Cheat (6 page)

As I turned onto my street, I slowed down, which was really stupid, considering it was pouring rain. I hardly noticed. I was more worried about facing my brother than I was about getting soaked.

What was I going to do? Was I going to tell him that I'd seen him in Mr. Draper's classroom? Was I going to demand an explanation? Would I threaten to turn him in? What if he refused to confess, even when I confronted him with the facts?

I had no idea what I was going to do. Maybe nothing—at least not right away. I needed time to think. I'd seen Jack in Draper's office, but he hadn't seen me. He had no idea I was on to him. If I could hide my feelings, he wouldn't suspect a thing. I'm not very good at stifling my emotions, so it would take a miracle to pull that one off. My best bet was to avoid Jack altogether.

I didn't get the chance. He was waiting for me in the upstairs hallway. He was slouched in the doorway to his bedroom, and he looked like he'd aged ten years since I'd last seen him.

“I need to talk to you,” he said.

“About what?” I mumbled, avoiding his gaze.

He pushed himself away from the wall and walked into his room. “I think you know.”

Chapter Twelve

My brain screamed
No!

I wasn't ready to face Jack. But my body followed him anyway.

I hadn't even closed the door before he started in on me.

“I'm going to ask you one more time, Laurel. Don't write this article. I asked you before—for Sean. Now I'm asking you for me.”

Suddenly I was laughing. But it wasn't a
boy-did-that-ever-tickle-my-funny-
bone
laugh. It was the kind of laugh you would expect to roll out of a person who was about to become an ax murderer. I was definitely losing it. The look on Jack's face confirmed it.

He frowned and—yes—he actually took a step backward. “What's the matter with you?”

That brought me back to my senses. “What's the matter with
me
?” I repeated in amazement. “The more accurate question is, what's the matter with
you
?”

“What are you talking about? I'm not the one cackling my head off like a crazy person.”

“And I'm not the one up to my eyebrows in a cheating scam!” I shot back.

There. I'd said it. The color drained from Jack's face. I could tell my words had hit home. I wished I could take them back.

“I saw you in Draper's office today,” I said. It wasn't an accusation—just a fact. “I saw you switch the answer keys.”

I wanted him to deny it, but he just slumped onto the bed and stared at the rug. “It's complicated.”

I didn't say anything.

He reached over to his desk and picked up a large brown envelope. No doubt it was the one he'd had in Mr. Draper's office. He placed it on the bed beside him.

Then he looked at me. “All I ask is that you hear me out. After that, you can do whatever you want.”

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “You were right about Sean. He is selling cheat sheets. But it didn't start out that way,” he added. “Sean's a good guy, but he's not a great student, especially not in math. Believe me, I know what I'm talking about. I've studied with him. For Sean, math is a foreign language. He just doesn't get it.”

“That doesn't make it okay for him to cheat.”

Jack scowled at me. “You said you'd listen.”

“Sorry.”

“At the beginning of the school year, Sean got on as Mr. Draper's biology assistant. I think he was hoping it would give him an edge with his assignments. It also gave him a bit of spending money, which Sean doesn't have a lot of. Cash is pretty tight around his house.

“The first time he cheated was at the start of basketball season. There was a big math test, and Sean had to pass it or he'd get booted off the team. He found the answer key by accident when Mr. Draper sent him to get something. And”—Jack shrugged—“the temptation was too much. He photographed it. Then he made himself a cheat sheet with just enough right answers to make it look like a legitimate pass.”

“So how did it turn into a business?” “I'm getting to that.” Jack cleared his throat and settled back into his story. “I didn't know about the cheating until the second time. We had a big tournament coming up, and Sean didn't have the money to go. That's when he came up with the idea to sell cheat sheets. He had practically a whole class of customers in no time. He knew he couldn't give everyone the actual answer key. If the whole class aced a test, he'd get caught for sure. But he had no idea how to figure out how many right answers each kid needed to end up with their usual mark.”

“That's where you came in.”

Jack sighed. “When Sean first asked me to help, I freaked out and told him no way. But he said he'd already used the money to pay for the basketball trip. If he didn't come up with the cheat sheets, he'd be toast. The kids in his class would either rat on him or kill him.”

Jack's eyes pleaded with me to understand. “Sean's my friend. I had to help him.”

“But it happened again.”

He nodded.

“How many times?”

“One time after that, and then I told Sean I was done. No more. Basketball season was pretty much over, so there was no reason for him to cheat anymore.”

“But—”

“But he didn't want to quit. He's been hounding me to help him one last time. But I told him flat out—no. So he said he'd do it on his own.”

Jack looked miserable.

“So you gave in.”

His head shot up. “No! I already feel like crud for helping him as much as I have. I won't do it again. I
can't
do it again.” He paused before adding, “And I can't let
him
do it either.”

He picked up the envelope and opened it.

“When you saw me today in Draper's office, I was switching the real answer key for a fake. If Sean tries to sell cheat sheets using that, everyone is going to fail, and he'll be as good as dead.”

“So now what?”

“So now I call him and tell him he's got the wrong answers.” He flopped back onto the bed and stared at the ceiling. “He is going to be so pissed off.”

“Maybe,” I conceded, “but at least he won't get in trouble.”

Chapter Thirteen

The cheating scam was supposed to be my ticket to fame. It was a juicy scandal I could take to the editor of the
Islander
. With a reputation as an ace reporter, I would finally be recognized for me and not just as Jack Quinn's little sister.

All I cared about was the glory my article was going to win me. Jack was right about that. As long as the scammer was some faceless kid in school, everything was fine. I didn't think about what would happen after I exposed him. I was even okay with the situation when I thought Sean was involved.

But when I found out Jack was part of the scam too, things weren't so black and white anymore. Jack had done a bad thing, but he wasn't a bad person. And there was no way I was going to tell everyone at school—
everyone in the
city!
—what he'd done. But to reveal only Sean's part wouldn't be fair either.

So my story was dead.

I still had to write an article though. So I wrote about me. Well, sort of. I wrote about the things I'd learned while chasing the story.

I wrote about how everyone hated me after the first article on cheating. I said I thought I had a responsibility to report the story. But maybe all those kids who were mad at me had a point. I'd only been seeing the facts, not the people. I said that Jarod and Dale may have cheated—I still didn't mention their names— but instead of seeing what they did as a crime, I now saw it as an act of friendship.

I wrote how there is always more than one side to a story, and I apologized for judging others. Sometimes the reasons people do things are just as important as the things they do. And most important, I told my readers—if there were any left—that at the end of the day, we have to be able to live with ourselves. It wasn't the article I'd planned to write. It was the one I needed to write. I worked on it for days.

It didn't erase the harm I'd done. It didn't make kids start talking to me again, but I knew I had learned from my mistakes, and that was a start.

The morning after the paper came out, there was another envelope waiting for me in the newspaper office.

As soon as I started to read it, I knew it was from my informant. It said,
I gave
you the story on a platter, but you jammed
out. You blew it
.

Great! Now my informant hated me too. Most people were mad at me for the stuff I'd written. This guy—I assumed it was a guy from the handwriting—was mad at me for what I
hadn't
written.

After morning announcements, Sean got hauled into the principal's office. Apparently my informant had taken matters into his own hands. Since I wasn't going to write about the scam, he had decided to go to Mr. Wiens himself. But he didn't know about Jack's involvement.

Even though Sean was still mad at Jack, he never ratted him out. Sean could have denied his own part in the scam too—it was his word against another student's—but he confessed everything.

Sean got kicked out of Barton High and was transferred to another school. That meant he wasn't going to graduate with the kids he'd known since kindergarten.

What Sean had done was wrong, but it's not like he was headed for a life of crime. He'd just had a weak moment. If I hadn't put out that survey, no one would ever have found out. On the other hand, my informant might have gone to the principal anyway. There was no way of knowing, but I still felt like the situation was my fault.

My conscience was bugging me, but it was nothing compared to what Jack was going through. I stopped by his room the day Sean got kicked out to see how he was doing.

“It's my fault!” he groaned as he paced his room. “If I'd stuck to my guns the first time, the whole thing would've died right then.”

“You've got a very convenient memory, Jack,” I said drily. “Sean had spent the money before he even handed over the cheat sheets. Remember? If you hadn't helped him, he would've got the crap beat out of him. Would that have made you feel better?”

He sent me a withering glare and continued to pace. “Well, I should've done something,” he muttered. “Pay back the money maybe.”

“Since when do
you
have that kind of cash?” I hooted. “Sean made six hundred dollars for one math test!”

“I could've—”

“Give it a rest, Jack,” I interrupted him. “This isn't your fault. Sean knows that. Which is why he didn't take you down with him.”

Jack sank onto the bed. “It's not right that he's taking the fall for this alone.”

“What possible good would it do for you to be in trouble too? It wouldn't change anything for Sean.”

“I know,” he said. “But it might change things for me. You said it yourself, Laurel. At the end of the day, we all have to be able to live with ourselves.”

Jack confessed to Mom and Dad, and the next morning he told the whole story to Mr. Wiens.

He was stretched out on his bed, staring at the ceiling when I knocked on his door after school.

“So what happened?” I asked after he gave me the okay to come in.

“I'm suspended.” He didn't sound angry or even upset. It was just a statement of fact.

“For how long?”

“Two weeks. Mom and Dad also grounded me.”

“Is that all?” I asked.

Jack lifted his head and squinted at me. “Isn't that enough?”

“What I mean is, did you get transferred to another school too—like Sean?”

He sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “No. But Mr. Wiens made it crystal clear that if basketball wasn't finished for the year, I'd be off the team.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, that's sort of lucky then. You couldn't have been scouted by all those colleges if that had happened.”

“Yeah, well maybe that would have been just as well. Then I wouldn't have gotten my hopes up.”

“What do you mean?” I asked warily. He smiled, but it was pretty pathetic. “Do you remember how Mr. Wiens and my coach sent out letters of recommendation to all the colleges that were recruiting me?”

I nodded. “Yeah. So?”

“Well, Mr. Wiens says that now he is obligated to let all those schools know what I did.”

“Oh no,” I gasped. “Does that mean they'll take back their scholarship offers?”

Jack shrugged. “I don't know. Mr. Wiens said he doesn't view what I did as a morality issue so much as a lapse in judgment, and that's how he plans to present it in his letter.”

“That's good—right?” I asked hopefully.

“I don't know.” He shrugged again. “I guess we'll have to wait and see.”

I nodded. I felt empty—flat. Everything had gone so wrong. The big article that was supposed to put me on the social map had done exactly the opposite. It had turned me into an outcast, ruined Sean's and Jack's reputations, strained their friendship and maybe even cost Jack his basketball future.

Yeah, things had backfired all right. All I could do now was hope they'd improve. But like Jack said—we'd have to wait and see.

Kristin Butcher is the author of numerous popular books for juveniles, including
Chat Room
in the Orca Currents series. She has never cheated on a test. Kristin lives in Campbell River, British Columbia.

o
rca
currents

The following is an excerpt from
another exciting Orca Currents novel,
Chat Room
by Kristin Butcher.