Cheating Lessons: A Novel (24 page)

“There was never the slightest risk of being caught,” Mr. Malory said impatiently.

But no one believed him. He had just said he did it on a whim, and
that
rang true. He hadn’t worried about consequences, or them, one bit.

“I thought it might be interesting to see what average American students could do if they were really pushed.” His features lit with enthusiasm. “And good God, you pushed yourselves. Lucy and I couldn’t get over it. You threw your hearts into it.”

Five faces stared at him. So now they were “average.”

“It was a rotten thing to do.” David’s fair skin was as pink as if the wine were double-proof instead of no stronger than Coke. “I read
The Sound and the Fury
in Cliff’s Notes!”

Mr. Malory gave a patrician wave. “The best way, trust me. Don’t you see, none of you had a decent grounding. We had to play catch-up. My point is that you did catch up. You rose to the challenge like champions.”

“Then why did you
keep
cheating?”

“Anthony, you were never meant to know.” A mild look of reproach at Bernadette. “Once I’d landed you in the contest I owed you a respectable showing. I had no way of knowing just how strong Pinehurst might be. I simply—” He ran one hand through his wiry hair.

“Yes.” Nadine spoke up. “Tell us about Dr. Fontaine.”

“Ms. Walczak, that’s personal,” he said.

“Oh, please, call me Nadine. I feel like we’re really getting to know each other.” The froggy voice was sweetly venomous, and Bernadette stared at her partner with new respect. “You make up a dying friend so you could seduce the head judge—use her—and you’re right, that’s pretty darn personal.”

For the first time, a trace of shame flickered in Mr. Malory’s eyes. He’ll never tell us, Bernadette thought. But after a long pull from his beer, he did.

“I called on Dr. Fontaine immediately after Wickham won the contest. She was very—pleasant. She made it clear she would see me, but only in her office during department hours. There were no private meetings at all, at first.”

Bernadette wanted to shout, “Stop!” This wasn’t any of their business. Nadine put a warning hand on her arm.

Mr. Malory didn’t notice. “I appealed to her American love of the underdog. Told her if Pinehurst kept winning that her contest applications would drop off to nothing. The NCS Bowl would become ridiculous, and Mrs. Hamilton’s whole purpose in running the thing would be defeated.”

It seemed to relieve him to describe his strategy, and Bernadette realized that for the last month he could have had no one to whom he could tell the truth. Even cheaters, evidently, needed someone to applaud their cleverness. You saw that in Sarah Sloan a lot.

“She lent me the Bowl videotapes. I pretended to be disturbed that so few minority writers were covered. A sad lack of diversity, surely, in our time? Anything to keep us talking. That put her on the defensive. She had often thought the same thing. The Bowl is privately funded, she said, and Mrs. Hamilton prefers classics she studied in her own college days. But now Gena felt she owed me something.”

He caught the waiter’s eye and pointed to his glass.

“But the English department closed at five. To meet with her I had to leave school at three, yet I couldn’t ease up on the practices. If I failed to get the questions beforehand, we’d need every scrap of preparation simply not to look foolish.”

He seemed oblivious to the hostility around the table, but the vibrations almost swamped Bernadette. David sat as though watching a wreck in progress, while Anthony just shook his head. Nadine’s grim mouth completely unnerved Bernadette. Lori had come out of her daze to stare at him with awful wonder.

The new beer arrived and half vanished in one long draft.

“You’re quite right, David, that bit about Gene was melodramatic. But Lucy had to know why I couldn’t be at practice. And cancer has such good sympathy value. I called him Gene as a joke, you see. Lucy was delighted to help.”

Because she respected you.
He read Bernadette’s expression accurately. “You were working so hard, all of you. I couldn’t stand to see you lose to those arrogant snobs.”

“That’s bullshit,” Anthony burst out. “You couldn’t stand for
you
to lose. Because you tried for a job at Pinehurst and they turned you down.”

Lori cut in. “But we
lost!
” she cried. No disclosures could alter this fact. “We could have won it, you said so. Everyone saw us lose, and my fa—everyone thinks we just didn’t know enough.”

“Lori—” Mr. Malory began.

“Stop it!” Lori’s chin trembled, but her voice was steady. And loud. Heads turned toward their table. “Stop talking. That’s what you do, isn’t it, you talk to people so they won’t lose their nerve. You trick them into thinking they’re smart when they’re stupid, they’re
so
stupid . . . . It was all lies—you didn’t care about me. You didn’t think I could have some kind of
power
 . . . . I never did, did I?” She drew a ragged breath it hurt to hear. “You’re just a cheat.”

The cell phone bill.
Bernadette felt a new kind of disgust for her teacher.
She
could survive this betrayal. But Lori . . .

Mr. Malory opened his mouth but before he could speak Lori picked up her wineglass and flung its contents full in his face. For a stunned second the only sound was that of sparkling Spumante dripping off Frank Malory’s elegant, wet, nose.

Lori shoved her chair back with such force, it tipped over. She stumbled out with every person in the dining room goggling after her.

David righted the chair. Mr. Malory mopped his face with a large linen napkin. The silence at the table stretched on until Bernadette had an irresistible urge to cough, sneeze, do anything to break it. Finally Anthony said, looking out the window, “There she goes.”

Down below, Lori appeared on the sidewalk. A sprinkle of rain had begun, and the cars pulling up had their windshield wipers on. The valet parking attendant leaped up and produced Lori’s keys as though he’d been waiting for her. She stopped him from setting off for her car. Instead she snatched the keys away and took off at a run while he stared blankly after her.

From one story above, the Wickham group watched in similar bemusement. How could she spot her car so fast, Bernadette wondered, and how can she run in those shoes? Because Lori, her small purse clutched in one hand like a track runner’s baton, loped like a hunting cheetah across the parking lot. Her steady, driven rhythm set off a chant in Bernadette’s head:
See Lori run. See Lori run fast.

She passed row after row of cars glistening in the rain. Near the back of the lot, shiny yellow tape flapped wetly around the wall construction. Bernadette spied the little red Miata in a far corner. Lori almost passed Mr. Malory’s car in its splendid isolation but then jerked to a halt. For one long moment she stood motionless, one hand on her hip as though she was thinking. The Porsche gleamed under the floodlights like a queen accepting homage.

Beside Bernadette, Anthony growled, “Uh-oh.”

Brick stacks cast black shadows on the starkly lit ground. Lori dropped her purse, lifted a brick off the closest pallet, and tested its weight in her hand. Then, with a beautiful, powerful sidearm swing, she threw it.

The driver’s window crumpled in a sheet of tiny cubes. The black square left behind reflected nothing.

Deep inside Bernadette something pulsed with a dark, terrible joy.

Lori reached for another brick.

“Jesus.” Mr. Malory set his beer down. The glass missed the table, but by then he was halfway across the dining room. His students followed. Bernadette heard people crowding to the windows as she ran out.

“Did you see that girl?”

“Someone should stop her!”

“But that’s a Porsche!” A bald man said this twice, as though he could understand attacking, say, a minivan, but
this
 . . .

Out the dining room and down the steps they ran, under the canopy, across the drive into the lot. The drizzle had turned the asphalt slick. Bernadette’s dress heels threatened to spill her at any instant. When Anthony grasped her elbow to give her support, she let him.

They reached the back wall.

The parking attendant had beaten them to the spot. Now he hung back, teetering in indecision. At their approach he turned in relief.

Lori sat sprawled against the Porsche, her legs splayed out in front of her as though she were a Raggedy Ann doll. She still held a brick, and Bernadette sympathized with the parking man’s hesitation. No other windows were broken. She’d only thrown the one.

Mr. Malory crouched beside her. Gently he pried the brick out of the death grip formed by long fingers tipped with pale blue polish. With a groan Lori turned her face into his shoulder and started to cry. Mr. Malory patted her bright, wild hair while creases Bernadette had never noticed before appeared around his eyes and mouth. Into her mind came a vision of him years from now, comforting a child of his own.

“Man oh man oh man.” The parking lot attendant had the tickled air of someone who’s gotten a ringside seat. “She’s lucky nobody got hurt.”

When no one answered, he snapped his gum and tried again. “Guys think breaking up in a fancy restaurant is such a good idea, but some chicks don’t take no for an answer, know what I mean?”

Bernadette eyed him with dislike. He was not her pal.

“Go away,” she said firmly. She shook off Anthony’s hand and crossed to Lori, tugging her to her feet. “Here.” She straightened the crumpled collar, pulled down the vest. “Use this.” Lori’s fingers tightened around the plastic brush from Bernadette’s purse.

Bernadette looked down. “Mr. Malory?” Her lust for revenge had died, replaced by an emotion so alien to anything she’d ever felt for him she couldn’t put a name to it at first. It was pity. He had wasted so much.
Just because you loved someone didn’t mean they deserved it.
Funny how that worked. She
had
loved him, she realized. Loved him with a hopeless, wordless ache she was sure she’d never feel again. All his knowledge! All the green-eyed charm, the approachable elegance, the way he’d taken his students seriously and convinced them they could do miracles—because
he
thought they could. God, she’d loved that. Some of that had been real, hadn’t it? The way he’d taught them to trust in themselves—that was as real as the bits of glass under her shoes. Every single Wizard knew Wickham had outstudied Pinehurst. Every single Wizard (except for Lori at the moment) had learned that deserving a trophy was better, sometimes, than getting it. And he’d given Bernadette friends. Talk about The Power! Frank Malory had it, all right. Until he’d gone and wasted it.

“I’m sorry about your car. Will you—will it cost much to fix?” Will you call the police? Will you sue?

He got to his feet. Glass crunched. Raindrops glinted in his hair. She knew what brand of shampoo he used. His hand traced the line of the olive-green hood, and the gesture triggered another memory in her mind. Of a muscular arm polishing that same hood, on a cool, sunny day, while two girls worshiped from the highway.

He lifted his head. “Thank you, Bernadette. No, it won’t cost much. I’m insured.” He glanced at Lori’s tense face, then back to the car.

A wry smile twisted his mouth. She’d always liked his mouth. “Gena said I’d wreck it someday.” He slapped the hood, and a last few cubes of glass tinkled to the ground. “And I did.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you,

will you join the dance?

—Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

T
he next day at school they had a substitute English teacher who knew nothing about their regular teacher and who made them do a ditto package on structural grammar they’d never been taught. Ms. Kestenberg popped in midway through the hour. Mr. Malory had been called back to England very suddenly, she said, some kind of family emergency, and did anyone want a half-Siamese cat with a yowl like a tortured baby?

At lunch, by unspoken agreement, the Wizards ate together. They decided that no one had to know about the cheating. Bernadette suggested this, with a look around the table that said the brick-throwing, too, did not deserve publicity. Mr. Malory would not file charges.

“Speaking of Malory—I’m not saying we should have gone along with him cheating or anything.” David salted his rigatoni with close attention. “But ten thousand bucks! That’s a lot of comic books.”

“I know.” A month ago Bernadette might have flattened him by saying correspondence school didn’t cost much money. But David had worked as hard as anyone. And ten thousand dollars
was
a lot of money. She reached across the table and laid her hand on his, startling him considerably. “I couldn’t think of any other way.”

Under the table Nadine gave her a supportive kick and said, “No use crying over spilled milk. We can always enter next year. We know how to do it now.”

“Yeah, no point beating a dead horse,” Anthony said, “plus we’d come off as bigger whiners than Pinehurst.”

David groaned. He’d never liked Proverbs and Sayings. “Yeah, yeah. A chicken in every pot. How long are we going to keep doing this?”

They avoided looking at Lori. Spic ‘n’ Span had announced that morning that the Wickham pompon squad had taken first place in the Governor’s All-Star Championships over the weekend. Their school could now lay claim to the best cheerleading squad in Michigan, something they should all be proud of. She had not mentioned the Classics Bowl.

Almost no one had. Bernadette suspected it was from embarrassment, and didn’t blame them. When she spotted Samantha’s magenta hair coming toward her in the hall, she ducked down a stairwell.

Now Lori paused with a piece of pizza halfway to her mouth. It must be a Red Day. “Hang on.” Her eyes scrunched up with effort. “ ‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,/gang aft a-gley,’ ” she said in a distinctly Michigan-tinged Scottish burr. “Some people call Burns a pre-Romantic, but not me.”

The other four clapped and made a fuss, and Lori’s shy, proud smile went a long way toward restoring Bernadette’s peace of mind.