Free Elliot Allagash by Simon Rich Page A

guitar at every talent show. I had never seen him angry before, but now he looked furious. His face was flushed a fiery red and his ponytail had come unraveled. I wondered what a history teacher was doing in science class. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, but he was too angry to produce any sound.
    “Lance,” he managed, finally.
    Lance stood up and started to unbutton his lab coat, but Mr. Douglas flicked his wrist impatiently.
    “Just come,” he said.
“Now.”
    I excused myself to go to the bathroom and quietly followed them down the hall, toward the school’s administrative wing.
    The principal’s door was glass, and when I walked by it, I caught a glimpse of the havoc Elliot had wrought. Principal Higgins was reading Lance’s latest history exam and shaking his headin disgust. Lance’s parents had been called in for the meeting. They sat on either side of their son, staring at him in horrified amazement. Lance stared down at his lap, his face a mask of fear.
    • • •
    “What happened to Lance?” I asked, on the limo ride back to Elliot’s. “Did you tell on him?”
    “Give me some credit,” Elliot said. “I’m not some tattling
child.”
    “If you didn’t tell, then how did he get caught?”
    Elliot cracked each of his knuckles, one by one, basking in my curiosity.
    “Anyone with good information can destroy an enemy,” he said, finally. “But it takes a subtle genius to get an enemy to destroy himself.”
    He dropped some ice cubes into a glass and filled it to the brim with Scotch.
    “No interruptions,” he said.
    • • •
    Mr. Douglas had several eccentricities, the most famous of which was his obsession with saving paper. Instead of printing out forty-one tests each week, he wrote out a single copy in longhand and read the questions out loud. We wrote our answers on scrap paper, which he scavenged from the other classrooms’ recycling bins.
    Mr. Douglas always wrote out his tests on Wednesdays, while supervising study hall. They took him about fifteen minutes to write. When he was finished, he waved the test in the air, announcedthe topic, and deposited it into a locking desk drawer. If Lance was cheating—and Elliot was certain that he was—he
had
to be getting his answers from this drawer. No other copies of the test ever existed.
    The lock was impregnable without tools, Elliot explained, but the desktop itself was light enough to pry open. All you had to do was ratchet it up with a strong ruler and the drawer’s contents would be exposed. Elliot usually broke into the desk at lunchtime, while the teachers and students were packed into the cafeteria. Elliot’s allergies required him to visit the nurse’s office every day at noon, to take an antihistamine. And Mr. Douglas’s classroom was conveniently located right next door.
    “Do you actually have allergies?” I asked him.
    “What do you think?” he said.
    Elliot had assumed that Lance was stealing the test on Wednesday evenings. As captain of the basketball team, he was required to stay an extra fifteen minutes after practice to put away the cones and balls. By the time he left the gym each day, the halls would be deserted, giving him ample time to break into Douglas’s desk. Of course, by raiding the desk
after
Elliot had already had a chance to tamper with the test, he opened himself to sabotage.
    “Did you take away the answer key? So he couldn’t cheat?”
    Elliot shook his head.
    “If I took away the answer key, Douglas would know someone had broken into his desk. I left an answer key, all right. Just not a particularly useful one.”
    After copying Douglas’s test at lunchtime, Elliot went into the nurse’s office and faked a massive allergy attack. James arrivedpromptly and took him home, where the two of them constructed a counterfeit exam for Lance to copy a few hours hence. James took great pains to replicate Douglas’s looping cursive. They kept Mr. Douglas’s questions intact, but they