CHAPTER THREE

It was dark when I finally made it out to my car. First things first: I texted my buddy Vince, who needed that answer key at least as much as I did. No joy, I typed. He responded with an impressive string of swear words.

As I drove home, I thought about what I’d seen in Ms. Opal’s classroom. Could I have misunderstood what she was doing?

I didn’t have a chance to review the evidence until after dinner, when I uploaded the photos to my laptop and enlarged them on the screen. The first couple didn’t show anything conclusive, just Opal hunched over the papers on her desk. Then came the ones where I’d used the zoom. The money I invested in the camera had been well spent. You could see everything: the stack of tests with dozens of penciled-in circles; the booklet with the test questions; and right in Opal’s hand, an eraser going over someone’s answer. The next shot showed her pencil, filling in a different bubble. And so on, over and over, a couple dozen crystal-clear shots.

As far as I could guess, Opal must’ve taken the test herself and made an answer key. Then she checked our work and fixed some of the wrong answers she found. Even seeing it right there in front of me again, it was hard to believe a teacher would cheat on the standardized tests. They’re more than just a way of grading the school. We have to pass them to graduate. Sure, we get multiple tries if we don’t pass the first time. But everybody has to pass eventually or no diploma. Plus the teachers get evaluated based on our scores, and that affects their raises and promotions and stuff.

So if Ms. Opal really did change answers on those tests, she was messing with people’s futures.

Then again, she’d have to be changing wrong answers to correct ones, right? Otherwise, she’d just be screwing herself, because it’d hurt her if her students failed. So she must have been giving us a boost on the test—kind of like the one I was hoping to give myself on tomorrow’s trig exam. Our scores go up, she gets a bigger raise, and we get to graduate. Win-win.

Besides, who was I to judge? I would’ve cheated on Ms. Opal’s exam if I’d found that answer key.

I almost deleted the photos right then and there. But something held me back. Maybe I just needed to stop thinking about it for a little while. After all, I had an awful lot of trigonometry to study.