Cheated by Cheating

      I didn’t do well in high school.  I didn’t like the girls because they were phony, I didn’t like the boys because they were silly, and I didn’t like the teachers because they were boring.  When I finished school for the day I usually went home, opened the front door, and dumped my books on the floor, where they remained until Monday morning, unless my mother nagged me to pick them up.  I never studied anything.  Except for economics, which I actually liked.  

     There were the usual reprobates in my class. Daryl, another under-achiever who slept with his head cradled in his arms;  Philip, a tall, gangly snot with a rash of pimples ruining his forehead; and Karen, a chubby girl who became my friend in that class.  After a few weeks, we sat together.    

     The economics teacher was tall and goofy – goofy because he had a wandering eye, which led us to joke about which eye was actually looking at us. He had a bad temper and threw chalk or the eraser if we weren’t paying attention, or talked. He was good at keeping the class under control.  

     Every Friday we had a quiz on that week’s chapter.  It was all part of the class mark, and because it was the one subject I actually liked, I would read the chapter at home the night before the quiz, without fail.  Karen never did.  She hated economics. Karen was hopeless and failed her quizzes the first weeks of class. She bit her fingernails down to the quick and worried about failing. 

     I started to help her. One day when I was doing my quiz, she poked me in the ribs with her pencil.  I looked at her and she nodded her chin towards my paper.  ‘Give me the answers,’ she mouthed. ‘Wait,’ I mouthed back.  After I finished filling in all the blanks, I dangled my paper over the edge of the desk (when Goofy wasn’t looking) and Karen copied all my answers, writing furiously to fill in all the empty spaces before the teacher came and gathered up all the papers.