The fact that she’s calling me by my full name is making me nervous. My mother does that too when she thinks I have been behaving badly. But I do what she says, sliding into the desk directly in front of hers.
“So.” Mrs. Bennett focuses her attention on me. Her eyes are too small and look beady. “Is there anything you would like to tell me?”
I stare at her. I don’t say a word. Whatever Kenzie told her, there’s no proof.
When it’s obvious I’m not going to confirm or deny anything, she pulls two test papers out from under the pile on her desk and throws them down in front of her. “You copied Kyle’s test paper. You are right behind him, you were looking at his paper, and you copied his answers.”
I open my mouth to say something, but it feels like there’s something stuck in my throat, and nothing comes out. I can’t believe this is happening. I’ve never cheated in my whole life, and the one time I did it, I get caught, like, an hour later. I have the worst luck.
To be fair, I didn’t get caught for killing my dad.
“Well?” Her eyebrows shoot up. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
There are still no words coming. What am I supposed to say? I did cheat. I don’t want to lie on top of what I’ve already done. “I’m so sorry,” I finally squeak out.
Mrs. Bennett looks completely unmoved. That’s no surprise. She reminds me of the wicked witch in one of those Disney movies. All she needs is a cape. “Cheating is an extremely serious matter. Tomorrow morning, I’m going to be discussing this with the principal.”
Principal Higgins already does not like me. She used to like me. Well, for the first year and a half I went to Caseham High, she didn’t even know who I was, which is probably the best possible situation. The first time I went in to talk to her, she was so kind to me. And now she thinks I’m a troublemaker because of what I did to Mr. Tuttle.
What is she going to do when she finds out I’ve been cheating on top of everything else?
“You can go,” Mrs. Bennett tells me.
I stand up on shaky legs and somehow manage to make it out of her classroom without collapsing. I don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow, but it’s going to be awful. The principal is going to find out that I copied off Kyle. They’re probably going to have to bring in my mother, and then I’m going to see that awful disappointed look on her face.
And maybe worst of all, Mr. Bennett is going to know about it.
I am so furious at Kenzie. She did not have to tell Mrs. Bennett about this. She could have kept her mouth shut. I don’t even understand why she hates me so much.
I’m not going to be a doormat anymore. I’m not going to let Kenzie get away with this.
OceanofPDF.com
Chapter Thirty-Three
EVE
I’M surprised that when I get home today from the school, Nate is already there waiting for me.
I’m almost always home first. Often, he stays so late that I can’t figure out what he’s doing there. But today when I get home, he is sitting on the sofa. And when I walk into the living room, he stands up to greet me. He even gives me a kiss.
“How was your day?” he asks.
“Good.” I glance over at the kitchen to see if he’s got anything cooking in there. “What would you like for dinner tonight?”
“Actually,” he says, “I thought we could order something. From anywhere you want.”
Nate usually thinks the delivery places are too expensive, and he’d rather have some spaghetti out of the box than get delivery from an Italian restaurant. “That sounds great.”
There’s a smile playing on his lips. His eyes crawl down my body, and there’s an expression on his face I haven’t seen in a long time. “You look nice today, Eve.”
Do I? I’m wearing a white blouse with tan slacks. Although I do have on my pair of Manolo Blahniks, which I don’t wear all the time, but I needed a boost today. “Thank you.”
And then he kisses me again. A long, lingering kiss this time. There is an urgency in his kiss, and a second later, he works the top button free on my blouse.
“Nate,” I gasp.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he breathes in my ear. “Okay?”
I’m not going to say no.
Half an hour later, the two of us are lying breathless in our bed. Nate was so determined to ravage me that I kicked off my Manolos instead of removing them carefully and placing them lovingly back in the closet. The rest of our clothes are strewn about the room. When I look over at Nate, he has a sheen of sweat over his body, and he looks back at me and grins.
“Whew,” he says. “That was…”
I nod in agreement. I don’t know what changed today, but maybe there is a path back to saving our marriage. Not that I don’t care deeply about Jay, but he and I do not have a future together. Nate is the future, for better or for worse.
“Good thing we’re ordering in,” I say. “I am way too tired to cook.”
Nate laughs. “I know.”
“We should, you know…” My eyes lock with his. “We should do that more often.”
“Absolutely.”
I snuggle up next to my husband, and he puts his arm around me. I rest my head against the muscles in his shoulder, feeling contented with him for the first time in a long time. We do have sex once a month, but it’s never like that anymore. It’s usually very regimented, like we’re brushing our teeth.
This is like back in the old days, when we were first together.
“By the way,” Nate murmurs into my hair. “I got this weird note today. It said that you needed to see Addie Severson urgently. Everything okay?”
Addie Severson is the last person I want to talk about when we are relishing in our postcoital bliss, but it feels rude not to answer him. Besides, I want him to know what that girl did. He needs to know what she’s capable of.
“Not really,” I tell him. “She cheated on her midterm.”
He’s quiet for a moment. “Cheated how?”
“She was looking at another student’s paper. I saw her do it, and then I checked the two papers right after, and the answers were almost identical. That other kid is a stellar student, and there’s no way she would have gotten so many right answers on her own.”
“Wow. So what are you going to do about it?”
“I’m going to the principal.” I’ll have to wait till tomorrow morning, but this is the protocol if a student is caught cheating. “I’ll let Higgins know what happened, and she can deal with it.”
“The principal.” Nate shakes his head. “Wow. That’s rough. You really have to take it all the way to the principal?”
“I have to. Those are the rules.”
“Well,” he says thoughtfully as he squeezes my body close to his, “it’s not like she did anything nefarious. It’s not like she had some cheating scheme that she came up with in advance where she stole a set of answers. She was sitting there during the exam, and she didn’t know how to do the math problems, which I can definitely relate to. She panicked.”
“She cheated, Nate.”
“But you don’t even have any proof, do you?” He frowns. “You say you saw her copying another paper, but maybe she didn’t. Maybe she really studied for it. Did she admit it?”
Technically, Addie did not admit to cheating. But I could see her looking at Kyle’s paper. After all my years of teaching, it was painfully obvious. Plus, that girl is not capable of getting that kind of grade on her own. And I saw the look on her face when I confronted her. “Not exactly.”
“She’s struggling.” He squeezes me closer to his warm body. “We’ve all been there, Eve. Didn’t you struggle with your English class in high school, and you needed a tutor?”
I don’t know what to say to that. It’s technically true. “So she could have gotten a tutor. She didn’t have to cheat.”