The Nix(12)

Laura Pottsdam consistently comes to class between three minutes early and two minutes late. Her seat of choice is in the far back-left corner. Various boys in the class have slowly shifted their own desk preferences to get closer to her orbit, creeping mollusk-like from the right side of the classroom to the left over the course of the semester. Most sit next to her for a span of two or three weeks before they suddenly shoot away to the opposite side of the room. They’re like charged particles colliding and bouncing apart in what Samuel assumes is some psychosexual melodrama playing out extracurricularly.

“You never wrote this paper,” says Samuel. “You bought it in high school and then used it again in my class. That’s the only thing under discussion today.”

Laura draws both her feet under her. Her leg releases from the shiny leather with a wet pop.





APPEAL TO PITY


“This is so unfair,” she says. The way she so effortlessly and fluidly moved her legs is a sign of youthful flexibility or serious yoga training or both. “You asked for an essay on Hamlet. That’s what I gave you.”

“I asked you to write an essay on Hamlet.”

“How was I supposed to know that? It’s not my fault you have these weird rules.”

“They’re not my rules. Every school has these rules.”

“They do not. I used this paper in high school and got an A.”

“That’s too bad.”

“So I didn’t know it was wrong. How was I supposed to know it was wrong? Nobody ever taught me it was wrong.”

“Of course you knew it was wrong. You were lying about it. If you didn’t think it was wrong, you wouldn’t have lied.”

“But I lie about everything. It’s what I do. I can’t help it.”

“You should try to stop that.”

“But I can’t be punished twice for the same paper. If I was punished in high school for plagiarism, I can’t be punished again now. Isn’t that, like, double jeopardy?”

“I thought you said you got an A in high school.”

“No I didn’t.”

“I’m pretty sure you did. I’m pretty sure you just said that.”

“That was a hypothetical.”

“No, I don’t believe it was.”

“I think I would know. Duh.”

“Are you lying again? Are you lying right now?”

“No.”

They stare at each other for a moment like two poker players who are both bluffing. This is the most eye contact they’ve ever shared. In class, Laura almost always stares into her lap, where she hides her phone. She thinks if the phone is in her lap she has effectively concealed it. She has no idea how obvious and transparent this maneuver is. Samuel has not asked her to stop checking her phone in class, mostly so he can savage her grade at the end of the semester when he doles out “participation points.”

“At any rate,” he says, “double jeopardy doesn’t work that way. The point here is that when you submit work, there’s a basic assumption that it’s your work. Your own.”

“It is mine,” she says.

“No, you bought it.”

“I know,” she says. “I own it. It’s mine. It’s my work.”

It strikes him that if he doesn’t think of this as “cheating” but rather as “outsourcing” then she might have a valid point.





FALSE ANALOGY


“Plus other people do worse things than this,” says Laura. “My best friend? She pays her algebra tutor to do her homework for her. I mean, that’s way worse, right? And she doesn’t even get punished! Why should I get punished and she doesn’t?”

“She’s not in my class,” Samuel says.

“How about Larry then?”

“Who?”

“Larry Broxton? From our class? I know for a fact that everything he gives you was written by his older brother. You don’t punish him. That’s not fair. That’s way worse.”

Samuel recalls that Larry Broxton—sophomore, major undeclared, buzz-cut hair the color of cornmeal, usually in class wearing shiny silver oversize basketball shorts and a monochromatic T-shirt featuring the gigantic logo of a clothing chain found in roughly all of America’s outlet malls—was among the boys who had crept toward and, later, bolted away from Laura Pottsdam. Larry f*cking Broxton, skin as pale and sickly green as the inside of an old potato, pathetic attempts at a blond mustache and beard that looked more like his face was lightly crusted with panko bread crumbs, a kind of hunchiness and withdrawn, inward manner that for some reason reminded Samuel of a small fern that could only grow in the shade, Larry Broxton, who had never once spoken in class, whose feet had outpaced the rest of his body, growth-spurt-wise, and had resulted in a kind of floppy walk, as if his feet were two large and flat river fish, feet on which he wore these chunky black sandal things that Samuel was pretty sure were designed for use only in public showers and pools, this same Larry Broxton who during the ten minutes Samuel gave to each class for “freewriting and brainstorming” would idly and subconsciously and casually pick at his genitals, he could, almost every day, invariably, during their two-week sitting-together period, on the way out of class, make Laura Pottsdam laugh.