Chapter 74: Honesty and Lies
Wednesday arrived with the specific energy of a day that several people had been dreading and one person had been looking forward to.
Ms. Ingram came through the classroom door at eight-fifty with a stack of test papers under her arm and set them on her desk with the calm efficiency of someone who had administered enough assessments to have stopped finding them dramatic.
The classroom had a different quality than usual.
The back rows — normally the territory of students who had negotiated a comfortable distance from academic engagement — had gone quiet in the specific way of people who had been reminded that distance wasn't always available. Two of them were visibly pale. One was tapping his pen against his desk in a rhythm that suggested his leg was doing something similar underneath it.
Georgie was in the second row, which was as far forward as he'd gotten before the good seats filled up. He was sitting with his shoulders slightly hunched and the focused, internal quality of someone running through a plan they'd made and checking it for weaknesses.
He was wearing new sneakers.
White, clean, flat-soled. He'd put them on that morning without comment, and nobody had commented, because they were just shoes.
Sheldon, who had ended up in the front row through the combined forces of his own punctuality and everyone else's avoidance of the front row, had his pencil out and his notebook open to a fresh page and the alert, forward-leaning quality of a soldier who had trained for exactly this terrain.
Mike was in the third row with his jacket over the back of his chair, reading the first page of the test with the unhurried attention of someone taking inventory before starting work.
"Okay," Ms. Ingram said, once the papers were distributed and the room had settled. "This is a diagnostic assessment. The score does not factor into your semester grade." She paused, looking around the room with the patient attention of a teacher who had learned to read classrooms. "What it does factor into is athletic eligibility for next week's competition, for those of you it applies to."
She looked at the back half of the room for a beat.
"Complete your own work," she said. "I will be here the entire hour. If I observe academic dishonesty, I report it to Principal Tom and it goes in your file. Not the grade file — the permanent file." Another pause. "Questions before we start?"
No questions.
"Good. You have sixty minutes."
Mike flipped through the full test first.
The first eight problems were standard junior-level material — the kind of thing that three weeks of tutoring sessions and a 157 IQ handled without particular effort. The ninth and tenth were different. Calculus — derivatives and a related rates problem — which was not technically on the eleventh-grade curriculum and had no business being on a diagnostic assessment for this class.
He looked at the ninth problem for a moment.
He solved it in his head.
He worked through the first eight in order, writing out enough steps to be clearly correct without performing thoroughness for its own sake, and reached the calculus problems about forty minutes in.
He worked both of them.
He put his pencil down, checked his work on the ones most likely to have arithmetic errors, and then — with twenty minutes remaining and nothing left to verify — put his head down on his arms and closed his eyes.
He was asleep in approximately three minutes.
Two rows up, Sheldon had been moving through the test with the systematic satisfaction of someone for whom the first eight problems were less a challenge and more a formality — the academic equivalent of a warmup lap. He finished them in twenty-two minutes, checked them once, and turned to the last two.
He read the ninth problem.
He read it again.
His pencil stopped.
These were calculus problems. Eleventh-grade math hadn't covered calculus. By any reasonable standard, these problems were outside the scope of this assessment and he was entirely within his rights to raise his hand and say so.
He began to raise his hand.
Then, in his peripheral vision, he caught Mike — two rows back, head down — and the specific evidence that Mike had already been working on the back page for some time before apparently finishing and going to sleep.
Sheldon lowered his hand.
He looked at the ninth problem.
He looked at Mike's sleeping form.
He pulled out his scratch paper.
The next thirty-five minutes were some of the most productive of Sheldon's academic week. He worked through both calculus problems from first principles — which he had not been formally taught but had read about extensively on his own time, because Sheldon Cooper's approach to knowledge was not to wait for someone to assign it. He filled both sides of his scratch paper. He made two errors, caught them, corrected them, and arrived at answers he was confident were correct.
He copied them onto the test paper with the specific satisfaction of someone who had been given an obstacle and had removed it.
He set down his pencil.
He looked at Mike.
Still asleep. Face pressed against his arm, the slight pressure-mark already forming on his cheek.
He gave up on the last two, Sheldon thought, with a private mixture of sympathy and victory. Even Mike has limits.
He sat with this conclusion for a moment, enjoying it in the way he enjoyed most things — completely, without performing the enjoyment for anyone else.
Then he looked around the classroom.
The general state of the room was what it always was during a hard test: a collection of individual struggles wearing different faces. Frustration, resignation, the focused determination of people trying anyway, the glassy-eyed stare of people who had stopped trying and were waiting for the clock.
His gaze moved to Georgie.
Georgie was sitting with one leg crossed over the other — casual-looking, the posture of someone taking a break — but his eyes were angled downward at an angle that had nothing to do with his test paper.
Sheldon looked at the sole of Georgie's shoe.
The sole of Georgie's new sneaker was covered in small, dense handwriting.
Mathematical formulas. Organized by problem type. Written in pencil, small enough to read at close range, large enough to read without needing to lean.
He wrote the formulas on his shoes, Sheldon thought, with the specific flatness of someone filing a fact before deciding what to do with it.
He looked at Ms. Ingram.
Ms. Ingram was at her desk, her posture in the specific configuration of someone who had decided not to fight the pull of a quiet classroom on a warm morning and had lost that fight approximately ten minutes ago. Her chin was at the angle of someone whose eyes were closed.
Sheldon looked at Georgie.
Georgie was consulting his shoe with the practiced subtlety of someone who had rehearsed this.
Sheldon made a decision.
He leaned forward slightly.
"Georgie," he said, barely above a breath.
Georgie's foot dropped immediately. He straightened in his chair, looked down at his test paper, picked up his pencil, and did all of this in one continuous motion that would have been impressive if it hadn't been accompanied by a sudden outbreak of perspiration along his hairline.
He looked at Sheldon with the expression of someone who had been caught and was deciding whether to admit it.
"Your shoe," Sheldon whispered.
Georgie stared at him.
"The—" Sheldon started.
"Quiet."
Ms. Ingram's voice came from the front of the room without her posture changing — the specific skill of a teacher who could monitor a classroom with her eyes closed, which several decades of experience had apparently developed into a genuine capability.
Sheldon looked at his test paper.
He felt, for the first time in his academic life, the specific discomfort of having been doing something that wasn't entirely above reproach. He had not reported the cheating immediately. He had instead whispered at the cheater, which had produced noise, which had drawn the teacher's attention, which had put him in the position of looking like the problem.
"Sheldon," Ms. Ingram said, still without opening her eyes. "Is there something you need?"
"No," Sheldon said, with the careful steadiness of someone producing a technically accurate statement.
"Then sit quietly until time is called."
"Yes, Ms. Ingram," Sheldon said.
He sat quietly.
He did not look at Georgie's shoe again. But he was aware — in the way Sheldon was aware of most things, which was completely and continuously — that Georgie's foot had gone back up approximately ninety seconds after Ms. Ingram's voice faded.
He sat with this awareness for the remaining fifteen minutes with the sustained discomfort of someone whose moral framework was producing a feeling he hadn't expected and didn't know what to do with.
At the hour mark, Ms. Ingram collected the papers in order, row by row, and left the room with the specific efficiency of someone with a second-period class to prepare for.
The room exhaled.
Two students in the back immediately started comparing notes on how badly it had gone. A girl near the window looked at her hands with the expression of someone who had done her best and wasn't sure what that had produced. Someone in the far row said something about the last two problems that made the people around him groan in recognition.
Sheldon turned to Mike, who had woken up at the sound of papers being collected and was now pressing the heel of his hand against his cheek to flatten the pressure mark.
"How did you do?" Sheldon said.
"Fine," Mike said. "The first eight were straightforward. The last two took some work."
Sheldon went still.
"You solved the last two," he said.
"Yeah," Mike said. He looked at Sheldon. "You?"
"Yes," Sheldon said, with the careful tone of someone reporting something accurately and processing the implications simultaneously. "Though it required going outside what we've covered in class."
"It's calculus," Mike said. "She's been watching how people handle problems outside their training. That's what the test is actually for."
Sheldon sat with this for a moment.
"I suspected as much," he said, in the tone of someone who had not suspected it at all and was not going to say so.
Georgie materialized between them with the loose, relieved energy of someone who had been under significant pressure for sixty minutes and was now on the other side of it.
"I think I did okay," he said. "The formulas were pretty much what we covered."
He said it to Mike, not Sheldon.
Sheldon turned to look at him.
Georgie met his gaze with the steady, neutral expression of someone who had already done the math on this situation.
"George," Sheldon said carefully. "You were wearing new shoes today."
"So?" Georgie said.
"So," Sheldon said, and stopped.
He looked at his desk. Looked at Georgie. Looked at the door Ms. Ingram had walked through.
He had not reported it. He had whispered at Georgie and drawn the teacher's attention to himself instead. By any honest accounting, he had — however accidentally — run interference.
Georgie read all of this in Sheldon's face with the accuracy of a brother who had been watching that face for nine years.
He leaned slightly forward and said, very quietly: "We're in this together, Sheldon."
It was not a threat. It was a statement of fact, delivered with the specific matter-of-fact tone of someone who understood leverage and was naming it without drama.
Sheldon opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Georgie picked up his backpack and headed for the door, stopping to talk to someone near the back about the game on Monday.
Sheldon remained at his desk.
He sat there for a moment in the particular discomfort of a person who had tried to do the right thing, had fumbled the execution, and had ended up implicated anyway — and who was now unable to determine whether the fault lay in the original decision, the execution, or something more fundamental about the situation he'd found himself in.
It was, he decided, a genuinely complex moral scenario.
He would think about it more later.
He picked up his pencil and put it in his bag in order of length, which was what he did when he needed something to organize.
(End of Chapter 74)
[500 Power Stones → +1 Bonus Chapter]
[10 Reviews → +1 Bonus Chapter]
Enjoyed the chapter? A review helps a lot.
P1treon: Soulforger (20+advance chapters)