CHEATING
LESSONS
A NOVEL
Nan Willard Cappo
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Nan Willard Cappo
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
This edition contains the complete text of the original 2002 hardcover.
Available in trade paperback, hardcover, and digital formats
Interior design by Maureen Cutajar
Publisher's Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cappo, Nan Willard.
Title: Cheating lessons / Nan Willard Cappo.
Description: Pittsburgh: Tadmar Press, 2016. | "Previously published by Simon & Schuster/Atheneum Books for Young Readers 2002/Simon Pulse 2003." | Summary: On the eve of the state Classics Bowl championship, Bernadette Terrell learns someone she trusts has cheated.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016903813 | ISBN 978-0-9838222-2-6 (pbk.) | ISBN 978-0-9838222-3-3 (hardcover) | ISBN 978-0-9838222-4-0 (EPUB) | ISBN 978-0-9838222-5-7 (Kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Young adult fiction. | CYAC: Cheating—Fiction. | Contests—Fiction. | High schools—Fiction. | Competition (Psychology)—Fiction. | Conduct of life—Fiction. | BISAC: YOUNG ADULT FICTION / General. | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / Girls & Women. | YOUNG ADULT FICTION / School & Education / General.
Classification: LCC PZ7.C17374 Ch 2016 (print) | LCC PZ7.C17374 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23.
Books published by Tadmar Press are available at quantity discounts on orders of ten or more for educational, fund-raising and special sales. Please inquire at 1-866-316-1913.
First Edition: April 2016
For Ellen and Gradon Willard,
and for Emily
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
We can do noble things without ruling earth and sea.
—Aristotle
CHAPTER ONE
Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.
—Knute Rockne
Bernadette Terrell came home from school and caught her mother snooping in her room.
It was an accidental bust. Bernadette got home at 3:30, her usual time, wolfed down a handful of cookies, then headed upstairs to drop her backpack on her desk the way she did every afternoon. She knew it was her mother’s day off because the old Suburban stood in the driveway, and overhead the vacuum cleaner droned.
As she reached the stairs, the roar of the vacuum stopped. Thick carpet deadened her footsteps in the sixteen seconds it took her to climb the stairs and cross the hall to her room, which today smelled faintly of Lemon Pledge. Martha Terrell had her back to the door and was busy reading the application essay Bernadette planned to customize for every college on her list.
Bernadette’s eyes narrowed. Her room was always the cleanest in the house, through no choice of hers. She gave her mother five seconds to get more deeply incriminated before she said softly, “I’m home.”
Only a guilty person would have screeched like that. Pages scattered as her mother collapsed into the desk chair.
“Bernadette Terrell, are you trying to give me a heart attack?” Martha patted her blouse in the general vicinity of her left breast. “What were you thinking?”
Bernadette let her backpack thud to the floor. “I’m thinking you should stop spying on me.”
“I was not spying, I was cleaning. If your papers are so terribly confidential you shouldn’t leave them lying around in plain sight.” Martha abandoned her haughty tone. “You aren’t really going to send this, are you?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
Martha picked up the pages around her feet. “Well, let’s see. ‘The entire Pinehurst case was a stinking mess of half-truths and distortions. They gave us a rookie debate judge who thought “negative” was a blood type. She claimed the first affirmative had an appealing speaking manner, but I thought he sounded like a Hitler Youth.’ ” Martha’s eyebrows lifted almost to her hairline. “What’s wrong with it? It’s too harsh, that’s what. I’m not saying you shouldn’t write about debate—I know you love it, and God knows you’re good at it.” She flicked a hand at the tops of the bookcases lined with plaques and trophies. “But you’re not debating here.”
Bernadette moved a stack of folded laundry off the bed and sat down. She was one of the five best high school debaters in Michigan. This did not impress her mother, with whom she had yet to win an argument. “Our guidance counselor said we should let our personalities shine through.”
Her mother threw up her hands. “Of course! But not your true personality. God bless us! I know you hate Pinehurst, I know you can’t stand to lose at anything, but ranting about it on paper isn’t very attractive.” She pointed a finger at Bernadette. “You catch more flies with a teaspoon of honey than a gallon full of vinegar.”
“I don’t want flies.”
“Colleges, then.” Martha leaned forward with her elbows on her knees. “If your own mother won’t tell you the truth, who will? And the truth is, sweetheart”—she sighed here, as if a terrible secret were being dragged from her—“you are too critical. Your father and I are worried about it.”
Bernadette gave a gasp of part outrage, part grudging admiration at her mother’s nerve. She was too critical? If that wasn’t the pot calling the kettle black, as Martha herself liked to say. And Bernadette’s father thought she was perfect—he often told her so.
“You are. Of everyone. If a person can’t spell every little word perfectly, or doesn’t realize you’re quoting poetry—and they better get the poet right if they know what’s good for them—you write them off. You treat them like, I don’t know what, servants—on probation.”
Bernadette lay back and pulled her pillow over her head. “I’m not listening,” she said into its comforting softness. But her mother’s words thumped through like the roar of a distant waterfall.
“People pick up on that. They might not say anything, but they notice. Just look at you this minute. You can dish it out, but you can’t take it. And then you wonder why you don’t have more friends!”
This stung Bernadette into lifting the pillow. “I don’t need a lot of friends. I have Nadine.” She wished, as she often did, that life was conducted more like a debate, with flow sheets and rules, timekeepers with stopwatches, and judges who punished illogic with low scores—preferably branded on the losers’ foreheads.
“Nadine is like your father and me, honey—she’s been your debate partner so long, she overlooks your faults. What if she moves away, or meets some boy? Hmmm? Then where will you be?”
“At Vassar. On full scholarship.”
“Not with this essay.”
There followed a pause so long, Bernadette peeked
out from under the pillow. Her mother’s eyes were half-closed as she continued reading, and she had her lips pursed up and out in what Bernadette called (to herself) her “contemplative trout” face. Suddenly Martha gasped, and Bernadette braced herself. Her mother had reached the last paragraph. “My greatest accomplishment at this stage of my life will be to beat Pinehurst Academy in debate. They say character comes with defeat. I intend to help Pinehurst develop as much soul-building character as I can.”
Martha lowered the paper.
“Mr. Malory says I write with ease and imagination,” Bernadette blurted.
“Does he.” Martha’s puckered lips stuck out still farther, as though she did not share the opinion of the best teacher ever hired by Wickham High.
Bernadette sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “You like Mr. Malory. You told Dad it was high time Wickham got a teacher who would push the kids.”
This hit home, she saw. She’d watched her mother at Open House. Martha’s skeptical face had said plainer than plain, oh, come on, a handsome, single young man, in a classroom with teenaged girls, what was the principal thinking? and then Mr. Malory came over and shook her hand and commended her on raising such a marvelously questioning student as Bernadette. “She sets the whole room thinking, it’s really quite helpful,” he’d said, in the upper-class British accent that reminded Martha, as she confessed later, of Peter O’Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, and after that it was all right. Mr. Malory was an O.O.O., one of ours, a Bernadette supporter.
Now Martha said “hmmm,” which was as close as she ever came to admitting Bernadette might have a point, and turned in her chair to study the wall over the desk. Sooner or later everyone did that. Burlap-covered fiberboard stretched from desk to ceiling. Her father had helped Bernadette carry it up from the basement last October. Pushpins impaled more than a hundred three-by-five-inch index cards on an expanse of blue burlap, each containing a single sentence or paragraph printed in meticulous black fine-tip felt pen. It was a quote-board, Bernadette explained, like the one in Mr. Malory’s classroom. It hung between ceiling-high bookcases crammed with books, as though the authors had cried out a few of their favorite sentences for special notice.
“We didn’t have those in secretarial school,” Martha had commented, but not as though she minded, for afterward they heard her on the kitchen phone telling her sister-in-law in Cleveland about it, the pride behind “Did your boys ever do anything like that, Cynthia?” as obvious as an elephant to Bernadette and her father, who exchanged knowing smiles.
Suddenly Martha sniffed as though she’d spotted a quotation she didn’t believe for a New York minute. “Speaking of Mr. Malory, why don’t you show this essay to him and see what he thinks? Since he’s so educated and I barely finished high school.”
“Maybe I will.”
Martha rose to her full height of five feet eleven inches. With the briskness that characterized her movements and her judgments, she wound up the vacuum cleaner cord. “We’re having lasagna for dinner,” she announced as she trundled the vacuum out into the hall, “and coconut cream pie.”
The vacuum thumped down the stairs.
Bernadette’s mulish look changed to one of interest. Lasagna and coconut cream pie happened to be what she’d order for her final meal, even if they were the frozen kind. Which these would be. In spite of having received last Christmas the latest edition of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook (Bernadette had even sprung for the hardback), Martha had not made lasagna from scratch since the last neighborhood wake.
During countless phone calls, when they were not settling the finer points of immigration law for debate or arguing the exact color of Mr. Malory’s eyes, Bernadette and Nadine sometimes touched on Bernadette’s mother’s job. She was the office manager of a family counseling clinic. Nadine insisted that Mrs. Terrell saw so many dysfunctional teenagers all day at work, she probably felt guilty because her own daughter was so beautifully adjusted. No drugs, no pregnancies, no suicide attempts. “Maybe,” Bernadette said doubtfully. “But she sure keeps looking. I make president of the National Honor Society and she checks my arms for needle marks.”
Now, stretched out on her comforter, Bernadette stared up at the ceiling. Too critical, her foot. Suddenly she scrambled off the bed. From under her desk blotter she slid out a plain white envelope and reverently unfolded a closely typed sheet. Mr. Malory had given her a copy of the college recommendation he’d written. She would not actually mail her first application for four months—she had to wait for her junior grades—but Bernadette believed in thorough preparations.
“Ms. Bernadette Terrell is a quietly tough-minded, intelligent young woman.” She liked that: tough-minded.
She could recite the rest: “ . . . work that is consistently superior . . . displays an intellectual curiosity most refreshing . . .” Ah, here it was: “Both in her writing and her class participation, Ms. Terrell is courteous and fair, though she will criticize in an honest and forthright manner when she feels it is deserved. She sets a high standard for herself and for others—a challenge that will make her a stimulating presence in any classroom.”
She sighed happily. Take that, Martha Terrell. Her gaze traveled over the quote-board, and she played the tranquilizing game of letting a random quotation inspire her.
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
Bernadette read it out loud, but it was her teacher’s voice she heard, as though he and not Yeats had written the words—for her. She shivered.
A card on the far edge of the board made her frown, and she clambered onto the desk to see better. That was not her writing. “Before honor comes humility.—Book of Proverbs.” Bernadette stared at the firm, nun-taught penmanship, then at the doorway through which the vacuum cleaner had exited. The gall of some people. She unpinned the card and dropped it in the wastebasket.
Paper crumpled. She was kneeling on her college essay. She sat down and considered it one more time. Perhaps the wording was a tad strong for debate-impaired admissions officers.
She crossed out “Hitler Youth.” In a tough-minded, forthright manner she drew a little caret above it and printed “smug, arrogant rich kid.”
She could too take criticism.
CHAPTER TWO
His mouth is most sweet: yea, he is altogether lovely.
—Song of Solomon, 5:16
Pressed to describe Bernadette Terrell, most people at Wickham High would say: smart. Acute observers might mention the zealot’s gleam in her dark eyes, usually veiled by glossy brown hair as she bent over some book; or the poignant but deceptive underfed look of her angular body, which prompted her debate coach to press coupons on her for free sundaes at the Creighton Dairy Belle. Not a babe, Bernadette Terrell, but . . . interesting. Oh, and smart—if you liked smart.
Bernadette adored it. Clever dialogue in movies or books, real wit (not the crude comebacks of the boys on the bus), elegant logic, people who never said “preventative” when they meant “preventive”: these were the things that made life worth living.
And this year there was Mr. Malory.
Her mother would be appalled if she knew how much time Bernadette spent dreaming of her teacher’s face. She dreamed about the rest of him, too, but the expression Mr. Malory wore while he savored his students’ search for the answer was the picture that sweetened her sleep most nights. His greenish-gray eyes would scan each knitted forehead, his upper lip would thin in ever-so-slightly malicious amusement, and the hand not holding the clipboard would ravage his hair into a wiry reddish halo.
Like now.
“Green Team, listen up. In Wuthering Heights, Brontë introduces Heathcliff’s personality by using a nonhuman image.” Mr. Malory took off his reading glasses and slipped them into his sport coat pocket. “What is that image?”
He ve
rified that the two lines of juniors facing each other across the desks in his Advanced Placement English class were paying attention. A smile flitted across his mouth. Oh, she liked his mouth.
“Come on, you loafers. At least pretend you read it.” His cultured, resonant, distinctly British voice slayed his girl students and made the boys feel dully American. And rightly so, Bernadette felt. She herself would rather die than muff a book bee question.
Brains were racked and memories probed, but Wuthering Heights had been four weeks ago.
Beside her, Nadine scowled behind 400/200 wire rims. The scowl was meant to suggest intense concentration. From long experience as Nadine’s debate partner, Bernadette knew it actually meant, “I don’t have a clue.”
“You get it, Bet.” Even in a whisper Nadine’s voice came out startlingly deep, at odds with her fragile appearance. She was the only person who called Bernadette by her initials (the “e” stood for Elizabeth).
Bernadette grimaced. She’d gotten the last two.
From her other side came the jingle of heart-shaped earrings. “Heathcliff, Heathcliff. Horseshit,” Lori muttered.
Try “Heathcliff, Heathcliff, he’s our man.” But Bernadette didn’t say it out loud. Lori Besh stood five feet ten inches and had biceps defined by years of cheerleading handstands.
“Eh, you bunch of sissies. Will you let the Blues eat your lead?” Mr. Malory’s mocking voice enchanted Bernadette. “Ms. Terrell? Is there more to life than debate?”
She could see the page etched in her mind. But she made her voice tentative. “A pack of dogs?” she asked. “They come in and they’re as brutal and unfriendly as their, uh, master?”
People were funny. They could hold a God-given gift like a photographic memory against you. But Frank Malory wasn’t so petty. His glinting smile made her stomach muscles tighten pleasurably. Mr. Malory thought her memory and her brains first-rate.
Catcalls and hissing came from the Blues. Her answer put them behind by three points.
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