Tales From Heller

The Only Winning Move

After the poster thieves had been identified by Jason and his impressively competent team, their info was relayed to Mr. Kurtz, who decided the fair thing to do was to bring them in for a talk with him and Jason. This was a thorny case: they were already Epsilons, and thus had nothing to lose with regard to the club's social system, and it was deemed politically inadvisable for the situation to escalate beyond Mr. Kurtz's office. Parents would have to be called, emails would have to be sent home, questions would be raised. The worst possibility was that the tide of public opinion could turn against them—Mr. Kurtz was already used to words like "draconian" being thrown around, and the last thing he needed was his most troublesome students becoming martyrs.

Jason had tried foisting his duty of disciplinarian onto Frank, preferring to remain in the shadows, but Frank had "obligations" with Juliet (Jason was starting to suspect something to their dinners—when he got word that Juliet was the main initiator of these encounters, he assumed she had kompromat on Frank), and it was left to him to confront these rebels. They dressed formally, almost identically, in tight suits with black ties that made them look like bodyguards, but despite their composed presentation, Jason knew these were the lowest of the low. They avoided eye contact, but one chewed gum defiantly. He hated the noise—was this disrespect intentional? Or maybe they simply didn't know any better.

Their first team task was simple: get them to admit they had actually stolen the poster—nobody outside the club or Mr. Kurtz would be willing to pay this any heed without a confession:

"Look, all of you are good kids," Mr. Kurtz began. "We know you did this. There aren't going to be any consequences—any bad consequences—if you confess. Y'all are already on bathroom duty anyway, it's not like we can make you scrub the floors with your tongues. How about this: whoever first confesses gets no bathroom duty for a week and a day of Alpha meals."

"We can't do that!" Jason interjected in a loud whisper to Mr. Kurtz, the Epsilons looking on unfazed. "It's not fair to the other students who've earned those privileges, not having to clean the floors with toothbrushes or shine the Alphas' shoes. We aren't rewarding them for going above and beyond—we're rewarding them for doing the bare minimum of human decency."

"Let me handle this," Mr. Kurtz said back, and he turned again to face the Epsilons:

"I don't want to stand all day and wait for one of you to speak up. I get why you don't want to say anything—your friends are here. So here's what I'll do: I'll send one of you to Ms. Wolfe's office, one of you can stay here, and one of you can wait outside with Jason. You won't be able to see each other or communicate. Whichever of you fesses up first gets the rewards, and the other two won't know who did, just that they weren't first. And to spice things up more: the two who don't confess will have to call home with me while I explain that they didn't just do something bad, they didn't do the upstanding thing and admit to it. Deal?"

The Epsilons nodded, and so the plan was put into action. Jason and his assignee, Ricky (Epsilon, 2.1 GPA, in Ms. Liu's academic support class, phone password 80085), went to the central courtyard. The January air was fresh, and around them students did their homework, cleaned the campus, chatted with their friends, and did all the things happy high school students did.

"So I hear you're in Ms. Liu's academic support class? Do you like her as a teacher?" Jason asked, wishing to build rapport and also kill time. Ricky looked sullen, and made no response.

"This isn't a trick question or anything. I just want to make conversation. Who knows how long we're going to be out here?"

"It's good," Ricky said. "I'm passing all my classes right now."

"That's great. Is she a nice teacher?"

"Yeah. She's nice."

"Two people from my grade are in your class, right? John and Regina?"