Page 63 of Sweet Surrender

“Mr. Lawrence,” Principal Chittenden said, standing as he entered the classroom. “Glad you could make it.”

The principal, Denise Staley, and Becca were all seated at a table at the back of the classroom.

And both of his boys were sitting there with them.

“What’s this about?” Zane asked.

“We’re hoping Miss Hawthorne will enlighten us,” Denise said in a flat voice that was just on the safe side of sarcasm.

“Thank you all for coming,” Becca said. “I realized something as I was thinking about this situation last night. One thing that none of us ever did was get the boys involved and hear what they had to say. And I think that was a mistake.”

“We talked to them, Miss Hawthorne,” the principal reminded her gently.

“Yes,” Becca said. “Exactly. We talkedtothem.”

Zane blinked at her in amazement. Had she really just challenged her principal? Was she going to get fired for trying to give his boys the benefit of the doubt?

“Nick,” Becca said gently, as the others stared at her in stunned silence. “Can you tell me about your work? I notice that sometimes you turn in excellent work, and other times you hardly work at all.”

Nick swallowed, and glanced at Zane.

Zane nodded to him, hoping that their conversation the other day about him being enough just as he was, would give him the confidence to feel good about speaking honestly to his teacher.

“Sometimes… I just can’t keep up with the questions and the copying,” he said to Becca. “Even if I try.”

“I see,” she said, nodding. “Nick, there’s a math problem on the board. Can you do that for us?”

Zane noticed that Nick already had a piece of paper and a pencil in front of him. He watched his boy look across the sunny classroom at the three-digit addition problem on the board and then frown.

“I-I can’t do that one,” he admitted to Becca, his voice flat.

“How about this one?” she asked, sliding a piece of paper to him that had a problem written on it.

Zane frowned and glanced back up at the board.

It was the same problem. That didn’t make any sense. Was she trying to make him look silly? What was that going to prove?

But Nick smiled and grabbed his pencil, getting to work on the problem quickly and neatly.

“There were a couple of clues here that none of us noticed,” Becca said quietly as Nick worked. “One was that Nick’s grades in math, which often has information on the board, seemed to change quite a bit, but his spelling quizzes, which are dictated, were all perfect.”

Nick finished up the problem and turned around for her to see.

“That’s perfect, Nick,” Becca told him. “Great job.”

“Oh,” Principal Chittenden sighed. “Oh, my.”

She had clearly noticed something that Zane still hadn’t.

“I don’t get it,” Denise said. Making Zane glad he wasn’t the only one. “He was literally looking at his brother’s paper.”

“Nick, is it hard for you to see the board?” Becca asked him.

“Sometimes it’s easy,” Nick told her. “But sometimes it makes my head hurt.”

The pieces began to fall into place for Zane, but it still didn’t explain the cheating.

“When you first moved over to my classroom, you sat in the front row, and you did well on your own,” she said. “But when you were taking the test in Miss Staley’s classroom, you and Cal were in the back of the room like you are now, right?”

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