Unravelling. Elizabeth Norris
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look away and decide what I’m going to say, but I can’t seem to concentrate on my computer anymore. I want to keep staring—like if I look at him long enough, I’ll unravel the enigma that is Ben Michaels.
Then I see his computer.
He has the school mainframe open and my schedule on the screen. A few keyboard shortcuts, and it’s completely wiped. A blank slate.
“What are you doing?”
“Changing your schedule,” he answers, as if accessing the mainframe couldn’t get him expelled.
“But you can’t—how’d you—”
He shrugs. “I stole the password off Florentine as a freshman. I’ve been fixing schedules for a couple years now.”
I look around the library. No one’s paying attention to us, but we aren’t exactly hidden from sight, either. Anyone could glance this way and see the screen.
“Janelle,” he says, and just the way he says my name—like I matter—makes me turn back to him. There’s no tension lining his eyes; now they look like they could be smiling. “What classes do you want?”
Junior year is supposed to be the most important year for applying to colleges. And I did follow all the rules—I submitted my class requests on time, I got the paperwork signed off on. It’s not my fault the schedule is all messed up.
So I tell him.
Ben clearly knows his way around the software, deftly searching for the course titles. I point to the teachers and class periods I want—and effectively match my schedule with Alex’s.
When I pick Poblete’s third-period class, Ben cracks a half smile. But I have a moment of panic when he tries to insert me into the class and an error message pops up to declare the class is too full.
Ben chuckles beside me—I must have gasped or something— and I realized how close we are, how much I’m leaning into him. Close enough that I can feel his body heat next to me. Close enough that I can smell the faint mixture of what I’m coming to know as pure Ben—mint, soap, and gasoline. Despite the fact that we’re not actually touching, I’m leaning over his shoulder, my mouth dangerously close to his ear.
If he turned his head just a few more inches in my direction, he could kiss me.
I have no idea where that thought came from.
I lean back, shifting in my seat.
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Ben says, gesturing to the computer. “You think you’re the first person who I needed to override to get them into Poblete’s class?”
Obviously not. He enters an override code, and a class roster pops up.
“Wait,” I say, reaching for him. “Don’t take anyone out. That isn’t fair.”
“I won’t,” he says, but he’s looking at my hand on his arm, and I pull it back, my face heating up. “I just need to manually add you in, see?” He copies and pastes my student ID into the class roster.
Which is when it hits me that he has access to EVERYTHING—even grades.
“It’s so wrong, right?” he asks, as if he can read my mind. “That it’s this easy to hack into the system. To steal a password?”
“How often do you do this?”
He shrugs. “I’ve changed schedules for a few people who were freaking out about shit, but mostly I just change a couple of friends’ schedules at the beginning of each semester. Avoid the counseling office.”
“Have you ever changed . . . more than schedules?”
“Like grades?” he says with a laugh. “Of course not.”
I’m so relieved, I let go of the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“Although I think you’re the first person to recognize it’s the same program,” he adds. “None of my friends have put that together.”
“If they knew, would they ask you to do it?”
His head cocks to the side, and I can tell he’s chewing on the inside of his cheek. For some reason that makes me smile.
“I don’t think so. I mean, the guys who are my friends wouldn’t—they know I wouldn’t do it. And most of the other guys we hang out with, they don’t care enough to ask.” I’m tempted to tell him not to befriend any AP students because nobody cheats as much as they do, but I don’t. Because technically that’s me—I’m an AP student.
“What do you want last period?” Ben asks.
After I’m inserted into the right Spanish class, Ben prints my schedule and looks down, refusing to meet my eyes. My breath catches, and I wonder if he’s going to say something about the accident.
“So I’m not saying you would, but usually when I do this I make the person swear they won’t tell anyone.”
My insides plummet. “What, you don’t want eight hundred people asking you to schedule them?”
“No . . . it’s not about how many people are asking,” he says. “It’s more about why they’re asking, if that makes any sense. If it’s ‘Oh, counseling messed up my schedule and won’t fix it,’ okay. If it’s ‘I want a teacher who will let me cut class and not take attendance,’ I don’t want to bother.”
“Honor among cheaters?” I ask. And immediately regret it, because he glances up at me and looks pained—like I’ve insulted him.
“It’s just . . .” He sighs. “I don’t always make the right decisions, and I get that.” He shrugs. “But at the end of the day, I want to be able to look myself in the eyes and say I believe in them. I want to know I’d make each one again.”
I do know. It makes so much sense, my chest aches. Right should be about conviction. For all of my condescending comments about everyone else in this school, I can’t think of anything that I choose to believe in, that I choose to stand for. Except maybe Jared.
“And would you?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. “Would you do it again?”
Something in his face changes, and he pushes his chair back and stands up. I’m talking about more than my schedule now.
But he just shrugs. “Even I know Janelle Tenner shouldn’t be in earth science and algebra. They would have fixed it for you eventually. Why not speed up the process?”
“Thanks,” I say, but I don’t feel it. Inside my eyes are watery and my throat is tight. A heaviness weighs down on my chest. Because that isn’t at all what I wanted to hear.
I sit there for a long time after he’s walked away. I replay each moment in my mind—the accident, what I saw and felt, almost running into him in the office, seeing him at lunch the other day, this conversation. He’s not what I expected at all.
I replay it all. Over and over, like I’m trying to memorize each detail and figure it out.
Until someone touches my shoulder and I can’t help but jump.
“I’ve been calling you,” Nick says with a laugh. “Come on, let’s hit off-campus for lunch.”
I don’t roll my eyes, even though I want to. We just went through this yesterday—how does he not remember? “Nick, I can’t—”
“Don’t worry. Coach is at the gate. I already talked to him, and he said he’ll let you through.”
He flashes me such a big smile, I instantly feel bad for thinking the worst when he’s actually planned ahead.
I should be giving him a chance instead of second-guessing his motives, without looking down on him because he has different priorities than I do.
“Sure,” I