Fighting Chance(65)

“Patrick Loftus,” Bennis said. “The man who founded Pacific Microsystems. The man who invented—”

“The very tool that lets the government spy on its citizens and get away with it,” Janice Loftus said. “If you think that’s an achievement, I think you live a very impoverished life.”

It was time to head this off at the pass.

“Let’s get back to Martha Handling,” Gregor said. “She was your roommate in your freshman year?”

“That’s right,” Janice Loftus said. “You could pick your own roommate if you already knew someone, and I did know someone, a girl in my house at Miss Porter’s, but, well, we didn’t get along, and I don’t think she wanted to room with me any more than I wanted to room with her. So I told the college to pick for me and I got Martha Handling.”

“And that was bad, too?” Gregor asked. “Right from the beginning?”

“Oh, no, it wasn’t too bad at the beginning,” Janice said. “I mean, the woman was a complete fascist, but I didn’t know about fascism then. And she was just like everybody else, really. Except the whole thing was her idea.”

“What was her idea?” Gregor asked.

“Patrick Loftus,” Bennis said. “Miss Porter’s. For God’s sake.”

Janice had gone back to ignoring her. “It was her idea that we should work together to cheat,” Janice said. “We all had this absolutely terrible teacher for history. He wanted everybody to know dates and all that kind of thing, and he went on about battles and things and he was really old and he had tenure. Bryn Mawr is a very progressive place. There are wonderful teachers there, teachers who understand gender and race and class and know how to put you right into history. And make you understand what things mean. But he wasn’t one of them, and he had tenure, of course, so we were stuck with him.”

“Why didn’t you drop the course?” Bennis asked.

“It got too late to do that,” Janice said, “and then it was a requirement if you wanted to take other history courses, and almost all of us wanted to do that because you have to if you want to major in Women’s Studies or political science or sociology. We had a test every third week, and when he handed back the first one, a lot of us knew we were going to fail. We just knew it. There wasn’t going to be any way to avoid it. And that’s when Martha said she had the idea.”

“An idea to cheat,” Gregor said.

“Martha said that the reason people got caught cheating is that they went about it by themselves,” Janice said. “She said people who cheated were always ashamed of it, so they tried to hide it, not just from the authorities but even from themselves. So they did all the stupid stuff that everybody knew about already, and they got caught, because it wasn’t hard to catch them. She said what we ought to do was work as a team. She said if we worked as a team, it would be almost impossible to catch us, because no one of us would be doing any of the things they were expecting. Oh, I don’t know. It sounded good at the time, and I didn’t want to fail.”

“What could you have done that was so different?” Gregor asked.

“Martha said she’d seen it in a movie,” Janice said. “I don’t remember the name of the movie. It isn’t anything you’d recognize. The course was this big lecture thing twice a week, and then the class was broken up into seminar sessions that met at different times, with only ten people in each of them. And there were about ten of us, and only one of us in the first one. So, what we’d do, the one of us in the first session would take two copies of the test when it was handed out and also two blue books. Then that person would hand in her blue book very early and bring the extra copy of the test and the extra blue book back to the dorm and we’d make copies of it. And while we were doing that some of the others of us would be filling in the answers in the blue books. And then when that was done, when the seminar sessions were over, some other couple of us would find a way to get the blue book out of the pile and the fixed one into it. We’d go to his office right when the seminar was letting out and one of us would distract him and the other would do the things with the books. The rest of us would have the test answers going in and we wouldn’t have to do all that.”

“And that worked?” Bennis asked. “Really?”

“It worked for months,” Janice said. “I don’t think it would have, except that he always used test days to meet students, so he was pretty much distracted or he’d be out of the room in the hall talking to somebody. It was a two-semester course and it worked for everything except the big midterm at the end of the first semester, and that was a scramble, but I think it would have worked all the way through if Martha hadn’t turned us all in.”