Cheating Lessons: A Novel

by Nan Willard Cappo

  “Lori—”

  “Do me a favor? Forget I mentioned this.”

  “Absolutely.”

  They got in. Lori put the car in reverse and carefully backed out. The silence felt awkward. “What’s your mother do?” Bernadette asked, and held her breath in case Mrs. Besh turned out to be a kleptomaniac, or a porn star.

  But Lori smiled. “My mom’s Miss Tanya.”

  Miss Tanya’s School of Ballet had been a fixture in downtown Creighton as long as Bernadette could remember. “I took lessons from Miss Tanya when I was four,” she cried.

  “No kidding? I took them about a hundred hours a week.”

  “Do you still?”

  Lori’s face wrinkled into distaste, as though there was something uncool about dancing. This, from a devotee of pompon, struck Bernadette as funny.

  “I mostly just teach,” Lori said. “Beginning ballet three nights a week and twice on Saturdays.”

  “And pompon, and study for the Bowl? God, Lori. It’s a wonder you’re not sleeping in class.”

  “My mom’s taking my night students this month. She knows what the Classics Bowl means to me.”

  They turned off Grand River into Bernadette’s subdivision. Lori glanced over at her. “You’d think I’d want to win it for her, wouldn’t you? And I do. But what I really want is to win, and take the computer or the check or whatever they give us and shove it in my father’s face. Look at this, I’d say. I’m smart enough without you, I don’t need a father.” She laughed at herself. “Is that dumb or what.”

  Dumb? Suddenly Lori’s phone calls to Mr. Malory made some sense. He was kind and he was around. Compared with Mr. Besh he must look like the father on The Brady Bunch. “I don’t think it’s dumb,” Bernadette said.

  She turned toward the window and made a quick, hidden sign of the cross. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And Saint Bernadette, too, if you’re listening. We have to win. Please.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  . . . then he seized his left foot with both hands in

  such a fury that he split in two . . .

  —The Brothers Grimm, Rumpelstiltskin

  On Thursday—Bowl Day Minus Three—Bernadette slumped at her desk in the classroom grown familiar as a cell and listened to her stomach rumble.

  Two desks away, Lori yawned. Bernadette yawned back. Nadine yawned, too. David had his head down on his arms and hadn’t moved in some time. Anthony came in. He dropped his books with a bang that made them all yelp.

  “Hey, Ms. Terrell.” He leaned toward her and lowered his voice mysteriously. “I have something you’d love to get your hands on.”

  Bernadette stifled a yawn. “What?”

  Anthony waved his notebook. “The genuine, actual questions for this year’s Classics Bowl. Get ’em while they’re hot.”

  Bernadette jerked upright so hard, her neck twinged, shooting a fiery pain toward her ear.

  “You do?” Lori twisted around. “I don’t believe it. Read some.”

  Bernadette catapulted out of her seat. She grabbed at the notebook, but Anthony backed toward the blackboard holding it over his head.

  “Bet, he’s lying. He doesn’t have them.” Nadine’s gruff voice held amusement.

  “Oh, yeah?” Anthony said. “Listen to this—”

  “NO!” Bernadette screamed. Was he crazy? If he read them out loud, it was over. Everything would be over. She leaped up again.

  Anthony fended her off as though she were a puppy. “Name the Laura Ingalls Wilder classic—ow!—about an elf who carries a tent camping,” he shouted.

  Huh?

  “Little House on the Fairy. Get it?” Anthony’s laugh was a bray.

  Bernadette’s arms dropped to her sides. Her heart hammered painfully. “That wasn’t funny.”

  “Well, it was, kind of. How did you think I’d get the real questions?” he asked her. “Kissing up to Phoebe Hamilton? She’s a little old for me.”

  “And still in her right mind,” Nadine put in.

  David jotted something down. “I have one. Name the English novel that describes Anthony at work.”

  “Well, Animal Farm’s a contender.” Nadine made a hideous face at Anthony. “But it could be Lord of the Flies.”

  “Ooh, ooh. Let me try.” Lori ran a silver fingernail down her book list while they all waited. “Okay. What English novel describes the Wickham Warriors’ halftime show?”

  Nobody knew.

  “Middlemarch!” she cried. “Get it?”

  Groans from all around, but Lori settled back in her chair with a very satisfied expression.

  Bernadette recovered from her scare. This was a competition, after all. “What did Tarzan say when his girlfriend put a plastic bag over his head?”

  “Jane—Air?” David guessed.

  Bernadette whistled. “You’re quick,” she said, and earned one of David’s louder burps.

  It was as though Madison Avenue had announced a prize for the worst pun. They couldn’t stop themselves.

  What did you call a residence with HBO in every room? House of the Seven Cables. What did the hammer say when he took the remote control away from the pliers? It’s The Turn of the Screw. What did they call Johnny Bench when he retired to New York? The Catcher in the Rye.

  “These are worse than my cousin’s joke books. And he’s only six.” Nadine scoured her book list. “Okay, okay. Gimme a good name for a bathroom sink store.”

  “Vanity Fair!”

  At first no one noticed Mr. Malory. He stood in the doorway with a pink box under one arm and a black scowl on his face. Bernadette, who could sense fresh doughnuts through stone walls, looked up. So did David.

  “Hey, Mr. Malory,” David called, leaning back on two chair legs. “What did the waitress say when the guy ordered a martini?” He answered himself immediately. “ ‘Olive or twist?’ Get it? Oliver Twist?”

  “I ‘got it’ all the way from the main hall, Mr. Minor. Let’s hope your knowledge is more impressive than your wit.” Their teacher’s voice was clipped and cold and burningly sarcastic in a way they’d never heard it.

  David’s chair legs crashed forward. Anthony folded himself into his desk. Lori laced her hands in front of her, kindergarten-style. Through the open seatback of Bernadette’s chair, Nadine’s foot prodded her in the ribs just like old times.

  Mr. Malory looked them over as though they were something a plunger had brought up. He unlocked the file drawer in his desk and took out the familiar red binder. This he opened with great deliberation. “Ms. Besh,” he said. “Suppose you tell us who wrote Lyrical Ballads.”

  Panicked blue eyes sought Bernadette’s. “I can’t think—” Lori stammered.

  “Ms. Walczak?”

  “Coleridge and—Byron?”

  “Coleridge. And. Wordsworth!” He smacked the desk top. “Coleridge and Wordsworth, only the most influential poets of the Romantic period.” He rifled through his papers. “Who had the Romantic Poets?”

  Everyone started leafing through their assignment packets as though they had to check.

  “Ms. Besh.”

  Lori squeaked.

  “Do you see Romantic Poets on your assignment sheet?” he asked with dangerous softness.

  “I guess I didn’t get to them yet, Mr. Mallory.”

  “And when were you planning to get to them? Between cartwheels, perhaps? Or were you hoping to ink a few names on your arm the day of the Bowl?”

  Lori looked stricken. Bernadette shut her eyes.

  Then opened them. She could split Romantic Poets with Lori. “Mr. Malory, what if I—”

  “No.” He hurled the doughnut box the width of the room. It thwacked against the doorjamb. “The bloody hell with this. Do you think I’ve done all this work so you can act like a bunch of asses?”

  No one answered.

  “I’ve not given up my afternoons and evenings and weekends for the pure pleasure of your company. I had hoped you would rise to the challenge. That you’d feel you had som
ething to prove. But obviously I’ve been kidding myself.” He slammed the binder shut. “Pinehurst Academy knows how it feels to be winners. Perhaps if you ask them nicely on Sunday they’ll describe it to you.”

  He strode from the room, giving the door a good bang behind him.

  Bernadette stared at the bent box of doughnuts, its poor sugary contents squashed and spilling out, and suddenly time warped and she was ten years old, shopping with her mother at the grocery store.

  Bernadette had waved a coupon in one hand and a box of doughnuts in the other. “ ‘One Free Coffee Cake, Any Flavor. Not Good on Doughnuts or Sandwich Rolls,’ ” she recited to the cashier. “So these don’t count, Mom.”

  Martha had laughed airily and said, well, what were you supposed to do when there weren’t any coffee cakes left? But the cashier stood there as stolid as lard and did not offer to make the swap and finally Martha said, “Oh, we’ll take them anyway.” When they got out to the car she lit into Bernadette like nobody’s business.

  “Let me explain something to you,” she said as she slung a gallon of milk on top of the lettuce. “Food companies want us to buy their products, right? So when they’re out of one thing they want us to buy something else they make, why do you think I go to that cashier who God knows is slower than Christmas. Understand?”

  Bernadette understood they’d be lucky if one egg out of twelve survived. She had nodded, solemn-eyed.

  The mix of anger and righteousness in her mother’s tone that day—she’d just heard it again. In Mr. Malory’s voice. The doughnuts brought it all back.

  Her fellow Wizards came out of their trances.

  “What set him off?” David asked, aggrieved.

  Nadine snapped her fingers. “He’s lost it. Gone postal.”

  Lori sniffled back tears. “It’s all my fault. He gave me a chance, and I messed up. I am so sorry.”

  “Sorry?” Anthony leaped out of his chair with a crash. “Did you say you’re sorry?” He swept to the front of the room and began stalking back and forth, waving his arms like Mussolini berating the troops but sounding more like Winston Churchill.

  “Do you think I’m in this bloody contest for my health? Do you think I’ve neglected your grammar, ignored your essays, not even opened the practice tests that just might help you all pass the AP exam next month,” he removed an imaginary pair of glasses, mimed folding them and putting them in his shirt pocket just the way Mr. Malory did, “and treated your mediocre classmates as though they were pond scum, just for the bloody fun of it?”

  Bernadette gasped. She looked behind her at Nadine, but that was a mistake. Giggles racked them both, helpless little snorts that turned into hiccups of hysteria. It was so awful, and so true.

  Anthony bowed. He got a second wind and ranted on about the bloody this and bloody that, retrieving the crumpled pink box and strafing them all with doughnut holes as he paced up and down.

  Lori sniffled to herself. But Bernadette, cramming still-warm glazed bits of dough into her mouth as though they had medicinal value, breathed more freely. Anthony was always a clown. You could depend on him.

  The door opened.

  Anthony stopped in mid-rant.

  It was only Ms. Kestenberg, in a suit so turquoise it shimmered. “Mr. Malory is quite upset,” she said, and held up her hand against their clamor. “It isn’t you. His friend Gene—the one who’s been so sick?—he died this afternoon.”

  They fell silent. As an excuse for bad behavior, death was hard to beat.

  Nadine and Lori murmured, “Oh, no!” while David and Anthony shrugged in uncomfortable, manly forbearance. The guy’s buddy had kicked it, no wonder he was bummed.

  Bernadette rejected the last cake doughnut hole and chose a coconut-covered mutant. She chewed thoughtfully. She had seen plenty of movies where people died—she knew what grief looked like. Certainly death might make you angry. But would losing a loved one make you mean? Put a cagey glint in your eye, make you pick on people who didn’t deserve it? Well, yes, it probably would. But would it let you buy doughnuts as though they still mattered?

  Call her cold-hearted, but something felt off.

  That night the temperature plunged into the thirties. The wind roared in the streets, blowing words around and around just too fast for a listener to make sense of.

  Bernadette closed The Prelude. Out her bedroom window tree branches lurched in a wild dance. Overdue homework sat heaped on her desk, and downstairs her parents discussed her in worried tones. Tonight she would dream of pages of type so clear, she could name the fonts.

  The wind shrieked and moaned in a language she didn’t speak, yet it seemed to have a message for her. She shivered and returned to her reading. Whatever was making the skin on her neck prickle, it wasn’t coming from any book.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  O Hamlet! What a falling-off was there.

  —Shakespeare, Hamlet

  Bernadette half-expected Mr. Malory to take the next day off. But Friday morning there he was at his desk, wearing his gray shirt, her favorite. A bit casual for visiting a funeral home, wasn’t it?

  He fixed his gaze somewhere over the tops of their heads. “I owe some of you an apology for losing my temper yesterday.”

  The non-Bowl students looked curious at this, while the Wizards made polite pooh-pooh noises. It was nothing, he’d been upset, anyone would be annoyed at how silly, etc.

  Lori’s complexion had a sallow tinge, and the blue eyes were bloodshot. “I know the Romantic Poets,” she announced.

  Bernadette quailed. Don’t start him off again.

  Mr. Malory considered Lori. “Do you, indeed?” he said. “Let’s try you, shall we?”

  He flipped open the red binder. “Name the poem Wordsworth wrote that was inspired by the death of his daughter.”

  “ ‘Surprised by Joy,’ ” Lori said.

  “In the following verse, what is the poet describing? ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance/Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.’ ”

  She didn’t hesitate. “Daffodils.”

  “In Christabel, Coleridge introduced a new poetic technique. Instead of counting the syllables in each line, what did he co—”

  “Accents!” Lori cried joyfully.

  “Splendid, Ms. Besh. Well done.” So must Gepetto have gazed upon Pinocchio.

  The whole class applauded. As an omen for the Classics Bowl it couldn’t have been bettered.

  Loir’s pleasure put color back in her cheeks. “Oh, stop,” she said, and ducked her head. “They were on my list.”

  But she couldn’t stop smiling, and Bernadette would have confessed to poor study habits before revealing that she, too, had stayed up until far too late steeping herself in the Romantic period. Just in case.

  At lunch Nadine happened to mention, looking out the cafeteria windows, that since practice was canceled she thought she’d leave after fifth period to make a stop at the mall. She did not invite Bernadette.

  “Sure.” Bernadette supposed she should be thankful Nadine still ate lunch with her. “It won’t kill me to take the bus home.”

  “Bet—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Then, helplessly, Nadine said, “You think everything is black and white. All one way or another. You know? You’re so—so intense.”

  Bernadette stared at her. Then she drained her milk. Pushed back her chair. “Yeah. It’s part of my charm. Catch you later, crocodile.” She had to blink very hard on the way to the conveyer belt, where she sent her tray down the line bearing an untouched piece of coconut-cream pie.

  Of course she was intense. Intense was good, it was tough-minded. Intense was an achievement. If Nadine wanted a wimpy, “anything you do is fine with me” friend, she could just look elsewhere.

  She did, said the little voice.

  In fifth hour Mrs. Standish came on the PA system. “Please join me in extending our best wishes to Mr. Malory’s team of Wickham Wizards, who will take on Pinehurst Academy this Su
nday”—boos echoed throughout the building—“in the National Computing Systems Classics Bowl. It will be carried live on Channel 28 at five P.M. Tune in and watch our Wizards win!”

  On her way to the media center, Bernadette was stopped once again by the ring-in-the-navel girl. The ring wasn’t visible today, but the short blond hair had turned magenta.

  “Hey, Bernadette,” she said.

  Bernadette had found out her name, too. “Hey, Samantha.”

  “You gonna beat Pinehurst?”

  “Gonna try.”

  “Good. I think Wickham taking them on is the coolest thing ever. Make ’em cry, okay?” She gave Bernadette a thumbs-up gesture. Someone would be crying Sunday, of that Bernadette was sure. She only hoped it was Pinehurst.

  Ms. K. sat at a study table, reference volumes stacked all around her. Her suit glowed yellow as a Yield sign.

  “Hi, Ms. K.” Bernadette set her books on the table and sat down. “Um . . . is something wrong?”

  “Bernadette, I want an honest answer.”

  “Okay.”

  “I caught David Minor reading this—this thing. Did you know about it?” In her hand was an especially lurid comic book of Tom Jones. If the woman on the cover showed any more cleavage, she could advertise for a topless bar over in Windsor.

  Bernadette leafed through it, stalling for time. “Racy stuff, Ms. K. You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  The librarian did not smile. “I want to know if the whole team has been using these rags to study for the Bowl. Have they?”

  “Um—maybe. A little.”

  “Bernadette!”

  “Not much. Only when we’re the backup in a category.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Mostly.

  Ms. Kestenberg flicked a page with her fingernail. “They shouldn’t even sell these. All that’s here is the plot, bits of it, and suggestive cartoons.”