A Hole in Juan by Gillian Roberts Read Free Book Online Page A

fact, duplicated the key in advance, how long had this idea been building? And why? Panic over grades as college applications approached was real, and parental expectations were always insanely out of touch with reality. I understood the pressures, but how would this help?
    Maybe I’d never locked the drawer. Maybe I imagined it.
    Maybe before I’d locked the drawer I’d left the room between periods, or during lunch, and somebody had spotted the opportunity, in which case it could be anybody.
    I wished I’d said something more about the exam to Nita and Allie, just to see their expressions, their reactions, but now it was too late.
    As they entered, the seniors had the sideways-glancing, vaguely frowning faces of a class facing a major test. I wanted to study their expressions as they read the questions—wanted to see who looked shocked or dismayed.
    Maybe no one would, because the note itself was a hoax.
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    A HOLE IN JUAN
    Then I laughed at myself, thinking back to today’s discussion of A Separate Peace, in which Finney refuses to believe World War II is really going on. I was pulling a mini-Finney—and he wound up dead. Literature can be so instructive.
    I watched them, making mental notes, and I realized I was preparing a dossier on each student to share with Mackenzie, to get his fix on who the culprit might be.
    Two of the students, Erik Steegmuller and Donny Wilson, by chance Allie and Nita’s boyfriends, had seemed particularly grim and worried lately. Normally, they considered physical, not necessarily mental, attendance sufficient. Their brains were seas of hormones, with a few basketballs and tennis balls afloat in there.
    They weren’t history-making stars on the courts, just fine athletes, and in any case, this wasn’t the sort of school scouts can-vassed. And neither Erik nor Wilson, as he was known, came from families that could generously endow or gift a university.
    That they were going to have to gain admission by their records alone was apparently a thought that hadn’t occurred to them until a few weeks ago. I knew they were now working feverishly with independent college advisors to find a school so desperate that it would want them—in essence, the collegiate equivalent of Philly Prep. But even with such a school, they couldn’t afford to fail English.
    Today, they seemed cocky, overly self-assured, elbows into the other’s side and winks as they found their seats. I’d like to think that was the body language of the insufficiently gifted who might well balance the scales by stealing an exam, except that it was also their normal behavior. They were like ill-trained puppies, only not as cute.
    “It isn’t fair, you know,” redheaded Susan Blackburn told me in a sweet voice that barely masked the steel within it. “I think it’s against the rules.”
    I wondered if someday I’d find out that Susan had become a lawyer. Philly Prep didn’t have that many rules, but she could GILLIAN ROBERTS
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    quote each one of them from memory—especially when it suited her side of the argument. “We just had a test with Dr. Ja—I mean Mr. Reyes.”
    This semester, the headmaster had instituted a master calendar with the objective of having the staff stagger the schedule of major exams. Apparently, parents had been protesting the burdens on their overworked offspring. Given that this was the least academic private school in the Delaware Valley, possibly in the entire Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, possibly in the solar system, the complete fiction of our students being crushed under the weight of assignments verged on the ludicrous. Nonetheless, nonoverlapping exams were the new rule, and bad luck if you and the math teacher both finished units and wanted to test and move on.
    Where is the No Teacher Left Behind program?
    Our students, consistently underestimating the faculty’s intelligence, played us off one another, behaving like children fer-rying back and forth between parents. “Dad said