Page 93 of Ancient History

“Thank you for your time,” I said to the panel, my heart racing.

Ms. Pike stood up as soon as I sat down. “Mr. Bright, I have a question for you.”

“Are we allowed to ask each other questions?”

“In this part of the hearing, we are,” Mr. Camp said, though he never offered me the chance to ask questions after her speech.

Ms. Pike clacked my way. “Mr. Bright, do you have a vendetta against my client?”

“No.”

“Because from your statement, it sounds like you really don’t like Thomas.”

“I don’t like his attitude in class, and I don’t like that he cheats. But I have nothing against him as a person.” After that sinister grin he gave me, I wasn’t sure how true that still was.

“How did you discover that he had allegedly plagiarized?” she asked.

“I did a search online, and the text popped up in Google.”

“Do you do that with all of your students?”

A pit sunk in my stomach. I knew where she was headed, and I didn’t know how to stop her. It was that queasy feeling of knowing you were about to be outsmarted.

“I use an online anti-plagiarism program to analyze all papers.”

“That’s different from Googling?”

“I’ll Google if something suspicious pops up.”

“Something that doesn’t ‘pop up’ on the anti-plagiarism software?” Her air quotes for “pop up” were lethal.

“Correct.”

“And how many of your students required a secondary Google scan for this paper?”

“Just Mr. Alvarez.” I hung my head.

“Interesting. So you don’t think that scouring the internet trying to find out if this one student cheated counts as a personal vendetta?”

“No!” My voice jumped an octave, taking the panel aback. I tried to keep an even tone. “The writing in the paper sounded nothing like his other assignments.”

“So you’ve memorized how all of your students’ writing sounds? Or, again, just Thomas?”

I turned to the panel and to Aguilar, who had a sympathetic frown. “You would notice if there was such a big difference! It went from barely English to sounding like a history professor?”

“So now you’re calling my client illiterate?”

“No!” I yelled, not caring how it made me sound. I was losing my mind, I didn’t care if I sounded crazy because I wasn’t crazy. And I knew that didn’t make sense, but it also made perfect sense.

I handed over a folder to the panel. “Here are Tommy’s previous papers and the paper he submitted. You can spot what a difference it is.”

“Those papers are inadmissible.” Ms. Pike gathered them from the table.

“So now weareusing legal terms?”

“How do we know they haven’t been doctored by you?”

“Are you serious right now?” I whipped my head to her, to the panel, searching for a lick of common sense.

---