Yet Phyllis was aware of the number of the last assigned password. It must be in her records. Did she know who was using it? Was Phyllis, herself, using it?
Nancy’s thoughts were interrupted when her first student arrived. He was a tall, awkward boy named Dan. “I don’t see why we have to learn this stuff,” Dan mumbled as Nancy opened the history book. “These geeks are dead, man.”
Nancy could see that she had her work cut out for her.
Her next two students weren’t much easier. One was a girl with short red hair who needed help in English. Apparently, she had never bothered learning much spelling or grammar because she had Spellcheck and Grammarcheck on her home computer.
The other one was a girl who was failing history. She admitted to Nancy that she’d been caught writing her reports from miniseries on TV.
To each of the three students, Nancy asked the same leading question: “Wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow change your old grades now that you’re going to start doing better?” She asked it casually, with a smile, but her blue eyes scrutinized their faces for any trace of reaction. All three students agreed it would be wonderful, but Nancy didn’t note any signs of guilt or nervousness.
Nancy glanced at the name of her fourth and final student before lunch. Victor Paredes. He was the guy Sally had named as the computer whiz, she recalled. Apparently he needed tutoring in English.
There was a tap on the open door. Nancy looked up and saw a guy standing there, grinning at her. He was very good-looking, tall and broad shouldered, with light brown, almost amber eyes, and dark brown hair.
“Hi, Teach,” he said.
“Hi, Stu,” she retorted. “Come on in.”
Nancy looked over the sheet that detailed what he was supposed to work on, then got down to it. Victor was very quick, but it was obvious he had never bothered to spend more than two minutes on English grammar before. Now that he was bothering, he caught on easily.
“If any of my teachers were as pretty as you, maybe I would have paid more attention to this stuff,” said Victor, gazing into Nancy’s eyes.
“With lines like that I’m surprised you didn’t get better grades.” Nancy laughed, trying to deflect his flirtation.
At the end of one of the exercises, Nancy said, “Now, that wasn’t hard, was it? It’s too bad you can’t go back and change last year’s grade in English, now that you know how to do the work.”
“Who says you can’t?” Victor replied. “I could, if I wanted to.”
Nancy started, then caught herself and said lightly, “Don’t be ridiculous. Your grades are in your permanent file.”
“Sure,” said Victor, flashing her a dazzling grin. “And my permanent file is in the school computer, along with everybody else’s.”
Nancy fought to keep cool as she said, “Yes, I know. But you need special access codes to get to them, don’t you? Otherwise, people would go around giving themselves whatever grades they wanted.” She held her breath and waited to hear what he would say.
“There are ways to access those codes,” Victor replied. “You’d have to be really smart to figure out how. But I could.”
Nancy laughed. “You’re not big on modesty, are you?”
Pink spots bloomed on Victor’s cheeks. “Well, I don’t want you thinking I’m dumb just because I bombed out in English,” he told her. “I mean, being smart is sort of attractive, isn’t it? And I want you to see my good side.”
Again, Nancy tried to ignore his flirting, though she couldn’t help being charmed by it a little, too. “You mean, you’ve figured out how to get into the locked files in the school computer?” she asked, trying to get the conversation back on track. “That’s pretty amazing—if it’s true.”
“It’s true, all right. Here, I’ll prove it to you.” He went over to the terminal and turned it on. “Let’s see, what would light a fire under the honchos in the big office? Hey, I know!”
Nancy looked over his shoulder. His fingers were moving over the keyboard too quickly for her to follow, but on the screen she saw a demand for a password, then a directory of files. Apparently, Victor had somehow figured out how to get past the security codes and break into the system. The glowing cursor moved down the list of files and stopped at one named HEADMAST.BIO.