There are two tests I remember more clearly than any I took later, the kind that outranked university exams and job interviews and all the forms you fill when you’re trying to be a person in the world. They were small and papered in the kind of beige we used to call white. Across both, I did something that made me feel clever in one moment and older in the next.

The first was in second year primary school: an ordering exercise, put the words in the order they would appear in the dictionary. The teacher, a woman with bracelets that clicked like polite rain, passed out lists. On the board she’d written the lesson’s scaffolding in loopy print: alphabetical order, first letter, second letter if needed. She read the words aloud, apple, apron, apricot, apply, and I could feel the little satisfaction machine in my head light up. It was the same feeling I got when I straightened a crooked picture frame in the hallway or lined up pencils shortest to longest on my desk. There’s a joy to sorting, a dignity to getting a sequence right.

There were five girls who always wanted to copy off me. I don’t know if they conspired. Maybe I only noticed it because each time we bent over a worksheet I’d feel their bodies tilt in my direction, the way flowers lean toward a window. They were nice enough. They shared chips at lunch and let me cut in line for the drinking fountain. They were also relentless. I don’t know why the teacher didn’t see. Most of the adult world seemed deliberately blind back then, as if being tall made you comfortable enough to ignore what the short could not.

I asked them to stop. I whispered it twice during math and once during the morning handwriting drills where we practiced making our letters sit on the baseline as if they were trying not to slide off a roof. They giggled and promised and then reached for my paper anyway. The giggle did something to me, smudged my pride like a thumb across a chalk mark.

So when the dictionary test came, I did nothing dramatic. I just arranged the words wrong.

Not obviously wrong. I did not write zebra before ant. I wrote apron, apply, apple, apricot, because the second letters tell the truth, not the first, and if you listen wrong, order becomes a costume. I made my mistakes clever on purpose, small enough to be mine, wrong enough that a person who didn’t love me would follow.

They did. I heard their pencils whisper the shapes of my choices. I handed my paper in with a weird mix of shame and triumph, as if I’d smuggled something out of a museum that belonged to me.

When the tests came back, the bracelets clicked. Our teacher’s face had the soft, disappointed set that adults wear when they think disappointment educates. She didn’t call anyone out. She wrote a note home, A rare miss today, and put a sticker shaped like a gold star on the corner of my page as if that balanced the wrongness. The girls left me alone afterward. One test was all it took. I’d taught them the possibility of traps, which is a skill the world would have given them anyway. At seven, I felt both cunning and justified. If there was a bruise to the justice of it, I didn’t feel it then.

That’s the first test.

The second was in year five. Different classroom, different teacher, same precision in my fingers when I held a pencil. Tests then were a little more serious, less about neatness and more about the shape of an answer. I’d worked out the shape of myself enough to know I was good at those. But there was a boy, always a boy, singular and general both, who sat behind me during tests, behind and to the left. He was taller by a head and angry about it, or angry about something that made him look angry about that. He smelled like PE and the particular sour that comes from not caring who notices. The problem was simple: he copied, and he didn’t care if I noticed. He did it with the entitlement of someone who thinks the world is a bowl that should be filled for him, and we, the smaller, will bring the ladle.

I tried to cover my paper with my arm. He shifted his chair closer. I tried to hunch. He put his chin in his palm and leaned so brazenly it was comic. I told the teacher under my breath, on the way back from sharpening a pencil at the communal machine. She frowned the frown that means we will create a plan. The plan, when it arrived, had a history, a cousin to the second-grade plan I’d invented, and I didn’t have to be its author this time. She said, “Just take the test,” and then she added quietly, “Do what you need to do.”

So I bombed it. Not with flair. I answered wrong enough that a pair of papers, compared side by side, would share not just the right shapes but the wrong ones. I misspelled beautiful in the way a person does if they are sure of the placement of the a but too certain about the e. I put the second argument first in the short-answer. I wrote a date wrong that anyone with eyes on a chalkboard could have corrected. He copied faithfully. It felt like standing still while a trap springs, getting to be both bait and witness.

They called him in later; there were meetings with forms. The school did some version of official comparison. The numbers told a simple story: he was tracing me. And then the story opened like a door we thought was a wall. They tested him for more than cheating and found something else: he couldn’t read. Not really. He could injure his way through a label or a sign, could bark out the shape of a sentence the way a person might recite a warning they can’t translate. But on the paper where meaning matters, he saw snow.

They held him back a year. He didn’t return to our classroom after Easter holidays. News like that spreads without author or verb; it lives at the back of a room and waits to be believed. I watched his desk remain empty until the custodian rolled it out, and it gave me a feeling that I didn’t have words for then: the suspicion that my small vengeance had uncovered something larger and that the way to feel about that would not come clean.

I told myself, still tell myself, that I did nothing wrong. He’d been stealing. The system did its system thing and found a problem that had existed before I arrived with my little sabotage. It’s even possible, I’d argue later, that I helped; that if I hadn’t set the trap, his situation would have gone on longer, a person walking around inside a fire that only he could feel. I tell myself that and feel mostly clean. And then, sometimes at night, when memory does its parade, I feel a small shine of guilt under the teeth of my certainty. I picture the way he leaned, the way his mouth moved when he copied. I picture him made to unlearn the fact of our friendship to go back to a room with smaller chairs. It’s a mix I still don’t know how to drink without choking a little.

I didn’t feel bad then. That’s the truth. Ten year olds can be, have to be, a little brutal to survive it. I said, fuck that guy, under my breath, I didn’t say it out loud because there were still rules about words; you could feel where they lived, and I added, in a voice that did not feel like pretending, I hope he learns to read now.

The year two girls had faded to footnotes by then. I went out to recess with my group and we took turns on the bar you were allowed to hang from until your hands hurt. After school I played the game where you run your finger along a book’s spine and stop when your body says to and you have to borrow that book. I was beginning to sense that the care adults ask of you isn’t the same as the care you owe people. The school’s care was procedural; mine had started to get teeth.

I’ve told both stories a few times. You learn how to stage them for the person across from you, how to confess just enough so that you can enjoy your own sharpness without sounding like a villain. With time the stories braid together. It’s hard not to read them like a moral fable for children who like tidy shapes: Beware of copying; beware of cleverness; look beneath appearances; the alphabet is trickier than it looks. The uncanny part, the part that nudges me at the edges of each ordinary day, isn’t that I set traps or that the traps worked. It’s that tests, which feel like small sealed boxes when you are inside them, sometimes open into corridors after. You think you’re writing down where apron goes, and what you’re really doing is teaching five girls that your answers belong to you. You think you’re catching a cheat and you’re really becoming a hinge in someone else’s life. Small hand, big door.

We moved away the year after primary school. Or rather we moved across the same town and into a different catchment, which is like moving when you are that age because your map is just school and the streets that get you there. In the new place I learned the names of new boys who leaned too close and new girls whose pencils looked toward me when questions were asked. I didn’t set any more traps. I didn’t need to. The knowledge that people might be baited was a deterrent enough, a rumor you could let circulate without repeating.

Once, years later, years in which tests stopped being paper and became interviews and proofs and all the way grown-up trials like do you love me and will you stay, I dreamed about the year five classroom. It looked ordinary from the door: the flag, the calendar, the cursive alphabet marching its curve across the wall like a sermon. I took my seat in the second row and looked back toward the left where he had sat. The desk was there; the boy was not. In the dream I bent my head to my paper, and the paper wasn’t a test at all but a page from a dictionary, and the words tried to arrange themselves under my pencil without me. Beautiful, because, beginning. I watched them jostle politely for first position, and for the first time I felt sorrier for the letters than for anyone in the room. They were all correct, in their way. They all wanted to be where meaning was easiest.

When I woke, the feeling didn’t have words at first, which seemed fitting. I lay there counting the steps to the kitchen like I had counted the steps between my school desk and his. Old habits are maps you lay over new places, seeing if your life still fits.

I keep odd little private rituals about reading now. I leave books in public places with notes in the margins: this chapter made me call my mother, skip the third page if you don’t like descriptions of weather. I donate dictionaries like a lunatic, the good heavy ones you can’t hold without remembering your thighs under the table. I tutored a first year secondary school pupil one summer for an afterschool program; she hated every part of it until she learned that there and their and they’re could be tamed with stories, and then her face changed shape. The muscles of a person who believes herself difficult can relax so fast you hear them sigh.

Last autumn I ran into my old primary school teacher at a B&Q, the kind of place that has never betrayed the smell of dust. She recognized me in the way adults recognize children: a slow flip through a gallery of faces until one lines up with your voice. We stood among the bins of screws small enough to be choked on. She asked what I’d done with all that certainty I used to carry to the front of the room, and I said something about work and not-work, about finding excuses to keep reading. Then, without planning to, I asked if she remembered him. The boy. I didn’t say his name because some names don’t belong to your mouth anymore.

She did. She said the school had done what schools do and the local authority had done what local authorities do. There were programs with names, she said, and there were meetings, and he went back a year. She said it as gently as her bracelets used to sound. I wanted some epilogue that would clear me. That he’d become a carpenter and loved shop manuals; that he’d run a garage and kept the books himself; that he fell in love with a librarian and they raised a daughter who read early under the kitchen table. She didn’t have that. She had only the practical grace of someone who stayed on to witness other children’s hinges. We parted with the tired laughter of people who know too much about the ways things keep happening whether you approve or not.

I still think about those five girls in second year and him in fifth. What I did to the girls was petty and instructional, a lesson delivered in the delicious privacy of wrong answers. What happened with him was bigger, not because I intended it to be but because the world used my pettiness to reveal its own negligence. There’s a part of me that wants to be forgivable for both: the part that says I was a child, tasked with the job of keeping my paper mine. There’s another part that wonders if I should have done something other than the clever thing. Turned around and said, “Why?” Held up my paper and asked if he wanted to sit with me after school and try the thing with the vowels that always tricks you if no one shows you where it breaks.

What I know is that we seldom waste a cruelty on purpose at that age. We put it into the world out of panic or pride and watch it grow legs. We also seldom know when we are useful. I may have hurt five girls just enough to make them better; I may have hurt one boy in a way that introduced him to his own future. Both can be true. The alphabet contains more than one possible sequence; we learn to live with the version the day hands us.

I don’t have a clean angle to end on. That seems right. When I picture second year, I see the light on the dictionary cart and the weird thrill of knowing a trick nobody else in the row knew yet: that the second letter sometimes matters more than the first. When I picture year five, I see the empty chair and the way the custodian slid that desk away as if moving a piano through a narrow door. In between is the feeling of someone leaning over my shoulder to copy my answer while neither of us has really learned how to ask for help.

This is the story I can tell: once I wrote the wrong answers and taught five people to stop looking at my paper. Later I wrote the wrong answers and taught a school to look at his life. In both cases, I’m not sure who exactly I helped. In both cases, if I could go back, I’d still press my pencil down and write, then put my hand across the page the way we all learned to do in rooms where other hands hovered too close. I would still want my answers to be mine. I would still want theirs to be theirs. And if I could, afterward, I’d slide a dictionary across a table to anyone who looked like they were drowning on dry land and say, “Start with apple. Listen for the second letter. It will save you more often than the first.”