Page 42 of The Teacher
“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 hisarm 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’snot 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.”
“Shecheated, 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 couldseeher 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.”
“Not every student can afford a tutor. I think we can both agree that Addie has been through alotin the last year.”
Under any other circumstances, this conversation would have enraged me. Cheating is wrong, and the fact that my husband would defend a student who copied off another kid is ridiculous. Especially since he seems to have made Addie his little pet project, despite the fact that I warned him about her. But curled up in his arms, I can’t work up much anger or even indignation. Nate cares deeply about his students, and I can’t fault him forthat. It was one of his qualities that made me fall in love with him.
“So what do you suggest?” I say.
“Well,” he says, “obviously you can’t let her keep the grade, but if you give her a zero and a stern warning, I doubt she’ll ever try something like that again. And it will give her a kick in the teeth she needs to pull her act together.”
“You think so?” Addie just seems so incredibly hopeless sometimes.
“I definitely do.” He kisses the top of my forehead. “I know that deep down, you want her and all your other students to do well. I think this is the best thing for her. You don’t want to wreck her life, do you? Even if you are still angry about what happened with Art. You realize that wasn’t her fault, right?”
Do I? I suppose he’s right. Addie Severson has been through a lot in the last year, and the truth is, I’ve been hard on her. Maybe because I’m angry that my own mentor lost his job because of her.
“Fine,” I agree. “I won’t go to the principal. I’ll speak to her about it after class and let her know that she’s getting a zero, but I won’t report her.”
“You’re doing the right thing, Eve.”
He kisses me one more time on the top of the head, then he rolls out of bed and hits the bathroom. The shower starts running a second later, and my phone buzzes on the nightstand where I left it. I pick it up, and there’s a message waiting for me in Snapflash.
Will I see you tomorrow night?
