Cheating Lessons: A Novel (18 page)

Keep talking, Bernadette prayed. Keep moving around, keep making noise. She couldn’t budge. If she backed up one inch, the ironing board would knock against the wall. A thought paralyzed her. What if he’d come back to put on a clean shirt? A shirt that needed
ironing?

“Sheba, you never said we had a message,” Mr. Malory said reproachfully. The click of the answering machine was followed by the whir of a tape rewinding.

“Frank, it’s me,” a woman’s voice began. “I missed you at school, so in case you’re stopping home I wanted to tell you I’m running way behind.”

“Me” sounded slightly breathless, self-assured, with a non-Michigan inflection that made Bernadette think of ivy-covered walls in New England towns. Me sounded—pretty. “I had to fax some last-minute stuff to NCS. If you get this, come straight to my office, I’ve got my things here.” A low laugh, and the confident voice turned arch. “Including a few you’ve never seen. Bye now.”

Bernadette writhed.
She’d
seen a few of them.

“A bit of luck, that,” she heard. Then the rapid punching in of a phone number known by heart. “Dr. Fontaine, please.” A pause. Sounds of plastic CD boxes being restacked. “Gena? Frank.”

Gena?

“You’re not the only one running behind. I forgot the tickets, believe it or not. But those opening acts go on for hours. Look for me in, oh, forty-five minutes, with luck and no police.” He listened a moment, then laughed. “Yes, me too.” The receiver clicked into place.

Footsteps sounded down the hall. A bang right behind her, like a doorknob hitting a wall, nearly made her yell. Her closet shared a wall with the bathroom.

She considered sneaking away. Then realized he’d left the bathroom door open. He would hear her.

She wiggled her toes inside her shoes while her English teacher answered nature’s call for what seemed like an eternity. It didn’t matter. She could stand it. Nothing was too awful, as long as he didn’t catch her.

Her thoughts whirled around like moths trapped in the closet. NCS? Gena. Gene. Strange. Maybe Gena was Gene’s twin sister. She certainly wasn’t Mr. Malory’s. Though she hadn’t sounded very mournful. Nor did “opening acts” suggest any funeral rites Bernadette had ever heard of.

At last water surged through a pipe two inches from her head. Beside her came an insistent
beep, beep, beep.
Her digital watch glowed: four-thirty, time for
Jeopardy!
She fumbled for the alarm off button while sweat broke out on her forehead. A few seconds sooner . . .

On the other side of the wall a medicine cabinet clicked open. A bottle was unscrewed, screwed closed again, the cabinet banged shut. She heard the distant clink of hangers on a rod, then a sliding sound as though he was pulling the closet doors closed.

Her own door rattled before her face as though someone was trying it, and her heart jerked in a painful spasm. An ankle-high shadow bumped against the louvers, then purred.

Brisk steps rounded the corner from the hall. “Get away from that cupboard, now, and give us a kiss.” Twelve inches from her legs, Mr. Malory scooped his cat up in his arms.

The almond spice scent of fresh Intrigue drifted through the door. “A very nice lady will be by—heavens, any minute now—to give you a little holiday. I told her you’re a good kitty, so don’t make me out a liar.” He leaned over the back of the couch to pick up his keys. “Bloody hell!” he said. Sheba hit the carpet with a plop and mewed in outrage.

Mr. Malory straightened up with the fat red binder in his hands and a relieved look on his face. “Talk about
in flagrante delicto.
Now where can we hide this?”

Bernadette tilted her head to see better. Eight months in his class had exposed her to the more basic Latin phrases. Talk about caught in
what
act? Why did he have to hide his Bowl papers?

He crossed over to the desk. Whistling under his breath, he took down a large blue binder. “I can’t see Lucy peeking in Car Repairs, can you, puss? Recipes, now, that would be a different matter.” He chuckled as he slid the red binder inside the blue one, and replaced them both on the hutch.

In the dark, Bernadette glowered.

He picked Sheba up and turned to scan the room. Two pairs of greenish-gray eyes stared straight at her, then slid past. Evidently satisfied, he picked up his keys, tossed the cat onto the sofa, and whipped the door shut behind him. The dead bolt sprang into its socket.

He was gone.

Bernadette counted to fifteen. Then to fifteen again. Not until she heard the muted roar of an engine did she push open the door.

The underarms of her good spring jacket were soaked. If he hadn’t spritzed on aftershave, he’d have smelled her panic.

“Thank you, God, thank you, thank you, thank you.” She tottered to the desk chair and collapsed. Sheba jumped up and kneaded her lap with soft, insistent paws.

“You!” Bernadette said. “You’re a fine friend. If you could talk you’d have ratted me out in a second. Thanks a bunch.”

She ran her hands over the soft cream fur. The steady throb of the warm, living motor gradually calmed her own breathing to normal.

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

W
hatever 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.