The Answer Key is Wrong

CHAPTER ONE

Pessimists will tell you that disaster awaits around every corner, but most pessimists are assholes. 

Yet, I have to give them a little credit; I should have seen this coming.  I had to know I couldn’t leave my past in the past.  Every day we go through our lives as if it’s a normal day and we have some control over the events.  Then disaster blows up in your face like some kind of evil Jack-in-the-box—BLAM!  That’s actually kind of redundant—all Jacks-in-the-box are evil.  That nasty little SOB lurking in the dark as you crank on the handle?  Letting the tension rise?  Letting your heart pump faster, just waiting to jump up and scare the bejesus out of you?  Disaster loves surprises, the little bastard. 

Everything in my life blows up when I leave a voicemail for the parent of a plagiarist, announcing his daughter’s transgression.  I get an email from Dad.  “Dear Ms. Baker, I received your voicemail yesterday.  I have serious doubts my daughter copied her story somewhere online.”

Most parents live in a fantasy world.   

So, I reply to his email and explain the whole thing, sending screen shots and website links, and at the end, as a perfunctory courtesy, I write, “If you’d still like to meet face-to-face please let me know and we can schedule a time that is convenient for you,” thinking he’d never want to meet after presenting all the evidence and having the jury already pronounce a guilty verdict.

Nope.

“Will next Tuesday after school work for you?”

Scraping up what little diplomacy I have left, I politely agree. 

Now, I have had dozens of parent meetings, good and bad, but nothing could have prepared me for what would knock on my door Tuesday after school.  Nothing.

Students are gone.  My physical evidence is ready.  I will simply reiterate what I had said in my email.  I mean, how many ways can you say, “I caught your daughter cheating and I have proof.”?

He knocks, I open the door, and the Jack-in-the-box clown gets right in my face!  Disaster loves surprises.   No “Pop Goes the Weasel” warnings, no handle cranking.  All that stuff occurred years ago. 

Standing at my classroom door is no pedestrian parent.  No perplexed patriarch.  It is Disaster himself and he has a contract on my ass.

He stares at me a moment.  His brain connecting the dots.  His eyes and expression slowly form a vile little smile.  “Miss Baker?  Jessica Baker?”

I know who he is the moment I open the door.  “Oscar Ferguson.”  It is all I can do to not throw up on his shoes.

“I thought your name was Tess.”

Ok.  Let me stop the tape here.  For the record, my name is Jessica Baker.  But when I first met Oscar Ferguson two years ago it wasn’t.  In fact, it was a lot of things over the course of four years, several countries, many men, and a whole continent.  I’m not even sure I can remember them all…Finch, Tess, Jane, Elizabeth…all my favorite women in all my favorite books.  I kinda plagiarized their lives for a while.  Living their stories—in my own words, of course—but, coopting their personas, nonetheless.  So, who am I to judge a student for cheating on her schoolwork—a literary misdemeanor at best—when I am a Class-A Felon?

I’ll get back to that and let you be the judge.  Mr. Ferguson first.

“Yeah…Tess.  It was a nickname.”  I add, “I guess”, weakly, bring him into the room, and offer him a chair.  All I was going to say, my whole case—physical evidence, witness testimony, color photos of the crime scene…all gone.  Poof!   I remain quiet while my brain reboots.

In the silence, he begins.  “Well…Tess?  Ms. Baker?”

I just shrug whatever.

He smiles.  “Tess…”

Tess?  Really?  What a dick. 

“Gina is not a cheater.  She’s going to Stanford.”

I nod silently while my brain’s hard drive locates files.

“She is a top student and her grades are of the utmost importance.”

Utmost importance?  I want to ask, “To whom?” but say nothing.  His ridiculousness jolts my brain back to reality.  I listen, waiting to present my open-and-shut case which by now is reassembling in my memory banks.

“She simply can’t have a low grade nor a disciplinary mark on her record.  She’s going to Stanford.”

“So, you said.”  I almost begin tallying the times he tells me she is going to Stanford.  “Have you heard of whowroteit.com?”

No.

“It’s a plagiarism website.  It takes any writing a student does and searches the whole Web to see if it was written before as well as searching its own database of millions of student writing samples.  If it’s been written before, whowroteit will find it.”  I click on my projector.  Up on the big screen appears the browser with Gina’s story—the future Stanford Cardinal.  “Here is her story.  The one she submitted herself.”  I click a button and the whole story instantly highlights in red. 

Every word.  She didn’t even bother to put it in her own words.  The only thing worse than a cheater is a lazy cheater.  I mean, she wasn’t even trying.

“What you see highlighted in red is what was copied from the website freetermpapers.com.  As you can see as I scroll, every word of her story came from this site.  That story was uploaded to freetermpapers eight years ago.”  I scroll through it, “Looks like it’s been used a few dozen times since then.”  I turn to him.  “Gina’s isn’t even the only download this year.”  I open a second browser and go to freetermpapers.com and find the story.  “Here it is.  Clearly not her story.”

Open and shut, right?  What more is there to say? 

Just wait.

He nods his head thoughtfully.  He takes a deep breath and says, “Tess, when we met in Germany,” he pauses and smiles, “I learned a great deal about you from Frau Wagner,” pronouncing it “VAHG-ner” to sound intimidating…like he vas zee Gashtapo.  “Among the things I learned were your credentials…or would ‘lack of’ be more accurate?”

When people are being blackmailed do they know it right from the start?  I do.

Now, I don’t know if you caught that, but a few years ago, he was working in Germany on a bank deal.  He didn’t just know Frau VAHG-ner socially, he was bonking Frau Wagner, daily!  She was the wife of one of the bank partners, Herr Jacob Wagner of Anschuetz-Gunderman Bankinschloss or something.  I was just shagging her son.

Somehow, it seems to me, Oscar feels as though he is in a great bargaining position—as though he has the goods on me and he, himself, is completely guilt-free.  Are there still men out there who think their philandering is just boys-being-boys, but for women it’s a still a sin?

Apparently.  One of them sits before me.  And his daughter is going to Stanford.

Up to this point, Haupt Sturm Führer Ferguson merely insinuates that he knows of my dirty little secret and not that I know of his.  He hasn’t actually threatened me.

“So, in order to keep your secret, you’re going to need to change my daughter’s grade and tear up the disciplinary referral.  Lest your career end this very day.” 

So much for subtle insinuation.

If I am going down, it will not be without a fight.  Especially to a butt-weasel like this!  My anger reignites my disdain for him, or the other way around; it’s really an artistic choice.  My mind races back to Germany, to Europe, to my senior year in high school, in an attempt to reconstruct my memories of exactly what he is talking about.  That’s a hard trip.  I am not who I was back in twelfth grade.  Who the hell is?

…