Old School:

                                                                                                   Dmitry Andreyev

   The Great Test Conspiracy

Scene 1:  Emma Rubik

            Dal Segno moved his gaze from his own graded test paper to the back of the classroom. Even though Billy Lockham sat two desks behind him, directly behind the red-headed Patricia Reese, Dal could still spot the obese blonde boy. He was waving his own test paper around in a ludicrous fashion, attempting to show all around him his grade, and grinning in a way that his lower lip drooped as if he had no control over the muscles in it. Although the paper was very difficult to read from Dal’s viewing position, there was no doubt about the vibrant red mark Ms. Paccino had inscribed upon it. The test paper sported an A-plus. It surpassed even Dal’s own, which was an A-minus. A moron had surpassed Dal Segno.

            Dal shifted his gaze to the right, and made eye contact with a brown-eyed, brown-haired, stern-looking Australian thirteen-year-old. Dal could see that, without any need of speech, Ron Frakes comprehended the situation.

            Dal waited until Ms. Paccino had finished passing out the corrected papers from last Friday’s test on the Crusades and had given the class permission to pack up, then stowed all of his supplies in his backpack and walked casually up to Ron, who was still seated.

            “It happened again,” Dal said in an undertone, rather unnecessarily. “This time it was Billy.”

            “Alroight, then,” replied Ron halfheartedly. “We usk Emma for help.” He got up from his desk.

            This was not the first time that an apparent idiot had received a perfect test grade in Ms. Paccino’s seventh grade social studies class. For the past two or three weeks, this phenomenon had been occurring. Supposedly remedial students, such as Gabriel Dycus and Cory Wessex, had received A-pluses on their tests when some of their intellectual superiors had received regular A’s, A-minuses, and even B’s. Some people believed this to be lucky coincidence, some believed that the students were beginning to try harder, most just took it as a joke and eventually began ignoring it. Yet Dal and his best friend Ron had taken it seriously.

            For the past week, Dal and Ron had attempted to solve the mystery on their own. Yet, despite Ron’s natural intelligence and Dal’s devotion, their investigations had been fruitless. Dal soon realized that they needed help, but Ron had denied it. Eventually, the two comrades had come to an agreement: If one more of these strange happenings would occur, and they would be unable to explain it, they would seek the aid of Emma Rubik, a girl in their class.

            Dal and Ron approached Emma’s desk at the far right side of the classroom, at which the black-haired girl had been sitting and watching Billy Lockham’s gloating display through her reflective sunglasses. She shifted her gaze towards them. The three waited for Gabe Dycus, the freckled kleptomaniac that sat behind Emma to leave, then plunged into conversation.

            “Emma,” Dal started. “Ron and I need a favor. We need your help with a little investigation we are having.”

            Emma lowered her glasses to reveal jade eyes. She replied, “Would this involve how the stupid people in our class have been receiving A’s on their tests?”

            Dal was stunned. “How did you know?”

            “You two have been getting worked up over it for a week,” she said, expression unchanged. “It was obvious that you would want my help with the investigation, considering how much you accomplished.” She smiled a teasing smile.

            Dal could feel a smile forming on his face also. Emma Rubik was perhaps the most intelligent person he knew, both academically and naturally, and he had the utmost appreciation for her.

            It was Ron’s turn to speak. “’Ave you been monitoring this too? We think there is an undercover conspiracy to cheat on these tests. What do you know already?”

            “Well, Ron, I already know who the culprit most likely is,” declared Emma. She glanced at the Hispanic boy with the mop of black hair that was having a conversation with Billy Lockham on the other side of the room. “Felix Espinoza.”

            “Felix, of course,” muttered Dal. “He comes into the classroom after school everyday to clean the chalkboards and help Ms. Paccino organize her papers. It is logical to believe that he takes a little peek at some of her answer sheets while she leaves the room to run one of her mysterious errands, which are normally quite long.” Dal looked towards his teacher for a moment, a slightly overweight middle-aged Italian woman with short dark hair, brown eyes, and thick pitch-black eyebrows. She was sitting at her front desk shuffling papers.

            “He also sits in the last row,” pointed out Emma. She pointed at Felix’s desk, which was the farthest to the left in that row. “If he is passing the answers to the tests to all his ‘friends’ in that row, for whatever odd reason, it is understandable why the people with the surprising scores are only those that sit in the back of the class.”

            Dal was astounded. He had never even noticed that fact before. All three of the remedial people that had received A-pluses in the past weeks, Gabe, Cory, and Billy, were seated in the back row, just as Emma had said.

            Ron did not show the same feelings. “Alroight, so we already know who our mine suspect is, now we have to catch ’im in the act of the croim. We need to schedule a stikeout for the next test, and foind out ’ow ’e’s giving these goys the answers.”

            “There should be a geography test next Wednesday, I think,” replied Emma. “Dal, you sit closest to Felix, you can spy on him for us. Give Ron a signal of some kind if you detect suspicious activity. I’ll bet he is using notes to pass the answers to his clients, or maybe he’s using something reflective like a mirror to display his answers so that they can see.”

            “Alright, I’ll try to spy on him,” Dal said, rather perfunctorily. He did not care about how difficult the endeavor might be, he was just eager to help and show his significance.

            “We should probably tike toim to plan this,” indicated Ron. “Today’s Thursday, we ’ave three more dize to work this out.”

            “Our class meets again on Monday, due to the school’s block schedule,” said Dal. “We’ll work this out then when we have the oppurtunity.”

            “Agreed,” the other two said simultaneously.

Scene 2:  Stakeout

            The next Wednesday was a very dreary day. It had rained the night before, so icy blue sky and damp hallways could be seen through the window in Ms. Paccino’s classroom. The room itself did not provide any relief from this starkness, the environment was always very austere and unwelcoming during a social studies exam.

            Dal was struggling with his test. Not only had he neglected some key aspects when studying again; (such as which peninsula was the Balkan and which the Iberian) he also had forgotten most of what he had learned because of his anxiety about the stakeout that day. The fact that he had to take a look at Felix every ten seconds did not help him with his test. Every ten seconds, he would bring his watch up to his eyes, positioning it at an angle at which he could not see the digital numbers on it, but the glass gave him a reflected image of the people sitting behind him. This would not seem eccentric to an observer, Ms. Paccino’s clock had been broken for months.

            Dal was, of course, very disappointed to not capture any suspicious activity. Felix Espinoza had spent the whole fifteen minutes he had for the test tapping his pencil against his teeth, drumming his desk with his left hand, or writing something down on his test paper innocently. Dal began to think that perhaps the boy had not planned to pass any answers that day, or had just failed to find the answer sheet to that particular exam among Ms. Paccino’s papers. He kept giving Ron the vibrating open hand gesture, which the investigator trio had agreed would indicate that there was nothing suspicious going on.

Dal knew that he looked ridiculous doing this, because his hand had red ink all over it. For the past three school days since the first meeting Dal, Ron, and Emma had had, mysterious red ink had been appearing on the outer side of the doorknob on Ms. Paccino’s classroom door. Emma had convinced Dal and Ron that it was just some fool’s prank. That morning, Dal had been foolish enough to actually use that doorknob without putting on a latex glove.

After everybody had finished their tests that day and had corrected each other’s papers, (Dal was too ashamed to look at his own test grade, he was convinced that he had done horribly) Dal walked over to Emma’s desk, where Ron was engaged in conversation with her. Despite his failures that day, Dal was glad to be with his comrades, who may have been feeling his same light frustration.

Emma was just putting her glasses back on after taking the test. “Listen, Dal,” she said seriously, and Dal loved the way she said his name. “Matt Ross just got an A-plus on his geography test.”

Dal felt his eyes widen. “Matt Ross?” he repeated, bewildered. “He’s insane as heck. How could he ace a geography test if Felix didn’t pass him the answers?”

“He couldn’t have,” said Emma. “You must have missed something Felix did. Perhaps he did not pass the answers in such an obvious fashion as I at first thought he would. Maybe it was something in the way he acted during the test…”

“You mean in the way he tapped his pencil against his teeth or drummed on his desk?” Dal uttered sarcastically, although he really didn’t want to offend Emma.

“You know, you may be on to something here,” said Emma, ignoring his sarcasm. She beamed. “Maybe he was using Morse Code.”

“Morse Code? These are blokes we’re talking about ’ere,” Ron interjected.

“Well, not the official Morse Code,” replied Emma. “But a simplified version for the circumstances. Anyway, I could here a lot of pencil tapping behind me during the test. That may have been Jean Francois passing the messages to Matt.”

Once again, Dal was stunned by Emma’s brilliance. He knew that Ron was not. She was an intellectual rival to him, and he insisted on denying her superiority.

Ron took out his tape recorder, a device that he carried around with him just about all the time. “Wednesday, Mie fifth: We ’ave ’ad our first stikeout and ‘ave detected no suspicious activity, yet Matthew Ross ’as gotten an A-moinus.”

Dal and Emma could not resist snickering at Ron’s accent.

“We should have another stikeout… er, stakeout… this Friday during the big Latin Test,” suggested Dal. “We should meet again tomorrow at lunch or after school.”

“No go, Dal,” Emma said. “There is a Science Olympiad Team meeting during lunch tomorrow, and Extracurricular Art class after school. I have to be at both.” 

“Well, we can’t meet after school tudie,” Ron declared, pressing the “stop” button on his tape recorder. “Oi ’ave to be at Chess Club. We’ll just ’ave to work with what we’ve already decoided un.”

And at that moment, the three detectives were dismissed from the room by the school bell.

Scene 3:  The Next Monday

            The next Monday, Dal and Ron managed to find Emma sitting at a crimson-colored table during Lunch Period. Ron believed that they all needed to discuss the results of Friday’s stakeout urgently. He had already realized by that time that what they were doing weren’t exactly stakeouts, yet he didn’t want to admit his mistake.

            “Jean Francois got an A-moinus on ’is Latin test,” Ron said at the Lunch table. “He is definitely too slow to get such a good gride on ’is own, yet if Felix helped ’im, he wouldn’t get such a low score.”

            “Maybe there was a misinterpretation, it is a great distance between Felix’s and Jean’s desks,” muttered Emma, clearly annoyed. She had just been eating a sizeable meal of cafeteria-quality pizza, lettuce salad, greasy French fries, crisp potato wedges, and creamy chocolate frozen yogurt, when Ron had intruded upon her dining with declarations about issues she was already aware of. Dal had noticed how much she spent on lunches that month and the one before, wondering for three seconds how she had gotten the money for such one-person feasts.

            However, Dal was not concerned about the matters of Ron Frakes, Felix Espinoza, Jean Francois, or even Emma Rubik at that moment in time. He gazed at the grass quad with a blank expression on his face, examining the thousands of green blades glistening like emeralds in the white sun, the sapphire blue ceiling of sky above them, and the many students, many people, many lives circling around this display, oblivious to its beauty. Such a joyful sight did not seem to deserve to be in front of him, because it contradicted Dal’s feelings.

            On the day of the Latin test and during that morning in the halls, Dal had greeted Ms. Paccino. Instead of completing the greeting exchange, she had in both situations flung her head back and snorted in a dignified manner, as if Dal was an insignificant lowlife. Ms. Paccino was not necessarily his favorite teacher, he was hence not obsessed with the impression he had on her, yet he did not want to lose the respect of any adult. It tore his insides apart to think of being one of Ms. Paccino’s least favorite students, such as the trouble-making Gabe Dycus or the jerk Cory Wessex. 

            Dal tried to convince himself that he was just being paranoid about people’s feelings, he often was. Yet he knew the truth: the investigation had been detrimental to his relationship with his teacher. He was not sure about how exactly it had been, though.

            “Miebee Felix isn’t sneaking peeks at the answers,” Ron suddenly said. “We didn’t detect any patterns in ’is pencil or finger tapping. Miebee he isn’t even the one behoind this conspiracy.”

            At that comment, Emma dropped the spork she had been holding up to her mouth, and her face was wiped clean of her frustrated expression. That expression soon returned.

            “Felix is the main suspect, he is the culprit,” she spat, startling both Dal and Ron. Her reflective glasses shined with the reflection of the sun, reflecting her unorthodox anger.

            Then, just as sudden as her outbreak of anger, a smile appeared on her pretty face.

            “And you will catch him today.” 

             Now she had Dal’s attention, as well as Ron’s.

            “There is a big test on the Middle Ages tomorrow,” Emma continued. “Felix will have to try to steal the answers to it. Today, after school, you two are to go to Ms. Paccino’s classroom, while she is away on her errands, and catch him in the act of stealing them.”

            Dal felt enlightened. Soon, this entire mystery would be over, and he would earn back the respect of his social studies teacher.

Scene 4:  Into The Nest

            Dal and Ron arrived at the door to Ms. Paccino’s classroom at exactly three-fifteen pm that afternoon, after leaving Mrs. Carl’s room in a hurry and grabbing their clarinets from the band room, wedging the instruments into their already stuffed backpacks.

            Ron took his tape recorder out of his pocket and pressed the “play” button, prepared to record anything that happened worthy of recording.

            When Dal grabbed the doorknob, he became angry and annoyed at himself for not noticing the fresh coat of ink upon it. The ink had stained his entire right hand before he had withdrawn it. Ron just rolled his eyes in an irritated fashion and grabbed the doorknob himself, thrusting the door open.

            The interior of Ms. Paccino’s classroom was generally dark, yet a number of thin brown amber sunrays peeped out of the cracks between the shutters of the windows on the opposite wall. There was no sign of either Ms. Paccino or Felix Espinoza.

            “Odd that nobody is here,” Dal mumbled through gasps for breath.

            At that moment, something on Ms. Paccino’s front desk must have grabbed Ron’s attention, because he stowed his tape recorder and began advancing towards it, a look of curiosity and seriousness on his lean face. Dal followed him perfunctorily.

            Dal and Ron approached the front of the desk, as if to answer a summoning from an invisible teacher. They looked down upon the stack of stapled papers on the desktop. The two boys both inhaled deeply, Dal feeling as if he had swallowed his tongue and it had hit the pit of his stomach. There, mere inches from their hands, were the answer sheets to Tuesday’s major test.

            Dal suddenly felt an impulse, a desire that overcame all logic and reasoning. He reached towards the packet.

            Ron’s eyes widened. “No, Dal!”

            Ron thrust his hand at Dal’s, but it was too late. Dal held the packet half an inch from the desktop, and Ron’s own fingers landed right in the the center of the top paper.

            “What ’ave we done, mite?”

            Dal, still mesmerized, reluctantly relinquished the answer sheets to the desk. He and Ron gradually lifted their fingertips.

            There upon the first page of the answer document were the red, incriminating fingerprints of the two boys.

            And suddenly, all reality rushed back to Dal’s mind when he felt deep breathing on the back of his neck.

Scene 5:  Confession

            Dal and Ron reached the school field gasping for more breath than either of them had been when they reached Ms. Paccino’s classroom four minutes before. The strap of Dal’s overloaded backpack dug deep into his right shoulder, so he gave into the pain and released the bag. It hit the concrete of the lowest stair of the staircase that Dal and Ron had run down, producing an audible thud. Dal Segno let gravity pull him down onto the same stair.

            He was bewildered. He and Ron had just been chased through the halls of his middle school with Felix Espinoza in pursuit, which was exhausting considering Felix’s incredible running speed. Fortunately for the two of them, Ron had managed to kick a trash can right in Felix’s direction, which had knocked the pitiful Hispanic boy backwards and sent him hurtling to the ground with swear words escaping his mouth. This had bought the two trespassers enough time to escape towards the school field.

            However, their escape did not matter. Even if Felix Espinoza never did capture them, it would only be a matter of minutes until Ms. Paccino would return to her room and find the unique loop of Dal’s fingerprints and the arch of Ron’s emblazoned haphazardly upon her answer sheet. The thought of what Dal’s academic life would be like after that made him shudder. With all hope lost, all he could do now was stare at the expansive grass field before him, pondering over the agonizing truth that he had just realized.

            “She betried us!” shouted a red-faced Ron. His voice echoed throughout the entire expanse while the blood seemed to fill up behind the skin on his face. “She set us up, she was tricking us all along…”

            “She played us,” Dal concluded the sentence. “She challenged your brains, and seduced my emotions.”

            “Oh, I am very sorry for that, Dal,” came a sinister voice from behind a cluster of trailers.

            Emma Rubik stepped out from behind a trailer, grinning at the two losers before her and showing the reflections of their own ridiculous expressions on her sunglasses.

            Dal felt insignificant, pitiful, and weak as a person that was ill with a fever. But above all, he felt betrayed. He had trusted Emma for the last week-and-a-half, thought that there were emotions and unique experiences that they had shared, and had even believed that there was a friendship developing between them. He had gotten his hopes up about there being a relationship between them long after the mystery of the Great Test Conspiracy had been solved. Now he faced the realization of their entire endeavor being a lie, a forgery, and he saw no longer the Emma Rubik that he had been fond of the entire school year, but a foul being, like siren, that had flung him and his best friend straight into their doom and would not dive down to rescue them. Dal was sure that at that moment, he would have felt his insides being torn apart if he could feel his insides at all.

            Emma advanced towards them. “Felix had never stolen the answers to those tests,” she uttered. “Nobody did. I just used him as a decoy to get you two to be too distracted to see that I was behind the entire conspiracy. He was a perfect suspect, you see. Those answers that Gabriel, Cory, Billy, Matt, and Jean received; they were all my own honest responses. All that would happen during a test would be me writing down what I thought were the correct answers on my paper, then using my reflective glasses, which I never wear during an exam anyway, like a mirror to show my answers to Gabriel, who sits right behind me. Gabe would then use a type of Morse Code I invented to dictate the answers to the other people in his row by tapping his pencil. If the morons were lucky, they would get a perfect grade, just like me. Only when I messed up and got an answer wrong would this be different, like with Jean. Of course, with you, Dal, looking towards the other side of the room and you, Ron, looking right at Dal, the two of you were completely oblivious to this system.

            But I couldn’t stop there. I had to ensure that you wouldn’t ruin my plan in case you wised up to take the investigation a step further than I had anticipated. I had to poison Felix against you two, convincing him that you were the ones behind the entire conspiracy. If you’d come into the classroom before and started looking over papers, like I’m sure you have just done right now, he would have caught you, mistaking you for cheaters, which are who he hates more than anybody else in the world, by the way. I also went through the effort of putting red ink on the doorknob after school everyday since our ‘investigation’ began, so that if you started touching things you weren’t supposed to your fingerprints would serve as evidence. You’d be in Saturday School in my place if you ever figured everything out.”

            Another painful realization struck Dal. “You poisoned Ms. Paccino against me,” he muttered weakly.

            “Yes, and you can’t blame her for believing me, considering the way you were always looking at your watch in a suspicious way and using your little hand signals like you were passing secret information.”

            Emma laughed. Dal nearly cried. “But why did you do it?” he inquired.

            “Money,” Emma replied simply. Her grin disappeared. “I was sick of having to work in the cafeteria to earn my lunch, which was normally just a sorry excuse for a meal. I wanted freedom, I wanted wealth, and with those idiots paying me for my services, I got everything I wanted.”

            There was a moment of silence during which Dal digested all of this new information, Ron seemed to boil with frustration, and Emma just stood by proud of her supposed success. Then Ron burst into laughter. He took out of his pocket a tape recorder. The “play” button was still depressed. He had unintentionally recorded the entire confession.

            Emma just stood there, a yard away from Dal and Ron, her face expressionless and her eyes hidden behind her glasses. At that some moment in time, Dal could see Ms. Paccino’s portly figure running up to them from the field, finishing a lap.

“So that was what she did when she ran errands,” declared Ron mischievously.

            “Damn it!” bellowed Emma. Dal knew that at that moment knew that  she had felt defeat for the first time in five weeks.

            As Ms. Paccino advanced slowly towards the three of them, Dal recalled all that had happened in the past week-and-a-half. He soon understood that, despite Emma’s malevolent actions, greed, and dark conspiracy, he did not want to be distanced from her. The Great Test Conspiracy, despite the major detrimental effect it had had on Dal’s emotions, seemed to be just an impediment that got in the way of Dal and Ron’s potential friendship with Emma.

            Dal decided, right at the moment that Ms. Paccino ran by the trailers and Ron sprinted towards her, bearing his tape recorder proudly, that he would try to befriend Emma when the entire calamity was over.

            He was considerably unaware of how someday he would marry that girl. Yet that is another mystery.