miller.
“No,” I said. “No.”
The bottom went out of my stomach. I stared at the name, waiting to see it morph into something else. There were two Nates in our grade. Maybe it was Nate Oberman. He was a tool. Nate Oberman would totally do something like this.
But this wasn’t Nate Oberman. I recognized Nate’s creative writing and journalism electives. It was him. It was our Nate. My Nate. “No,” I said again.
Emily was stone-faced.
“You’re not surprised,” I said.
“Are you? Nate didn’t have the grades for Emory. You must have wondered about it.”
I squirmed inside, because honestly, I had. Nate was one of the smartest people I knew. He wrote beautiful essays—when he turned them in—but he could barely do math to save his life. I knew he’d gotten a C− in precalc last year, because I’m the one who got him through it at all. I glanced at his grades. Apparently precalc wasn’t the only math class he’d had problems with.
“There’s no way he was in on this,” I said.
“Mischa,” she said. “Look at what’s in front of you!”
“But he was helping us! Why help us,
if he knew he was going to get caught?”
She shook her head. “Nate is…”
“No,” I said. “No, I know him. He wouldn’t do this. Why would he?”
“Maybe because he got scared,” she said. “He must have known he didn’t have what it took to get in there. Maybe he got worried he wouldn’t be able to handle it, and he wanted out.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “That’s a load of crap.”
“The evidence says otherwise,” she said.
“Stop copying the database,” I said.
“What? No!”
“Emily—”
“Mischa, pay attention! Do you not get it? There are nineteen people on this list. Sixteen people who got a spot that should have gone to someone else. Three people who got shafted.”
When I said nothing, she said, “You do remember that you’re one of those people, right?”
“Believe me,” I said. “I haven’t forgotten.”
There was a rumbling out in the hallway—the students coming back into the building.
“We have everything copied,” Emily said, pulling the flash drive out of the computer and logging off. “Time to go.”
“Don’t do this to him,” I said. “Emily, he didn’t do this.”
“If we don’t get out of here, we’re going to get caught!”
We both stopped and looked up, because the voices were now a whole lot closer than they had been thirty seconds ago.
“Are they running?”
“We need to get out of here,” I said.
“I’m glad you caught up to that,” she said. I followed her to the door. There were people there. People who were about to see us coming out of the office.
Mrs. Hadley was one of them.
We figured this out just as she opened the door and saw us. In the office. She saw us in the office. I thought, Those orange prison jumpsuits are super ugly, and also my mother is never going to forgive me for this.
“Hi, Mrs. Hadley,” Emily said, her expression suddenly brightening. “We saw Bebe outside, and she told us about your sweater.” She shrugged out of her backpack and unzipped it, pulling out a Target bag. “I just bought this last night, but then I realized it’s a petite, and I don’t wear petite, and I thought…”
She handed Mrs. Hadley a white cardigan with kittens embroidered on the pockets. Mrs. Hadley took it, a little reluctantly. “Oh,” she said. “I couldn’t.”
“Oh, please take it,” Emily said earnestly. “Bebe feels awful, and I was just going to return it anyway.”
She ran a hand over one of the tiny ginger kittens. “You girls are so thoughtful,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Anytime, Mrs. Hadley,” Emily said smoothly.
“You’d better get to class,” Mrs. Hadley said. “I wouldn’t want you to be tardy.”
“You’re absolutely right,” Emily said, and pulled me out into the hallway. “Contingencies,” she said to my raised eyebrows. And then she disappeared into the throng of students flooding the hall on their way to class.
I joined the crowd of people on their way to first period. My head was kind of cottony. A ring. There was an entire ring of people at Blanchard with changed grades. People had used it to get into places like Stanford and Yale and Harvard. And they’d used it to keep me out.
Nate had been one of them. That’s what the evidence showed.
Would Nate really do something like that? It went against everything I thought I knew about him.
But I’d seen his name on the list.
On my way into class, he texted me: Did you get it?
I stuck my phone away, riddled with doubts and guilt.
Emory, I knew, was Nate’s dream school. He had family in Atlanta and was dying to go down there to be closer to his cousins and aunts and uncles, and he loved the city and the campus. He’d been talking about going there since sophomore year, and he’d been so, so excited when he’d gotten the letter. But I’d seen his math grades. Emory wouldn’t accept those. They just wouldn’t.
Nate must have known that.
He found me after class. “You didn’t answer me,” he said. “I had to text Emily. She said you got the database.”
I stared fixedly at the floor. “Is that all she said?”
“Ye-es,” he said slowly. “Why? Did you guys end up making out in the box?”
“No,” I said. “We didn’t make out in the box.” I rubbed my eyes. “We found nineteen people with changed transcripts.” I looked up at him, waiting for a twitch, a grimace, something that would indicate that he’d known anything about this at all.
But he just said, “Whoa. That’s. Whoa. So, Meredith Dorsay?”
I wasn’t sure whether he meant that Meredith’s transcript was changed, or that Meredith was the one who had changed it, which had been the prevailing theory until about an hour ago. I said, “Meredith was one of them. Yeah.”
He said, “And you.”
“Well, obviously, me.”
“Anybody else we know?” he asked.
I hedged. His eyes were troubled, like you’d expect, but the fact was that Nate was a terrible, terrible liar, and if he’d known something was wrong with his transcript, it would be all over his face. And it wasn’t. “Nobody interesting,” I said. “Look, let’s talk tonight. Okay?”
“Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I think maybe I was just in that box too long. I’m feeling—I don’t know. Claustrophobic. Or something.”
I texted Emily on my way into class. He didn’t know, I said. I’m sure of it.
There was no response.
Emily, come on.
Again, nothing.
We’re going to have to talk about this sometime!
Finally a text came through; it was a selfie of Ms. Ishikawa, the computer science teacher, looking thoroughly pissed, and a caption that said, EMILY CAN’T COME TO THE PHONE RIGHT NOW BECAUSE SHE IS IN CLASS, MISCHA ABRAMAVICIUS. WHAT CLASS ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO BE IN?
I stashed my phone without answering.
* * *
—
On my way to lunch I got a text from Shira. It was a selfie of her at Panera, in front of an entire chocolate cake with a fork stuck in it. It said, Suspension not so bad!
It was a group text, and Bebe responded, Save me some of that cake.
Shira replied, Not bloody likely.
When I got to the dining hall, Caroline was sitting alone with a bowl of tomato soup and a cheese sandwich, and it occurred to me that, unlike Meredith, unlike Nate, she’d actually earned her spot at college all on her own. I wondered if she knew that, at Blanchard, that made her special.
I was still feeling a little numb, but I didn’t really want to be alone, and Caroline was kind of a safe space. She was pure, somehow, untouched by either cheating or cybercrime.
“Hey,” I said. “Mind if I sit?”
Caroline looked at me. I was aware that I’d barely spoken to her in weeks, and she was probably mad about that. I said, “I can go, if you want.”
“No,” she said. “It’s okay.”
I picked the crust off one edge of my sandwich while she watched. After a minute she said, a little hesitantly, “I decided on Columbia. By the way.”
“Oh,” I said. “Wow.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t expect you to be happy for me or anything.”
“I am,” I said. “Happy for you. I’m happy for you. I think Columbia’s great. There’s the city. With the bodegas. And the cats.”
“Yeah,” she said flatly.
“Look,” I said. “I’m sorry. I know I haven’t been the greatest friend.”
“Maybe we should just change the subject.”
“Okay.”
She yawned and rubbed
the heels of her hands into her eye sockets with a groan.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m just tired.” She looked it, I realized. Her posture was abnormal—slumped, I guess—and her hair looked like she’d forgotten to brush it in the back. In short, she looked pretty much like I felt. Which was bad. It was bad.
“Up late?”
“Yeah. We had a practice AP in Latin today. I was studying.”
I laughed, because suddenly that struck me as really funny, taking a practice AP. “It never ends, does it?”
“Nope. It never ends. Well, I guess I’ll die someday.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah.”
“That probably shouldn’t seem like such a relief,” she said.
I sat up a little and looked at her again. She really didn’t look so great. “Seriously, are you okay?”
“Yeah. I’m okay. Or I will be, in about four hours.”
“You’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
I ate a spoonful of my soup. It was not hot. Probably it had not been hot for some time. “Why do we do this to ourselves?”
“What else are we going to do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Move to a commune? Turn on, tune in, drop out?”
“Smoke some dope?” She laughed. “That didn’t turn out so well for Shira Gastman.” I showed her the picture of the cake on my phone. “Or maybe it did,” she said.
I put the phone away and ate a corner off my sandwich. “Hey, if you hadn’t gotten into Columbia or Dartmouth, what would you have done?”
“Um. Gone to UVA, probably. Or someplace else, I don’t know.”
“What if you hadn’t gotten in anyplace else?”
“Hey,” she said gently. “Revere’s not so bad. You know my step-cousin who went there? He’s totally in law school now. He loved it there.”
“I’m not talking about me,” I said, even though I kind of was. I was also thinking about Nate. I was thinking about what it must feel like to know your dream is out of reach because of a couple of math grades. If that would make you do something you normally wouldn’t.
“Do you want to get together to study for that quiz in government on Thursday?” she asked.