The Nix(124)

“Did you?” her mother asked.

“No!” Laura said. Then, after a long pause: “Actually, yes. I did cheat.”

“Well, I’m sure you had a good reason for it.”

“I had an excellent reason for it,” she said. Her mother had always done this, supplied her with good excuses. Once when she was fifteen and she came home at three in the morning obviously drunk and maybe also a little stoned, dropped off by three very loud, very much older boys who had recently either graduated high school or dropped out of it, the hair on the back of her head tangled and disheveled from what had obviously been vigorous friction against the backseat upholstery of a car, in a state so near comatose that when her mother said “Where have you been?” she could not think of anything to say and just stood there and dumbly wobbled, even then her mother had bailed her out.

“Are you sick?” she asked Laura, who, taking the bait, nodded her head. “You’re sick, aren’t you. You’re coming down with something. You were probably taking a nap and lost track of time, right?”

“Yes,” Laura said. “I don’t feel well.” Which of course required her to play hooky the next day to keep up the lie, claiming an unbearable cold-and-flulike illness, which was not too much of a stretch given the top-shelf hangover she woke up with.

The weirdest thing about these interactions was how much her mother seemed to believe them.

It wasn’t only that she was covering for her daughter; she seemed to be willfully hallucinating about her. “You’re a strong woman and I’m proud of you,” she’d tell Laura afterward. Or: “You can have anything you want.” Or: “Don’t let anyone get in your way.” Or: “I gave up my career for you and so your success literally means everything in the world to me.” Or whatever.

But now Laura also felt doubt, which was not one of the fifty allowable emotions according to iFeel, which itself made her doubt that it was doubt she was feeling, a kind of mind-bending paradox she tried not to spend too much mental time with.

She could not fail her Intro to Lit course. That much was clear. There were too many things at stake—internships, summer jobs, grade point average, a besmirched permanent record. No, that could not happen, and she felt mistreated and wronged by her professor, who was willing to effectively take away her future because of one stupid assignment, which seemed to her a response all out of proportion to the crime she’d committed.

But, okay, even this she doubted, because if it didn’t matter if she cheated on any single assignment, then by extension it would be okay if she cheated on every assignment. Which struck her as at least a little weird because the agreement she’d reached with herself in high school when all the cheating started was that it was okay to cheat on every assignment now as long as sometime in the future she stopped cheating and began doing the actual work, as soon as the assignments started to matter. Which had not yet happened. In four years of high school and one year of college, she had not done anything that registered even remotely as mattering. So she cheated. On everything. And lied about it. All the time. And did not feel one ounce of regret.

Not until today. What was screwing with her head today was this: What if she made it all the way through college never having done any actual college work? When she got her first very powerful publicity and marketing job, would she know what to do? It struck her that she did not even fully comprehend what was involved in the word “marketing,” despite a low-level innate ability to recognize when someone else had done it well, to her.

But every time she thought about maybe paying attention in her classes and doing the work herself and really studying for tests and writing her own papers, the fear that grabbed her was this: What if she couldn’t do it? What if she wasn’t good enough? Or smart enough? What if she failed? She worried that the Laura unaided by deception and duplicity was not the elite college student both she and her mother assumed her to be.

For her mother, this knowledge would be crippling. Her mother—who since the divorce signed all her e-mails to Laura with You are my only joy—she could never handle Laura’s failure. It would be like a nullification of her whole life’s project.

So Laura had to do this, press forward with her plan, however risky, for her mother’s sake. For both their sakes. There was no room for doubt.

Because the thing is? Is that now the stakes were even higher. Her phone call to the dean had effectively relieved her of any Hamlet-related suffering, but it had caused an unexpected problem, which was that the dean was now going to extraordinary lengths to show how sensitive the university was to Laura’s hurt feelings. The dean was organizing a Mediation and Conflict Resolution Conference, which, as far as Laura could tell, was a two-day summit where she and Professor Anderson would sit across from each other at a table while several third-party peacemaker coaches would help them engage in, manage, cope with, and productively resolve their differences in a safe and respectful environment.

Which sounded like just about the worst thing in the world.

Laura knew it would be difficult to maintain her fabrications over two days of intense scrutiny. She knew she had to prevent this meeting at all costs, but she felt doubt and maybe even a bit of guilt and remorse about the only solution she’d so far devised.

There was a knock at the door. That, finally, would be Larry.

“One second!” she yelled.