Lexicon Larceny: Vocab and Vice at Parkland’s Troxel Jr. High ‘86-’87
The autumn of ’86, the Reagan years were in full swing, with leadership as questionable as their decision to make ketchup an official school vegetable. Bud Dwyer would soon commit suicide live on TV, and I was a student at suburban Allentown’s Parkland Troxel Junior High School. I was a misfit with a knack for words, hobbling around on crutches with a busted knee, trapped in the mundane drudgery of junior high English classes while already reading at a university level. My A’s in English meant nothing when faced with the obligatory, mind-numbing repetition of fill-in-the-blank vocabulary workbooks due at the end of the year, counting for 30% of our English grade. I had to find a way out.
Floating on a cloud of prescription codeine for my knee injury from a high-speed skateboard crash, everything seemed surreal. An idea struck me as hard as the pavement had months earlier.
It was a Friday, and Eris, the goddess of chaos, smiled upon me as our usual English teacher was out sick, replaced by a sweet but easily confused older substitute teacher. As we watched a filmstrip, and she leafed through a magazine, I noticed my chance: there, on her desk, was the unattended answer key to our vocabulary books.
My crutches and full leg cast allowed me to leave class 10 minutes early to navigate the crowded halls. This freedom, complete with a hall pass and an elevator key, gave me an edge. As the filmstrip droned on, I waited for my moment.
When the clock struck 10 minutes to the bell, I hopped up to the substitute teacher’s desk and dropped my open backpack on the floor just below her desk and the vocabulary answer key. I cracked a smile, made eye contact, and holding my crutches up in a pleading manner, I asked to be excused. In her confusion, she took pity on me, a friendly young man with a plaster cast running from toe to hip, politely asking to leave to go to his next class. She smiled and waved me on, turning her head back to her magazine. I acted, swiping the answer key with the precision of a seasoned kleptomaniac, sliding it off the desk into my bag and picking up the backpack in one fluid motion, and excusing myself to my next class, nervously hoping my fellow students hadn’t noticed as I spun out of the room on my crutches.
I spent whatever free time I had that weekend holed up in my room, claiming to study for my upcoming exams while feverishly copying and validating every answer. By Monday morning, the entire thing was perfectyly duplicated into two notebooks. Hiding one of the notebooks in my room and placing the other with the answer key in my bag before heading back to school.
Fortunately, the usual English teacher was still out with her cold on Monday morning, and returning the vocabulary book answer key to the desk I had taken it from was as easily performed as it was taken. My grade was secured from the doldrums of those practically murdersome vocabulary exercises.
I was new to this school; I had recently moved and had made limited social contact. The friends I had were more acquaintances, and given the situation, I was certain that giving away the key would probably ruin it for me. But, as the semester wore on and my peers expressed their exasperation over their English grades, an idea dawned on me after observing a teacher go and retrieve a vocabulary book for a student who had lost theirs.
The idea was simple: sell blank vocabulary books, encouraging those who buy them to enter the correct answers in their own hand. My problem was that the books were not easily come by. By watching the teachers, I discovered that the extra vocabulary books were stored on a dusty and overlooked shelf in an unlocked faculty storage room in the school. I already had a hall pass that gave me great latitude in wandering the school, and it only assisted me in purloining as many of the books as I could carry on my crutches, with my oversized backpack in two trips.
Storage was a minor obstacle. There were many vacant lockers at the time. When opened, these beige-painted steel lockers had a hole inside the built-in combination lock mechanism where you could insert a screwdriver and change the combination to anything you wanted, so I set each of my clandestine storage locker combinations to ‘666’ in a cheeky nod to our ultra-conservative, God-fearing community, chuckling at what it would do to their heads if they ever found the combination.
As a student library volunteer, I had access to the two unnetworked Apple II computers kept in the library. The Apple II, a clunky beast of a machine, would become the nerve center of my scheme. In that lab, I painstakingly keyed in each answer, cross-referencing chapter, page, and question number, until it was flawless. Triple-checked for accuracy and safely stored on a floppy disk hand-labeled “ZORK II,” more or less only accessible to me and a few other teachers and students. For me, this wasn’t just about making a quick buck; it was about precision, perfection, and getting one over on the school.
Pricing was simple: $50 for a printed copy of the answer key and a blank workbook. No deals, no bargaining. It was a seller’s market — I was the only seller, and the desperate masses paid without question for the most part. My clientele was the usual suspects — the jocks, metalheads, and stoners who either couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work. For them, this was a lifeline.
The scam ran for about a year. It was a beautiful, anarchic stretch of time rife with the insecurities of puberty, the thrill of a crime, and extra pocket money without having to actually work for it. The most memorable moment? The school jock, a web-toed colossal oaf with a shoe size larger than his IQ, who was perpetually in danger of flunking every course that was not gym class, demanding a big discount because he was, well, the school jock. The sheer audacity was laughable until he got violent over it. In the end, he paid full price for a copy of the key seeded with deliberately wrong answers. Yeah, he passed English with enough of a margin to continue his football career with the Parkland Trojans, but barely.
The closest I came to being caught during the scam was a few months before I moved and changed schools when someone stumbled upon one of my stash lockers filled with blank books. There were murmurs, suspicions, but nothing concrete. They couldn’t quite pin it on me, but students talk, and eventually, I was given up, perhaps a year after I’d moved from the area. The Parkland school district did reach out to my new school, but my new school was unable to punish me for something that did not happen there.
Looking back, I see the irony of it all. I was bored, acing my classes despite the broken knee and the cast while high as a kite on codeine; it was this little scam that gave me a thrill. It wasn’t just about the money or the rebellion. It was about outsmarting a system that had underestimated, undervalued, and absolutely overlooked me…
And that, dear reader, is how a bored, injured, and medicated fifteen-year-old kid turned Parkland’s Troxel Jr. High into his own personal goldmine.