With a loud sigh, Madeline Myers laid the essay she had just finished on the growing pile to her left. Then, rather than reach for the next one, she opted instead for the open bottle of beer that rested between the two piles. Normally, the thirty-six year old redhead would never indulge while grading student papers, but in this circumstance she felt she would never get through them without doing so.

Putting down the bottle, she again sighed as she picked up another paper from the now thankfully smaller stack to her right. Glancing at the title, she saw that this one, at least, had a different subject than the last six. While she had expected a good number of the students to pick the easiest subject, reading the results had been frustrating because just about every one of them had failed to cover the most important points.

“Well you have no one to blame but yourself,” Maddie thought as she began to read the opening paragraph. “You could’ve just said no when Principal Carey asked you to take over Mr. Andreatti’s history class, just like the other six teachers he asked before you did.”

A month before, Dino Andreatti, one of the high school’s veteran teachers, had suffered a mild heart attack. Thankfully, his doctor’s prognosis was for a full recovery, but he would be out until the next term at the very least. Catching Maddie at an unguarded moment, one which she later defined as one in which she couldn’t come up with a believable excuse as to why she couldn’t, John Carey had talked her into taking over the class for the last few weeks.

“It’s a senior class,” Carey had stressed as he tried to make the offer more appealing, “they graduate in not more than a month. It’s more babysitting than teaching.”

Normally, Maddie wouldn’t have minded the extra assignment, especially since she owed the principal a favor or two. She actually still liked being a teacher, although admittedly not as much as when she’d first stepped in front of a class twelve years before. Her reluctance in this case was that it was American History 101, or as it was more commonly known – the Neanderthals.

Every school had a class like that, some more than one. A class designed to be an easy grade for jocks that needed to keep their academic eligibility. Maddie wasn’t naïve; she knew how the game, so to speak, was played. That didn’t mean, however, that she had to like it.

In fact, she was about to say no, excuse or no excuse, when the principal played his trump card. If she took over the class, he promised, he would count the extra time against the post term activities that every teacher was required to do. In other words, she would start her summer vacation two weeks ahead of everyone else. That, Maddie had to admit, fell under the category of an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Therefore, she agreed to go along, but only to a point. There was no way she was going to give out passing grades without having anything to base them on. Just showing up for class simply wasn’t going to cut it, not with her name on the class register. The problem, she quickly discovered, was that Mr. Andreatti hadn’t so much as given a pop quiz all semester.

It wouldn’t have taken much effort to come up with a final exam, but even she had to admit that it wouldn’t be fair to judge this class by the same standards that she used for her regular ones. It was also doubtful, she judged, that most of these students could pass one of her tests. It was then that she came up with the idea of the essay.

She announced to the class the next morning, only the third day of her charge, that their entire final grade was going to be based on an independent research paper. The topic of which, she said, could be of their own choosing, as long as it covered a subject listed in the syllabus. All they had to do to pass, and in doing so graduate, was show that they had learned something about American History this year. At the time, little had she imagined that in the case of this particular class, even that might prove an insurmountable task. By the time she’d read the first half dozen essays, Maddie realized that she’d be grading their work on a very generous curve. Then, by the time the read pile was one paper higher than the unread one, the first bottle of beer had been opened.

It wasn’t that these kids were stupid, she thought, just that too many of them were simply lazy. From the time most of them first picked up a ball and exhibited superior skill in handling it, they had been led to believe that was all that mattered. Oh they might have to apply themselves somewhat in a few classes, but not too many. Not when there were teachers and school officials that were willing to help them along. Student sports brought both prestige and more importantly additional funding to the school, money that kept other programs going in a time of budget cuts. They also, she admitted, gave some students access to college educations that they might otherwise never have afforded. It was a game alright, one that had been played long before she’d become a teacher and would most likely continue long after she was gone. Therefore, it was pointless, she told herself, to get upset about it.

The student whose name graced the paper she next picked up was a perfect example of that system. Johnny Knight was an eighteen-year old first baseman on the school’s championship team. Well on his way to leading them to their fourth state title, he’d been offered both a full scholarship to one of the best schools in the state as and invited to skip school totally and play minor league ball. As far as anyone knew, he hadn’t yet made up his mind.

As she opened the plastic cover and began to read, Maddie remembered another aspect to the baseball player that had added to his fame. It might have been expected for a young man with his movie star looks and athletic form to score heavily among the school’s female population, but an often whispered but never confirmed rumor had made him almost legendary. The rumor claimed that his many conquests hadn’t been confined to a who’s who of the most desirable girls in school, but had included at least one and possibly two teachers as well. It had been a rumor that the administration hadn’t been eager to investigate, considering it their own version of don’t ask, don’t tell.

Every time she heard that rumor, Maddie wondered if it was true, and if so, who the teacher might have been. If she had to pick a likely candidate, her vote would go to Yvonne Anders, a physical education teacher who had topped the schools secret TILF list that the students created every year. Officially, just about every female teacher in the school, and a few male ones once the list became co-ed, expressed outrage that such a list actually existed. Secretly, however, more than a few harbored a secret delight at having been included on it. In all her years as a teacher, Maddie hadn’t so much as gained an honorable mention.

If that rumor was indeed true, Maddie wasn’t sure if she should be ashamed of her associate, whoever she or they might really be, or envious. At five ten and a hundred and sixty-two pounds, just about all of it muscle, coupled with looks that belonged on a matinee star and not the baseball field, Johnny Knight was temptation enough to lead the most devout woman astray. She’d often overheard other teachers who’d had him in their classes confess to their closest friends that if they let their minds wander too long thinking about it, they often ventured into forbidden realms.

Focusing her attention back on the subject in hand, Maddie found herself considerably surprised. She had expected Johnny’s report to be one of the worst of the lot and it was anything but. Her low expectation had been based on a confrontation she’d had with him after the class in which she’d announced the project.

Quite self-confidently, he had come up to her desk after everyone else had cleared the room, and informed her that because of his busy practice schedule, especially with the state championships only a few weeks away, Mr. Andreatti usually excused him from assignments like this. What was unmentioned, but inherent in his attitude, was his equally active social life.

Taken back for a moment by his presumption, especially since his former teacher had never given him any assignments to be excused from in the first place, Maddie had replied to his request with an anger that in hindsight was perhaps a bit over the top. He would, she informed him, submit a final report like everyone else or fail the class. Further, she added, if he planned to go and complain to Principal Carey, like she had heard he’d done on other occasions, he was free to do so. But she also warned him that she and the principal had an agreement that she could run this class as she saw fit, and that wasn’t about to change. Not if he wanted her to continue teaching it. In her class, she repeated, he had to do more than just occupy space.

“This is pretty good work,” Maddie said to herself as she turned another page. “I’m really surprised. Who’d have imagined that King Jock had a first class brain to go with his first class bod?”

Of course that wasn’t a sentiment she could share. Teachers were, after all, not supposed to notice such things. Not even when boys with rippling muscles came to class with body fitting t-shirts, or sweet young things wore outfits that left little to the imagination, especially when they had their tits all but hanging out.

Back in her own high school days, Maddie would never have dressed like that. Not that she wouldn’t have liked the guys, and she included teachers on that assessment, to have looked at her. The former Madeline Goldberg could’ve walked naked across the cafeteria hall, and only drawn slight interest. Not an ugly duckling by any means, she nevertheless considered herself only average. It was a description she preferred to the one she’d overheard her grandmother use – plain Jane.

She’d learned to compensate for the boy’s lack of notice of her body by developing her mind, quickly becoming the go to girl if you needed help in any subject. The problem with that was that once they got past the class, she quickly became a non-person again.

She thought that had changed in her second year of college when she met Benjamin Meyers, who had proposed marriage six months after they’d been introduced to each other at her sister’s wedding. Ben had seemed nice enough, so she had said yes. It hadn’t hurt that they’d been sleeping together since a month after they’d met. Still, it hadn’t taken long after they’d made it official for her to realize that their marriage had quickly devolved into one boring day after another, with the nights being even more so. The decision to divorce soon after their second anniversary came easier than the one to marry.

Not that her life after marriage had turned out to be very exciting either. She’d had a few short relationships in the years since, but none memorable. She’d even drifted into an affair with a married teacher who had since transferred to another school. To this day, she wasn’t exactly sure how that had come about.

They’d been picked as the school representatives for a conference up in the state capitol. Prior to that, she didn’t have any opinion, good or bad, about Teddy Green. Looking back, all she remembered was that on the second night of the conference, she and Teddy had been having drinks with a few other teachers they had met. Somehow, they had wound up back in her room afterwards, and before she knew it, they were kissing each other. Maddie distinctly remembered the feel of his hand as it slipped inside her blouse; the rest was pretty much an alcoholic blur. Except of course for the fact that only a few minutes later she found herself down on her knees, his cock deep in her mouth. Much later, she would learn that Teddy’s wife of twenty-two years considered that act to be both vile and disgusting, and something not done by decent women.

That one night stand had blossomed into an affair, one that had begun to wither even quicker than her marriage. Sharing box lunches and sneaking away for a quickie in a locked classroom afterwards hardly created the sort of memories she wanted to be able to look back on in her old age. Especially since even the quickie soon devolved into an even shorter knee bending session, without the lunch. Still, in light of the past few years, there had been times when Maddie missed even that.

“Son of a bitch!” Maddie suddenly exclaimed as she abruptly stopped reading and backtracked to start the last paragraph over. “Son of a bitch,” she repeated, now that she had no doubt.

Dropping the paper on the couch, Maddie got up and walked over to the desk where her laptop sat. Opening up one of the desk drawers, she pulled out a small box of storage disks and, after sorting through them until she found the one she wanted, slipped it into the drive.

Once the disk loaded, she went to the search screen and typed in the phrase that had caught her attention. It didn’t take long for the computer, old as it was, to sort through all the files and find a match.

Opening the file, Maddie quickly confirmed something that she was already sure of someone else had written Johnny’s paper. He had been smart enough not to simply copy one that he’d gotten off the Internet, but had gone to the trouble of having someone ghost write a totally new one for him. If it hadn’t been for that particular phrase that caught the teacher’s attention, he would’ve undoubtedly gotten away with it.

Scrolling up to read the name on paper, Maddie quickly remembered the girl as having been in her AP History last term. Johnny had to have known that, but what he couldn’t have known was that she had made such an impression on Maddie with her writing skills that her work might be recognizable. At the time she had first read it, Maddie had thought that turn of phrase that had worked its way into Johnny’s paper to be one of the cleverest turns of phrase she had read in a long time. So much so that it couldn’t help but seem familiar a year later. Even so, if it hadn’t been for the fact that a few years back, Maddie had begun to let her students email in their papers, she wouldn’t have been able to confirm her feeling so quickly. Rereading Alice Morgan’s paper in it’s entirely; she was now even more certain that she had written both reports. The writing style was too similar to be otherwise.

“That sneaky bastard,” she said as she shut down the laptop.

Maddie spent a good many hours over the rest of the weekend trying to decide what to do about the paper. Her first reaction of course was to simply give him a failing grade, which would undoubtedly prevent him from graduating as well as participating in the final championship game, still a week off. While her action would be more than justified, she began to have some reservations as to whether Principal Carey would let her do just that. There was no telling what an accusation of cheating, no more than an accusation since she had the proof, might do to his college prospects. Not wanting to be involved in any scandal, the state university might very well withdraw their scholarship offer. She didn’t think the baseball team would care, but you never can judge the effect of negative publicity.

Then there was the matter of Alice Morgan to consider. Since she had graduated the year before, there was little Maddie could do about her having helped Johnny cheat. Still, having her name associated with a scandal, one that would certainly get some press attention since it involved a star athlete, couldn’t do her own career goals much good.

American History 101 was her last class of the day on Monday, which was one of the reasons Principal Carey had asked her to take it, her original class schedule having ended a period before. As she went about her duties in the classes before it, Maddie felt a sour taste in her stomach. She had finally decided to do what was probably the best thing, even if it was the least palatable. She was going to let Johnny Knight get away with it. But not, she promised herself, without her first giving him a piece of her mind. It might not do him any good, but it might at least make her feel better about it.

Johnny Knight was confused but unconcerned when he got back his paper and instead of the B he had expected, he had told Alice not to make it too good, the front page had been marked with the instructions to see the teacher after class. That his deception had been found out never once entered his mind.

“Is this going to take long?” he said as he walked up to the desk, this time not even waiting the class to empty out. “I’ve got someone waiting for me.”

“No doubt,” Maddie said under her breath, not looking up from the papers on her desk.

She let him wait a few more moments, then told him to sit down and she would be with him as soon as she was finished. In actuality, she was just killing time, waiting until the last of the other students left. All told, she waited five minutes after that before telling him to close the classroom door so that they could speak uninterrupted.

She began by telling him that she had been genuinely surprised by the quality of the paper he had submitted. So much so that it caused her to reassess her original opinion of him.

Johnny sat up in the chair, a broad smile of satisfaction on his face. Then she dropped the hammer, causing that smile to instantly vanish.

“It really was a shame that I couldn’t give it the grade it deserved,” Maddie continued, “but that would be pointless since the author isn’t even a student at this school any longer.”

“I don’t understand,” Johnny said.

“Oh I’m sure you do,” Maddie replied. “Doesn’t the name Alice Morgan ring a bell?”

Johnny turned pale.

“I have to say that I’m deeply disappointed by this turn of events,” Maddie continued, ignoring his now obvious discomfort. “All you had to do was turn in anything, it didn’t even have to be that good, and you would’ve passed the class. Yet, you couldn’t even be bothered to do that much. No, it was just easier to have someone else do it for you.”

Johnny’s mind quickly focused on the phrase, “would’ve passed the class.”

“You’re going to fail me?” he asked.

“Isn’t that what happens to people who cheat on final exams?” Maddie said, not actually answering the question. “And as I made clear in class, this was your final exam.”

“But if I don’t pass, I don’t graduate,” Johnny said, as if the idea had just occurred to him for the first time.

“The two do usually go together,” Maddie said, resisting the urge to smile.

“My scholarship...” he said, his voice trailing off as the implications hit him.

His reaction was exactly what Maddie had been hoping for. The only question was how long she would let him dangle before letting him off the hook. Long enough, she hoped, for the lesson of what could have happened to really sink in. It was possible that once he was off the hook, he would quickly put it all out of his mind, but that was a chance she was willing to take. The longer she let him think about it, the greater the likelihood that it might have some positive effect.

“I don’t suppose that you even considered how this might affect Alice, have you?” Maddie asked, thinking of anything that would draw out the discussion.

“Alice?” he said.

“I don’t know what she got out of all this, but it’s liable to cost her as well,” Maddie said, thinking now that including Alice might not be a bad idea since it would help justify her letting him off scot free. “If I remember correctly, she once told me she had plans to be a teacher when she graduated. That obviously would now be out the window.”

To her disappointment, Maddie saw that her inclusion of Alice seemed to have no effect on Johnny. All he kept talking about was what his not graduating was going to mean to him.

“Oh well, at least I tried,” Maddie thought in frustration as she decided it was time to do what was she had to do.

Before she could, however, Johnny suddenly became quite animated and began talking over her.

“Look, I know I did something really stupid, and I’m sorry,” he said, the look of concern on his face quite genuine. “But there had to be another way that we can work this out.”

Maddie paused for a moment, maybe her scare tactic might have some lasting effect after all.

“Do you mean like taking a make over?” she asked. “Redoing, or actually doing the paper this time.”

“Not exactly,” Johnny said. “The state championship game is this Friday and I have practice almost every day after school.”

“So much for him having learned a lesson,” Maddie thought.

“I was thinking something more along the lines of a trade,” he said.

Now it was Maddie’s turn to look confused, saying that she didn’t understand.

“You have something that I want, a passing grade,” Johnny said, glancing over his shoulder for a second at the empty room, as if making sure there was no one else there to hear, “and maybe I have something that you want.”

“A bribe, you’re actually offering me a bribe?” Maddie said in surprise. “You want to give me money in exchange for a passing grade?”

As shocked as she was, Maddie couldn’t help but be curious as to how much money he was actually talking about. She knew Johnny’s family was middle class so it wasn’t like he was going to be offering her some big payday. Probably at least a thousand dollars, she thought, anything less would be insulting. Not that she had any thought of actually taking it.

“I wasn’t talking about money,” Johnny said, adding even more to her confusion.

“I don’t understand,” Maddie said.

“Something you might enjoy more than money,” Johnny said.

When it was obvious that she still didn’t get what he was implying, Johnny was a bit more explicit, pointing out that he knew that many of the female teachers looked at him in the same way that most of the students in school did. In fact, he admitted, giving confirmation to the rumor, a few of them had done more than look.

“Yvonne Anders?” Maddie said without thinking, stunned as Johnny nodded his head in acknowledgement.

“I’m not going to confirm anyone else because the both of them are married,” Johnny said, expanding the list to one more than anyone had suspected.

“Well it’s nice to see that you have some scruples,” Maddie said, if a bit sarcastically.

The sarcasm was lost on Johnny.

“So we’d just do right here on the desk?” Maddie asked, this time making it hard to miss.

As soon as she’d said the words, she was reminded of the few times when she and Teddy Green had done just that.

“No, we could go somewhere else,” Johnny smiled. “Maybe a motel, or your apartment.”

“Neither of those sounds quite private enough,” Maddie pointed out, not able to believe that she was actually having this conversation, even if she knew that it was only for curiosity, that she would not actually do something like that.

“Well, my brother has a place over in Greenridge, that’s about an hour away,” Johnny suggested. “He lets me use it when he’s out of town, like he is now.”

The phrase “keep your indiscretions a hundred miles from the flag pole” jumped involuntarily into Maddie’s head. Greenridge wasn’t a hundred miles away, but it wasn’t just around the corner either.

“This is insane,” was the next thought that popped into her head, and she opened her mouth to say just that.

Instead, it came out as a question as to, if that was where he had taken the others.

“The married ones,” Johnny answered. “Miss Anders just had me come over to her apartment.”

Somehow, knowing Yvonne Anders as she did, Maddie didn’t find that surprising. There was a reason that she only taught gym and health education.

“So what do you think?” Johnny finally asked.

Now was the time, Maddie knew, to bring this all to a close, saying that it was a tempting offer but one that she had to decline. But since he was so sincere in his remorse, a lie but what else could she say, she was going to cut him a break. After all, there was Alice to think of, as well as how devastated his parents might be if he didn’t graduate.

Then, for the second time, her mouth opened and the wrong words came out. To her surprise, she simply said okay.

Johnny had given her his brother’s address and told her he would be there at eight o’clock that night. As she drove south about a quarter after seven, Maddie considered the fact that she really should just turn the car around and hightail it back home. Give him the minimum passing grade and just pretend that none of this ever happened.

Thinking about their conversation afterwards, Maddie decided that all it needed was a change of gender to match the plot of one of those old porn videos she and Ben used to watch in a vain attempt to spice up their marriage. The young temptress who seduced the older teacher to get a passing grade. Things like that didn’t happen in real life, did they? Yet, by his own admission, Johnny had slept with three teachers, although he never stated that it had been for a grade. She was sure that whoever the other two had been, they had also made the TILF list, married or not.

As the miles passed, she thought back to the image in her bathroom mirror that greeted her when she came out of the shower, only a bit over an hour ago. There was nothing really wrong with her body, at least not when compared to any other thirty-six year old. Yes, she could stand to lose some weight, who couldn’t, and her breasts sagged just a bit. But overall, it wasn’t that much different from the image that greeted her on her wedding night. However, it definitely wasn’t an image that would entice an eighteen-year old boy, especially one that looked like Johnny and had his pick of women.

Putting on her sexiest underwear, ones that had been bought by a boyfriend now long gone, Maddie tried to justify what she was doing. It wasn’t as if she was really trading the grade for sex, since she had planned from the beginning to let him slide. True, at least for another week, he was still a student and she was a teacher, so that bothered her a little. But, she reminded herself, he was the one who initiated this, and he was eighteen, even if he was still a student. The racy undergarments were balanced out by a plain blue dress, the kind she would normally have worn to school.

When she turned into the parking lot of the apartment house where Johnny said his brother lived, Maddie was having doubts. Still she went on, leaving her car in one of the spots for visitors on the far end and walking the length of the lot to the lobby entrance. It wasn’t until she was reaching for the buzzer on the wall that it suddenly occurred to her that all of this could be a set up.

“Oh my God, what if it is?” she asked herself. “What if Johnny and some of his friends were waiting for her, ready to have a laugh at the expense of the horny old teacher? How could I ever explain what I’m doing here if that was the case?”

Suddenly, the idea of picking a less clandestine place, one that might’ve had an alternate reason for being there grew in appeal. Perhaps Yvonne wasn’t as dumb as Maddie had taken her for. Still, it seemed too late to back down now, and Maddie rang the bell.

While she waited for a response, she considered the idea that she could always claim she had a frantic call from one of her students, despondent that he was going to fail her class and not graduate. That she hadn’t called anyone else because he asked her not to. It was a weak excuse she knew, but better to be thought of as having made a bad call than being exposed in the truth.

“Yes,” said the voice over the intercom, just muffled enough for Maddie to not be totally certain that it was Johnny’s.

“Madeline Myers,” she said, keeping her response neutral in case anyone else was listening.

“Come on up,” came the reply as the door buzzed and unlocked.

Much to her relief, Johnny answered the door himself, wearing a short, terry cloth robe. He looked fresh from the shower, which he had been taking, explaining that he had come to the apartment right from practice.

He quickly tried to set her as ease, telling her that they were quite alone, offering to let her take a quick look to make certain. Evidently, that concern had occurred to his previous guests as well. It only took a few minutes for her to cover all four rooms, although by the time she was done she felt a bit silly actually checking both the closets and behind the shower curtains.

“Would you like a drink?” Johnny asked. “We’ve got beer or I could open a bottle of wine?”

“A beer would be fine,” Maddie said, thinking for a moment that she might get in trouble drinking with an underage student, then realizing how that was the least of the things she could get in trouble for here.

Johnny took two cold beers from the refrigerator and after opening them both, handed her one. To her surprise, she downed almost a third of it at once. Johnny went a little more slowly with his.

“Well it’s not as if I’m the one who has to worry about getting it up,” she thought after considering how much she had just downed.

“Why don’t we have a seat on the couch?” Johnny said, motioning to the long L shaped sofa in the center of the room.