Fall from Grace (9 page)

“OKAY, YOU KNOW
the drill. Everything off your desks but your calculator and your pens. And no pencils this time, right, Alicia? Very funny. Just don't use it on the test.”

Mr. Young was making his way down the aisle, handing out the packets. Four pages of questions, double-sided, stapled at the top left corner, five pages of official blank paper to
SHOW ALL WORK
clipped to each test.

“Remember, it's a B day. You'll have the full ninety minutes, so pace yourselves. There's plenty of time. And do I have to say anything about keeping your eyes on your own papers?”

Sawyer took the glasses out of his shirt pocket. They were as big and ugly as they were the day before, maybe
bigger and uglier. He flicked out the tape-covered arms and took a deep breath.

Less than a minute after he had hit Send last night, he'd gotten a reply.

And she was there when he pulled up, a table by the window, laptop open, checking a celebrity gossip page. He walked over to her and she smiled. She didn't give him any grief, didn't go off on an I-told-you-so rant, didn't get all smartass on him, just gave him the glasses.

Where's the power switch?

They're on already.

What about the volume?

Isn't any. Cup your hand over your ear like this or you won't be able to hear me.

How good will you be able to see?

Good enough. So watch where you're looking.

Anything else?

Yeah. Trust me.

“If you finish early that's a good sign you made a
lot
of mistakes. Go back, double-check your work. Wrong answers can still earn you partial credit but I have to be
able to read it, so write legibly.”

Sawyer looked at the glasses, at the lumps of black tape, at the clear plastic tube that stuck out so damn obvious now, the whole thing an impossible joke.

He could put them on, find out they didn't even work, all that sweating for nothing.

Or they could work and everything could be going fine. Until Mr. Young figured it out and he got busted.

Or they could work and Mr. Young wouldn't notice, and he could learn that Grace was no better at precalc than he was.

Or he could put them back in his pocket, do the test on his own. And fail.

Or it would work and—

“Cheaters,” Mr. Young said, standing next to Sawyer's desk, looking right at him as he said it.

Sawyer didn't move.

“Cheaters,” he said again, nodding at the glasses in Sawyer's hands.

“I, uh, I can—”

“That's what they used to call reading glasses. Cheaters. Not prescription but still a help.”

Sawyer forced a smile and put the glasses on. Fast. “I never heard that before.”

Mr. Young dropped a pile of papers on the desk, blank-side up. “That pair's seen better days.”

“Yeah. Kinda rough. They were uh, my, uh grandpa's. My mom's dad. Before he died.”

“Well, I hope they bring you luck.”

“Me too,” Sawyer said, thinking about his grandpa and how he'd never wear such ugly glasses. And how surprised Grandpa would be to hear that he was dead.

So that was it, he was wearing them now.

He glanced up when Mr. Young asked the class if they had any last questions, but everything was fuzzy so he looked back down and focused on the magnified paperclip.

“Okay, your time starts…now. Good luck.”

Sawyer turned the papers over and wrote his name on the line in the upper left-hand corner. Then he skimmed the first ten questions, looking for an easy one to start with.

He didn't see any.

He folded back the page and ran his eyes down the next set.

Even worse.

He was flipping the packet over and was halfway down when he heard a mosquito by his left ear. He went to flick it away when he remembered. He cupped his
hand over his ear and leaned to the side, all casual.

Nothing.

He adjusted his hand, feeling for the plastic tube with his thumb, maneuvering it into his ear.

Nothing.

He pushed his hand tight against the side of his head and could hear the wet
swish-thump, swish-thump
of his pulse in the roaring silence.

He tilted his head—a little, not enough to make it noticeable—toward the windows one row away, toward the faculty parking lot and the narrow grassy area that nobody used, toward the chain-link fence and the Starbucks that Grace had assumed was less than five hundred feet away but that was probably more like ten or twelve miles, too far for her puny laptop and the lousy shared Wi-Fi—

“Are you going to start this test or what?”

He snapped his head up.

Mr. Young was at his desk, reading his iPad.

“Whoa, not so fast. Makes me dizzy.”

It was faint, but clear, and he pressed his hand tighter, holding her voice in.

“You seemed surprised to hear from me. I can go if you'd rather be alone. No? Okay, then back to page one.
We'll start with the simple ones.”

He looked at the test paper and froze, afraid to lose the connection.

“Is that how you normally sit in class, all stiff like that? Relax, Max, you've got to act natural. Just do what you'd normally do when you take a test.”

He wrote “I PANIC” in half-inch caps on the scrap paper.

“Cute. But don't do that. Don't write me notes. Well, don't panic, either, but definitely don't write notes.”

He drew a question mark.

“Because you have to turn in the scrap paper and if it's covered with notes, you'll have some explaining to do. Keep your head steady. That's good. Chin down just a bit. Too much. Perfect. All right, page one, please.”

Sawyer flipped back and stared at the first question.

“‘Factor this expression: X to the fourth plus eight X to the second plus twelve.' Could he start us off any easier? We simplify this…X squared…write that down…then X to the fourth…multiples of twelve that add up to eight—duh, six and two. I hope he doesn't expect you to show how you got
that
. And your answer is X squared plus six times X squared plus two. No, get rid of that multiplication sign. Yeah, that one. Put them in
parentheses. You
do
know parentheses, right? Just wondering. Okay, done. Now, question two…”

It felt familiar, some of it, anyway, and there were a couple times when he knew what she was going to say before she said it. But there were more times when what he would have written was nothing at all like what she told him to put down.

“‘Question ten. X to the fourth plus sixty-four equals…' Oh, this is interesting….”

His hand was sweating against his ear. He left it there, afraid that if he moved it the faint buzzing whisper would somehow echo across the room or disappear into cyberia. He looked up to check the clock between answers since that's the kind of thing he'd do during a test, and every time he did, she would make some comment about roller coasters or drunken dancing.

They were halfway through page two when Grace said, “Hi, can I get a caramel macchiato and one of these yummy brownies?” and for five minutes he listened to the gurgling hiss of the espresso machine and to Grace as she hummed along to a Skye Sweetnam song that played in the background. He spent the time going back to review his other answers, no idea what he was looking for.

“‘Question twenty-three. Given F of X equals X squared minus 1, and G of X equals two X, find G of F of X.' Hmmm…how do we want to play this?” She talked through the problem and he wrote it down as she went.

“Move your hand, I have to see something. Good, you got it. Now cross that answer out.”

He stopped writing.

“Seriously. Cross it out. It's all wrong.”

The pen didn't move.

“I took the two of X and substituted it into the X squared minus one. That screwed it all up. Don't worry, it was deliberate. If you don't make a few stupid errors you'll look like a genius.”

He wrote “RU1” and added a question mark.

She laughed. “No, but I hope to play one in the movies. And what did I say about writing notes? Back to the problem. You solve these things by working backward, so we substitute in X squared minus one for the two X…”

Twice during the test Mr. Young walked the aisles. Both times he went past, Sawyer was positive he was busted. And when the kid across from him had a question
and Mr. Young squatted down
right there
, his hand on Sawyer's desk for balance, Grace's whisper seemed like a scream. But nothing happened, and Mr. Young went back to his desk and Sawyer's heart went back to beating.

There was forty minutes left when they got to the last question. Sawyer kept his eyes fixed on the equation and waited for Grace to work her magic.

After five minutes he was still waiting, then Grace said, “Sorry. Had to    bathroom break    what    I miss?”

Sawyer wrote a zero on the scrap paper.

“Good plenty  time    go back to   with antiderivative after    last     -estion   log 6    squar-  minus    plus four equal     -kay     -ing to the zer-     four X      equa-     -us    -ositi- ”

Then nothing.

No static, no clicks, no buzzing.

Nothing.

Sawyer tapped the frame up by the hinge. He assumed it wouldn't help, and it didn't, but he couldn't think of anything else to do. He took the glasses off, folded them closed, and put them in his shirt pocket, wire-end down, then he stretched and rolled his neck, working out the kinks, rubbing the fuzziness out of his eyes.

He was on his own now.

A half hour and one question to go.

How hard could it be?

Thirty minutes and two sheets of scrap paper later, Sawyer picked a number between one and a hundred and wrote it down.

“WHO WAS THAT
girl you were with at Starbucks?”

Great.

He couldn't say he wasn't there because obviously somebody saw him. It couldn't have been Zoë, because if she saw him at a Starbucks talking to a girl she didn't know, she would have come in and introduced herself.

Or something like that.

She knew he was at Starbucks and she knew he had been talking to a girl and if he tried to pretend he wasn't he'd only make it worse.

And he couldn't try to joke his way out of it with a
Which Starbucks?
or a
Which girl?
as if he was always bumping into strange girls at Starbucks all over town
and couldn't be expected to keep them straight.

They both knew him better than that.

Nope, somebody had seen him and of course that somebody had to let Zoë know, and now there was no way out of it, he had to admit he'd been there and that he had talked to a girl, the crime of the century exposed.

“It was Francis's granddaughter.”

There was no way out of it, but it didn't have to be the truth.

“Who's Francis?”

“The guy I work with.”

“The one that taught at Harvard? The old guy?”

“Yeah, him. And it was Notre Dame.”

A pause. “So how do you know her?”

“I don't. She stopped by his house when I was there yesterday.”

“What were you talking about?”

“Nothing. Just hello and stuff.”

A longer pause. “What did she give you?”

She knew about that, too. Well, what
did
she give him? There were a lot of ways he could have answered that—hope, friendship, a guilty conscience—but he kept it simple and close to the truth.

“A pair of the old guy's glasses. He left them at her mother's house last night. She wanted me to give them to him at work.”

Close enough.

“Why didn't she drop them off?”

“I don't know. I didn't ask.”

He kept his eyes on the road, flipping down the visor to block the late afternoon sun. He could tell by the silence that she was going over it in her head, weighing the evidence. Later she'd check his phone, look for any numbers that weren't familiar, but she wouldn't find any since he took care of that.

“Are those the glasses you wore in math?”

Spies everywhere.

“Yeah. My eyes hurt. I was up all night, cramming for the test.”

“So you wore somebody else's glasses? That's stupid.”

“They're reading glasses. All they do is magnify stuff.”

“Did they help?”

He laughed. “Yeah, they did.”

“You think you passed?”

“I think I aced it.”

Now she laughed.

“Seriously. It was like there was a voice in my head, telling me the answers.”

“And you think it was the glasses? Really? That
is
stupid.”

“I get the test back Monday. We'll see then.”

She held out a minute, maybe even two, before she had to ask. “What's her name?”

“Whose name?”

“That girl, the one at Starbucks.”

“Grace McGillicutty.”

She smiled. “I thought you said it was her
mother's
father. Her last name wouldn't be McGillicutty.”

“Okay, so it's not. It was just a guess.”

“But her first name is Grace.”

“Yeah. Grace.”

She put on the radio, changed it to the channel she liked, then waited until they were driving past Mike's Ice Cream before she said, “Isn't that the same girl that applied for the job?”

He remembered what he had said.

“Yeah. That's the one.”

“Did she get it?”

“No.”

“Good.”

He gave her a look. Two could play that game. “What difference does it make?”

“Do you want to spend your day with some Westie girl? Sandra said that she was a total loser, remember? And Sandra knows some
real
freaks, so that should tell you something.”

He thought about saying that Sandra didn't know Grace but that Sandra knew
her
, but it wasn't worth the effort so he let it drop. She didn't say anything after that either, too busy texting.

They were almost to her house when a light went on. She looked over at him, grinning like a cat.

“You don't drink coffee.”

That was it.

“You don't like
any
hot drinks.”

The one little slipup.

“And they don't sell Mountain Dew.”

Busted.

“So what were you doing at Starbucks?”

Think.

Some kind of fruit juice?

No, they had it at school and it was a lot cheaper.

A doughnut?

Yeah, for sure, and they had them at Starbucks, but not the kind he liked, and she knew it.

Think. What would Grace say? What would be her Plan B?

“I wanted to buy a gift card for Mr. Young, give it to him before the test. You know how he loves his frappuccinos.”

Her eyes went wide, her mouth dropped open, and he knew he was safe.
“You bribed Mr. Young?”

He shrugged. “I was going to, yeah. But they wanted twenty bucks for a gift card and I thought that was overdoing it.”

“
Overdoing it?
What are you, crazy? You can't bribe a teacher like that.”

“It's not really a bribe. It's more of a joke. I figured it would put him in a good mood when he graded my test.”

“That's a bribe, you idiot.” She rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “I can't believe it. What were you thinking?”

“Relax. I didn't give him anything.”

“But you were
going
to. And Mr. Young? I mean,
my god
, he would have had you suspended in a second. He doesn't joke around about that stuff.”

“Well, I didn't—”

“And what would that say about me? Did you think about
that
? How would that make
me
look?”

“Why would it have anything to do with you?”

“Because I go
out
with you. You do something stupid, I look stupid.”

“But I didn't do anything.”

Zoë sighed. “Sometimes I wonder why I go out with you.”

He used to wonder about that too.

The very first time she told him to ask her out, he wondered why.

She was hot.

He was average.

She was popular. Maybe not A-list popular, but popular enough.

He wouldn't have been on any list if it weren't for her.

She had lots of friends. Friends that let her decide where they went and what they did and who was cool and who wasn't worth their time.

He used to have friends.

She could have had her choice of guys, but she went out with him.

And he knew why.

He was safe. With him, she got to set all the boundaries and decide how far they'd get pushed, if they got pushed at all, knowing that he wouldn't even think of challenging them.

He was predictable.

Harmless.

Vanilla.

Boring.

No, not boring.

Obedient.

Fetch. Sit. Roll over. Beg. Stay. He was well trained and housebroken too.

She didn't want a boyfriend.

She wanted a purse poodle.

An accessory.

That's why she went out with him.

But that was okay.

He could have found another girlfriend, maybe, but he went out with her.

And he knew why.

It was easy. Go along to get along, give her what she wanted and he'd get something out of it too. Not always and not often, but enough to keep him around. When she
was happy she could be cute and fun, even considerate, and all he had to do to keep her happy was do what she wanted to do. It saved him from ever having to think about it. Wasn't that the way it was supposed to be? Plus his parents liked her. His mom loved when she came over to watch movies, and his dad thought it was great that she baked him cookies from scratch. They had no problem with Zoë being there when they weren't home, and if they assumed they were having sex, they knew Zoë would make sure it stayed safe.

It was easy. That's why he went out with her.

That, and she was hot.