I Was Told It Would Get Easier(69)
“Ms. Burnstein,” said Agent Feld patiently, but she ignored him.
“Thank goodness I quit,” she said suddenly. “We’ll leave the country. Or I’ll take the job with Ostergren and move to Baltimore.” She turned to the agents. “Do you need to Mirandize her? What’s the charge? Do you have witnesses?” It turns out there is a middle ground between harassed mother and polished lawyer, and it’s harassed lawyer. It was almost adorable, but not quite, on account of the incredible loudness.
“Ms. Burnstein!” Agent Feld put on his big-girl voice. “Ms. Burnstein, Emily didn’t do anything wrong. She isn’t being accused of cheating.”
Mom gazed at him. “She’s not?” She stared at me. “You didn’t cheat?”
I shook my head and may even have smiled a little bit. “No, Mom, I’m not the cheater.” I took a deep breath. “I’m the snitch.”
JESSICA
Well, this was unexpected.
It turned out Emily overheard some girls in class talking about a guy who’d approached them online and offered to sell them the exam paper for the upcoming AP Statistics test. One of them was a friend of hers, and when she asked Emily for her opinion, Em said it was a terrible idea. Which of course it was. Em pointed out that (a) they had no way of knowing if the paper was real, the College Board (who administers the APs) is pretty freaking uptight about exam papers; and (b) they were jeopardizing their futures by cheating.
“The thing is,” Emily said, leaning across to the FBI agents, one of whom had lemon cake crumbs on his chin, “they were all pretty decent at stats anyway, it wasn’t like they were going to fail the AP. But they wanted to do better.”
“So you called the cops?” I was sitting there pretty stunned, I’ll admit it. After the embarrassment of accusing my innocent child of cheating, I’d kind of kept my mouth shut.
Emily shook her head. “No, I wanted to stop them from cheating, but I didn’t want them to get into trouble and have it ruin their transcript or whatever.” She shrugged. “All they’d done was talk and think about it, they hadn’t even agreed to meet the guy.”
“So you told the principal?”
“I wrote a note,” said Emily. “I didn’t want to get caught snitching, either, although that doesn’t seem to have worked out very well.” She blushed suddenly. “I had Anna write it, I’m sorry. I knew they would recognize my writing.” She tried a small smile. “I told you penmanship wasn’t going to pay off.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She frowned at me. “You’re a lawyer. You’re a mandated reporter, right? You would have to tell the authorities.”
“I guess. But aren’t teachers?”
“Yes,” said Agent Feld. “The principal dealt with her students as she saw fit, then she contacted the LA field office and told them what the girls had told her about the man offering to sell them the papers. One of the girls agreed to wear a wire for us and meet the guy, and the LA office managed to catch him and get him to turn on his coconspirators. It’s a much bigger problem than Los Angeles.”
“Well, how did you know I wrote the note?” Emily looked worried.
“Your principal made an educated guess, she said. It could only have been someone who knew all the girls, it was reasonable to assume she was also in the Statistics class, and someone who had—her phrase—a strong moral compass.”
We all regarded Emily, who was clearly torn between being pleased her principal thought she was a good person and being pissed off she was perceived as a Goody Two-shoes. No teenager wants to be told they have a strong moral compass; they might as well wear a hat with a propeller on it.
Feld continued. “The agents in LA told us they’d heard one of the kids on this tour was going to pick up exam papers from someone in New York, where the College Board is headquartered.” He smiled. “You’d think they’d email, but apparently they don’t trust the internet.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant. “Are you suggesting someone at the College Board is selling papers?”
He shook his head. “It’s unlikely to be someone who actually works for the College Board, but plenty of people have access.”
There was a pause. Then Emily said, “So, why do you need me?”
The agents looked at each other. “We don’t, really,” said Feld. “We just wanted to ask you if you knew anything useful.”
“Useful? No,” said my daughter firmly.
“No?” said Agent Feld, crestfallen. “We thought maybe you’d overheard kids chatting about it . . . like you did before?”
Emily raised her eyebrows at him. “Do you think I just creep around, listening in to conversations? Look, it’s bad enough you guys just outed me to the entire tour group. So much for confidentiality. There is no way I’m going to do anything else to help you.”
“Oh,” said Agent Feld, clearly taken aback.
Emily sighed. “Because, no offense, snitching on my friends to the principal was bad enough. The kids in the room you just burst in on basically represent every private high school in Los Angeles, and you can bet they’ve already texted their friends that Emily Burnstein got arrested by the FBI.” She put up her hand. “I know I wasn’t arrested, but truth doesn’t matter online, you know that.”