Riggs Park by Ellyn Bache

righteously devious. We tutored Steve, lied for him, taught him to write gibberish essays in an indecipherable script. “His writing’s bad because his hands shake,” we informed our teachers. “Didn’t you know? There’s probably a note of it in his records.” We knew because we’d put the letter there ourselves, signed Shirley H. Ginsburg in perfect imitation of his mother’s handwriting. Helping Steve was better than psychotherapy. It allowed me to deal with a mother who wanted above all to foster musical skills in a daughter who didn’t have a shred of talent. Steve had starred in my childhood as living proof that it was possible to have musical talent and still, in critical ways, not be able to function as well as a neighbor girl with a tin ear.
    “The important thing was, you helped him,” Marilyn said now, as I clunked the lettuce on the counter and removed the loosened core. “It doesn’t matter what you believe might have been your motives. ”
    “Maybe not,” I said. “Maybe I want to protect him from your misguided intentions just because he’s my friend.”
    Marilyn attacked a cabbage with her chopping knife. A slow smile crept across her face. “We had fun, didn’t we?”
    “We did.” We’d worked out a system for Steve to copy multiple-choice tests without getting caught. We encouraged him to endear himself to the teachers. If the class read a poem, he would recite it back from memory. If actors were needed for a play, he would be the only boy to volunteer, and all Marilyn and I had to do was read the script aloud to him, and he’d memorize it overnight. Steve was bright. Steve had potential. Teachers knew his shaky hands were an unlikely explanation, given how well he played the guitar. But they’d loved him too much to care.
    “Basically, we taught him to be a con artist,” Marilyn said now, chopping with a kind of cheerful rhythm.
    “Not a con artist!” I tore mounds of lettuce into the wooden bowl. “We just taught him to use his charm.”
    In junior high he’d begun calling all the females in his life sweetie, which might have seemed affected except that he made everyone feel she really was his sweetie. Steve had grown into an adolescent with so little sense of style that even when his friends got crew cuts, his hair flopped greasily onto his forehead. He was no threat to either gender. Calling the girls sweetie was safe. Every year from eighth grade on he convinced a whole bevy of them to tape textbooks for him, saying to each one, “Oh, sweetie, I like your voice so much,” and smiling so coyly they didn’t know whether he was serious or joking. He committed each taped book to memory—he could always remember everything he heard—and not one of his helpers ever found out about the others.
    By high school Steve was offering to bring his guitar to anyone’s party and sing for free if in return they would write him a term paper. On the day of the SATs, he finagled a seat next to Bernie, knowing Bernie was in love with Marilyn and would let him copy. He was determined not just to avoid humiliation, but to shield his parents, who, like many in Riggs Park, had little formal education and valued it above all for their children. He wasn’t planning to go to college (although later, briefly, he did), but even then he wanted everyone to think he could get in if he wanted.
    In a way, Steve’s enforced charm prepared him well for the irony of becoming our best-known classmate, the one non-reader in a class that worshipped scholarship. Marilyn and I were glad that, in the early years, when beneath his charm and comedy, Steve’s affliction gave him pain, we lied to his teachers, stayed up all night before exams, dug earthworms out of the garden to teach him biology. We never minded, not really. And certainly had never minded basking in the twinned glow of his talent and gratitude, which he had beamed on us like a benediction ever since.
    I’d shredded my entire lettuce by the