Cheating Lessons: A Novel

by Nan Willard Cappo

  On the desk hutch Car Repairs beckoned like Pandora’s box.

  She didn’t even pretend Ms. K. would do such a thing. She had the binder open on the desk before Sheba could meow at being dumped.

  The first page started her heart hammering again.

  Bernadette knew that loopy writing from a thousand evidence cards. “Name: Nadine Walczak. School: Wickham High.” One hundred rows of five boxes each. An answer sheet from the Classics Contest they’d taken. Not the original—a copy.

  She turned it over with fingers that shook. Anthony’s sheet was there, and David’s. Lori’s. Her own. Here was the bootleg test itself, with its dire empty threat: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO COPY THIS TEST.

  Bernadette Terrell had scored an eighty.

  Not an eighty-seven. She counted up the circled wrong answers just to be sure. There was a calculator in the top desk drawer. The five scores averaged seventy-five.

  Bernadette felt for the desk chair and sat down. She’d been right after all about someone cheating. Just wrong about who it had been.

  Her mind jumped back to the day they had taken the test. It became a video camera, replaying the scene in slow motion.

  She had finished first. Anthony next, then Lori. After a while Mr. Malory had gone out—to copy the test, he’d told Ms. Kestenberg. And obviously, she saw now, to cheat. He’d probably kept these copies as a record of what the team would need to learn. How had he known how many answers to change before Wickham’s performance went from impressive to suspect? She didn’t know, but he’d gauged it just right—at least for NCS. Then back to the classroom and his carefully selected proctors: one who thought he walked on water, and one who just hoped that wherever he’d been, he’d washed his hands.

  The famous Terrell memory had not mattered at all. Frank Malory could make a Wickham Wizard out of a chimp.

  That hokey explanation about normalizing—how could she have swallowed that? She groaned out loud. Every feeling revolted.

  Sheba stared up at her, and she glared back. “So what?” Bernadette growled. “So someone cheated. Surprise, surprise.” If she could live with the idea a month ago—and she’d managed to—she could live with it now.

  But now it was Mr. Malory.

  She choked off that train of thought immediately. There was no time to have hysterics all over the man’s apartment just because he turned out to be a lying, cheating, sleeping-around manipulative BASTARD—

  She turned over the test. Underneath it was a letter on University of Michigan letterhead. A photocopy.

  Dear Research Committee Members:

  As I mentioned in my fax, Mrs. Hamilton felt that this year’s questions underrepresented British poetry. Your contributions (attached) will certainly remedy that. We feel that correct responses in the sixty to seventy percent range would be an excellent performance from this age group.

  Thank you for your prompt response.

  The typed name read “Genevieve L. Fontaine, PhD, Chairwoman, NCS Classics Contest Research Committee.” The blue signature scrawled above it said “Gena.”

  It was dated March 17, twelve days earlier. At the bottom of the sheet bold black capitals warned: DO NOT CIRCULATE OR COPY.

  Gene wasn’t dead. He was a girl.

  Under the letter were questions on poets from Auden to Yeats. The Wizards could answer them all. Had answered them, in bits and pieces, over the last two weeks. Her insides shriveled. All their practice this month, all those hours—it had been an act, to fool them into thinking that they’d earned The Power.

  Some power. Their coach had the questions.

  Bernadette wrapped her arms about herself tightly and bent over in the chair. Blood rushed to her head, and dark colors exploded behind her eyes, but she stayed that way a long time, rocking. There was a crooked man and he had a crooked smile. A beautiful, crooked smile.

  After a while she sat up. She slid the binder back in its place. Now what?

  She gazed around the apartment. She could take a kitchen knife and gouge dirty words on his CDs. Scoop the clumps from the litter box and hide them in his pillowcase. Pour Pine-Sol into his orange juice. He deserved all that and worse.

  But she didn’t do any of it. At that moment she knew about him, and he didn’t know she knew. Years of Sarah Sloan kicked in. You might not know why or when you’d need it, but having surprise on your side was always an advantage.

  Bernadette fetched Sheba and the cat supplies and locked up. By now Ms. K. would think she’d crashed the car. She banged her way down the stairs and out the back door, not caring who saw her. An illegal cat was the least of her worries. When she set the carrier on the ground to unlock the car, she checked her watch. Her life had changed, and Jeopardy! was still on.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I do perceive here a divided duty.

  —William Shakespeare, Othello

  Whatever they’d given Ms. Kestenberg for pain made her so dopey, she didn’t notice how long Bernadette had been gone. Bernadette helped her and her new plaster cast into the car, drove her home, and unloaded her and the cat. Then she called Martha for a ride. Her mother was so impressed by this Good Samaritan role, she forgot to scold Bernadette for not calling sooner.

  That night, alone in her room, Bernadette let the implications of her discoveries crash around her.

  Mr. Malory had cheated. If they won the Bowl it would be a giant scam. He’d set the Wizards up. And oh, one more thing—she was a fool.

  She stared with loathing at the full-length mirror on the back of the door. Her eyes showed dull and pinkish behind the glasses she wore at home, as though she had a cold. Her flannel Harvard sleepshirt could stand a washing. “You even look kind of stupid,” she told the mirror girl. “Easy to trick.”

  Clues that had been in plain sight all along shone now as though viewed through a special night-scope. The job reference to Pinehurst that Anthony had seen; the “missing” scoring procedure; Mr. Malory’s lie about Lori’s SATs; that thing he’d said in his car before their first team meeting, about how even if they had gotten in the Bowl by mistake that they could win with hard work—he had no doubt of it, he’d said. Well, no wonder. His arrogant belief in the superiority of English literature; the way rules didn’t apply to him.

  “And don’t forget the flattery.” She paced about the room, determined to flay herself with all possible recrimination. Tell me I can win and I’ll believe anything. Mr. Malory hadn’t wasted soft words on Bernadette Terrell about her eyes, her hair, her distracting legs. He had praised her mind. Said this was her year. Told her she could have The Power. She remembered the physical thrill she’d felt in his car when he brushed her leg, and hated him for that, too.

  Abruptly she snatched up her purse from the desk. Zipped in the inside compartment were the matches she’d stolen on that drive. Gena probably had some just like them.

  Bernadette bent back the cover and lit them all. They flamed to life in one bright, smokeless burst. She held the book until it burned down to her fingers and then dropped it in a china mug.

  Cheater. Liar. Betrayer. She ran out of epithets. He was all of those, but what was she?

  A sucker? Or worse?

  True, she had questioned the contest results. But she’d managed to stifle her doubts. “To win,” she said out loud. “For him.” She stopped in front of the door again. The mirror girl’s left eyebrow lifted. “Oh, all right. And for Nadine. And my parents. And part of me wanted to win, too.” Quite a big part. The faces of the other Wizards filled her mind’s eye, their expressions intent and serious the way they’d looked during practices. David, Lori, Anthony. They’d worked so hard!

  And now? Was Bernadette supposed to let her team walk into a setup? They called her Captain. They trusted her.

  She couldn’t do it. Frank Malory could sleep with the whole female faculty of any college he chose, she decided. He could catch every disease there was going (and the sooner the better), but he had no right to cheat his students. She felt as besmirc
hed as if he’d turned out to be a child molester. Although, she had to admit, this was not that bad. But it was bad enough.

  She went to bed and, eventually, to sleep. The stakes of the contest had changed. But it was still a contest—and Bernadette Terrell still hated to lose.

  At Creighton City Park the next morning the wind gusted cold and sharp. Even a headband and gloves didn’t keep the chill out.

  Bernadette jogged along the path that circled the park, narrowly avoiding a pile of dog droppings that belonged, at a guess, to a Saint Bernard. They had signs all over the park telling owners to clean up after their animals, but some people evidently felt their dogs’ messes were a privilege to step in. She tied her hood around her face. When she turned to jog back, Nadine was coming toward her.

  Her spirits rose. “Hey there.”

  “You look like a drug pusher.” Nadine’s breath came out in little puffs of smoke. Her jean jacket had no hood to disarrange her new swingy, geometric haircut. She wore earrings Bernadette had not seen before—little pewter pigs. “What was so urgent you couldn’t tell me on the phone?”

  “Excuse me,” Bernadette said. “Am I keeping you from an Egg McMuffin? Or wait, what’s it called—kim cheese?”

  “Kimchi,” Nadine corrected loftily. “No, we go out for Belgian waffles on Saturdays. Boy, are you grumpy.”

  “On Saturdays,” was it? As though Nadine’s life had formed an unbreakable pattern after all of three weeks. Jealousy gnawed at Bernadette. She couldn’t even say who she envied—Nadine, or Vince.

  They started to walk. Nadine turned her collar up and put her gloveless hands in her pockets. “Speaking of grumpy, the other day Vince bet me I couldn’t name all the Seven Dwarfs, and I did! I’m telling you, Bet, he was in awe.” She gave her throaty chuckle that usually made Bernadette smile, too.

  Not today. Bernadette could only shake her head in wonder. How could a girl whose favorite movie was the undubbed version of Babette’s Feast settle for Vince Cirillo? Dwarfs! Try mental midgets!

  Nadine bubbled on. “Vince has a thousand dollars riding on Wickham tomorrow, at three to one. Isn’t that wild? It’s for Anthony’s college.” She peered into Bernadette’s face. “Something’s wrong, isn’t it. I’m sorry. I’ll shut up.”

  “I was in Mr. Malory’s apartment yesterday.”

  Nadine stopped dead on the path. “You were?” Then, “Oh, my God, Bet. Did he—” She gripped Bernadette’s elbow and said fiercely, “Did he try something?”

  Bernadette’s laugh was part choke. “Yeah,” she said, coughing, “yeah, you could say he tried something.”

  They tramped along the cinder path hunched into their jackets, sometimes walking backward into the wind, while Bernadette told all.

  When she got to the bra part, Nadine whistled. When Mr. Malory came home unexpectedly, she squealed. “In the closet? Why didn’t you just tell him why you were there?”

  “I couldn’t look him in the eye. You didn’t see that bra, Nadine. It was like something out of a porn movie.” Bernadette had never watched a porn movie, but she could imagine. With a vicious kick she sent a rock sailing into the muddy brown stream that ran below the path. “Anyway, he would have thought I was spying on him. So I hid.”

  “And spied on him.” Nadine chortled with delight. “Excellent!”

  She cried, “Gena!” with the same startled suspicion Bernadette had felt. At the bathroom part, she groaned. “That is so gross. You must have been dying.”

  Truly, a great audience. With every sentence Bernadette’s heart lightened.

  When she revealed the contents of the binder, however, the sparkle died out of Nadine’s face. The tips of her ears glowed red from the cold. Bernadette pulled off her own headband and made Nadine put it on.

  They were at the gravel-filled square of exercise stations. Nadine collapsed onto a splintery sit-up bench. “He had our answer sheets?”

  “Copies.” Bernadette sat beside her. “He must have sent in the originals after he’d changed them. Probably kept the copies to see where we were weakest.”

  “What’d I really get?”

  “Seventy-nine.”

  “That’s not bad,” Nadine said, before sinking back into gloom. “I can’t believe it. Mr. Malory! He’s so cool. Everyone . . . oh, hell.” Suddenly she demanded, “What about Spic ‘n’ Span? You said she acted weird in her office, like she wondered if you had seen something suspicious. Remember? Is she in on this?”

  Bernadette was impressed that Nadine recalled that. It seemed a million years ago. “I don’t think so. She might have suspected him, just because Wickham had never won before, and he’s the only one who could have done it, really.” Now she saw that. “But she wouldn’t have wanted to rock the boat. The worst she might have done was nothing. But as for being in on it? He wouldn’t need her. He didn’t need her to give him the right test answers. And he sure didn’t need her help seducing Gena.”

  Nadine squeezed her arm. “Sorry,” she said gruffly.

  “It’s okay.”

  Nadine chewed thoughtfully on her bottom lip. “So,” she said eventually. “Now what do we do?”

  “We get him fired.” It was the worst thing Bernadette could think of, castration being beyond their power. “Maybe we could get him deported.”

  ‘What about tomorrow?”

  “Forget tomorrow. Once we call Mrs. Hamilton—” Bernadette looked at her watch. It was almost noon. “We should do that right away. They’ll have to postpone it.”

  “You’re going to get NCS to call off its Tenth Anniversary Bowl on a day’s notice? You really think they’ll believe you?”

  Bernadette turned to her. Nadine had used the deceptively calm voice that made her debate opponents quake.

  “Why not?” Bernadette said warily. “I can prove I know the questions.”

  “Don’t you think it’ll leak out that Wickham cheated?”

  “Not Wickham, Nadine, just Mr.—”

  “Wickham is us.” Nadine hissed it. Her black eyes blazed, and the pig earrings danced in fury. “It’s the Wizards, it’s our parents, it’s the whole school. Everyone will say Wickham cheated its way into the Classics Bowl. Is that what you want?”

  “Of course not. I’d give my eyeteeth to beat Pinehurst. In a fair fight.”

  Nadine jumped off the bench. She grabbed one of the chin-up bars and hung there, her profile to Bernadette. “I’m going in there tomorrow like nothing happened.”

  “You can’t. What if he stole all the questions? Just because I didn’t see them doesn’t mean he hasn’t fed them to us. We’re contaminated.”

  “I didn’t cheat. And neither did you. Why should we get punished because Malory’s a crook?” She dropped to the ground. Bernadette could not help wondering how they had ever lost a debate with Nadine capable of such passion.

  She swallowed. “Nadine, I realize it wasn’t our idea. But it’s still cheating.”

  “Is it? Malory didn’t do anything worse than we do when we prep for a debate.”

  “What?”

  “You know how we always take the desks by the window, so the sun’s in the other team’s eyes? And how we pump people in the hallways for clues about their cases and then take notes, in case we meet them in a later round? We’d read someone’s case if they left it lying out and you know it.”

  “That’s different.”

  “How?”

  “That’s their own dumb fault,” Bernadette cried. She stood up into the wind, which must be what filled her eyes with water. “If they’re that stupid they deserve it. We wouldn’t break into their house and steal their files. We wouldn’t sleep with the desk clerk to get the key to their hotel room.”

  “Oh, so there are degrees of honesty.”

  “I didn’t say that.” Though come to think of it, of course there were. “I’m saying Malory cheated.”

  “Bet, grow up!” Nadine’s voice was full of scorn. “Who lied to your mother about how her car got scratched, h
mmm? Driving around Mr. Malory’s parking lot trying to see where he lived?”

  “That was just a fib. It doesn’t mean I’m a liar.”

  Nadine pounced. “All right. If a fib doesn’t make you a liar, then just knowing a cheater doesn’t make us cheats!”

  It felt illogical. Still, Bernadette’s certainty cracked. They weren’t supposed to debate each other. Desperately she cast about for some common ground, something that would put them back on the same side. “Nadine. What happened to Anna Karénina when she ran off with Vronsky?”

  “That was Russia, ages ago. It was fiction.”

  “You told me she violated the moral code.”

  “Of her time—not ours.”

  “All right. But aren’t some things wrong in any time?” Surely this was true. Surely some things were always wrong.

  Nadine’s face grew dark as the blood rushed to it. “This isn’t one of those things.”

  “I think it is.”

  “Fine. Go throw yourself under a train,” Nadine spat, and stomped off.

  Bernadette sat back down again. She picked up some stones and chucked them at the metal slide on the nearby playground, pretending the slide was Vince. She’d thrown three handfuls when Nadine reappeared.

  “Listen.” Nadine sat down close beside Bernadette on the bench. Her husky voice was patient, as though she were speaking to someone who was a little slow. “Everyone is counting on us. Our parents, the kids at school. David, Anthony. Lori would be crushed.”

  Lori, who’d invited her father to watch her win something that took brains.

  “It’s not like he tried to get us to cheat,” Nadine continued.

  That was true, too. Though he’d probably been thinking less of their immortal souls than about the security risk to himself.

  “It’s the right thing to do, for everyone,” Nadine urged.

  There’s always a right thing. Bernadette remembered someone saying that. What a dope, whoever it was. Nadine took Bernadette’s unresisting hand between her own.