When exam time rolled around in January, Kendall, Jake, and a couple of their friends asked for help again. This time for Chemistry and Physics, and they actually wanted a couple of real tutoring sessions. We did those, which amounted to $100 an hour because I ran it like a class with all four of them together. I also wrote up a one-page summary sheet of all the basic stuff they needed for the exams.
I told them "Memorize this and write it out like a dozen times, more if you have to. Once you know this sheet off by heart, the first thing you do is write it out on the back of the exam paper. You can carry this into the exam room in your head and it isn't cheating. Once you got this, you can refer to it for formulas to solve the problems like I showed you." Jake thought this was the most brilliant idea ever and paid me $10 for the summary sheet. Each of his buddies did likewise. Another quick handful of cash.
And that made me think. I could sell this kind of thing to a few other people in my classes. Once Jake and the guys told our classmates, a bunch of them wanted a copy, but I'd told them not to share it. I also told them I would be very happy to sell it to anyone, 'cause hey, we all gotta get by, right? I sold 8 of more those sheets, which was a nice windfall. I wondered what the teachers thought about all the stuff written on the back of so many exams.
By the end of second semester my ghost writing had taken off and I spent most of my weekends typing up reams of essay material and lab reports. My college fund was growing fast. But I worked hard for it. One of the hardest parts was to make sure that the stuff I was writing was credible. I knew that in University the profs would run student's work through analysis programs to detect plagiarism. In high school it was more like the teacher getting a 'feeling' that the work did not belong to a particular student, or watching for the same exact text to show up from multiple people. The challenge for me was to write stuff that sounded like it was done by the person handing it in. Turned out I was good at that.
The summer was gearing up to be another minimum wage grocery store shelf-stocking job until I realized that the ghostwriting I was doing could easily translate into a real job. I could be a technical writer. I did it all online, under a made-up company name, and no one knew, no one even questioned it. It wasn't glamorous work, mostly rewriting manuals and procedures for local businesses, but it paid way more than what Foodland was offering. It was a traceable and taxable income however, so I had to keep track of a lot of paperwork and stuff for reporting on my income tax return. That was an extra bit of work, doing taxes as a small business owner, but I was making loads of money towards college.
Grade 11 and 12 were more of the same. I worked on ghostwriting as much as my schedule and course load would allow. Everything I made at school was undeclared cash, so yeah, I was scamming the government out of their unfair share of my wages. I also upped my rate to $30 an hour. People still paid it. The online technical writing gig also kept me busy all year round. I was doing really well at this. But one thing I didn't have was a social life. I spent every evening either writing or studying. I guess I was so busy I never even knew what I was missing.
When I started university I found myself with loads of time on my hands. Sure, the classes were longer and tougher than in high school, but there were fewer of them. And I was used to working and studying all day, all night. Some of our profs and TAs encouraged us to form study groups, so we could help each other. A lot of us in the dorm were in the same classes, so I joined a couple of groups.
It turned out that my study habits were a couple of notches above everyone else's, mostly because I'd been doing the work of 6 people most of the way through high school. The groups I studied with soon started treating me as their leader. I was always the guy with the answers, and more importantly, the right answers. One day someone asked me how come I was so smart or something along those lines. I told them that I'd spent most of high school working and studying; no social life, no sports. That made them laugh and made me wonder what I missed out on.
Since I still needed money for school, and I had spare time, I figured I would try ghostwriting at University. I found a Discord server that seemed to be a place for people to exchange 'research ideas'. Reading between the lines, it was people asking for help the same way I had helped people back in High School. This was exactly what I needed. I read a bunch of posts to get a feel for how they worked, and figured out what to say. Within an hour of offering my services for 'research', I had a client.
Gerhardt was a grad student, working on a Masters in something arcane in biochemistry. Unfortunately for him, he had to meet some requirements that meant he had to take some Arts & Humanities classes. His BioChem research was keeping him so busy he simply had no time for this other stuff. Like English Lit essays. We negotiated a price and I wrote his paper for him. I was a bit worried, because here I was, a freshman, writing a term paper for a grad student, in a 400-level course.
I had nothing to worry about. Gerhardt was happy as shit, and he said he would come to me again next time he needed to lighten his workload. His 'review' of my 'research' on Discord led to a couple of more clients. I was kept busy most weekends on these projects, and they were a financial boon for me. I just had to make sure I didn't take on so much extra work that my own grades suffered.
Then there was the client that changed my life. Sharlene. The notice on Discord was about some 19th Century English Romantics paper. I exchanged the usual contact info and agreed to meet at the Campus Centre. I showed up at the time and place to find Sharlene waiting for me. She was a short dark-haired girl, with a kind of half Goth, half Nerd sort of vibe. Edgy, I guess you'd call it. We grabbed coffees and sat in a quiet corner where we could talk.
I asked about the paper, and she explained what she needed.
"I signed up for this class because it was supposed to be a bird course. Turns out there had been some complaints, and this year they assigned a new prof, and he upped the difficulty level about a thousand times. So it's not easy anymore. Not at all. I kept telling myself it would ease off, and after the drop-by date passed I found out I'd made a mistake. Should've switched to something else. Anything else. It's like the prof is trying to make a point, and he's grinding us to dust."
"How big is this paper?"
"He wants minimum thirty thousand words. It's for 40% of our grade, so if I can get a good paper turned in I can handle the rest. But I don't have time for this now. I'm taking a double major, which is why I needed a bird course as an elective. I'm overloaded as it is."
"I'll need to see what you have so far, and anything else you've written for the class, or for other courses."
She handed me some papers and turned to rummage in her bag. I started looking through the requirements for the paper, and the outline she'd written. The prof had given her a 75 on the outline. It was way better than that I thought, she should have got at least 90 on it. Sharlene held out another handful of papers. "What do you need this other stuff for?" she asked.
"Credibility. I want to write like you do, so the prof won't have any reason to question the validity of the paper."
"Oh! Good idea. Vickler is just evil enough that he'd be looking for that."
She waited patiently whilst I went over some of her work, and looked at her outline again. "Well, can you do it?"
It was due in a week, but I could finish it easily before the deadline. "Sure. No problem."
"How much?"
I figured 6 or 7 hours, so I told her "Two ten. If I get it done in less time, I'll discount the price. And I won't charge you any more if it takes me longer."
"Two hundred and ten?"
"At most, yeah."
"Shit. I was hoping for like a hundred bucks or so."
"Well, if this Vickler guy is as bad as you say, you need a hell of a paper to make the grade you want. That takes time."
"And time is money, yeah, I get it. Dammit. I guess I'll have to settle for a less impressive paper and work my ass off for the final. All I can afford is one-twenty, unless you'll take blowjobs as payment."
She said those words, and I blushed. Hard. My face felt so hot my brain was going to melt and run out my ears. Contact with the opposite sex had always been very much theoretical for me. My go-to sex source was Mr Hand and a couple of internet porn sites. I tried to say something and choked instead. When my coughing abated, I looked at Sharlene, who was leaning back in her chair with an unreadable expression on her face. Not smiling, but not frowning either.
"You okay?"
"Uh, yeah. Sorry, that was, you uh, surprised me, with that, uh..."
"I was sorta kidding, but your reaction was interesting."
