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

found herself so tired of the whole thing, so weary, that she was barely able to open the door of the old car that had once given her a moment of freedom. It was the last time she ever spoke to Paul.

By the time she walked into Professor Greenway’s office the next day, Rachel had realized her mistake.

She told the professor about lending her notes to one of the seven, though she did not name Paul. She had decided to let him hang himself, as he had done before.

“So there’s the link to you,” the professor said, pleased.

She went on to suggest that the others had stolen the exam questions, although she did not know how they might have done so. And then she told him about her mistake, and theirs.

“At first I thought that they had memorized their answers, but then I remembered how similar all seven were. Nearly identical, you said. Especially the Kissinger quote, which they got from my notes. It didn’t seem possible that they could have produced several nearly identical answers purely from memory.” The professor watched her and did not interrupt. “They had to have collaborated on the answers and then actually written them out before the exam. Using my notes.”

“But how could they have prepared the answers ahead of time? Those exam booklets come in five colors, and nobody knows what color is going to be used until they take the exam.”

“They bought all five colors,” Rachel said. “You can get them at the bookstore. And then they wrote out their answers in all five booklets and snuck them into the exam. And then, when they saw which color you were handing out, they just took out the right one and switched it with the blank booklet you’d given them. And spent an hour doodling. I can’t believe it. If they had spent all that effort studying, they wouldn’t have needed to cheat.”

“Sounds pretty far-fetched, but I suppose it’s possible. It would be easy to do something like that, trade booklets I mean, if they sat in the back. It’s a big class.” Professor Greenway sighed. “Any idea how they got their hands on the exam in the first place?”

No, Rachel said. She didn’t know how they’d stolen the questions. And that, Rachel thought, was that. She thought she’d heard the last of it.

For the next few weeks Rachel did little more than study. With savage determination, she fueled her mind, distinguished herself in the process, wrote an impeccable set of final exams, and began to pack her things.

On the day of her departure for Belle Haven, set to catch an afternoon bus, Rachel went to the refectory for a final lunch. She was meeting some of the friends she’d barely seen since the fall. She missed them, as if they had gone away somewhere, or as if she had. They were waiting for her when she arrived.

She had sat here with these people hundreds of times before, making jokes about the food, agonizing over deadlines and syllabi, gossiping, passing the time before class. Today Rachel just wanted to be away. She had always thought of these friends as people she would remember fondly once she’d graduated and gone her own way, but looking at their faces around the table, Rachel felt as if she were already remembering them, as if they were locked in her past and could not join her in the place she now inhabited. She tried to think of a way to explain this to them, to excuse herself from their chatter and find her way to the bus station, but then she looked across the table and saw her old friend Colleen pick up a shaker and pour salt all over the bowl of ice cream she had only begun to eat. It was a habit of Colleen’s, a wealthy girl from Connecticut, to break her perpetual diet with a forbidden sweet and then, before any real damage had been done, to thwart herself with a dose of salt.

Since Harry, since her parents’ death, since Professor Greenway had found her under the maple tree, Rachel had noticed a lot of things she’d missed before, or chosen to ignore. She had come to realize that far too many of the students on this campus—these friends among them—had an extremely rigid view of the world beyond, one that was rarely based on actual experience or sincere investigation, and that they were comfortable with their assumptions. She had come to feel like a stranger here, more an outsider than she had felt on her very first day of school nearly three years before. But it was the sight of her old friend ruining her food that finally made Rachel scramble to her feet and shock them with the brevity of her good-byes.

She met Professor Greenway on the sidewalk outside the refectory.

“I’m glad I ran into you like this,” he said, leading her to a bench in the shade.

“I only have a minute, Professor. I’m going home this afternoon.”

“I won’t keep you long. I just wanted to say good-bye. I hope I’ll see you in one of my classes in the fall.”

“I’m sure you will,” she said.

“And I also wanted to tell you,” he said, as Rachel began to draw away, “that we finally found out how those boys were getting their hands on my exam questions. Stupid, really. We made things far too easy for them. But once we figured it out, it was just as easy to catch them.”

“Was it your secretary?”

Professor Greenway looked at her sharply. “She didn’t knowingly participate, any more than I did, or you either for that matter. We all made the mistake of being too trusting, too naïve. I’ve always left my exam questions in Nora’s in basket, and she’s always left a set of typed copies in my pigeonhole, both places right out in the open where anyone could watch for the chance to help himself. But this time we did up a second