Cheating Lessons: A Novel (3 page)

Nadine put a hand on her shoulder and measured her with calm, dark eyes. “Hey, come up for air. You’d think we just beat Pinehurst or something.”

“Sorry.” Bernadette blew out a deep breath. “I still can’t believe it. We beat them. We’ve debated them at least five times and we’ve
never
beaten them. Is this strange or what?”

“ ‘Strange’ is not the word.” Nadine’s laugh was a delighted guffaw. “It’s inconceivable. But so what? You’re the one who always says they’re not smarter, just richer. We proved your point.”

Bernadette did like to say that. It had always seemed a safe enough claim. “Yeah.” She smiled widely, forgetting to hide her retainer. “I’ll tell my parents they just saved forty thousand dollars. I’m brilliant
without
private school.”

Nadine’s eyes lit with answering glee. “I’ll tell mine it’s my Asian genes kicking in.” The Walczaks had adopted Nadine as a baby from a Seoul orphanage.

“Watch out. They’ll sign you up for Korean lessons.”

To her relief, Nadine took the bait and launched into her “I’m Polish-American, I refuse to learn Korean” speech, which was good for at least three minutes.

Bernadette needed the time, because a little voice in her head was trying to ruin her mood. From across the room came another David burp to punctuate the question the pesky voice wanted to know: How could Wickham students possibly have outscored Pinehurst?

CHAPTER THREE

It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backward.

—Lewis Carroll,
Through the Looking-Glass

M
r. Frank Malory knew more about English literature than anyone still in his twenties had a right to. Though Bernadette preferred murder mysteries (especially Sarah Sloan’s) to the novels of D. H. Lawrence, still she could tell that their teacher used only a fraction of his learning to teach her class.

His presence at run-down Wickham seemed a miracle in itself. He was single, everyone knew that. But for someone so personable he didn’t seem to have much social life. When LaShonda’s Siamese cat had kittens which turned out to be half neighborhood tabby, he took one off her hands. He said it would give him someone around his flat to talk to.

Back in October, Bernadette had asked him to act as a judge at Wickham’s own debate tournament.

Mr. Malory hesitated. “I don’t know the topic,” he said. “You might as well ask the custodian.”

“It’s U.S. immigration policy,” she said. “You
are
an immigrant, aren’t you?” Oops. She’d made it sound like he swam to Ellis Island. “I mean, you’re not American.”

He laughed. “Hardly. But there are in-betweens. Do you know what a nonimmigrant visa is?”

He hadn’t known her long. She forgave him. “A temporary visitor’s pass, as opposed to a green card that gives an alien permanent resident status. Let’s see, this is your second year here, you’re an English teacher, which means you can’t have needed a Labor Certification, so your visa is probably a J-1, for some kind of exchange program. Am I right?”

He gave her a long, quizzical look. “J-1 it is. Unless I apply for a green card, of course.”

His tone was joking, but Bernadette answered him seriously. “You could do that,” she conceded. “But the immigration people won’t like it. They’ll figure you planned to do that all along.”

“Only if I had applied within the first few months I was here, is what
I
heard. Where do you get your information?”

“Debate research. Wickham has a very strong evidence squad.”

“So I see.” His mobile mouth twisted in a grin that drew an answering smile from her. “All right, then. I suppose I could judge a round or two in not quite total ignorance. Where and when?”

Truly, a good sport.

He seemed quite happy in America, sometimes dismayed but more often amused by his woefully underread students. Bernadette decided he was biding his time until greater things came along. And they would, she felt sure, if there was any justice in the world.

He could challenge her favorite opinions in the nicest way. Back in November they’d covered
The Great Gatsby.
Bernadette did not approve of books where married people slept with people they were not married to. She said so.

“That’s rather sweeping, don’t you think, Ms. Terrell?” Mr. Malory had asked. “In this day and age?”

“If it’s wrong, it’s wrong,” she said. “The day and age shouldn’t matter.”

Mr. Malory was rarely at a loss, but this surprised a small laugh from him. “One reason we read novels is to decide for ourselves whether a breaking of social conventions may not represent a higher individual morality. You’ve read
Huckleberry Finn
, I take it?” Bernadette had seen the movie. She nodded. “Huck flouted the convention of slavery. Was he immoral?”

A smart debater did not get tricked into conceding an analogous point. Slavery was not the issue here. “Are you saying adultery is a higher morality?” Bernadette asked.

He laughed. “No, I am not. I’m saying it’s provincial to cut yourself off from excellent books because you think you know what they’ll say. Good fiction isn’t comfortable all the time. We need to decide firsthand whether characters have done the right thing. Or if, indeed, there
is
a right thing.”

“There’s always a right thing,” Bernadette said firmly. Provincial, her foot.

He smiled as though he found her quaintly delightful. “And may you always find the courage to do it, Ms. Terrell.”

He had eyes the greenish-gray of Lake Erie after a storm. And a nose like a Greek statue. His smile soothed her ruffled feelings, and Bernadette contently let the discussion move away without her. All right. She would be more tolerant of books about bums. She would consider their circumstances, read what they had to say for themselves—and then hope they got killed off in the end.

Mrs. Standish broke the news of Wickham’s victory to the whole school during fifth-period announcements. In biology, Mr. Fodor forgot to be annoyed at being robbed of precious class time long enough to exclaim, “All right!”

Cheers echoed up and down the halls. The win could have been in Norwegian thumb-wrestling for all anyone cared. Wickham had slain the giant.

A girl wearing jeans dangerously low on her hips stopped Bernadette during change of class. “You’re in that advanced English class, aren’t you.” She fingered a gold ring in her navel. “I hope you beat the crap out of Pinehurst. That place really pisses me off.”

“Oh. Well . . . thank you very much.” Bemused, Bernadette watched her slouch away. Plenty of kids at Wickham had pierced body parts, haircuts she herself would sue over, tattoos they would live to regret. Usually she paid them no attention. They didn’t strike her as readers. But now she grinned, absurdly pleased. She had a groupie.

In study hall she pulled out her notebook. According to a film they’d seen once in art class, there were at least seven kinds of intelligence. Watching, Bernadette had mourned briefly for the kinds she didn’t have: she would never play her violin at Carnegie Hall, never be asked to paint a mural in a Detroit museum, never be on the Nobel short list for brokering peace between Israel and Palestine. She cheered up when the film moved on to what she
was
good at: taking tests. Her mental skills shone on word puzzles, quiz shows, essay questions—anything requiring memory (though her logic was pretty good, too). If asked—Nadine was the only one who ever asked—she could recite all Jane Austen’s novels in the order they were written; how many Balkan refugees had received immigrant status since 1995 (
Newsweek
and
Time
offered different figures); and the titles, in sequence, on the
Reader’s Digest Condensed Books
in her parents’ living room.

So it shouldn’t be hard to recall test questions from five weeks ago. She jotted down all the names she remembered. Sophocles and Aeschylus.
Canterbury Tales.
O’Neill’s
Desire Under the Elms.
Eliot and Dickens and Twain and the other Eliot and more. National Computing Systems might be a bunch of techno-nerds, but they had high literary expectations for today’s youth.

So far, she had remembered (with the help of the list on the back of a Cliff’s Notes) about seventy-five titles or authors from the test. Of those, she had recognized about half. Still, after listening to Mr. Malory all year, she’d made far better guesses than she could have made the year before.

Assuming a generous hit rate on the guesses, her own score
might
have been as high as 90. Or 85. It
was
a hard test, as Spic ‘n’ Span had pointed out. Lori Besh must have been flipping coins.

A little worm of dread quivered far down in her belly. For five students to average ninety-two percent, some of them must have scored close to perfect.

Perfect scores. On books they’d never read?

She told her mother the news in the kitchen after school. Martha splattered chocolate pudding all over the frozen pie shell she was filling. “Bernadette! At least you’ve ruined your eyes for
something
! I’ll bet your teacher was thrilled!”

“Dumbfounded.”

“No wonder. Beating Pinehurst!” Some of the most disturbed teenagers at Martha’s counseling clinic attended private school, a statistic she mentioned whenever they drove past an especially well-groomed campus. “I always said those people had more money than brains. Wait’ll I tell your Aunt Cynthia. She sent your cousins to that expensive Lutheran school, and I never heard of
them
going to any Classics Bowl.”

“It’s a Michigan contest, Mom. They don’t have it in Cleveland.”

Martha waved off such irrelevance as she handed the pudding beaters to Bernadette. “I’ve had my doubts about your Mr. Malory,” she continued. “I thought, heavens to Betsy, might as well put a cat in charge of the parakeets. But any teacher who can get you kids into the Classics Bowl is doing something right.” She licked the spatula with an absent expression. “We thought of sending you to Pinehurst once.”

“
What?
Get out. I never knew that.” Bernadette stared at her mother. “Why didn’t you?”

“Money. But then someone at work said they knew someone who went there on scholarship, and I thought, well, there aren’t many kids smarter than my Bernadette, so I checked it out.” Martha’s laugh was bitter. “Pinehurst was shocked to hear such a nasty rumor—wanted to know who’d told me. Said it cost more than nine thousand dollars a year no matter how smart you were. Or how stupid, I guess.” She laughed again, but her eyes never left Bernadette’s face.

Bernadette felt the silent question there. She licked chocolate from her thumb. “If I’d gone to Pinehurst, I’d have never met Nadine.” She shrugged. “And anyway, I look terrible in purple.”

Her mother said “hmmm” in a noncommittal way. But Bernadette had given the right answer, she could tell.

Joe Terrell’s pleasure showed in his voice. “Good job, pumpkin.” Her father set down his suitcase and wrapped her in a bear hug.

“Jeez,” Bernadette said into his suit jacket. His reaction surprised her; she brought home academic honors on a fairly regular basis. “I haven’t gotten this much attention since I ate your boss’s pie at that picnic.”