I loved her enough that I didn’t tell her it wasn’t exactly a compliment.
“So, did you get ahold of Sydney last night?” Sam asked.
I nodded, digging into my pizza sticks. “Yeah. I’m meeting her after school.”
“Meeting who?”
Chase suddenly appeared at my side, dropped a tray on the table, and straddled the bench next to me.
“What?” I asked innocently.
“Who are you meeting?”
I paused. Truth was I didn’t really want to spill who I was meeting with until I knew if she had anything useful to tell me. Even worse than not getting a unique story out of Sydney would be the look on Chase’s face if he knew I didn’t get a unique story.
But before I could weigh my options, Kyle blurted out, “She’s got an exclusive with Sydney Sanders.”
I shot him a death look.
“Really?” Chase gave me a quizzical face, one eyebrow raised.
Since the cat was out of the bag, I nodded. “Yeah. I’m meeting her after school.”
“But she’s grounded.”
“I have my ways.” I winked at him, doing my best secretive-reporter-type all-knowing smile.
I’m not sure I pulled it off as his other eyebrow headed north.
“You think you can get Sydney to spill how she got the cheats?” Sam asked.
I shrugged. “I dun-” I stopped myself just in time from saying the forbidden word. “I’m going to try,” I amended.
“What about Tipkins?” Chase asked.
I gave him a blank look.
“Mr. Tipkins? Your interview today?”
I did a mental face palm. In my excitement over the exclusive with Sydney, I’d totally forgotten about my appointment with Mr. Tipkins. I looked up at the clock on the wall. I had only fifteen minutes before the end of lunch.
“Shoot. I gotta go,” I said, shoving a pizza stick in my mouth and grabbing my book bag.
I could have sworn I heard Chase call something like “good luck,” behind me as I jogged toward the precalculus room.
Mr. Tipkins was sitting at his desk, a red pen hovering over a stack of papers. He was an older guy with thinning hair that was going gray at the temples. What was left of said hair was slicked back from his forehead in a way that said he stopped paying attention to current fashion decades ago. He had a bushy mustache that matched the salt and pepper up top and twitched intermittently like a nervous tic. His eyes were stuck behind thick glasses, and his clothes looked like they’d come from the Goodwill bargain bins. Brown corduroy pants, black tennis shoes, powder blue, short-sleeved dress shirt. A perpetual smear of ink stained the heel of his right hand from smudging words on the whiteboard.
Even before the cheating bust, Mr. Tipkins had garnered a reputation for being one of the toughest teachers on campus. Sam had taken his summer school precalculus class and swore it took ten years off her life.
“Mr. Tipkins?” I asked, approaching his desk.
He looked up, blinking at me from behind his bifocals. “Yes?”
“Hartley Featherstone?” I said. “From the
He nodded. “I know who you are. You’re late. I usually leave at lunch.”
Due to budget cuts, our school could afford only a set number of full-time teachers who received benefits. The rest had to make do with part-time status, taking only four periods a day.
“Have a seat,” he said, indicating a desk in the front row.
I did, pulling out a micro-recorder from my book bag.
“What’s that?” Mr. Tipkins asked.
“Recorder. Just so I don’t forget any important points.”
He frowned. “What’s wrong with taking notes? Your hand broken or something?”
“Um. No. I just… This is easier.”
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Easier. God, technology has made your generation so lazy.”
I cleared my throat, not sure I had a response for that. Instead, I put my recorder away and took out a piece of binder paper and a pen.
“Um, I wanted to talk to you about Sydney Sanders.”
He nodded. “Another lazy kid.”
“You caught Sydney cheating, correct?”
Mr. Tipkins nodded again. “That’s right. She thought she was so clever. Can you believe she actually tried to tell me it was just the current fashion to paint letters on your fingernails?”
I grinned, making sure I wrote that quote down. “So, she tried to deny it?”
“‘Tried’ being the key word,” Mr. Tipkins emphasized. “Poor thing’s about as sharp as a sphere.”
I blinked at him.
“Because a sphere is completely round without any angles or edges?”
I nodded. I knew. It was just the first time I’d heard geometry used in a simile. “So you caught Sydney, and she tried to deny it. At what point did you realize that Quinn was involved as well?”
“About the time we hauled Sydney down to the vice principal’s office. When her parents showed up, she said the whole thing had been Quinn’s idea.”
I raised an eyebrow. Ouch. Giving up your best friend like that was cold. “And did you confront Quinn?”
He nodded. “Sure did. When I told her Sydney gave her up, she was about as discreet as a set of real numbers.”
I wasn’t sure how discreet numbers could be, let alone fake versus real, but I thought I got the gist. “She confessed?”
He nodded. “She said that it was her idea, but that Sydney had gotten the actual answers and painted both their nails with the letters.”
“How did she get the answers?”
Mr. Tipkins threw his hands up. “How should I know?”
“They didn’t say?”
He shook his head. “No. They wouldn’t tell us how they obtained the answers, so they were both suspended and the administration is looking into it.” He leaned in. “Honestly? We’ll probably never know.”
Not necessarily. In fact, I hoped to answer that very question this afternoon when I talked to Sydney.
“Tell me about the test,” I said, switching gears. “How hard would it be for Sydney to steal the answers?”
“Very. I have four different exams for each section we study. I rotate them every four years, so that no student is ever taking a test that anyone else on campus has ever taken. Meaning no upperclassmen can give answers to lowerclassmen. No test ever goes home, even corrected ones. Before the start of every exam, all cell phones are collected to prevent anyone texting answers across the room. I tell you, I spend more time trying to make test answers secure than I do teaching.”
I bit my lip. I had to agree he’d devised a pretty good system. “Where are the tests kept?”
“Cabinet.” He pointed to a gunmetal gray file cabinet beside the whiteboard. “And I keep it locked whenever I leave the room.”
I glanced at the thing. It looked about as old as Mr. Tipkins’s cords. I was no expert, but I had a feeling that anyone with a paper clip could break into that thing. Add to that the fact that most classroom doors were left unlocked, and it was hardly Fort Knox in here.
“Are there any other copies?” I asked.
“A master copy is kept in the teachers’ lounge, but,” he added, wagging a finger at me, “only teachers have access to the lounge. There’s no way a student could have slipped in there unnoticed.”
This I knew for a fact. Teachers guarded the lounge, their one student-free haven, more heavily than the secret service protected the president. Not only did every teacher need a key to get in, but at any given time of day at least one of them was stationed inside at the coffeepot, standing sentinel over their sacred space. If Sydney had swiped the test, chances were she’d done it in the classroom.
“How would Sydney know which test you were going to give out?”
