CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

By the end of the day, I was exhausted. I felt like I’d told my story a million times. People couldn’t get enough of it, especially the part about Juarez apologizing to me. Not really his style, you know? So it was major news.

When the final bell rang, I set out to deal with the last loose end.

I knew where to find him—after all, I’d studied his patterns back before all this started, back when I was planning to break into Ms. Opal’s desk. After the last bell, he takes care of the cafeteria.

Sure enough, there he was.

“Hey, Sully,” I said.

“Photographer Kai,” he replied, setting down his mop. “Right on schedule.”

Hardly anybody was around, just a couple people at the vending machines. But I wasn’t about to take any chances, not this late in the game.

“Just wanted to thank you again for helping me out,” I said, offering my hand.

Sully gave me a firm shake, and I slipped him the cash. My last hundred bucks, well spent.

Sure, I probably would’ve gotten the suspension lifted even without a witness from Juarez’s own staff, but with him? It was a slam dunk. I wondered what Ms. Opal thought about my methods. Not for the first time, I realized that they weren’t all that different from her own. She was just the one who got caught.

Now it was all over. I’d done what I had to do. But I couldn’t quite make myself forget that Ms. Opal had actually been a great teacher. The kind who made stuff interesting—the kind who thought her students were interesting. The kind that people like Nat would shed tears over.

Yeah, I thought I needed to cheat on her trig exam, but it wasn’t her fault that I sucked at math. I probably would’ve done better if I’d studied more instead of spending all that time planning to steal the answer key. And Nat had made a good point. Opal would probably never teach again, at least not around here.

On TV, Juarez had said that Ms. Opal lost sight of the importance of teaching. But what she did had nothing to do with teaching. A lot of people think those ARA tests are completely bogus. Cheating on them didn’t mean Ms. Opal didn’t care about helping us learn.

At the end of the day, she had cheated and lied. And so had I. That was something I was going to have to learn to live with.

•••

On my way home, I swung into the park and went to look at the creek. I hadn’t been here for a week. In fact, I hadn’t used my camera at all since the Opal photos. I pulled it out of my backpack and held it for a minute, thinking about how much had changed in that short time.

The late afternoon light played out over the water in a new way. The shadows seemed longer somehow. Not completely dark but darker than before. I adjusted the camera’s settings, held it up, and clicked away. It took a few tries, but this time I managed a perfect shot.