Revenge of the Geek

by Piper Banks

  “I’m not surprised. Nora’s not stupid. If she was going to plagiarize someone else’s work, she’d definitely change the name,” I said.

  I’d read the short story during lunch. Wanting to avoid both Nora and Charlie, I grabbed a few sandwiches from the lunch room, wrapped them in a paper napkin, and hid out in my car, the pages of the short story propped up against Bumblebee’s steering wheel.

  I had to admit, the story was good. In fact, it was so good, it made me surer than ever that there was no way Nora had written it herself.

  The story was about a man whose wife is leaving him. He sits in the living room of their apartment, under the light of a single lamp, and listens to the sounds of her packing up her things in the bedroom. And while he sits there, he thinks back over his life with her. He remembers their first meeting, and the first time she slid her hand into his, and their wedding night. He thinks back to the first fight they’d had as newlyweds, and the moment when he first suspects that she no longer loves him. Each flashback was short, only a sentence or two, but altogether it was incredibly powerful.

  “Come on,” I said out loud when I was finished. “Who in their right mind could possibly think a high school student would be able to write this?”

  But that was the problem with Geek High. All of the kids at my school were so gifted and talented, that the maturity of the piece would just be chalked up to genius. And it was also the problem with Nora Lee. For whatever reason, people seemed to instinctively trust her. No one would ever believe that such a shy, sweet girl was capable of plagiarizing someone else’s short story.

  No one except me, that was.

  “Are you sure we’re talking about the same girl?” Emmett asked, looking up from his laptop. “Nora’s in my Latin class. She seems harmless. Maybe a little shy, but nice enough.”

  “Oh, no. Not you, too,” I said.

  “Men are notoriously bad judges of character,” Hannah said.

  “Hey!” Emmett said.

  “It’s true,” Hannah said, patting his hand affectionately. “I should know. I’m a matchmaker. It’s why so many guys end up dating pretty girls who are entirely wrong for them. They have no judgment. They see a pretty face, and boom, that’s it. They don’t bother to look any deeper than that.”

  “But I don’t think Nora is pretty,” Emmett protested.

  “It doesn’t matter. The point is that your entire gender can’t be trusted with character judgments,” Hannah said.

  “That’s not true. Dex is a great judge of character,” I said. It was true. For example, when Hannah’s friend Avery had been throwing herself at Dex, he had seen her for the vain, shallow, manipulative girl that she was. And a lot of guys wouldn’t have bothered to look past my geek-girl label.

  “Miranda’s right. I’m sure some guys are that superficial. But not all of us are. Look at me. You’re gorgeous, but that’s not why I love you. I love you for who you are, not what you look like,” Emmett said.

  “That is so sweet,” Hannah cooed.

  Emmett laced his fingers through Hannah’s and pulled her toward him. They began to kiss.

  “No, really. Don’t mind me. Just pretend I’m not even here,” I said.

  Emmett and Hannah broke apart and looked up.

  “What’s that?” Emmett asked. His eyes were dreamy and unfocused.

  “Less smooching, more researching,” I ordered. “Come on. I know that story must be here somewhere.”

  Over the next hour, our Internet searches turned up nothing. I’d even taken direct quotes from the story and Googled them, but no matter what I tried, nothing came up. Emmett went through the table of contents of various short-story anthologies on Amazon.com. Hannah continued to focus her attention on the title “Lamp Light,” although I kept catching her covertly shopping on Net-a-Porter.com.

  Finally, in frustration, I typed the phrase short story about a man whose wife is leaving him into the Google search engine, not expecting anything to come up. And, at first, the search results didn’t seem promising. There was a link to an out-of-print Wilkie Collins novel written in the 1870s, a blog entry written by a guy who was going through a divorce, and a few e-zine articles with tips for saving a failing marriage. I scrolled through these, feeling increasingly gloomy about my chances of finding anything worthwhile, and wondering if I could have possibly been wrong after all.

  Did Nora really write that amazing story? I wondered. Because if she had, then she had beaten me fair and square. My story was good and I was proud of it, but it couldn’t compete with “Lamp Light.” That was the sort of writing I hoped to eventually mature into someday. Maybe Nora truly was a gifted writer.

  And, if so, maybe I’d been wrong about her all along.

  But then I hit the jackpot.

  It was another blog entry, and a short one at that. The name of the blog was A Dream within a Dream—which apparently was a reference to an Edgar Allan Poe poem—and the entry was dated two years earlier:

  Just read the most amazing short story called “One Afternoon” in this month’s issue of The New Yorker. It’s about a man whose wife is leaving him. He’s sitting there, impotent to stop her, and thinking back on their life together and how much he loves her. It made me cry. I’ve never heard of the author before—someone named Enzo Lowry—but I’m definitely going to look for his future work.

  I stood, staring at the blog entry, hardly able to believe it.

  “Gotcha,” I said.

  “You found something?” Hannah asked. She’d looked up from her laptop, where she’d been browsing for shoes on Zappos for the past ten minutes.

  “I think so,” I said.

  Hannah pulled her chair around next to mine, and Emmett got up and stood behind us. With shaking fingers, I pulled up The New Yorker Web site, and typed in One Afternoon and Enzo Lowry into their search engine.

  “‘One Afternoon’? That’s a stupid title. ‘Lamp Light’ is much better,” Hannah said.

  “Especially since there was so much imagery in the story about the lamp. How the bright light kept distracting him from his memories and bringing him into the present,” Emmett said.

  This time, what I wanted was at the very top of the search results:

  “One Afternoon,” Lowry, Enzo

  I clicked on it, and started to read.

  He sits in the green velvet chair that they bought together at the Twenty-sixth Street Flea Market, listening to her in the next room.The creak of the closet door.The dull thump as the suitcase is pulled down.The drawers sliding open.

  “Oh, my gosh,” I said.

  “Is that it?” Hannah asked.

  “That’s it. Word for word, it’s the same story,” I said.

  My heart thumping, I scrolled through the rest of the story to make sure that the trend continued. Sentence after sentence, page after page, “One Afternoon” was an exact duplicate of “Lamp Light.” Or, more to the point, “Lamp Light” was an exact duplicate of “One Afternoon.”

  “I was right,” I said, shaking my head. “I can’t believe it. I was right.”

  “Don’t you mean I was right? This was my idea, after all,” Hannah said.

  “Yes. You were right. You totally nailed it,” I amended.

  “See? That’s because I’m a good judge of character,” Hannah said, tossing her hair back with a satisfied swish.

  “And I guess I’m not, because I really didn’t think we were going to find anything,” Emmett said.

  “That’s okay, honey. You have other good qualities,” Hannah said.

  “Why would she take such a risk?” Emmett wondered. “I know The Ampersand is just a school magazine, but even so, it’s pretty well-known. She had to know there was a chance someone would see the story and recognize it. Maybe even the author.”

  I opened up a new window and ran a Google search on Enzo Lowry.

  “Here’s his Wikipedia entry,” I said, scanning over it. “It says he committed suicide in 2009. He was thirty-two.”
/>   “That’s so sad. He was so young,” Hannah said.

  “And so incredibly talented,” I added, continuing to read. “Apparently he wrote one book before he died, and it was a critical hit but hardly sold any copies. That’s why he became suicidal.”

  “Nora probably thought she was safe copying from him,” Emmett said.

  “Now that I’ve found this, what do I do?” I asked.

  “You bust her,” Hannah said.

  “Do you think I should confront her? Or go straight to Candace?” I asked.

  “There’s no point in confronting Nora. She knows what she did. She just didn’t think she’d get caught,” Hannah pointed out.

  “That’s true,” I said. I hesitated. “But I’m not sure I want to go to Candace, either.”

  “Why not?” Hannah asked.

  “She intimidates me,” I admitted. “Plus, she knows that I wanted my short story to be published. If I’m the one who tells her about Nora, won’t it look like sour grapes?”

  “You could do it anonymously,” Hannah suggested.

  I shook my head. “Tempting, but no. That would be cowardly.”

  “Who’s the faculty adviser for the magazine?” Emmett asked.

  “Mrs. Gordon,” I said.

  “Tell her,” Emmett suggested.

  I nodded slowly. Mrs. Gordon was exactly the person I should talk to. She was kind and supportive and had always had an open-door policy with her students.

  “I think you’re right,” I said. “I’ll talk to Mrs. Gordon.”

  But before I talked to the faculty adviser, I decided to first talk to Dex. I sent him a text to see whether he was available. It took him a bit longer than usual to respond. While I waited, I used some of my nervous energy to clean up my desk, which looked like a bomb had exploded on it.

  My cell phone chirped at me. I checked it, and there was a message from Dex saying he was online and ready to talk. I signed onto Skype and called him.

  “Hey,” Dex said. He smiled, but looked concerned. “Is everything okay? We weren’t supposed to talk until after dinner.”

  “I know, I’m sorry. Is this a bad time?” I asked.

  “Sort of. I was in a study group at the library,” Dex said.

  “Where are you now? Outside?” I asked. “I can see the trees behind you.”

  “Yeah, I’m sitting on a bench outside the library. Do you want to see the campus?” Dex asked. He turned his laptop slowly around, giving me a passing view of Brown Academy. It looked very pretty, with lots of rolling green spaces, leafy trees, and redbrick buildings covered in ivy.

  “Very nice,” I said, when he was back on camera again. “Do you want to go back to your study group? You can call me later.”

  “No, I’d much rather talk to you,” Dex said, smiling at me. Even over the Internet, I could see the light in his eyes.

  “Good. Because I need your advice on something,” I said.

  “I’ll do my best,” Dex said.

  I filled Dex in on what I’d discovered about Nora that afternoon.

  He whistled. “That’s really bad,” he said. “Couldn’t she get kicked out of school for that?”

  “Yep. Geek High has an honor code. If you violate it, you can be expelled. And plagiarizing would definitely be considered a serious violation,” I said.

  “I wonder why she did it. She had to know there was a risk she’d be caught,” Dex said.

  “I don’t know. I guess she must have just really wanted the attention. Or maybe she just really wanted to beat me out,” I said.

  “But she didn’t beat you. Not fair and square. How could she take any pleasure in winning if she knows she didn’t deserve it?” Dex asked.

  “Who knows?” I said, shrugging.

  “So what part of this do you need advice on?”

  I hesitated. “I was thinking I should tell the faculty adviser for The Ampersand about this. But if I do that, Nora’s going to get in serious trouble.”

  “Sure she will,” Dex said. “But that’s not your fault. You didn’t make her cheat.”

  “But the only reason I uncovered the fact that she did cheat was that I’ve been jealous of her. First, it felt like she was taking over my friends. Then she got her short story accepted over mine,” I said.

  “So what? You think you had impure motives?” Dex asked, looking skeptical.

  “Well, didn’t I?”

  “No way. You had a gut instinct and you followed it. And you were right,” Dex said.

  “Do you think telling the faculty adviser is the right thing for me to do?” I asked.

  “I think you have to. If you know the story has been plagiarized, you can’t let The Ampersand go ahead and publish it. That would be unethical, too,” Dex said.

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way,” I said.

  “That’s what you have me for. Keeping you on the straight and narrow.” Dex grinned mischievously.

  I smiled back at him. “Thanks, Dex.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Dex was right—knowing what I now knew, I did have an obligation to the magazine to make sure that Nora’s plagiarized story wasn’t published. It’s something I really should tell Mrs. Gordon in private, I thought. Mrs. Gordon had told everyone on The Ampersand staff to feel free to call her at home if they ever had any questions or comments. So, feeling shaky with nerves at what I was about to do, I called her. Mrs. Gordon answered on the fifth ring.

  “Hi, Mrs. Gordon. It’s Miranda,” I said.

  “Hello, Miranda! To what do I owe this pleasure?” she asked.

  “I have something I need to talk to you about in private. It’s actually pretty important,” I said.

  “Can you come over now?” Mrs. Gordon asked.

  Ten minutes later, I was in Bumblebee, driving over to the Gordons’ house. Mr. and Mrs. Gordon lived in a small, one-story cottage on a quiet, sunny street near school. When I arrived, Mrs. Gordon was outside, planting impatiens in a pot on her front porch. When she saw me pull in, she smiled and waved, and then brushed her dirt-covered hands down the front of her jeans, leaving behind two muddy stripes.

  “Hello, Miranda. Come on in. Can I get you a lemonade? I’m having one,” Mrs. Gordon said as she led me into the house.

  The Gordons’ house was a lot like Mrs. Gordon—bright, cheerful, and endearingly sloppy. A pudgy yellow Labrador met us at the front door. After happily sniffing me and licking my hand, he followed us into the living room and settled in on a plump green dog bed, already covered in shed hair. Each of the living room walls was painted a different color—vivid pink, yellow, turquoise, Popsicle orange. The furniture was all shabby, but looked comfortable. Newspapers and magazines were stacked up on the coffee table, along with a jumble of incongruous items—a battered leather dog leash, a calendar that was two years out of date, what looked like a fishing lure. The clutter made the room seem even more homey.

  It’s the perfect place to curl up with a good book, I thought as I sat on a floral couch, sinking down into the cushions.

  Mrs. Gordon returned with two sweating glasses of lemonade, handed me one, and then took a seat in a wing chair opposite me.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” I said.

  “My door is always open,” Mrs. Gordon said. “And I know you well enough, Miranda, to know that if you say something is important, it definitely needs my immediate attention.”

  These words of encouragement made me feel braver about what I was about to do. I took a deep breath and decided to blurt it out.

  “I found out that Nora Lee plagiarized the story that she submitted to The Ampersand,” I said.

  The smile faded from Mrs. Gordon’s face. “That’s a very serious accusation,” she said.

  “I know,” I said, nodding. “But it’s true.”

  I handed her the story Nora had claimed to write and the original copy of “One Afternoon,” which I’d printed off The New Yorker Web site. “‘One Afternoon’ was written by Enzo Lowry and was ori
ginally published in The New Yorker a few years ago. Nora’s story, ‘Lamp Light,’ is an almost word-for-word copy of ‘One Afternoon.’”

  Mrs. Gordon put on a pair of reading glasses and began looking over the two stories I’d handed her. I sat quietly, not wanting to interrupt her. Finally, Mrs. Gordon put down the papers. As she read, her expression grew even grimmer. She took off her reading glasses and rubbed her temples, as though she had a headache.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, feeling guilty that I’d dropped this mess in her lap.

  “Don’t be. I’m glad you brought it to my attention. Can you imagine how much worse it would have been if we’d gone ahead and published it?” Mrs. Gordon said.

  I nodded. “That’s why I felt I had to tell you.”

  “Can I ask how you found out about this? Did Nora confess it to you? I know you and she are friends,” Mrs. Gordon said.

  “Actually, we aren’t friends anymore. And, no, she didn’t tell me. To be honest, I made a copy of her story without telling anyone, because I wanted to see whether it was better than the short story I submitted. I was jealous that Nora had beaten me,” I said. Shame cut into me, deep and hot. But I felt that I had to admit to what I’d done.

  Mrs. Gordon nodded. “And once you read it, you recognized it?”

  “No. I just didn’t think it seemed like something a teenage kid would write,” I explained.

  “Yes, I can see that. In fact, now that you point it out, it seems obvious,” said Mrs. Gordon. “The protagonist is a middle-aged man going through a divorce. That’s not a topic most high school students would choose to tackle.”

  “Plus, it was really, really good. Scarily good. It was written by someone who obviously put a lot of work into it. And that seemed odd to me, since Nora has never mentioned that she writes,” I said.

  “You had a gut feeling that all was not as it seemed,” Mrs. Gordon said.

  “Basically,” I said. I hesitated. “What are you going to do?”

  “This is a very serious matter. I’ll meet with Headmaster Hughes first thing tomorrow to discuss it,” Mrs. Gordon said.