Cheating Lessons: A Novel (6 page)

“
Murder by the Book!”
Bernadette opened it with care. Hardback. Shiny dust jacket, not even entered into the computer yet. She sniffed the crisp pages. If they could turn this smell into perfume she’d bathe in it. “Thanks, Ms. K. I can’t wait to read it.”

She was late for study hall, but the teacher in charge didn’t bother asking to see her pass. Students like Bernadette Terrell didn’t cause trouble no matter where they’d been.

In her room after dinner Bernadette struggled against the lure of an unread Sarah Sloan. Stubbornly she finished her trigonometry, a French essay, and a synopsis of the first three cantos of Dante’s
Inferno.
This she typed. She didn’t have to, but appearances counted, as Martha always said. When it came to her English homework Bernadette allowed the possibility that her mother, in this rare instance, might be right.

It was after eleven before she crawled into bed clutching
Murder by the Book
like a dieter with a pilfered éclair. She would never confess such common taste to Mr. Malory, but she found great comfort in mysteries, where you knew for sure who the villains were, and who were the heroes. None of that Fitzgerald ambiguity to make you unsure who to root for. With Sarah Sloan you knew where you were. Bernadette liked that in a book.

But tonight trusty Sarah let her down. To be fair, it wasn’t the book’s fault. The story began with a bang as always. The clever heroine—a grad student in library science—stayed one step ahead of her readers.

But Bernadette’s mind kept returning to test scores.
Could
someone have smuggled a massive cheat sheet into the test? It would have had to be on a microchip to escape Mr. Malory. Nor would one cheat sheet have sufficed.
Five
of them were Wizards. That called for fraud on a grander scale.

Sherlock Holmes said that once you ruled out the impossible, the improbable was left. Which meant . . . .

Mr. Malory? Bernadette lay in bed and laughed out loud. Ridiculous. Yes, he’d copied the test, but for a good reason. That was a far cry from altering their scores. If he’d wanted to cheat he’d have used proctors a lot dimmer than Ms. K. and eagle-eyed Spic ‘n’ Span.

Besides, he was death on cheating. A senior debater had told her of an incident from Honors English the year before, Mr. Malory’s first year at Wickham. He’d caught a boy copying from another student’s paper. He’d torn the boy’s test in half and called the parents in for a conference.

Bernadette had shivered at the tale. She would never cheat, naturally, but if she
had
cheated, and been caught, she’d have gone straight to the hardware store for rope to hang herself.

What about Ms. K.? She craved a laptop computer. And she had been alarmed about something today, Bernadette would swear to it.

She creased the bedsheet into a thick wad of pleats. To suspect Ms. Kestenberg of rigging a test was just as asinine as Nadine said. They
knew
Ms. K. She was too conscientious, too likable, too sporting. What was it she always said when she checked their evidence cards to make sure they said what was claimed for them? “Truth is the safest lie.” That flash of conscience had been remorse over the copied test, no doubt. Or maybe she’d left the water running in the teachers’ lounge. Ms. K. could have nothing to hide.

Bernadette went back to her book. The heroine was driving a car the wrong way down a one-way street while a former library volunteer shot at her from a helicopter.

What about Mrs. Standish?

Ah. Now
there
was a suspect. Telling them how proud the superintendent would be of them, as though she’d had anything to do with it! Perhaps she had. And the Lifetime Achievement Award as an incentive—something shifty there.
And
the tests had sat in the main office until Federal Express picked them up. Opportunities galore.

Bernadette nodded with decision and finished the chapter. Deep down she knew the odds that foul play really had occurred were as likely as her mother winning the Julia Child Cooking Award. But the sheer unlikeliness of the whole thing would not let her alone. She meant to investigate. The way she saw it, one of three things had happened:

1. The fates had conspired, and Wickham really
had
won;

2. Someone had cheated;

3. NCS had screwed up.

If it was (2) or (3), people were in for a very rude shock. If it was (1)—she was leaning toward Ms. K.’s curve theory—she and Nadine could set about humiliating Pinehurst with easy minds.

Bernadette fell asleep trying to decide what a Sarah Sloan detective would wear to question a key witness with very green eyes.

CHAPTER SIX

I am giddy, expectation whirls me round.

The imaginary relish is so sweet

That it enchants my sense.

—Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida

O
n Wednesday Bernadette missed her first book bee question of the year. And Mr. Mallory wore a collarless shirt to school.

Lori Besh pretended to pant. “I saw chest hair!” she whispered to the girl beside her.

Who was Nadine. Who giggled.

Honestly. Mr. Malory’s linen shirt was hardly in the thong category. Even by tilting her head to float her contacts into prime viewing position, Bernadette saw only a discreet expanse of smooth, male neck.

Which was quite enough.

“Now that you’ve finished
Gulliver’s Travels
—you
have
finished it, haven’t you?—name something the Yahoos do that the Houyhnhnms never do.” He’d lined them up into book bee teams. Three a week, he’d ruled, until the Bowl.

Maybe it was the shirt. But when David muttered, “I forget,” Bernadette’s own mind went blank. The rest of her team—Nadine, Lori, and LaShonda—looked to her as usual.

Um, um . . . Houyhnhnms were horses. Yahoos were barbaric people. “They can . . . juggle?” For once her tentative act was real.

Mr. Malory drew a finger across his throat. Hoots of glee came from the Blues. Anthony Cirillo smirked and said, “Yahoos lie.”

“Big deal. It’s only one,” LaShonda whispered to her.

Bernadette appreciated LaShonda’s support. She just wished it had come from Nadine, who usually stood in that spot. Apparently the suggestion that Wickham might not be a winner still rankled. Showing up a “real” Korean like Glenn Kim must mean more to her partner than Bernadette had realized.

Students vanished at the bell like bungee jumpers on faulty cord. Bernadette dawdled at her desk. “Mr. Malory?”

He looked up. “Ms. Terrell. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted to ask you—about the Classics Contest?”

He raised his eyebrows attentively. Bernadette clutched her notes and approached his desk. Unconsciously she slipped into her best argument-summarizing manner as she outlined her concerns: the unread books, her own estimated score, the possibility of an answer sheet mix-up. “I can’t figure out how we could have
averaged
ninety-two percent,” she finished in apology.

The tiny tic under Mr. Malory’s eye jumped.

Panic hit her.
Oh dear God I’m right. Someone did cheat, and he’s trying to figure out who.

He reached out his hand for her paper. “May I?” He scanned the many calculated score combinations with which she had estimated her classmates’ literary knowledge. His guarded expression gave way to a laugh.

“I see you’ve spent some time on this. Good heavens.” He smiled, and her stomach went into its airborne routine. “The fact is, the scores were normalized.”

“Ah.” Bernadette nodded sagely. “Normalized.”

“ ‘Percentaged,’ if you will. Based on the total results.” He started pulling out drawers from his desk. “Each school received a raw score and a calculated one. I have the scoring formula here somewhere. You can read it for yourself.” He flicked through hanging files. “Well, I can’t put my hands on it at the moment, but I will get it to you.”

“I
knew
we hadn’t gotten all those questions right.” Bernadette was delighted to be right and a winner, too. “Could you give me an example of how normalizing works?”

Mr. Malory leaned against the front of his desk. She caught a faint trace of almond spice scent. It was “Intrigue,” she knew, having sampled all the testers at Hudson’s cologne counter. They should need a license to sell it.

“Certainly,” he said. “First, the NCS people score the answer sheets. The highest student becomes one hundred percent. Then the top five individual scores from each school are calculated as a percentage of that single score.”

Bizarre. “You mean, say I got an eighty-five percent on the test—”

“If that was the highest overall score, it would be calculated as one hundred percent.” He paused. He took off his glasses, and his eyes looked more gray than green. “In actual fact, you got an eight-seven percent. The highest score in the state.”

“I
did?
Wow.” Bernadette couldn’t control her smile. She pulled her calculator from her back pocket and punched in some numbers. “So an eighty percent would be recorded as—eighty-seven into eighty—a ninety-two?”

“Precisely.” He seemed pleased. “Wickham didn’t actually average ninety-two on the test. Our raw scores were simply normalized to that.”

The whole process seemed a roundabout way for a computer company to proceed, Bernadette said. Not that she wasn’t tickled to death to have won—

“Let’s consider it from their perspective.” Mr. Malory leaned back as though there were nowhere he’d rather be. “NSC
wants
people to talk about how rugged their test is. You think those bogus scholars at Pinehurst weren’t sweating it out? Do you think
any
school, no matter how much shrubbery it plants, could cover all the material?”

“It
is
a pretty school, isn’t it,” Bernadette said pensively. At debate tournaments Pinehurst hosted, she and Nadine had privately exclaimed at the putting-green-luxury of the campus. Bleachers with awnings. Cobblestone walkways. Bathrooms with working tampon machines. “I wouldn’t mind some of that fanciness at Wickham.”

“No,
no.
That’s the beauty of this win, Bernadette, don’t you see?” He had that “Oh, you Americans” tone as he chopped the air with one hand. “It proves that you don’t need minor Impressionists hanging in the hallways, so-called experts in Elizabethan drama, students dressed like an army of plums. What counts is how well a school fosters its students’ natural competitiveness.”

She loved how he said her name. “You think so?”

“Of course.” He looked straight at her and inclined his head forward. Bernadette treasured his words in advance.

“I’ve known since September that this was Wickham’s year.” He wouldn’t confide this to just anyone, she saw. “You and your friend Nadine have brains like sponges. It’s inspiring. And Anthony Cirillo is nobody’s fool, though he can show a maturity deficit at times. This team can have The Power, Bernadette. Just you wait.”

She would wait. She would wait
forever.

He broke the spell then by glancing up at the classroom clock. Bernadette scooped up her books. She wanted to race out and memorize Goethe in the original German. To sleep with Greek myths under her pillow. To write sonnets better than Keats. “Ode to a Gray Shirt” sprang to mind.

“You’re a good teacher, Mr. Malory,” she managed to say.

His smile would have melted her retainer, except that she’d removed it before class. “I have good students, that’s the secret. Shall we adjourn to the cafeteria?”

Nadine would freak. “Sure,” Bernadette said.

He didn’t go so far as to eat with her, naturally. But he went through the line right behind her, which forced Bernadette to select her food with care.

Finally she ordered chicken rice soup and crackers. The fare of someone interestingly frail, not a teenager who ate like a healthy lion.

Mr. Malory walked off toward the teachers’ lounge while Bernadette scanned the room. Lori Besh’s eyes were popping, which made Bernadette grin. But where was Nadine? If she would only show herself, Bernadette would grovel on demand. Wait’ll her partner heard that they could have The Power.