Busted: Buying Time

Monday, January 02, 2006

Five weeks of The Moose in the Closet left before I take my much needed break. I had a great vacation, by the way, and I’ll try to get some video and pictures up tomorrow. I just got back to DC today and I’m fucking BEAT. New Years was nuts, we had a bottle of champagne for everyone at the party but the ladies drank them all – so all the chicks were drunk off their asses and the dudes were taking care of them, complete roll reversal from our usual parties.

Quote of the night goes to my very own Robin. We’re walking down Court Street, after midnight, on our way to Magnetic Fields and all the girls are wasted. We’re carrying beers and Red Bull’s with Vodka when G spots a cop car. He drops his drink down and says to our entourage, “It’s the Popes. The Benedicts.”

Robin turns to G and very, very, very loudly proclaims, “I call them a dick in my ass because I don’t need that shit!” We all start laughing, quite hard.

Robin also told someone, “If you want the chips you gotta get through the bitch,” while pointing at herself. She was pretty funny last night, to say the least.

__________________

Getting busted is a very stressful ordeal. That moment when you stand there, your mind racing – trying to make up excuses – the only words coming from your mouth are “um” and “uh” – the sweat forming on your brow, the shakes running through your body – the way you look for inspiration and strength somewhere near your twitching feet as you shift about and silently pray the person who busted you gets a cell phone call telling them their wife was in a car accident or some other event so horrible that it’ll pull them away from their accusatory posture and buy you at least another week to come up with a viable excuse and find some ingenious way to work it into conversation.

Once you’re busted you should just face the music and get it over with – like a fucking band-aid you take all the hurt up front instead of dragging it out. Like when I cheated on Jessica, my Junior High “girlfriend” and I was 100% positive she saw me making out with some other chick. The next time I saw Jessica I broke up with her before she can even accuse me of shit. I was busted, I knew I was busted and I just said, “Fuck this,” and handled it like a man.

An emotionally detached man but a man none-the-less.

What’s the worst is when you get busted, you decided to make an excuse instead of facing the music, and the excuse is JUST good enough to buy you several weeks of agonizing wait.

Boston University had a very strict “no cheating” policy. If you were caught cheating you were fucked – as in potential college career ending fucked. And when you’re paying one of the highest tuition rates in the country – that’s a fucking you don’t want. Needless to say, we cheated all the fucking time.

Copying homework, buying completed work from students who already took the class, drifting eyes during tests – I don’t know of a single student at BU who didn’t cheat at least once in their four years at that school – either giving away answers or happily accepting them. The reason I never met a single student that didn’t cheat? Because students that didn’t cheat had no friends.

One day, junior year, this guy Loc asked to borrow my lab report. It’s such a common occurrence you don’t even think twice about handing it over. Who the fuck looks that closely at a lab book, right? Well – my professor, for one.

The next day she sends me an email telling me to come to her office. I get there and she doesn’t just voice her suspicions – she tells me she knows I cheated and she’s going to fail both Loc and I. Not wanting to fuck around and get an F in a required class, I play dumb – something that instantly gets shut down the moment she shows me Loc’s paper.

And it is basically my paper, word for fucking word.

I was ready to kill that dumb fuck. Common courtesy, when copying, dictates that you rewrite the entire thing using the data and you even purposely make a mistake or two. But you don’t sit there with the person’s homework in front of you and scribble everything written onto a blank sheet of paper without taking the time to process the information and reformat it for your own homework.

I knew I was fucked, no matter what, so I said that the other day Loc asked to see my lab notebook because he was fucking up somewhere and he wanted to see my notes. I said my paper was in the notebook and he must have copied it then. Although I shouldn’t have handed him the notebook – I was still in a little trouble even with that excuse – it’s a lot better than premeditated cheating on my part and since Loc was the asshole who fucked up a routine copy-job there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be the person to take the burn.

My professor, however, didn’t buy my excuse – she picked up her phone and called Loc up. That had to be the worst thirty consecutive seconds of my life, I had no idea what she was going to say but I can only imagine she was going to try and catch me in a lie. When it became obvious she was talking to his voice mail I breathed a little easier – I bought myself some time.

She dismisses me and I fucking RUN to the nearest phone, call Loc and leave him a message highlighting everything that just happened, how he fucked me, and how I will kill him if he doesn’t take the fall on this one. After I hang up the phone I run back to the dorm and leave him a note. I go to my computer and send him an email. I make sure that there are several different ways he can receive word about his impending death at my hands if he doesn’t act like a man and take the F, get me in the clear.

The day goes by and I don’t hear from him.

The next day I call again, email again. His roommate says he wasn’t home the night before. Another day passes – still nothing – I don’t know what to do so I just sit and wait for either Loc or my professor to contact me and each day is exponentially more stressful than the previous day.

Finally lab comes along and I still haven’t heard from Loc. The professor asks me if I’ve seen him and I tell her I haven’t – she doesn’t believe me but it buys me more time. She tells me she’ll let me stay in the class for now in case my story ends up holding up.

Finally, about four days later, Loc calls me up and tells me he’ll take the hit and clear this up. I’m furious at this point – my professor is harassing me everyday, no-one’s spoken to this guy – he just fucking disappears at the worst possible time and leaves me making excuses left and right to cover up his fuck up.

He tells me he went to the school nurse, discovered he had chicken pox and they quarantined his ass or something. The whole story sounded seriously suspect, I never heard of quarantining a dude for chicken pox, but it wasn’t the kind of excuse I could argue with.

Why would it be? He had a week and a half to come up with it.

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