Before heading home that day after school, I stopped by Vince’s trailer for a while. I told him about my exchange with Hannah, and after that he was even more convinced that Kjelson was up to no good. But he was also more confused than ever. Why would a new teacher be so obsessed with getting a school in trouble with the higher-up Suits? I wished I had an answer for him, but I was probably even more confused than he was so we left it at that.
When I got home, I went straight up to my room. I had just about an hour before dinner would be ready, and I wanted to make some notes in my Books, which I had brought home for the night, before I ate. It’s always best to take care of any business you have before eating. Because after eating one of my mom’s dinners, all you’ll want to do is lie on the couch while a cheesy game show plays on the TV and wonder why you ate so much.
I flipped on the lights, closed the door, and turned to face my desk. And then I almost let out an embarrassing yell that would have shattered all the windows in the house.
“Hi, Mac.”
Tyrell was sitting in the chair by my desk.
“You have to stop doing that to me,” I said. “Do my parents even know you’re here?”
He looked a little taken aback. “No, why would they?”
You just had to love this kid. He didn’t understand the concept of lawful entry. To him the only way to enter or exit a location was undetected, and I didn’t think using a front door or a doorbell was a thought that ever crossed his mind.
“So you’ve been just sitting here in the dark waiting for me to get home like some kind of serial killer or something?”
Tyrell grinned. “No, of course not. I knew right about what time you’d get here. So no worries, I haven’t been waiting long.”
I chuckled. “I hope this means you have good news for me?”
“That depends. I have a lot of information for you, but it will be up to you to decide whether it’s good or bad.”
“Is it about the SMARTs?”
Tyrell nodded.
“Well, let me get Vince and Joe over here, then, because if we’re going to plan something, we’ll have to do it tonight since the school is taking the test tomorrow.”
I called Joe and Vince and invited them over for dinner. My mom had an open-table policy for dinner. Which meant I never even had to get her permission. I could basically just invite over whoever I wanted for dinner. Which, of course, was awesome.
After dinner I told my mom we were headed to the school to play football. And, well, we were headed to the school, just not to play football. Tyrell, Joe, Vince, and I all went to my office in the fourth stall to discuss the SMARTs.
Meeting there during school hours had been dangerous because of George’s recent suspicion, but it was now seven thirty at night, so we figured there was no chance anybody would be around. Which is why it was the perfect—no, the only safe place to meet to discuss a possible plan that involved cheating on a state administered test—something that I didn’t think had ever been attempted on such a large scale before in history.
“Okay, Tyrell,” I said once we were all grouped inside my office. “What do you have for us?”
Now, I’d like to say that what he found out was pretty good, considering he had only half a day to do it, but that would be a lie. The truth was he’d found out so much information that it was close to a miracle. It wasn’t just pretty good; it was better than was humanly possible. Tyrell would put CIA agents to shame. He could out-cool and out-spy James Bond with nothing but a used toothbrush and seventeen cents.
Tyrell had discovered that the SMARTs were administered via those sheets that just had circles all over them. The kind where you fill in A, B, C, D, or E with a pencil for hundreds of questions. The questions came in a separate packet. After the test Dr. George and his secretaries would go around to each classroom and collect all of the answer sheets for the entire school. Then they would go back to his office and put them all together in one large security envelope and seal it. At six thirty the next morning a few guys from the State Testing Bureau, or STB, would arrive and take the test results back to their local facility. The answer sheets were fed into a large machine, and because of some new software they got recently, the scores could be generated and delivered back to the school within a day or two.
Also, one last thing Tyrell discovered was that each school that gave the test got one master copy of the test booklet that contained all of the correct test answers for all grades. Tyrell said our school’s copy of the master booklet had been hand delivered to Dr. George (Tyrell witnessed this exchange happen), and since that time, it has been sitting in Dr. George’s office in a locked drawer in his desk, third down on the right side.
I shook my head and looked at Vince after Tyrell had finished. The kid was amazing.
“How did you possibly find out all of this?” I asked.
Tyrell smiled. “Mac, you know I can’t tell you that.”
I nodded. Tyrell was more open with me than anyone, but he was still pretty secretive about his methods. He always said it was more for our own protection than for his that he did not tell us, but either way he was probably right: I almost didn’t even want to know.
“Well, the problem is that sounds pretty airtight,” I said. “The answers go from the classroom right to Dr. George right to a sealed security envelope. And even if we did get the master booklet somehow, there’s likely not enough time anymore to get a copy of it to every kid in the school. Plus, then we’d have to deal with possible narks, and that’s not even mentioning how bush league that would be. I mean, if one kid gets caught with a copy of the master booklet, then the whole operation would backfire worse than when the Yankees gave Jeter a huge contract extension when he was already well past his prime.”
Joe and Vince agreed. Despite all of Tyrell’s great work it still seemed like there wouldn’t be much we could do at this point.
“Well, maybe that’s okay,” Vince said. “I mean, do you really think everyone is going to fail?”
I shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not. But more than that, think about the money behind this, Vince.” I reached into my backpack and took out my Books, flipped through them, and did a quick tally. “I mean, if you add up all the offers we’ve gotten from kids who want help cheating on the SMARTs, then we’ll make over one thousand dollars! That’s more than we’ve ever made from one single operation, by a ton. Can you imagine?”
Vince nodded. He knew it, too—that was a lot of bread. Plus, then we’d also have peace of mind knowing that our school would pass with flying colors, teachers and students would be happy, and so on.
“Okay, sure, but that still doesn’t help us figure out how we’ll pull this off,” Vince said.
“What about, like, intercepting the test scores on their way to the testing facility?” Joe said. “We’ll just need to take out the STB guys and grab the tests from them.”
I assumed he was joking, so I laughed. “Right, well, I haven’t quite moved up to armed robbery just yet, Joe.”
“If only Joe Blanton was here,” Vince said. “He’d know what to do.”
“Yeah, he’d probably just bribe the STB office,” I said. “And then he’d let them score eight runs in one inning of bribery.”
Vince scoffed. “That one doesn’t even make sense, Mac.”
“Guys!” Joe said. “Focus.”
He was right; we needed to figure this out.
“Well,” I began, “this would be no small job . . . but we could break into the administration offices at five o’clock, after practice, and after everyone else has gone home, and change all of the answers ourselves.”
Everyone stared at me for a moment. They could tell I was serious, and maybe that’s what scared them most.
Vince was the first to speak. “Mac, if you’re even suggesting this, I’m assuming you know how much of a risk this is, so I won’t even go into that. But even then, how do we get the answer sheets out of the security envelope without it being obvious that they were tampered with?”
Then Tyrell, who had been pretty quiet since sharing all of his research with us, said, “Oh, that’s not a problem. While doing my investigation, I was able to lift a couple SMART security envelopes off of one of the STB administrators I’d been tailing.”
He pulled out a few large, sturdy yellow envelopes from his bag.
“Nice,” Joe said. Vince nodded.
“We’ll just need to switch the school bar code and stuff off of the real envelopes to these when we’re all done. Which I think I can do pretty easily with an X-acto knife and some Gorilla glue.”
“That just leaves the question of how we’ll break in to get both the answer sheets and the master booklet,” I said.
Tyrell grinned. “Guys, I’ve got you covered there, too.”