“I got eight, once,” Torchie said. “But another time, I just got three.”
“It balances out,” I told him. “If you ran one test, just about anything could happen. One test doesn’t mean much at all. If you ran ten tests, you’d probably come close to the average. But if you ran a thousand tests, you’d get even closer.” I wanted to explain more about averages, but I stopped when I noticed his eyes start to glaze over.
My own words lingered in my mind. One test doesn’t mean much at all. I wondered whether my one test with Cheater was a fluke. Maybe he’d scored higher with other people. I’d find out soon enough.
The next day, everyone seemed eager to hear the results. “Well, class,” Mr. Briggs said, “we have some interesting numbers.” He had the computer keyboard in his lap. “First, let’s see if anyone scored higher than we expected, since that’s the whole point of our investigation. I’ll pull up a list of subjects who averaged better than five hits on their tests.”
We all crowded around the monitor. A bunch of names scrolled up. I could feel a wave of excitement pass through the room. Nobody—except for me—had ever expected any sort of special results. And I definitely hadn’t expected more than one mind reader to show up in the class.
“Now let’s check the specific details,” Mr. Briggs said. He hit a few more keys. The screen changed. “We seem to have two groups that had high scores. Robert, Justin, and Trevor all did better than average. I’ll put up their results and see what you think.”
I looked at the information. Each of the three had scored a perfect round of twenty-five hits. That was amazing. Then I noticed something else. Each had only done it once. And in every case, the tester was the same—Avery Morrison, one of the runts.
“Squinty,” a couple of kids said, calling Avery by his nickname. They’d realized the pattern at the same time I did.
Everyone turned toward him. Squinty looked back, peering at us through his thick glasses. “What’s everyone staring at?”
Mr. Briggs handed him a deck of the test cards. “Hold one up, but don’t let me see.”
Avery held up a card, raising it close to his face. “No, not here,” Mr. Briggs said. “Let’s go over to where you usually sit. The light’s better over there.” He followed Squinty to a corner of the rug near a window. After they sat down, Mr. Briggs tilted his head a bit, as if searching for something, and then said, “Minus sign.”
“Yeah,” Squinty said. “You got it.”
“Square,” Mr. Briggs said for the second card.
“Wow. Right again,” Squinty told him.
“Another square.”
“Yup.”
“Star.”
“Holy smokes. You got another one.”
Mr. Briggs named a couple more cards before Squinty caught on. By then, the rest of us were laughing hard enough to split a gut. It was like watching a magic act. Robert, Justin, and Trevor, who each had done the same thing during the actual test, were laughing the hardest of all.
Finally, Mr. Briggs, who was laughing, too, said, “This is a great lesson. It shows one way an experiment can go wrong. In this case, nobody intended to cheat, but I suspect that the opportunity was just irresistible to the three of you who noticed the reflection in Avery’s glasses. Of course, the instant we saw perfect scores, we should have become suspicious.”
As Mr. Briggs said this, I heard Bloodbath say, “Damn.” Then Bloodbath started looking around like he was thinking about leaving the room.
Mr. Briggs, staring at Bloodbath, said, “So someone who wanted to be really clever while cheating shouldn’t get perfect scores. It would be a lot better to miss a couple of times.” He went back to the computer and pulled up some more information. He didn’t say anything about the data—he just pointed to a column of numbers on the screen.
I think everyone understood what was going on right away. Bloodbath had gotten four perfect scores. But the tester in each case had been one of his buddies. They’d obviously cheated just for the sake of cheating. Maybe they thought it was a good joke. Maybe they were so used to cheating whenever they could that they’d just naturally done it during the test. But, as Mr. Briggs had pointed out, they hadn’t been clever enough.
“Now let’s throw out these cases and look at the rest of our results. Let’s see who did better than five right.” He tapped a few more keys. “As you can see, nobody managed to score six hits per test. The highest average was five-point-seven-six—roughly five and three-quarters. So, at least as far as this experiment is concerned, we have no real evidence of psychic ability.”