THERE ARE THINGS THAT ARE a secret that everyone knows. Like that the wrestling coach, Mr. Winter, was fucking the Religious Ed teacher, Mrs. Habler, even though they were both married. Todd found out because one day the door to Mrs. Habler’s office was locked and he made the mistake of looking in the little foggy window, long enough to catch a note of …
Something even his ghost couldn’t unhear.
There are secrets at least nineteen people know.
Spot met Greevy and Daniels in the corridor of the school the next day, looking sweatier than ever, if that was possible. The first bell had just rung, and students swirled through the hallways.
Spot pushed past them, focused on Greevy and Daniels.
“Detectives, please, follow me.”
This time, he did not smile or shake their hands, but pivoted and charged in quick, small steps down the hall.
In Spot’s office, Greevy unconsciously wiped her top lip, watching the sweat trickle-down Spot’s face as he settled behind his desk. It looked like he’d been sitting in a sauna for an hour. He pulled out another of his file folders, this one crisp. New. He took a deep breath. Placed the folder on the desk.
“Of course, you understand that we do not, we would not have…” Spot shook his head. “This is an unpleasant surprise to say the very least. This kind of behavior is in no way condoned by Albright Academy.”
Outside the window, a herd of students huffed past in a serious jog, their cheeks red with cold. Mr. Winter working the grade elevens with what he called “cold therapy.” Todd watched the puffs of air stream from their noses and lips.
Greevy, standing to the left of the desk, put her hand on the folder. “May I?”
“Y-yes.” Spot pulled his finger off the folder, looking at Daniels as Greevy opened the folder. “After your call, we examined Todd’s grades over the past three semesters, and we did not see any anomalies, of course, as I said Todd was a very able student. However…”
Greevy’s eyebrows went up as she scanned the contents of the file, passing pages to Daniels as she read.
“We did”—Spot paused to clear his throat, an incredibly uncomfortable sound, like a record skipping very slowly—“take a deeper look at the rest of the class grades and discovered … an anomaly in relation to Mr. McVeeter’s grade-twelve social studies class, which Todd was a member of…”
“Nineteen kids went from a C or a D to an A on the last midterm,” Daniels said, tapping a spreadsheet.
“Yes.” Spot cleared his throat again. “It appears that at least nineteen of our students had a significant jump in their grades for this last exam. We believe this jump was…” Spot paused. “Artificial.”
“This midterm was when?” Daniels asked, reading over Greevy’s arm as she flipped through the pages.
“December fifteenth. It was the last exam of the first term.”
“So,” Greevy said, “they cheated.”
“On this particular exam, it does appear,” Spot said, stiffening, “that some sort of nefarious activity took place, for nineteen of the students in the class.”
“Pretty much the whole class,” Greevy added.
Daniels nodded. “Do you have the exams themselves?”
Spot handed over a larger folder filled with exam booklets. McVeeter hated multiple choice. He told Todd it was the hopscotch of academia, so his exams were always essays.
Todd always found the booklets somewhat satisfying. He used to enjoy running his fingers over the textured covers. He’d always agreed with McVeeter, although they never discussed exams in any detail, that multiple choice was kind of cheating because you could guess and get it right without actually knowing the answer.
You should have to know something to get it right, Todd thought.
Daniels scanned the papers while Greevy tapped her chin.
“Did McVeeter discuss this with you?” she asked, pulling out her notebook. “Flag it? The grades?”
“No, he did not.” Spot drummed his fingers on the desk near the picture of his dog, who smiled back at him from the silver frame on Spot’s desk with black lips and sharp white teeth.
“Does he know you’re looking at these grades now?” Greevy asked.
“No, he does not,” Spot said crisply, finally wiping his hand across the slick surface of his brow. “We received your call, and we did a search of the grades for Todd’s year and this is what we found. And of course we notified you immediately. We thought … I thought it would be prudent to discuss this matter with you first.”
“We appreciate your prudency,” Greevy said. “Is Mr. McVeeter in school today?”
“He is in class, yes.” Spot nodded, pulling up a grid on his computer. “It’s Wednesday so he will be in room 454. Until morning break.”
“Can you excuse us, Principal Spot?” Daniels tapped the file, looked at Spot. “We just need a moment.”
Principal Spot scooted out of his chair with a little more haste than seemed normal. “Of course, I was just about to check in with my assistant. Move some meetings. You may use my office.”
When he closed the door behind him, Greevy sprung up and over to Spot’s desk, sinking into his chair. “It’s like twenty degrees warmer in this chair,” she gasped, plopping her notebook on his desk. “Okay. So. News flash. Rich kids cheat.”
“Yup.” Daniels flipped through the booklets, running his finger over the answers, often pressed into the page in pencil with such force they left a brail behind. “Hey, look, it’s your favorites.”
Daniels pulled booklets out of the pile, slapping them on Spot’s desk. “Cameron Hill, Chris Mattieu, Devon Marcus…”
“All members of an apparently very useless study group,” Greevy noted, leaning back in Spot’s chair.
“Yep.” Daniels nodded; he tossed another booklet on the desk. “And … Mark Walker.”
Mark Walker had terrible handwriting. Each letter crawled, gasping for breath, across the page to the end of every raggedly disjointed sentence. Todd thought that was why Mark didn’t like to take notes, which was part of why he was failing social studies. When Mark sat next to Todd in class, Todd would watch him out of the corner of his eye, his little forelock dangling over his face as he just held onto his pen, staring at the paper like it was talking to him.
Mark was the only person Todd had ever met with hands bigger than his. Mark said it was good for wrestling, for getting a good hold.
“Oh, I think of it as having piano hands,” Todd said. “Like for reaching the keys.”
“Reaching keys?” Mark seemed stumped. “Don’t you just move your hands?”
Todd laughed so hard he almost fell out of his chair. Mark looked embarrassed.
“You know what I mean.” Mark rolled his eyes.
This exchange was at an unofficial meeting of the tutor club, that was by then no longer a club and just Mark and Todd. In Mrs. Habler’s classroom, which was usually empty at lunch. Mark always sat under the picture of the Sistine Chapel, of God reaching to Man. Maybe that’s too symbolic, but that’s where they started hanging out. Or, whatever you want to call it.
Todd used to wonder if anyone knew where Mark was when he went to those tutoring sessions. If it was a secret. Mark said he just needed to get his grades up a letter. Otherwise there was no way he could get into college.
That old chestnut.
Daniels thumbed through each exam a question at a time. It didn’t take him long to notice the little dots McVeeter used for marking, following along each sentence.
“Look at this,” he pointed.
McVeeter had underlined, on Mark’s paper, the same sentence he’d underlined on eighteen other papers because they all used it in one form or another.
A person’s identity as a citizen, who is part of a community or a country, is a matter of ideology, it tells him what to do and what his responsibilities are.
Except for the gender bit, it was almost verbatim from the reference sheet. Apparently, Mark was pretty good at memorizing.
Apparently, they all were.
“Okay, I’m going to say it,” Greevy said, looking at the array of exams. “These kids are thick and unimaginative.”
Daniels pointed at the red underlines. “McVeeter marked up these papers, underlined this stuff, which means he knew,” he said. “So why not go to Spot? It’s not like it was his fault.”
Greevy plopped back into Spot’s chair and tilted back until she was staring at the ceiling. “Right? So instead, after the break, he goes after Todd? Calls him a ‘cheat and a liar.’”
Daniels frowned. “You think Todd was cheating, too?”
Daniels rummaged in the file and pulled out Todd’s exam. Opened it to the same question.
In his exam, Todd wrote:
OUR IDENTITIES AS AMERICAN CITIZENS, AS WELL AS THE MANY OTHER CULTURES, COMMUNITIES, AND MICROGROUPS WE CONSIDER OURSELVES TO BE MEMBERS OF, ARE AS MUCH A MATTER OF IDEOLOGY AS THEY ARE LIVED EXPERIENCES. WE ARE CITIZENS BY BIRTH, BUT WE GROW INTO THE PERSON WE KNOW WE ARE MEANT TO BE, FOLLOWING RULES, OUR ACTIONS MARKED BY INVISIBLE BOUNDARIES, THE WEIGHT OF RESPONSIBILITIES.
“Either he cheated WAY BETTER,” Daniels noted, “which given his track record would also suggest he cheated all the time, or, more likely—”
“Or he didn’t cheat. But we don’t know.” Greevy shook her head, reading through the rest of the essay.
“But we don’t know.” Daniels nodded.
It did not bother Todd to think that Greevy and Daniels would think he needed to cheat on a midterm. Because he was dead. Living, it would have made him livid. It was one thing not to want everyone to think you were smart; it was another to have someone think you were so un-smart you had to cheat on a test.
Greevy considered. “Worth talking to the tutor crew again?”
“Let’s get the whole class in, everyone who cheated.” Daniels stepped toward the door and stopped. “Call their parents, too.”
There are things that are a secret that everyone knows.
When Greevy and Daniels entered Todd’s former classroom with Spot this time, it wasn’t a surprise; their arrival had already hummed through the halls. Before the doorknob twisted, with the shadow of Spot in the doorway, nineteen boys looked at one another across their desks.
As soon as Principal Spot stepped into 234, Mr. Farley’s grade-twelve calculus, Chris pulled out his phone and held it up for the detectives to see.
“My father is a lawyer,” he announced. “I have the right to retain counsel.”
“Shut the fuck up, Chris,” Devon grumbled from the other side of the classroom.
All the students on the list went to Spot’s office to call their parents, then they were seated in an empty classroom, which happened to be Mrs. Habler’s.
Mark called his mother, who was working at home. Then he was silent as Daniels pointed him to the chair under a glossy image of the Sistine Chapel. He put his index finger to his lip and bit off a piece of cuticle, which Todd had never seen him do.
Trevor leaned back in the chairs set up for them, looked at the ceiling.
Daniels stood at the front of the classroom, snug in the silence.
“What are we doing?” Cameron finally mumbled, amid a chorus of chair squeaks. “I mean, or whatever.”
Todd could see that Cameron was high and pretending not to be high, which seemed to be making it worse.
“We’re waiting for your parents,” Daniels said, scanning the boys. “And we’re all having a think while we sit here. About what we’re going to say when your parents get here. Because when they do, we are going to have another discussion about any relevant details you might have not shared previously that you’re going to seriously consider sharing now about your fellow student, Todd Mayer, who I will remind you all again, is dead. This cheating thing you all clearly were a part of may or may not have anything to do with Todd being dead, but it seems to me a pretty solid coincidence, which I don’t believe in.”
Mark looked at his hands.
It’s possible Daniels, as a detective, knew what Todd had only learned just before his untimely demise, that a secret is rarely a secret for long.
Because people are careless.
Trevor sat up in his chair and stretched. He looked over at Mark on the other side of the classroom. Mark looked at Trevor then looked away.
People being careless is how two students becomes three students, and how three becomes five becomes nineteen.
This particular secret, split three ways, wasn’t a ton of money but it was something, is what they told Todd.
And Todd was careless, too, so he agreed.