“Give me two Hardy novels named for their protagonists,” Mr. Malory said.
“Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D’Urbervilles.” Anthony Cirillo snapped out the answer for the Blues. Figured. It annoyed Bernadette when a good mind was wasted on a jerk. Anthony probably thought it was his acne that kept him dateless, but she had news for him—it was his personality. His job at McDonald’s was not the only reason she and Nadine called him “McAss.”
He caught her eye and rounded his mouth into a fake “O” of alarm.
Just then Wickham’s principal, Mrs. Standish, knocked on the open classroom door. “May I interrupt you, Mr. Malory?” Her face was a mass of fine wrinkles all upturned at the moment in an inquiring smile.
“Absolutely, Mrs. Standish. Always a pleasure.” Mr. Malory settled a hip on the edge of his desk and loosened his tie. More than one girlish moan was quickly converted into a cough.
The principal opened her mouth to read from a paper in her hands as David Minor delivered himself of a truly impressive sneeze.
Everyone waited expectantly. Would Mrs. Standish, a.k.a. Spic ‘n’ Span, send David to scrub his hands as she often did to students who disturbed the germ-free order of her school? Not today, it appeared. She ignored him.
“Mr. Malory. Class. I’ve just heard some intriguing news from Dr. Genevieve Fontaine.” She gave the first name a French pronunciation, with a soft G, and looked over her paper at them. “Dr. Fontaine chairs the research committee of the National Computing Systems Classics Contest.”
Mr. Malory’s foot stopped swinging.
“Dr. Fontaine informs me that Pinehurst Academy”—she waited out the usual boos—“finished second in the Classics Contest this year with a score of eighty-five percent. A very good score on so challenging a test, I thought.”
More boos. Nobody cared what Pinehurst did.
A bizarre thought occurred to Bernadette, and her glance flew to her teacher. A tiny nerve under Mr. Malory’s left eye was jumping. His skin, always pale, gleamed damply paper-white.
“Wickham High School,” the principal continued, watching Mr. Malory now with arched eyebrows, “received . . . ninety-two percent. The highest score in Michigan!”
She tried to hand Mr. Malory the paper, but he didn’t seem to see it. “You’re”—he swallowed—“you’re certain? They said Wickham?”
Mrs. Standish gave a roguish laugh and stuffed the paper into his fingers. “Now don’t act so shocked, Mr. Malory. Your students might think you didn’t expect this of them.”
Mr. Malory didn’t answer. He was reading.
Nadine shattered the silence with a croaked, “We won?”
“We beat Pinehurst?”
“Get out of here!”
“We won!”
“I don’t believe it!”
“Oh, I knew we could!” That would be Lori. What a twit. Bernadette’s own mother wouldn’t have put money on them. Not to beat Pinehurst.
Pandemonium reigned.
Mrs. Standish folded her arms across her chest with all the pride of a coach at the Special Olympics and studied the ten students making the noise of fifty.
Pinehurst students, it had been reported more than once in the Creighton Courier, studied to the strains of Mozart. Some of them spoke fluent Mandarin Chinese (and they weren’t Chinese). It was an off year when only one Pinehurst senior got into Harvard. This year the Panthers had wiped up the football field with the Warriors 42-6. At home. From sports to academics to faculty credentials, the private school dominated. Even Wickham dropouts knew enough to spit at the Pinehurst name. The only good thing about the place, as far as Bernadette was concerned, was the hideous purple blazer all its students had to wear. Served them right.
Nadine’s fine black hair swung across her glasses as she pounded Bernadette’s shoulder. “We beat them! We beat Pinehurst, Bet!”
Bernadette choked. “You know what this means? We’re gonna be on TV!”
There was always a televised Classics Bowl matchup between the top two schools in the written Contest. Cable TV, but still. National Computing Systems (NCS), the Detroit-based company that sponsored the contest, promoted it heavily and awarded personal computers as prizes.
Nadine gave a throaty cry. “The Classics Bowl! I forgot!”
“Let’s go ask if we’re on the team.” Personally, Bernadette could not imagine Mr. Malory not choosing them.
They joined the group of chattering students surrounding Mr. Malory, who looked as if he’d just heard Robert Browning’s poems had been ghosted by Elizabeth.
“Mr. Malory! Hey! We beat the sissies!” Bernadette greeted him. The principal’s thin eyebrows snapped together.
Mr. Malory came out of his reverie. Determination dawned in his eyes. “We sure as damnation did, Bernadette,” he said, and earned his own glance from Spic ‘n’ Span. The use of her first name—her Christian name, he would say—thrilled Bernadette to her socks. He smacked one fist against his palm. “That’s nothing to what we’ll do in the Bowl. The Wickham Warriors will mow them down like the armies of Macduff.”
“ ‘Warriors’ is so jock,” Lori Besh put in. “Don’t you think?”
Bernadette and Nadine exchanged incredulous looks. Lori’s dedication to the ancient sport of pompon made her one of the biggest jocks in school.
Lori continued. “What about a name that’s more, you know, intellectual? Like, I don’t know—like ‘Wizards’?”
“The Wickham Wizards!”
“Go, Wizards!”
“All right, Lori!”
“Ms. Besh, that’s an excellent suggestion. Literary and alliterative. Let me see, who are our Wizards—”
With a fluttery start of recollection, Mrs. Standish handed him a second sheet.
“It appears that Mr. Anthony Cirillo, you yourself”—he nodded at Lori—“Mr. David Minor, Ms. Nadine Walczak, and”—Mr. Malory glanced at Bernadette’s outraged face with amusement—“Ms. Bernadette Terrell were the top scorers on the test. Which makes them the Classics Bowl team. Class, a round of applause for our Wickham Wizards!”
Groans of disappointment from the five not chosen were drowned out by the belch David reserved for special occasions. It rustled the window blinds and relieved them of Mrs. Standish.
“I’ll leave you to your fortunate—and, of course, studious—wizards, Mr. Malory. And class—well-done. This means so much to everyone at Wickham. The superintendent will be very proud of us.” There was a tiny quaver in her voice as, with a little wave, she departed.
Proud of “us”? Bernadette rolled her eyes. As if Spic ‘n’ Span had had anything to do with it. Mr. Malory grinned at her as though he read her mind, and suddenly she laughed. Oh, so what if the principal wanted to bask in their success. Let her. It would be a welcome change from checking the bathrooms for smokers.
The book bee was abandoned.
“This could be even better than a debate,” Bernadette said to Nadine in the general discussion. “It’s more about speed and memory than logic. And we’ve already read a ton of classics this year, and anything we haven’t read we can zip through if we skim, so I wouldn’t be surprised—”
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
Mr. 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 y
ou’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.”
Cheating Lessons: A Novel Page 2
