Chapter 3

The mock exam results were posted a week later.

A crowd of students gathered around the bulletin board in the main hall.

I pushed my way through, my heart hammering.

My name. Sarah Miller.

SAT Score: 820.

Near the bottom.

A small, grim satisfaction settled in me. Phase one complete.

Then I scanned for Tiffany Hayes.

There.

Tiffany Hayes. SAT Score: 1580.

Perfect math. Perfect verbal.

A wave of dizziness hit me.

How?

She was smart, yes, but not that smart. Not perfect score smart.

Not on her own.

"Sarah? Can I see you in my office?"

Ms. Evans stood beside me, her expression a mixture of concern and disappointment.

I followed her, my mind reeling.

In her office, she gestured for me to sit.

"Sarah, your mock SAT scores... they're, well, not what we expected."

She looked genuinely worried.

"I know you're capable of so much more. Is everything okay?"

"I'm fine, Ms. Evans," I said, my voice flat.

"Well, I wanted to show you something. As a learning opportunity."

She pulled out two exam booklets.

One was mine. The other, I knew, was Tiffany' s.

"Look at Tiffany's math section," Ms. Evans said, her brow furrowed. "It's remarkable. She got every question right."

She flipped to one of the complex problem-solving questions.

"And her methodology... it's quite unique. Especially for this problem."

She pointed to the scratch paper section where Tiffany had shown her work.

My blood ran cold.

The steps. The formulas.

The exact unique, flawed approach I had deliberately used, knowing it would lead to a wrong answer if followed to its logical conclusion.

My flawed setup. My strange, roundabout way of thinking, designed to fail.

Tiffany had replicated it. Perfectly.

But then, at the very last step, she' d inserted the correct numbers, the correct final answer.

As if she knew my flawed path, but also knew the real destination.

"She even made a similar notation here," Ms. Evans mused, pointing to a symbol I'd idly doodled in the margin of my own scratch work while pretending to think. "A little star. It' s almost identical to a mark you made on your paper, though you got the answer wrong."

It wasn' t almost identical. It was identical.

My breath caught in my throat.

This wasn't just cheating.

This was something else. Something... invasive.

She wasn't just stealing answers.

She was stealing my thoughts.

How?

"It's uncanny," Ms. Evans continued, oblivious to my internal turmoil. "It's like she understood your unique approach but then corrected it at the end. Very impressive."

Impressive? It was terrifying.

My suspicion was confirmed.

The room felt like it was closing in.

I stood up, my chair scraping against the floor.

"I have to go," I managed to say.

I found Tiffany in the cafeteria, holding court with her friends, Chad by her side, laughing.

I walked straight up to her.

"Tiffany."

She looked up, surprised. "Sarah. What can I do for you?"

"Your math section on the mock SATs," I said, my voice louder than I intended. "Explain it. Explain your work for question seventeen."

The one with my deliberately flawed, unique method.

Tiffany blinked, her smile faltering for a second.

Chad stepped forward. "Hey, what's this about, Sarah? Leave her alone."

"I want to hear her explain it," I insisted, my gaze locked on Tiffany.

Tiffany recovered quickly, her eyes narrowing. "I don't have to explain anything to you. I got a perfect score. You didn't."

"You copied my flawed method," I said, my voice shaking slightly. "How did you do that, Tiffany? How did you get inside my head?"