Cheating Lessons: A Novel (22 page)

Nadine was Primary on Russians. “So I’m in. And Bet was Primary on World Lit.”

“I did Romans,” Anthony said.

David gave an airy “so be it” kind of wave. “Yell if you need a handsome face.”

Bernadette said she absolutely had to use the ladies’ room and didn’t Nadine have to go, too.

In the hall she grabbed Nadine. “Did you see him? He’s counting the money.
These are the stolen questions.”

Nadine’s mouth set in a stubborn line. “I don’t care. We
can
win, and we will.”

“All right,” Bernadette said.

Nadine’s double-take would have been comical at any other time.

“It’s our turn to choose,” Bernadette explained. “If we can rack up a three-hundred-point lead before Romantic Poets, we’ll have enough legitimate points to win. Lori can answer every stolen question she wants after that.”

Nadine’s face registered instant comprehension. But not conviction. “You want us to run up the score by more than what all of Romantic Poets is worth.”

Bernadette nodded.

“What if we can’t?”

“Then the game is up. We throw it. That’s the deal.”

“I’m not making any deal.” Nadine moved in close and dug her fingers into Bernadette’s arms. Her black eyes smoldered. “We’re as good as Pinehurst. And you know it.”

“Of course we are. Win
or
lose.”

Light glinted off Nadine’s glasses, hiding her eyes. “Only if we win.”

BLATT. The buzzer sounded. Time for the Champion Round.

They took their places onstage. On Bernadette’s right, Lori’s golden book earrings jumped. “I’m so hot I’m on fire,” Lori whispered.

From the audience Martha called “Good luck!” Bernadette looked away. Her mother had had her chance. Bernadette was on her own.

“Give the Rabelais character whose name has come to mean ‘huge.’ ”

In Ms. Kestenberg’s library Rabelais lived directly above Sarah Sloan.
Bzzz.
“Gargantua,” Bernadette said.

670 to 590.

Through
Madame Bovary,
through Proust, through
The Magic Mountain,
the Wizards built up their lead.

But Pinehurst could do more than sneer when pressed. And they were pressed. Bernadette felt their concentration flow in hostile waves across the stage as they nailed five in quick succession. Aaron was not such a bum when it came to Balzac and Camus. Probably read the damn things in French, Bernadette thought as he identified a minor character from
The Plague
with cocky assurance.

Then came “Name the protagonist in
Crime and Punishment,
” and Nadine—Nadine!—said, “Rasputin.” Glenn Kim snickered and corrected her: “Raskolnikov.”

Rasputin? What was she
thinking
? Bernadette gave her an incredulous look. Wrong guesses here would kill them.

Romans. “What Greek epic poem served as the model for Virgil’s
Aeneid?
”

“
The Odyssey,
” Pinehurst said. Anthony stared at his hand as if it belonged to someone else, then redeemed himself by answering three in a row. Pinehurst muffed two, Anthony answered, and Wickham got a double whammy of net forty. He and Pinehurst split the rest.

Wickham 830, Pinehurst 670.

A one-hundred-and-sixty-point lead. Good. But not enough.

Pinehurst didn’t know that, so Bernadette could understand Glenn Kim’s murderous glare that made her resolve never to be alone with him without a very sharp pencil in her hand.

“And now for Romantic Poets,” Mrs. Hamilton caroled.

OW! Bernadette clutched at her leg where a chunky black heel had just made brutal contact.

“
No deal,
” Nadine muttered.

Bernadette smothered a whimper. A hole in her stocking framed a heel-shaped bruise.

Lori’s sharp, perfect nails caressed the buzzer. “I’ll get these,” she warned. “I mean it.”

Bernadette shrugged as though she’d never seen Lori throw a shot put. Still, she edged closer to Nadine, who would only stomp her to death.

Mrs. Hamilton took a sip from her water glass. “Name the author and the title of the poem from which these lines are taken:

“ ‘She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!’ ”

Lori swooped. “ ‘She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,’ by William Wordsworth.” A proud “Yay, Lori!” from Miss Tanya brought a sprinkling of laughter from the crowd.

850 to 670.

On Mr. Malory’s far side, David’s forehead wrinkled into furious thought. Bernadette could see the wheels turning—“Lucy ceased to be,” haven’t we heard that before?

“What is the work, and who is the author, of these lines: ‘He prayeth best, who loveth best/All things both great and small; /For the dear God who loveth us,/He made and loveth all’?”

Bernadette beat Lori’s buzzer by a millisecond. “Shelley, in his ‘Ode to the West Wind’.”

Lori gurgled as though punched in the throat.

“Sorry. Pinehurst?”

“
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
by Coleridge,” Glenn Kim answered. He did look like Uriah Heep.

“Name the title and author of the well-known poem which ends in these lines:

“ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ ”

Bernadette buzzed and knocked Lori’s elbow at the same time. “Keats? In his, um, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’?”

A little
sss
sound came from Nadine, like the last lifeboat springing a leak. Mrs. Hamilton shook her head regretfully. This public school had seemed so promising. “Pinehurst?”

“Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ ” Paul said, adjusting his school tie.

Wickham 810, Pinehurst 710. Like a favorable tide, losing points for missing answers could carry the Wizards to where Bernadette wanted them with a very few questions. She’d have preferred to sprinkle her wrong answers among some of Wickham’s right ones. But she was working alone, and there was no time to be subtle.

The audience shifted in their seats. Wickham’s top scorer was losing her grip, and maybe the match.

Lori put a hand over her microphone. “Shut up or I’ll kill you,” she whispered.

“Name Shelley’s lyrical drama in which an ancient champion of mankind is liberated.”

Bzzz. “Prometheus Unbound,”
Lori said, as though she hadn’t just brought her full weight down on Bernadette’s right foot. One of the smaller bones crunched. Lori seemed to lose her balance and put her hand down flat on Bernadette’s podium to steady herself. Bernadette used her right hand—the left was massaging her toe—to shove Lori back to her own turf.

By now David was practically shooting off sparks. He tugged at the sleeve of Mr. Malory’s new sport coat.

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

How could Lori not see what was happening? Bernadette pressed her buzzer hard enough to send it through the floor. Nothing.

From her left, a
bzzz.
“He counted the words,” said a gravelly voice.

What?

So confident had Nadine sounded that Mrs. Hamilton double-checked her card. “No, I’m sorry. Pinehurst?”

“He counted the accents,” Madhu corrected.

Now David and Mr. Malory were both waving wildly for a time-out. In mid-question, Mrs. Hamilton quelled them with a terrible look.

“—the ‘sadder and a wiser man’?”

What the—Bernadette’s buzzer would not budge. Pinehurst sneaked in with the answer before Lori could while Bernadette discovered a thin hook from a pierced earring wedged tight between her buzzer and its wooden frame.

Wickham 810, Pinehurst 750.

“What is described in this stanza:

“ ‘They stretched in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance’?”

Lori buzzed first. Everyone later agreed on that. But Nadine’s deep voice drowned her out.

“Dwarfs!” she shouted.

“HEY!”

Mrs. Hamilton looked down her nose. “Once a team buzzes in, any team member may answer,” she reminded Lori coldly. “Pinehurst?”

“Daffodils,” Paul sang out, and sniggered. Dwarfs! That was a good one! Bernadette sent him a telepathic curse: May your new laptop electrocute you.

Time-out.

Mr. Malory was scowling at the stage. Bernadette didn’t wait for him to decide who to replace. She headed for the stairs. At the bottom step her ankle somehow tangled with Anthony’s foot—where had he come from?—and she tripped. People gasped, and only his hold on her arm saved her from falling.

“What’s going on?” he muttered as he helped her up.

“Malory stole the questions,” she whispered. “And Lori broke my buzzer.” And my toe, she could have added. She leaned on him and limped, and then Mr. Malory and David were there and there was no chance to say more.

She left a seat between herself and Mr. Malory. Onstage, Anthony took her spot between the two girls and ignored David’s tap on his shoulder. David shrugged and took the far end spot where Anthony had been. Bernadette’s hopes dwindled. Anthony had the broken buzzer.

“Are we quite ready?” Mrs. Hamilton asked with impatience. They were breaking her flow.

“Several of William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’ have a contrary, or counterpart poem, in his later ‘Songs of Experience.’ What is the first line of the
contrary
of the poem that begins, ‘Little Lamb, who made thee?’ ”

The buzz, when it came, was from Pinehurst, but the audience was diverted by a struggle on the Wickham side of the stage.

“It looked to me like the tall kid put his hand over the redhead’s buzzer,” her father said afterwards to Bernadette. “Then she kicked him. Or punched him, maybe.”

It was a kick. From the way Anthony clutched his lectern as though it might fly off, Bernadette got a good idea of where Lori’s shoe had landed.

Mrs. Hamilton was turned toward Pinehurst with her hand cupped to one ear. With her other hand she adjusted her hearing aid, which emitted a thin, shrill whistle.

“ ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright,’ ” Tanisha quoted.

“Yes, indeed.” Mrs. Hamilton turned on her stool and looked at the scoreboard.

Wickham 790, Pinehurst 790.

“Goodness! Well, this is it, ladies and gentlemen. Our last question. In the event of a tie, we will go to a tiebreaker of the judges’ choosing,” she said. “What is the name of Byron’s travelogue in verse describing his travels through Europe?”

“
Don Juan,
” Nadine yelled, at the precise instant Lori cried, “
Childe Harolde’s Pilgrimage!
”

A tie, on the same
team?
Mrs. Hamilton turned toward her chairwoman of the Research Committee. Gena ran up onstage for a whispered consultation. Mrs. Hamilton nodded, and Gena handed her a sheet of paper from her clipboard.

“In the event a single team gives two answers simultaneously, the team is docked the points the question would have been worth,” Mrs. Hamilton said, sublimely ignoring the menacing rumble that rose from the seats behind Bernadette. “However, since I did not make that rule explicit beforehand, in this case we will simply disregard the question.”

Now the rumble came from the left side of the audience. Mrs. Hamilton ignored it, too. This was her Bowl, and she made the rules. “Our last question.” She read from Gena’s paper. “To whom does Browning refer in the following lines:

“ ‘We that had loved him so, followed him, honoured him,

Lived in his mild and magnificent eye,

Learned his great language, caught his clear accents,

Made him our pattern to live and to die!’ ”

Lori’s face was outraged. Browning was not, strictly speaking, a Romantic Poet. She hadn’t studied him.

Bzzz.
With the faintest of sneers, Glenn Kim said, “He’s talking about Wordsworth.”

Or Frank Malory. Wordless communication passed between Bernadette and Nadine. They’d done it.