How to Cheat the Universe

Scandal in a Central Texas High School!

This book tells two stories at once. It is about two males of adolescent mischief in a small central Texas high school, and it is simultaneously about the vast and indifferent Universe in which they found themselves. Their story is one about a perverse but hilarious cheating scandal—tiny stuff in the scheme of things—and yet it is also a story of how the Universe itself mysteriously touches even the most trivial of events. It is a recollection of Texas high school ethos—with its obsessions over football and popularity—but it is also a description of the mind-blowing Universe in which such things occur. Were there other universes in which the sad end of the cheating scandal might have turned out differently? Was the Universe planning for this scandal all along? Are the two perpetrators—Timmy and Bernie—a fleck of sand on a mammoth Universal beach, or are they somehow at the center of a Universe that had been preparing for them for nearly 14 billion years? And what about their foil—the ineffectual but vengeful World History teacher Rocking Roger Rodman?