Cheater Read online

Nurse Francesca is standing in the doorway. “I saw that. You can’t play adolescent pranks in here-your friend is sick. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Shut up!” Upchurch screams.

  “Shut up? Okay, Mister, you’re out of here. Say good-bye. And you owe him three CDs-I’m a witness.”

  Upchurch says, “You-” but holds back the rest. He tells Karl, “Next time I come, you’d better give me the answer I want to hear.”

  Nurse Francesca takes out her cell phone and snaps a picture of Upchurch. “There won’t be a next time: you’re not coming back. I don’t like the way you talk to my patients. This picture is going to the security desk downstairs. Sayonara, creep.”

  Upchurch lets out a growl that consists entirely of the letter r: “Rrrrrrrrrrrr!”

  By the time the growl ends, he’s gone.

  “Are you really friends with that jerk?” the nurse asks Karl.

  “No-the opposite. Thanks for throwing him out.”

  “Oh, I enjoyed it.”

  Mr. Hydine yawns, opens his eyes, and smiles at Karl and Nurse Francesca. “The sun finally came out, I see.”

  At first, Karl thinks the old man is hallucinating again, but a glance out the window shows that Mr. Hydine is right. The sky above the gray concrete has turned pale blue again, the clouds are bright white.

  “Hallelujah,” says Nurse Francesca.

  Karl wishes he, too, could find cheer in the sunny sky. For him, though, the gray gloom is permanent and inescapable.

  RULE #13: Learn from the martial arts: turn the force of your enemy’s attack into the force that defeats him. The hard Part is figuring out how to do this when you’re caught and threatened with suspension. Personally, it didn’t work for me-I got thrown out of my last school for trying-but it’s still a cool concept. Maybe you can make it work.

  Chapter 13

  After Mr. Hydine’s discharge from the hospital, Karl misses the old guy’s company-for about three minutes. Then he falls asleep.

  He dreams he’s wandering down a rocky hillside, into a meadow filled with tall dry grass-a pleasant place, until soldiers start shooting at him, first from the edge of the woods, then from behind the rocks on the opposite side. He understands that they’re not really after him, they’re fighting each other (ragged gray uniforms versus ragged blue uniforms), but these are not noble soldiers, they’re tough, dirty, and sadistic, and they couldn’t care less if he gets shot. So he’s running every which way, searching for a hole he can dive into, but every time he spots one, it turns out to be just a shadow. “I’m not in this!” he shouts at them, pleading for mercy.

  His own shout wakes him up. He discovers that he has tangled his sheet in a truly artistic manner. He’s curled on his side, and there’s someone watching him from alongside the bed-a girl in a black sweatshirt with chestnut hair in a short bowl. This confuses him, because Lizette’s hair looked different, shorter, the last time he saw it. Also, she almost always kept it covered with a baseball cap.

  “See what happens when you do bad things?” she says. “Eternal torment.”

  Almost giddy with happiness, he’s about to say, You broke your vow-you talked to me-but he notices that his hands are on top of his head. Why is that? Because he was dodging bullets a moment ago.

  Unscrunching himself, he fixes the sheet so he’s covered up to the neck. “Hi,” he says.

  His joy at the sight of her is complicated by shame- because the friend who begged him not to do wrong has returned to find him demolished by his mistake, and she has also seen his underwear, exposed by the twisted hospital gown. He peers at her face, and down at his hands, and back at her face, and down at his hands, and so on.

  Lizette has her own confusions and can’t look him in the eye. She picks up the framed snapshot of him with his parents (squinting at the beach) and says, “This is the best picture they could find of y’all?”

  “We’re not that photogenic.”

  He wishes he could kiss her and hug her, but instead they make small talk.

  “So how did your spring break go?” she asks. “Catch up on your rest?”

  “Uh-huh. How about you?”

  “Pretty dull. A little day trip with the family to Coopers-town, the Hall of Fame, that was nice. You see the error of your ways yet?”

  Heart full to bursting, he holds his troubles inside.

  He can’t remember, though, why he’s keeping it all to himself. Therefore, he blurts out everything-the whole nasty tale of Klimchock’s coercion and Upchurch’s secret life as the Prince of Sleaze.

  He assumes she’ll sympathize, but her face goes cold and distant as he speaks. Maybe she’s saving her compassion for the end.

  Or, maybe not.

  “I can’t believe you ever got involved with them, Karl. You should have known better. The whole thing is so low-down.”

  “I told you, I wish I never started.”

  The A/C cycles on, and goose bumps form on Karl’s forearms.

  “You dug your own grave, Karl. It’s nobody’s fault but yours.”

  By refusing to give him the slightest bit of sympathy, Lizette leaves Karl deeply disappointed. Also, to tell the truth, annoyed.

  “Klimchock called Jonah into his office today,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “He said Jonah was cheating.”

  “What?!”

  “You know Jonah’s nervous tic, where he turns his neck to the side? Klimchock said he was copying from his neighbor’s test.”

  Thinking, thinking… Is it a ploy, a message to Karl? Give in or I’ll crush everyone you care about. Or maybe that’s delusional.

  “What happened? Did he get expelled?”

  “He got sent home with all his stuff. I helped him empty his locker.”

  “How upset was he?”

  “How upset do you think?”

  That Klimchock would blackmail Karl is one thing. At least Karl really cheated. But Jonah…

  “So what are you planning to do?” she asks.

  “I don’t have a clue. I wish I could run away and join the circus.”

  “There aren’t too many job openings for a lone Flying Stringbini.”

  Lunch arrives. Karl and Lizette stare at the pale bread and the green curls of lettuce sticking out past the crust, all strangled by tight plastic wrap.

  “They’re just evil,” Lizette says. “Both of them-Klimchock and Upchurch. They deserve to sink in their own vile sludge.”

  These are the first kind words she has spoken to Karl in a long time-but they don’t solve the problem, because there is no solution.

  A second visitor interrupts their gloom-fest. This one has on a red tank top, tight capris, and red sunglasses worn up above her forehead, right on top of her silky dark bangs, which are new.

  “Hello, everybody,” Cara says.

  Karl and Lizette are helpless to do anything but stare.

  “I heard you were here. Just wanted to stop by and see how everything’s going.”

  “I tried to call you, but the number was disconnected,” Karl says.

  “We moved to a different apartment. I’m working in my aunt’s hardware store.”

  Lizette drifts away, over toward the sink. Cara stands at the foot of the bed. In a way, Karl’s a lucky guy. Two girls he likes both cared about him enough to visit him in the hospital. They would both go out of their way to help him-but they can’t get him out of this predicament, no one can, it’s hopeless, and not just for him, for Jonah, too.

  Tears trickle down his cheeks before he can stop them.

  “Hey, Edison, what’s up? Why’d you spring a leak?”

  Since Karl can’t make his voice work, Lizette explains matters to Cara. Through his teary blur, Karl notices something odd: Lizette never looks Cara in the face. He wonders, could Lizette have a crush on Cara? Was all her criticizing just a way of covering it up?

  Cara knocks that thought out of his head with a loud laugh. “Phillip Upchurch? He’s Blaine’s secret overlor
d? The up-sucking weasel with the pole up his butt?”

  She lets out a snort.

  “That’s hilarious. I can just see Blaine-‘Yes, sir, Your Oiliness.’ That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all year.”

  Karl isn’t laughing, though. His attention has returned to the matter at hand-how Klimchock’s cruelty and injustice are matched only by Upchurch’s fraudulence and general disgustingness. They both deserve to be exposed.

  The seed of an idea sprouts instantly: he’ll do it. He’ll tell the world the truth about both of them, no matter the consequences. It needs to be done.

  “There’s no way out of this,” he says. “My future is already wrecked. I’m going to expose them both.”

  “Hold on,” says Cara. “There’s one little problem: nobody will believe you. We’d better stop and think this over.”

  The three of them ponder Karl’s plight in silence.

  “This is so frustrating,” Lizette comments.

  They’re stumped. Nurse Francesca finds them moping together when she comes to administer Karl’s afternoon antibiotics. She teases Karl while setting the dosage on the IV computer. “Uh-oh, looks like they found out about each other. It’s dangerous, being a ladies’ man.”

  Lizette turns a sunburned red. Not Cara, though. “I don’t mind sharing him,” she says. “As long as I get him half the time.”

  “If I weren’t engaged,” Francesca says, “I might want to find out what all the excitement’s about.”

  Karl blushes redder than Lizette and scrutinizes his own lap. He doesn’t see that Lizette’s face has puckered into a tormented little cluster of features. Cara, on the other hand, not only sees, but understands.

  Discreetly, she backs away from the bed and joins Lizette at the sink. Lizette moves away from her-as Cara knew she would-and ends up back at the bed.

  As soon as Francesca leaves, Cara says, “If you really want to expose them, you’ll need proof.”

  “That sure is helpful,” Lizette complains. “What should he do, go back in time with a tape recorder?”

  “You’re going to have to wear a wire, Karl, and get them to repeat what they said.”

  Lizette ridicules the idea. “This isn’t TV. Real people don’t wear wires. And even if Karl somehow got them to speak right into the microphone, I still don’t like the idea of him messing up his whole life.”

  “That’s because you care about him so much,” Cara answers, smiling.

  Jerked alert, suspended in the still space between two heartbeats, Karl focuses eyes and soul on Lizette.

  She pretends that Cara didn’t say anything unusual or life-altering. “No, really-I just wish-I wish there were a way for Karl to duck and let them fire away at each other.”

  It’s intriguing to Karl how closely this thought resembles his dream, the one with the blue and gray soldiers firing across the meadow, and him in the middle. To him, this means that their minds are connected-complementary.

  Wanting to earn her respect, he works out his plan in detail: he will do as Cara says, get the proof, and then mail it to newspapers and local TV stations. Maybe he’ll give Samantha a copy, too. He always wanted to undermine the unjust powers that be; now he can do it for real. If, that is, he can get them on tape.

  He admits his uncertainty to his friends. “I just don’t know if a regular person can do this sort of thing.”

  Cara reassures him. “You’re not a regular person, Karl. Never were and never will be.”

  Lizette adds an encouragement of her own. “I guess it’s like my daddy says: you can’t climb out of a hole without getting dirty.”

  She forces herself to look him in the eye, and she’s rewarded for her courage, because, with two girls to choose from, he’s gazing into her eyes, not Cara’s.

  Certain confusing questions are beginning to get answered here. Just as some chemical reactions produce heat, this rapid sorting-out produces powerful emotions- powerful enough to send Lizette’s hand over to where Karl’s foot is poking up under the sheet. What, he wonders, will it do there?

  She holds his big toe through the sheet. His ecstasy is so complete that he doesn’t notice Cara leaving, even though she’s humming a song-a very familiar song, which Karl and Lizette hear as background music.

  Can you guess? Can you deduce? Can you feel the love tonight?

  RULE #14: Most people, when they’re caught, decide it’s too dangerous to ever cheat again. (Cowards!) But if you’re one of the few, the brave, the pure of (cheating) heart, you have my respect. Just keep your eyes open, including the ones in the back of your head, because they’ll be watching you like an amoeba Under a microscope.

  Chapter 14

  Karl’s parents are kissing him good-bye the next day when Lizette returns to the hospital room. She’s wearing a plain white T-shirt and cutoff jeans with the fringes just above her knees. Her legs and arms, which Karl has never seen before, are long, lean, and full of goose bumps. She’s beautiful, he thinks.

  A short, stocky man follows her in, wearing a bright blue T-shirt, baggy red shorts, and white socks up to his knees. This can’t possibly be her father (first, how could this little guy have produced such a tall daughter, not to mention her two titanic brothers? and second, he looks ridiculous!) but that’s exactly who he is. Lizette introduces him to Karl and his parents, and the first words out of Mr. Frenais’s mouth, directed at Mr. and Mrs. Petrofsky as he shakes their hands, are, “Sorry to hear about all this trouble of yours.”

  Funny, isn’t it, how a lightning bolt can strike from a cloudless sky, when you’re worried about a completely different catastrophe, and leave you charred, with a jagged mouth and only one crooked wisp of hair remaining?

  “What do you mean?” Karl’s father asks.

  Karl had been recovering nicely from his illness, but now he breaks into a drenching sweat.

  Honest, sincere Lizette invents the quickest cover-up Karl has ever seen. “Daddy, you’re confusing Karl with my other friend, the one who got hit by that ice-cream truck. Karl’s fine, he’s just getting over pneumonia. Please don’t scare his parents.”

  “Oh. Ohhhhh. Sorry about that. Well-glad to meet you.”

  “You had me scared for a minute.” Karl’s father laughs. “Whew!”

  Exit the chuckling parents. On with the intrigue.

  Mr. Frenais knows all about Karl’s situation. He has come with Lizette to help set up the hidden microphone, the one she bought online yesterday, paying an extra fifteen dollars for overnight delivery. (The mike is a tiny black box with a switch, not much bigger than the nine-volt battery that fits inside it.) Though Mr. Frenais agreed to help, Karl keeps expecting him to deliver a lecture about honesty; the lecture never comes, however.

  The mike works best when the mesh screen points directly at the speaker’s mouth. Mounting it on Karl’s nose would be ideal, but since that might not be the best location, secrecy-wise, they experiment with other options.

  Placing the mike inside Karl’s hospital gown doesn’t work. “All I could hear was fabric rubbing on it,” Mr. Frenais says. “And stomach-gurgling.” He suggests gluing the mike to Karl’s scalp and concealing it inside Karl’s floppy mop of hair. Sounds a bit silly, but they give it a go. After fluffing Karl’s hair to hide the mike, Mr. Frenais goes out in the hall and listens on his earphone as Lizette says, “So, Karl, I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

  He’s still fumbling for an answer when Mr. Frenais comes back into the room with two thumbs up, announcing, “Loud and clear.”

  A difficult question remains, though: how to attach the mike to Karl’s scalp? “We’ve got a hot glue gun at home,” Lizette offers.

  “I’m thinking this looks like a job for rubber cement,” says Mr. Frenais, and off he goes to the nearest Staples, one town over, leaving his daughter and Karl to… um… er…

  The last time we saw them together, Cara had bluntly announced that Lizette cared about Karl so much. Lizette’s electrifying grip on his toe lasted a
long time; neither of them could think of what to say next, and Lizette never moved her hand. If the loud guy in blue scrubs hadn’t appeared to collect the garbage, they might still be there, toe in fist; but as soon as he popped his head in and blared, “How’s everybody today?” Lizette dashed out the door.

  And now they’re together again, just the two of them, and he knows he has to say something, do something, make his feelings known, or else she’ll think he wants to be just friends.

  He summons his courage. He speaks.

  “Um, I’ll pay you back for the mike.”

  “You definitely will.”

  “Thanks for getting it. And for bringing your father.”

  “No problem. Glad to help.”

  He’s run out of words. She pops a piece of Orbit gum into her mouth and turns her back to him. He’s not sure what that means, but it can’t be good.

  Except that it helps: not having to look her in the eye makes it possible to speak again. “I’ve been wanting to say to you-ever since the first day when you showed up at school-I like you so much. But I kind of thought-I think a lot of people thought-that you…”

  She keeps her back turned but cocks her ear to make sure she hears the end of the sentence.

  “… were gay,” he mumbles, fearfully.

  She whirls around. Her face has turned Red Lobster red.

  “What?! Why? Because I like sports? Because I don’t wear quarts of makeup, or dress like Cara?”

  “No, none of that. I don’t know…“

  She stalks over to the door. “I don’t want to act like that, or dress like that. It’s never gonna happen. What’s that got to do with anything, anyway? Does a person have to be like her to be accepted? And you-how could-“

  She’s too upset to limit herself to one thought at a time- too upset to speak. It looks to Karl as if she might just run away. Panicking-not because he needs her help with the hidden mike, but because she can’t leave this way, before she even knows how he feels-he blurts out, “I kept wishing you weren’t gay. I’m not even sure anymore why I thought it. I was stupid.”