2. The Plagiarizing

6 0 0
by dureckl
by dureckl
                                    
                                              Upon closing the door, Jeni felt a wave of guilt wash over her body. A sharp pain rattled her bones. She had to sit down or else she was going to vomit up the miniscule amount of corn meal she had consumed. Why cornmeal, no one could answer (Jeni had taken to eating a Pagan diet, something to which everybody else was opposed). But now, there was nothing she could do to keep the substance down. Shevomited over the side of her couch. Her feline, Sylvester, came over and started to lick it up. Jeni turned her head and thought about the awful sin she had committed, which was in her head described in great detail.
                          It had been a Tuesday afternoon, fairly stormy,lightning and all. She had had a bad attitude all throughout her Spanish class, to which Ms. Brinkman said:
                                  “I’ve had it up to here with your attitude!”

                          “What’ve I done?” Jeni asked. “I haven’t done a thing!”
                          “Exactly!” Ms. Brinkman boiled, “You haven’t done anything! How do you expect to get ahead when you can’t even keep up?”
                          Jeni was indignant and held strong the rest of the class period, occasionally giving a dirty look to Ms. Brink, who, in classic Brinky fashion, returned the glare. 
                          Jeni suddenly remembered she had an assignment due for a class she didn’t like and she procrastinated to no end when she arrived at home. So, as carefully as she could muster, she bent over, her vertebrae popping singularly and grasped the soft handle of her laptop case. She plopped down on her bed with a sigh and the zipper made a metallic, annoying sound which ground into her subconscious. She screamed, a piercing scream that rattled throughout the edifice. When no one responded, she returned her eyes to the screen, where a blank, snow white page lay. 
                          “Curse it all!” she yelled. “Why must I complete an assignment for a class I don’t enjoy!? Nay I say! Nay!” 
                          “Quit being a horse, dear,” her mother said, passing by with the laundry. Jeni just stared as she passed by, as she didn’t approve of equine.
                          Once her mother was out of sight, Jeni proceeded to stare angrily at her computer screen. There was no way she would ever be able to finish her six page paper regarding the growth and development of imperialistic forms of government over the past 2,000 years in just 12 hours. She would fail out of her history class with Mr. Bausch and her entire life would be completely ruined! Unless… She could check to see what other papers had been written about this particular topic and paraphrase a bit. 
                          She Google searched (NOT YAHOO! SEARCHED) for papers of the same topic. To her great surprise, thousands of results appeared upon her screen - apparently Mr. Bausch had been assigning this essay for years. She scrolled through about ten before she found THE CHOSEN ONE!
                          It was an old paper from (she estimated) 200 years ago. As she read, she realized that the paper was so spectacular that she couldn’t possibly attempt to paraphrase it. It’s not like anyone would ever notice if she just copied and pasted the whole paper… She highlighted the entire paper, pressed command “C”, and moved her cursor over to her blank Pages document. She clicked command “v” and reformatted the paper so it met the criteria set by Mr. Bausch. She gave it a heading that suggested she had written the paper and saved it to her desktop. She couldn’t have been more pleased with herself. Mr. Bausch would never know the difference, but she couldn’t have been more wrong.