I don't know what possessed me to do it. The way he presented us with half the prompt just seemed like a challenge. Even when I had looked up the mysterious remainder of it, I barely gave it a glance. I didn't outline ahead of time instead of wasting the precious 15 minutes I usually do before hastily scribbling down my disjointed thoughts for the next 30 in class. And surely, if I had any sense, I wouldn't have had the paper proudly plopped on my desk when he went around handing an exact ditto out to all the others.

I remember the unimpressed look on his face, the judgement in his eyes, as I realized that what I had essentially done was cheat. I remember asking myself, "Why the %$$# did you have to do that?" I could never explain myself if he asked me to because I don't know why I just felt the urge to prove that I could do it.

Oh how I feared what he was going to do to me - rip me a new one, at least; perhaps fail me from his class at worst. All I could do was duck my head and stumble through the prompt clumsily, writing something that would barely pass for an essay (which was my usual in this class). I must have looked really guilty, and I remember thinking of what I was going to say. I'm pretty sure I decided on, "I understand if you want to give me a zero. I think I might deserve it." Whatever I said, whatever his reaction, I knew he was going to hate me.

At the end of the allotted 45 minutes, I wordlessly walked up to his desk, stapled together everything I had scrawled, and held my breath.

But he said nothing, and I said nothing, so I grabbed my bag and left.

I don't know whether he really forgot about it, realized that it wasn't my intention to cheat (or thought that I was so abysmal at it if I was that he felt sorry for me), or simply decided to be merciful because it was the end of senior year and he knew that making a big deal out of it would jeopardize my going to my choice university. I guess I will never know why I got away with something so stupid, but in retrospect, I was lucky that my ridiculous impulses didn't ruin me at 17.

It's just a shame the impulses didn't stop there.

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