"Vitya," she sighed. "The Vlasenkov edition we are using was updated this year. The exercise numbers shifted. You’ve successfully copied the answers for a chapter on 19th-century literature into a homework assignment about subordinate clauses."

He typed the desperate phrase into the search bar:

The first link was a maze of pop-ups. The second asked for his credit card number to "verify he was human." On the third attempt, he found a grainy PDF that promised the answers to Exercise 244. He scribbled the words down frantically, barely processing the linguistic rules he was supposed to be learning.

"Vitya, bring your notebook up," the teacher, Maria Pavlovna, said.