Sourland

Who would know, who could prove. You have only to say nothing.

I knew this, of course. But I was angry and disgusted, too. If I did not want to cheat, I would be at a disadvantage when so many others were cheating. My heart beat in childish indignation It isn’t fair! It wasn’t just incidental cheating, a girl glancing over at another girl’s exam paper, two girls whispering together at the back of a room. Not just the usual help girls gave one another, proofreading papers, pointing out obvious mistakes. This was systematic cheating, blatant cheating. Especially in science classes taught by an affable distracted man named Werth where notes and even pages ripped from textbooks were smuggled into the exam room, and grades were uniformly A’s and B’s. In English and history it had become commonplace for students to plagiarize by photocopying material from the periodicals library at the University of Buffalo that was within walking distance of the Amherst Academy. Our teachers seemed not to know, unless they’d given up caring. It was easier to give high grades. It was easier to avoid confrontations. “Well, Mickey: I know I can trust you,” Mrs. Peale had said once, mysteriously. The emphasis on you had felt like a nudge in the ribs, painful though meant to be affectionate.

My first few months at the Academy, eager to be liked, I’d helped girls with homework and papers but I’d never actually written any part of any paper. I’d wanted to think of what I did as a kind of teaching. This isn’t cheating. This is helping. Uneasily I remembered how at freshman orientation questions had been put to the Dean of Students about the honor code, those questions Dean Chawdrey had answered year following year with her so-serious expression Yes it is as much a violation of the honor code to fail to report cheating as to cheat. Yes! A ripple of dismay had passed through the gathering of first-year students and their parents, crowded into pine pews in the school chapel. Aunt Agnes had accompanied me and now she murmured in my ear Remember what that woman is saying, Aimee. She is absolutely right.

I felt a stab of guilt, thinking of my aunt. Agnes had such hopes for me, her “favorite” niece! She wanted to be proud of me. She wanted to think that her effort on my behalf was not in vain. I seemed to know that what I was doing would hurt Agnes, as it would hurt me.

For nights I’d lain awake in a misery of indecision wondering what to do. In Ransomville, nothing like this could ever have happened. In Ransomville public schools there was no “honor code” and in fact there hadn’t been much cheating, that I had known of. Few students continued on to college, high grades were not an issue. Here, I’d come to think, in my anxiety, that our teachers had to know of the widespread cheating and were amused that girls like me, who never cheated, were too cowardly to come forward.

The irony was, I wasn’t so moral — so “good” — that I couldn’t cheat like the others. And more cleverly than the others. But something in me resisted the impulse to follow the others who were crass and careless in their cheating. I am not one of you. I am superior to you. Finally, I’d written to the dean of students a brief letter of only a few sentences and I’d mailed the letter in a stamped envelope. Even as I wrote the letter I understood that I was making a mistake and yet I’d had no choice.

I thought of my cousin Sonny whom I loved. Whom I had not now seen in years. My boy cousin who’d been beaten in the youth facility yet refused to report the beatings out of what code of honor or fear of reprisal, I didn’t know. I thought of Sonny who’d killed a man out of another sort of honor, to protect my mother. Sonny had not needed to think, he’d only acted. He had traded his life for Momma’s, by that action. But he’d had no choice.

Dean Chawdrey persisted, “Who was cheating, Aimee? You’ve done the right thing to report it but now you must tell me who the girl is.”

The girl! I wanted to laugh in the dean’s face, that she should imagine only one cheater at midterms.

I mumbled, “…can’t.”

“What do you mean, ‘can’t’? Or ‘won’t’?”

I sat silent, clasping my hands in my lap. Mickey Stecke had bitten fingernails, cuticles ridged with blood. One of my roommates had tried to manicure my nails, painted them passionflower purple, as a kind of joke, I’d supposed. Remnants of the nail polish could still be detected if you looked closely enough.

“What was your motive, then, Aimee, for writing to me? To report that ‘someone was cheating’ at midterms but to be purposefully vague about who? I’ve looked into your schedule. Perhaps I can assume that the alleged ‘cheating’ occurred during Mr. Werth’s biology midterm, last Friday morning? Is this so?”

Yes. It was so. By my sick, guilty look, Dean Chawdrey understood my meaning.

“I hope, Aimee, that there is merit to this? I hope that you are not making a false report, Aimee, to revenge yourself upon a friend?”

I was shocked. I shook my head. “No…”

“Or is there more than one girl? More than one of your ‘friends’ involved?”

I opened my mouth to speak, but could not. The buzzing in my head had become frantic. I wondered if a blood vessel in my brain might burst. I was frightened recalling how my aunt Georgia had described finding an elderly relative seated in a chair in his home, in front of his TV, dead of a cerebral hemorrhage, blood “leaking” out of one ear.

“Aimee, will you look at me, please! It is very rude, your way of behaving. By this time, you must certainly know better.”

Through the buzzing in my head I heard the Dean chide me for my “mysterious subterfuge.” Wondering at my “motive” in writing to her. If I refused to be more forthcoming, how was the Academy’s honor code upheld? “I wonder if, in your mutinous way, you are not making a mockery of our tradition. This, perhaps, was your intention all along.”

At this, I tried to protest. My voice was shocked, hushed. In classes, as Mickey Stecke, I was a girl whose shyness erupted into bursts of speech and animation. I was smart, and I was funny. My teachers liked me, I think. I was brash and witty and willing to be laughed at, but not rebellious or hostile; no one would have called me “mutinous” I did not challenge the authority of my teachers for I required them desperately, I adored my teachers who were all I had to “grade” me, to define me to myself and my aunt Agnes. Dean Chawdrey should have been one of these adult figures, yet somehow she was not, she saw through my flimsy pose as my cousin Sonny had once laughed at me in a Hallowe’en costume flung together out of Aunt Georgia’s cast-off fabrics What in hell’re you s’posed to be, kid?

Dean Chawdrey had dropped my letter onto her desk, with a look of distaste. It lay between us now, as evidence.

“I’ve looked into your record, ‘Aimee Stecke.’ You are a trustee scholar, your full tuition is paid by the Academy. Your grades are quite good. Your teachers’ reports are, on the whole, favorable. If there is one recurring assessment, it is ‘immature for her age.’ Are you aware of this, Aimee?”

I shook my head, no. But I knew that it was so.

“Tell me, Aimee. Since coming to our school, have you encountered any previous instances of ‘cheating’?”

I shook my head, yes. “But I…”

“‘But’?”

“…didn’t think it was so important. I mean, so many girls were cheating, not such serious cheating as lately, so I’d thought…”

“‘So many’? ‘So many girls’? What are you saying, Aimee?”

An angry flush lifted into the Dean’s fleshy face. I tried to explain but my voice trailed off miserably. So stared-at, by an adult who clearly disliked me, I seemed to have lost my powers of even fumbling speech. Thoughts came disjointed to me as to one tramping across a field of mud half-conscious that her boots are sinking ever more deeply into the mud, being actively sucked into the mud, not mud but quicksand and it’s too late to turn back.

“But why then, Aimee, did you decide just the other day to come forward? If it has been so long, so many instances of ‘cheating’, and you’d been indifferent?”

“Because…” I swallowed hard, not knowing where this was leading. “…I’d signed the pledge. To uphold the…”

“To uphold the honor code, Aimee. Yes. Otherwise you would not have been permitted to remain at the Academy. But the honor code is a contract binding you to report cheating at all times, and obviously you have not done that.” Dean Chawdrey’s small prim mouth was creasing into a smile.