Cheating Lessons: A Novel (19 page)

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 besmirched 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, hmmm? 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.

“Your hands are like ice,” Bernadette said. “Are you saying all this because of Vince’s bet?”

Nadine’s “nah” was convincing. “Vince never bets what he can’t afford to lose. He’s not a chump.” With shy pride, she said, “Vince thinks I’m brilliant.”

“Of course he does! Compared to him you’re Galileo! Aristotle! Tolkien!” Perhaps insulting Vince wasn’t quite the right note. “Anyway, he’s right. I think you’re brilliant, too.” Bernadette considered mentioning Anthony’s “smart versus good memory” theory, but lacked the energy.

The cold grip on her hand tightened. “Whether I am or not, I want to show him that I—
we
—can win. The Wizards.” Nadine had pulled the headband down low on her forehead so that the pig earrings were squashed against her cheeks. “Bet? Pinehurst doesn’t need this like we do. There’s no significant harm.”

Ah, the shared language of debate.

“I won’t answer any stolen questions,” Bernadette said.

“Of course not.”

“But the others will. They won’t know he cheated. We could still win.”

“So we win! So what!” Nadine thumped their clasped hands on her knee in exasperation. “If you hadn’t freaked out in his apartment, no one would have known anything. This is partly your fault. You have to pretend yesterday didn’t happen.”

This dragged a laugh from Bernadette. What was a chump again? Someone who bet what they couldn’t afford to lose?

She couldn’t afford to lose Nadine.

She pulled her hand free and stood up to hang from the horizontal ladder. In Washington, some politician was either committing some horribly scandalous act or claiming he hadn’t. Downtown in Detroit, people would be shooting each other, selling drugs, sticking up 7-Elevens. Creighton itself harbored parents who hit their kids, and more than one house that never recycled a single milk carton.

Was one cheating teacher
so
terrible?

She dropped to the ground. “Let’s just get through tomorrow.”