Everyone in town knew Miss F. Her face was fissured, wrinkles creasing over even deeper furrows on crinkled crinoline skin. She barely cleared five feet, that tiny slip of a woman, and she was 75 if she was a day. She spoke eleven languages fluently (including Chinese, Arabic, and Russian) had served as an interpreter for two American Presidents, and was currently the Spanish and French teacher at the local Junior High. She was iron covered in crumpled tissue paper.

You could recognize her from a distance; she frequently transported a rickety tower of books in an old shopping cart, the precarious pile threatening to tumble over the sides of the cart as she walked to school. She often wore a clay-colored flower pot hat with a red ribbon tied tightly under her slack jaw. The unfiltered Middle Eastern fireball sun could be unkind.

Rusty shopping cart wheels heralded her arrival in the classroom. Upon hearing the familiar squeaks that set one's teeth on edge, students sat at attention, straightening their spaghetti noodle spines as if her presence was an invisible ruler held to their backs. Miss F. was myth and monster, a horror story passed down from older siblings, a chimera.

The summer before seventh grade, I stared in abject horror at the class schedule that arrived in the mail: Spanish I - Miss F - seventh period. After a summer of hushed cautionary tales from neighborhood boys, I entered the first day of seventh period Spanish on legs of water. I half expected Miss F. to be an actual fire-breathing she-monster holding in her jaws the bloody arm of a misbehaving student, an arm whose hand still gripped the straw that had moments earlier been used to shoot spitballs.

She sat at her desk, head bowed as she wrote (a decree of death for some poor unfortunate, most likely). All I could see was the top of a jaw-skimming burgundy wig that flipped up at the ends. She was small and slight and surprisingly devoid of blood-soaked fangs or teenage viscera.

Before class started, my friend K. gripped my arm and hissed at me, her eyes wild, "Make sure you're sitting down before the bell rings! B. told R. that his sister J. had to stay after class for two hours because she wasn't in her seat when the bell rang, and R. said that J. was then TARGETED for the rest of the year because of it." Not wanting to be targeted, I sat.

At the sound of the bell, Miss F. stood and surveyed the room. We surveyed back. She was indeed wearing a wig; it sat just slightly cocked to the right, covering the top of one ear. She had magnificent cheekbones under her leathered cheeks and her eyes were the color of terror, a fear-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach-ice-grey that slid over all, missing nothing. They were the eyes of Knowing, the eyes of a teacher who had seen it all and was not amused.

She wore a white button-up shirt that was buttoned incorrectly, the last button glaringly undone without a hole to fit in. Her sensible burgundy skirt ended sensibly at her knees, and her sensible nude knee-high stockings ended sensibly at her very sensible black shoes. Underneath the nude hose was a network of purple bruises, veins, and copious bandaids, as if her fragile skin was torn and held together solely by the bandages.

All was silent as Miss F. laid out the class rules. Students were to be in their seats at the sound of the bell. Seats would be assigned. Homework would be issued every night and would be discussed the next day. When called on for an answer students were to stand to give it. There would be no talking , no writing of notes, no funny business, no monkeying around, no backtalking, no smartassery, and absolutely no foolishness. After week one, there would be no English spoken in class. Students would be taught Castilian Spanish as it is spoken in Spain, which is to say "gracias" would be pronounced "gra'-thee-us," not "gra'-see-us," because in Castilian Spanish the letter "c" when followed by certain vowels is pronounced like "th." And tortilla would refer to an omelet-like dish, never EVER to a flour/corn wrap for burritos.

As Miss F. walked slowly up and down the aisles, staring through our very cores with her Terminator eyes and evaluating us for weaknesses she could exploit in the future, her speech was interrupted by a very unfortunate boy (who would come to be known as "JungleArms" amongst my group of friends due to his regrettable proclivity for sleeveless t-shirts that exposed a tangled primeval forest of underarm hair) clattered in breathlessly and tried to slide into the first available seat.

And so it was that JungleArms became The Target. From that day forward he was picked on mercilessly by Miss F., made to go to the board for endless conjugations that ended in much shuffling of feet, and mocked thoroughly for his many mistakes. Fortunately JungleArms had a thick skin to go along with his thick underbrush of armpit hair. He laughed off the attention and answered most of Miss F.'s stinging barbs with a shrug.

Unfortunately JungleArms sat directly next to me in the assigned seating chart which had the very undesired effect of making me a Target By Virtue of Proximity. For every answer JungleArms didn't have, I was expected to pick up the slack. Luckily I had a knack for languages and didn't embarrass myself overly much.

Every night we were assigned homework exercises from our textbook which were to be entered into our Homework Notebook. The next day we would go over our homework in class. Miss F. would start with the person in the front row and have them answer question one, and then the person behind them would answer question two, and so on. It was easy to count the people in front of you and figure out which question you were going to have to answer out loud.

Being the lazy person I am, I decided I would never do the written homework - why answer all those questions when I would only be called on to answer one or two? The day the homework was due I would quickly figure out which question I would be asked then scribble the answer hastily on a scrap of paper so as to be ready to give it when called upon. I never did the rest of the exercises at home, which gave me more time to talk on the phone. Perfect solution to Teen Problem #873.

Except at the end of the trimester we were informed that we would be required to turn in our Homework Notebook, which was to be completed in full and counted for 25% of our grade. And just like that my perfect solution melted away like snowflakes on a hot tongue. I had two days until the notebook was due, two days to finish an entire trimester of work. It couldn't be done, so I ostriched my head in the sand and hoped Miss F. wouldn't notice I had no Homework Notebook to turn in.

Miss F. was absent the last day of the trimester. Her absence created quite a party atmosphere - substitute teacher, last day of school before a long break, exams completed. I barely registered the substitute's instructions, "Make sure you turn in your Homework Notebooks before you leave," her words almost unintelligible over the sounds of student exuberance. I skipped off to my vacation and didn't look back.

Two weeks into my break, the phone rang. Praying it would be Kyle T. on the other end (he'sthecutestboyin8thgradeohmygod), I slid through the kitchen on socked feet and slammed my hip into the kitchen counter as I picked up the phone.

"Hello," I said, hoping to affect an air of aloofness with the barest hint of vague interest.

"Yes, I need to speak to [THL] please, this is Miss F. from school."

OH MY GOD ohmigodohmigodohmigod OH GOD.

"I'm dead," I thought desperately, wondering if I could kill myself with a spatula and an ice cream scoop since the knives were too far away.

"Oh hi, this is me, she, her, um yeah, it's me, hola Senorita," I stumbled.

"I was just wondering where your Homework Notebook is, I can't seem to find it in the stack of notebooks that were turned in on the last day. You did turn in your notebook, didn't you? You're one of my best students, you've done well on all your tests and in class participation and I'm quite prepared to give you an 'A' this trimester, but if I don't have that notebook, I'm afraid I'll have to give you a 'C' in the class," Miss F. said, in a voice surprisingly kinder than the classroom voice I was used to hearing.

Despair pushed me to the ground, my back against the cupboard. A 'C' was and unacceptable grade in my family, especially a 'C' received for not doing one stitch of homework for an entire trimester. I floundered, swinging my arms around blindly, groping for a life ring of hope in my ocean of wretchedness.

Then it dawned on me, Miss F. wanted to believe I had turned in my Homework Notebook, why not go along with what she clearly wanted to believe? It was almost like telling the truth because Miss F. knew I understood the material, we were just missing a little matter of the written proof I had actually done the work.

"I did turn in my notebook, I turned it in on the last day of school, I gave it to the substitute!" I blurted the sentence out, running the words together in the hopes it would sound more believable. Sure, blame the substitute, a kindly Peggy Hill-type who had been nothing but nice to me, for losing my notebook. I had climbed onto the Moral Slip-n-Slide, and slippery it was indeed. No one in my path was safe.

"Well, that is interesting. A student turned in a photocopied notebook and tried to pass off as their own work. I was wondering whose notebook they copied, perhaps it was yours. Please come down to the classroom this afternoon so you can look at the work and see if it belongs to you," Miss F. replied.

That afternoon I stood outside the classroom door, not wanting to enter. What was I going to do? Confess? No, that wouldn't do for a number of reasons, least of which was the very distinct possibility that Miss F. could kill me with her wig and shopping cart alone. Try to pass off the copied homework as my own? A dangerous proposition, that. Stick to my lie that I had turned in the work and claim it was lost by the innocent substitute teacher? The problem with that solution (besides the fact that I would be heinously accusing an innocent person of something that never happened) was Miss F. might not care and still give me a 'C,' and a 'C' meant no Kyle, no pool, no friends, no life, a guaranteed Junior High Kiss of Social Death.

Full to the brim with roiling reluctance, I quietly walked in. Miss F. was writing at her desk like the first day I saw her. She looked at me over the top of her black-framed cat-eye glasses and motioned for me to come closer. She handed me a pile of photocopied papers, the name of the girl (which, in one of two bizarre coincidences, was the same name as mine) written boldly on the first page.

I inwardly gasped. The handwriting on the paper was eerily similar to mine. If there was such a thing, I had found my handwriting doppelganger. It was as if the gods had dropped the answer to all my troubles right into my greedy lap. My mind raced - if I took credit for this work that I absolutely did not do, the other [THL] would get in trouble. But! She was going to get in trouble anyway, because she clearly copied someone. Why not benefit from her problem and pass off someone else's work as my own?

[Something isn't wrong if no one sees you do it, right? If it doesn't really hurt anyone, it's not wrong, is it? What is this outdated concept of "wrong," anyway? It's just some antiquated list of things we shouldn't do written by some old fuddy duddy to keep us from having fun.]

I wish I could tell you I broke down and confessed all to Miss F. I wish I could tell you I took the 'C' I deserved.

I could justify my choice all kinds of ways - I really did know and understand the material even if I didn't technically, you know, DO THE WORK, no one was really hurt by my lie anyway, and hey - it's not like I purposely set out to copy someone like the other [THL] did. I just sort of fell into it!

With a lump in my throat, I told Miss F. that the notebook work was mine. She believed me without suspicion or reservation and I got an 'A' for the trimester. The other [THL] was marked down 25% of her original grade, and I never found out whose notebook she really copied.

Happy ending? Not to me. Yes, my perfect grade point average dodged a bullet and I escaped imminent parental punishment and the Junior High Kiss of Social Death. I did get to kiss The Boy and I was allowed to hang out with my friends and I swam in many pools. But I was never alone; regret was my constant companion, a quiet tap on my shoulder, a voice only I could hear as I drifted off to sleep. I had taken the easy way out and the easy way out is only easy in the short-term.

Yet another "writer" was caught blatantly plagiarizing another author (Kaavya Viswanathan, Harvard all-star who "wrote" some horrible twit lit book for which she was rewarded handsomely and wholly undeservedly). A debate is burning up the internet - what exactly is plagiarism? Don't we all borrow from each other? Copying isn't that big of a deal, everyone does it, it's practically a compliment to the original writer! Imitiation, sincerest form, flattery, blah blah. Blogs are aflame with opinions.

You can plagiarize someone's original ideas and copy them word for word and you can call that act whatever you'd like - call it "creative re-remembering" and then "lovingly reinterpreting, but unintentionally!" and you might convince everyone around you it was just an adorable mistake brought on by the combination of naive youth (Whaa...copying is wrong? I never knew!) and stress from trying to please super mean parents who expect you to be better than the over-achieving children of the Smiths and Joneses of the neighborhood, but you'll know what you did.

The knowledge will follow you as surely as Tuesday follows Monday, a constant companion while you're laughing with your friends or signing the cover of "your" latest book or kissing a boy named Kyle. You'll hear its inconvenient voice late at night and feel its insistent tap on your shoulder. You'll quickly turn, irritated, ready to say "not you again," and your stomach will drop as you catch a glimpse in the nearest reflective surface of a person who compromised and sold the fuck out. And whether it was for a good grade in Spanish class or a $500,000, two-book deal with a movie option, I bet it feels the same.