Those Who Favor Fire by Lauren Wolk (no david read aloud TXT) 📗

to keep all that up for long? Better to say what you think, mean what you say, do what you think is right, live how you want to live. No need to be cruel, she amended. Say the cruel parts to yourself. Or don’t say them at all. Do the cruel things in your head. Or keep still. Be disciplined.

It was a start. An anchor of sorts. One she carried with her back to school after she’d dealt with her parents’ remains and the tangled business of surviving them. When she arrived back on the familiar campus, she found that it took some effort to avoid backsliding into the rabbit girl she had been before, but clinging to this anchor, Rachel held her ground. Old friends, thinking she was still grieving, made allowances for her lack of social graces. Paul kept his distance and she hers. She made no new friends. Every now and then she went alone to the movies, consumed a sack of M&M’s, and wondered where her parents were.

At one point, on a beautiful spring morning when everything seemed suddenly to have changed for the better, Rachel did slip, although at first it felt so good to relax her guard that she did nothing to resurrect it.

Forsaking the library for the campus green, she chose a spot under a maple tree and began to read the sonnets that had seemed such perfect work for a morning like this one. But the breeze and the smell of new grass plucked at her attention, and finally she shut the book and set it aside. The sun felt wonderful on her bare arms. The grass was soft. She closed her eyes.

“Rachel.”

She opened her eyes. Adam Greenway, her history professor, had come up quietly and was crouching next to her. “I didn’t want to startle you,” he said, smiling.

“You didn’t,” she said. “How are you, Professor?”

“Just fine. You?”

“Okay. I’m afraid I shouldn’t have come out here to study though. It’s too hard to concentrate.”

“Which is why I no longer allow my teaching assistants to hold discussion groups outside, under the trees. It’s hard to pay attention when you’ve got spring fever. My students were writing exams without much meat to them. They were just giving me back what I’d dished out during lecture or what they memorized from the reading assignments. Not much original perspective. Disappointing.”

Rachel nodded, bemused. This was unlike Professor Greenway. He had never said so much to her outside of class before. He was watching her intently.

“Rachel, do you remember much about your midterm exam last semester, the one you wrote for me?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” she said slowly. “Do I remember the questions?”

“Your responses. Do you remember what you wrote about U.S. foreign policy during Turkey’s ’74 invasion of Cyprus?”

“I remember, more or less.”

“Do you remember quoting Henry Kissinger?”

“Yes, briefly.” The sun behind him made Rachel squint. “But it seems strange that you remember. There were over a hundred kids in that class, and we took that exam almost six months ago.”

Professor Greenway sat down next to Rachel. “Of a hundred and forty-two students, seven wrote similar exams. Disturbingly so. They all presented the same information, all within the same basic structure and, to a limited extent, even used the same wording. Your exam was a bit different—the structure of your essay was unique, but the information was basically the same and all eight of you quoted Kissinger in exactly the same way. Or almost: you punctuated the quote differently, but the other seven were identical. No one else in the entire class quoted Kissinger. Just the eight of you.”

“Are you accusing me of cheating?” Rachel said, blinking with surprise. “On an essay exam? In a class I loved and studied for until my eyes nearly blew out of my head?”

He put up a hand. “I know, Rachel,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’ve waited six months to bring this up because I wanted to investigate all other possibilities. But the same thing happened when I gave the final exam for that class. All seven exams were nearly the same.”

“The same as mine?”

“No. Not at all like yours.”

“So you realized I wasn’t cheating, even if they were.”

“I never thought that you had cheated, Rachel.” He smiled at her, as if to prove it. “But I’m sure that you were somehow involved for a while last semester, without your knowledge.”

They were both silent for a time. Then, “That was a long time ago, Professor,” Rachel said. “What made you decide to bring this up now?”

“Four of those seven students are in my class this semester, too. All four of their midterms were too much alike. So were two other exams written by students I’ve never had before. But I’m still not sure what’s going on, and I was hoping you could give this some thought.” He stood up and brushed off his pants. “Let me know if you come up with any ideas.”

“It would help if I knew who the other students were,” she said.

He thought about that one for a moment. Then he told her. All nine suspects were boys. One of them was Paul.

Rachel had been in such a wonderful mood that morning, felt the first bit of joy since her parents had died. If Paul had been the one to approach her as she sat under the maple tree, drowsing, she might have forgiven him, found a way to patch things up between them. She had begun to feel, recently, as if she had judged Paul too harshly. When she tried to put herself in his shoes, to feel the sort of pressure exerted by his peers, she did not entirely succeed, but this new willingness to see things through his eyes had made Rachel vulnerable to the sight of him walking across the campus green or sitting in one of her classes, intentionally removed. Lately, she had reminded herself of Paul’s warnings, admitted that he been right about Harry