If you were taking a test and you noticed an acquaintance cheating on the exam, how would you handle the situation? If they were trying to cheat off of you, how would you handle it then?

My ninth grade English class was all about smells and vocabulary tests.  Ours was the class with the exchange-teacher from England, Miss Harrington, and all the boys thought she was hot because she had a short, hip haircut and she wore sexy patterned stockings.  And her accent, of course.  This was the year I don't remember doing anything except vocab tests and shunning the attention of Erik, the younger brother of a world-famous tennis star.  Erik played tennis, too, and I guess he was good, but it had to have been difficult to play in the shadow of a Wimbledon-winning older brother.  Besides vocab tests, Erik was the bane of that year's English class.

One of the smells we all fought that year was from Miss Harrington.  While the boys said she was "hot", when the woman was actually hot, she ripened, and in the closed quarters of our small room, it was bad.  I think the jealous girls played it up.  I was not one of them, but maybe it was because I sat in the last row and was most distant from the armpit reek.  Girls would make a show of going to the back and cracking open a window.  If Miss Harrington didn't understand the opening of windows and sides of hands pressed under noses when she walked by, she definitely understood when a bar of soap and deodorant appeared on her desk one afternoon.  I don't know if she used them, but she definitely started dousing herself in perfume, adding to the olfactory excitement of the little room.

Miss Harrington, however, was not my main source of pain: that was Erik.  He hadn't been with our class in middle school, nor had he even been with us from the very beginning of the year.  It was speculated that he'd gotten kicked out of his fancy private school and was only slumming in public school temporarily.  His family was rich, and Erik wallowed in it.  Even my untrained eye could recognize the alligator on his shirts and the freshness of his sneakers.  His clothes were pressed, and certainly not by him.  Erik himself was a sloppy mess.  He thought he was hilarious and God's gift to the girls in this lowly school.  He thought he was cool, and, therefore, he sat in the back row.  Next to me.

I sat in the back because I liked the back where nobody could look at me and I could doodle in my Trapper Keeper and maybe read some Clive Barker before class started.