Categorical Imperative

The girl, her name was Angela, turned to me, grinning. Her teeth had small black and grey circles of rot at the edges. A swath of black hair covered her right eye. The left, large and green, with a tiny knob of white mucus at the inner corner, glimmered at me. Her elbow brushed mine. I started. I looked back down at the sheet of paper in front of me, stared at the second essay question on the history exam. I knew the answer. I'd written half of it down already. But I couldn't go on. That green eye was pinned on me, entreating.

Angela was my classmate from fourth to sixth grade. She skipped more school days than she attended. When she came to school her uniform smelled musty; the pockets on the blue apron were coming undone at the seams. Her hair was flecked with tiny balls of lint. And her homework was always badly done. She passed from one grade to another, barely, because teachers in Communist Romania were reprimanded if students failed their classes, so they didn't let any but the most incorrigible fail. Angela wasn't one of the bad ones. She smiled a lot. She waited cheerfully to be picked for games during recess. She struggled with her homework, though that was a battle she lost most of the time.

She did nothing more than smile at me during that history exam. She didn't give me any secret signals to help her. But I knew that what she wanted was for me to move my arm a bit away from my exam paper so that she could read a few lines and patch together her own answer. I forced myself not to look at her. I scribbled on, holding my breath when a whiff from her clothes reached my nose. I glanced up at the teacher once; he was sitting at his desk, reading, his glasses low on his nose. He was a handsome man. When he looked up at the class his eyes sparkled, and his hair, blond on the top of his head, white on the sides, bristled. He didn't walk along the rows between desks during exams like other teachers. He said he trusted us. He said what history was supposed to do anyway was teach us what it meant to be an honorable man.

Eventually, towards the end of the hour we were allowed for the exam, I moved my hand enough for Angela to see what I'd written. I felt for a long time after that I'd lost something, not my honor, not in the sense my history teacher meant it. I felt sorry for Angela, though I was afraid of her, of her poverty, of her being an outsider, and most of all I think of her serenity about it. During that history exam I did something I didn't think I was capable of: cheat. It felt deeply wrong, but it also felt inevitable. Sometimes rules are meant to be broken.

I was very troubled by this. I told myself for a long time that I hadn't cheated on purpose, that I'd simply moved my hand -- it could have happened by accident, it could have been a muscle spasm -- and that Angela had the choice of looking at my answer or not. But I'd made a choice too. I'm not sure even now that it was the right one.