Cheater Read online

She pats the outer shell through the sheet.

  “Goofy and Pluto. Hm. Which is which, anyway? I can never keep them straight.”

  It occurs to him that she may be a foreign-born secret agent. That would explain the missing vowel in her last name, Nzada. Maybe they sent her here to corrupt America’s youth.

  “So, I assume you’re thumbs-down on the cheating thing.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Understandable, after a near-death experience. A lesser man would’ve fainted on the spot.”

  “It’s not just about almost getting caught.”

  “Oh?”

  She says this with a sparkle, as if anticipating an extremely creative lie.

  He watches his sneaker rub the garage floor. “The dishonesty is bothering me.”

  “Really?”

  She comes closer. He steps backward and bumps against the rim of Project X’s shell.

  “Tell me more about this-what do you call it? A conscience?”

  Annoyed and hyperstressed, he lets loose a flood of misery over his parents’ sleazy work, and how he doesn’t want to be like that. “I just don’t like what I’m doing.”

  “I have a question,” she says. “You’re seventeen, right?”

  “I will be in a few weeks.”

  “Close enough. Aren’t you a little old to believe in the tooth fairy?”

  He sees where she’s going, and it disappoints him. Everything he said came from the heart. If all she can say in reply is that honesty is a fairy tale, intended only for small children, then she’s not as captivating as he thought, because she’s trying to sell him a lie-and it’s not even an original lie.

  Cara responds to his sour face by turning in a new direction. “The whole world is unfair, Karl. It’s just a fact of life. Your parents aren’t bad people-they’re normal. Cheating is just a quick, efficient way to reach your goals. There’s no room for purity and virtue once you get a job. Name any career and there are compromises that go with it.”

  “Doctor.”

  “I didn’t mean name a job, Karl, I meant it’s a universal thing. But okay, since you don’t believe me-let’s say you’re Dr. Petrofsky, and you know that your sick patient, Mrs. Bobo, needs to stay in the hospital two days, but the HMO says, Sorry, outpatient surgery. Next! You argue, you protest, but in the end you do what you’re told, because otherwise you’re out of business.”

  He doesn’t know if she’s right or wrong. How could he know? The only job he’s ever held was scooping ice cream last summer at Baskin-Robbins, and the only compromise he had to make was when an entire soccer team came in: a couple times, he didn’t dunk the scooper between flavors.

  “I don’t understand why you should be lecturing me about how the world works. It’s not like you’re five years older than me.”

  “Probably it’s because you spend your life in a garage. This is all common knowledge, Karl. My dad used to say how funny it is, the way people talk so nobly and meanwhile there’s all this thievery and backstabbing going on. He said, ‘The ones that preach the loudest are the always the biggest crooks.’”

  He wishes he could disprove everything she’s saying, but he can’t.

  “Personally,” she adds, “I think it’s cool that your mom’s boss built those extra floors. That’s nerve.”

  Grimly studying the garage floor, Karl notices the silvery flecks left over from painting his first thermosensitive shingle. Those were the good old days.

  “Hey, Edison-don’t pout, it makes your mouth look weird.”

  She prods his skinny midsection (you can’t really call it a belly) with her index finger. He fears the long, sharp nail will pierce the skin and draw blood.

  “Question,” she says. “Did school suddenly get less cruel and unfair than it was yesterday?”

  He shakes his head gloomily.

  “So let’s be honest, since you like honesty. You got scared because you almost got caught. Really, if you peel away all the talk, this is about fear, not lofty principles. It’s about nerve-so get some! Like your mom’s boss.”

  A long shelf covered with dusty tools and doodads travels the length of the garage, shoulder high. Karl stares at the jug of blue windshield washer fluid-clinging to it like a shipwrecked sailor bobbing on the waves, just trying to hang on and survive.

  She plucks a chocolate crumb from his collar. (Must have been there the whole time, a souvenir of his after-school Mallomars.) “Changing the subject slightly, do you agree that it would be a good thing to act on your desires once in a while, instead of giving up in advance because it’s scary and you might get in trouble?”

  “I guess I can agree with that.”

  “Good!”

  She leans back against the top tube of his bike, smiling mischievously. Her silver satin shirt shimmers.

  She’s waiting for something.

  “What’s going on?” Karl asks nervously.

  “I’m giving you a chance to practice.”

  Karl is roughly as scared as he was when Mr. Watney called him to the front of the room. “What do you mean?”

  “Uh-uh-uh. That’s a delaying tactic. You know what I mean.”

  Because he lives on a cul-de-sac, there’s not much chance that a car, bike, skateboarder, or knife-wielding psycho will pass by. He has no excuse whatsoever to look anywhere but into Cara’s eyes.

  She shifts her weight, crosses her ankles the other way. She seems willing to wait indefinitely.

  “I don’t understand all this,” Karl says.

  “Yes you do.”

  “No, I don’t. I mean, why are you doing this?”

  “Ohhhhh. You think I’m… using you.”

  Karl turns his back to her and visits with Goofy. The situation is unbearably humiliating. He can’t face her.

  “Karl-I’m not using you. Really.”

  Her hands appear down below, on his waist. Is he still breathing?

  “The truth is, I don’t care that much if you help us cheat or not,” she says. “There are other reasons why I’m interested in you. Should I name them? Okay. First, you’re the only person at school who’s as smart as I am-though in a different way. Second, I’m enjoying the whole Shy Guy Comes Out of His Shell thing. There’s a definite cuteness about you-the Awkward Genius. It’s new for me.”

  She’s still there, behind him, holding his waist, waiting for him to turn and kiss her. Whether or not she really means what she said-honesty means nothing to her, so it’s hard to tell-he would be a pathetic coward if he didn’t accept the challenge.

  Having never kissed a girl before, he goes instinctively for the cheek.

  “I’m not your aunt,” she says. “Try over this way,” and she points to her smile, which seems more amused than adoring.

  He finds, when his lips arrive at hers, that he can’t believe this is happening. Literally: it’s not real, a voice in his head keeps saying. She can’t like him this way. And what about Blaine, are they together or aren’t they?

  He pulls away a bit, figuring it’s best to end the kiss before she gets bored. Once disconnected, he’s at a loss for words.

  “Isn’t it better to grab what you want?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “And are you going to do more of it in the future?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s good. Because shy is only cute up to a point.” There are flecks of gold in her green irises. Those eyes are so beautiful, they inspire him to hope. He wants to become a person she respects, not an entertaining project. He agrees with her: he has been cowardly, he should be braver. It’s time to crack the shell.

  He puts both hands in her hair. It’s so soft, so fine, he feels he’s touching a goddess. Nonetheless-Courage!-he kisses her again.

  She smiles. “Well done.”

  RULE #5: Don’t stick with the same techniques, year after year. Even though most teachers are so dim they’ll fail to notice a newspaper-size cheat sheet Under their noses, there are always a few maniacs who live to
catch cheaters. Once these obsessed types catch on to a system, you’re dead if you Use it. I repeat: vary your methods.

  Chapter 5

  In a survey of high-achieving teenagers a few years back, more than three-quarters admitted that they had cheated in school. Of these cheaters, nine out of ten said they’d never gotten caught.”

  With eighteen teachers jammed into Mr. Klimchock’s small office, there’s no room for him to pace the floor dramatically. He can’t even throw his arms out to the sides, or he’ll knock over Mr. Grantley’s Diet Pepsi and Ms. Singh’s Snapple, perched on opposite edges of his desk. The smell of Mrs. Kazanjian’s tuna salad dominates the room; posters for Man of La Mancha, Cats, Pippin, and Fiddler on the Roof surround the teachers, making them feel as if they’ve wandered into the lair of a mad theater fan, for whom time stopped in the 1970s.

  “You can’t persuade students to behave ethically. You can’t tell them that cheating doesn’t pay when they see dishonesty rampant in politics and business. In the 1940s, only twenty percent of college students interviewed admitted to cheating in high school. But the world has changed since then.”

  Mr. Watney gulps down a bite of turkey on rye so he can retort, “The change in numbers may just mean that students answer surveys more honestly now.”

  The widespread chuckling shows that most of these teachers oppose Mr. Klimchock and his campaign to wipe out cheating-but the assistant principal doesn’t need their love or their approval. He lives by the famous words of President Lyndon Johnson, “If you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

  “As I was saying, schools are the last best hope for restoring honesty to our society. We can’t do it with logic or by pleading. But we can produce honesty through fear.”

  The only sound in the room is Mr. Grantley, chomping on his pickle.

  From his coat closet, Mr. Klimchock wheels out a mannequin on a rolling desk chair. The mannequin, slumping limply to one side, wears a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses.

  “Know Your Enemy!” Mr. Klimchock blares.

  “I have that boy in my algebra class,” says Mrs. Kazanjian-an unexpected joke from the famously cranky chess team adviser.

  “Did it ever occur to you that he’s hiding more than his hair?” Mr. Klimchock asks.

  With the flair of a magician yanking a tablecloth out from under a ten-course banquet, Mr. Klimchock pulls the hood back, revealing headphones on the mannequin’s ears. The wires disappear inside the sweatshirt; Mr. Klimchock reaches into the pouch and comes out with a CD player. “What’s our little dummy listening to during his biology test?” He pops the player’s lid and shows them the CD label: Lethal Doopy, WA$$UP? “Let me guess. If you got this far, you would now tell your student, ‘I don’t know how you can listen to that awful noise,’ and that would be that. Am I right?”

  “No, I never insult their music. I don’t want to sound like my mother.”

  “Come here and listen, please.”

  Mrs. Kazanjian threads her way among the knees and feet and chair legs. Mr. Klimchock hands her the headphones, and she puts them on. When he plays the CD, her jaw drops. “Diploid cell-chromosomes in homologous pairs,” she hears. “The diploid number, 2n, equals twice the haploid number.”

  “This CD was confiscated by a teacher I know in Ho-Ho-Kus. I’ve been doing my research, you see. They have methods we never heard of ten years ago. You can go back to your seat, Fern.”

  As Mrs. Kazanjian returns to the back of the room, Mr. Klimchock produces a Thom McAn shoe box from behind his desk. The box is filled with seemingly random objects: a watch, a water bottle, an eyeglass case, a mechanical pencil.

  “Now let’s see. What’s the point of this innocent paraphernalia?”

  He dazzles his audience with one amazing revelation after another. Taped to the back of the watch is a teeny-weeny, folded-up cheat sheet. There’s a similar index card inside the eyeglass case, hidden behind the lens cloth, and a rolled-up page of physics formulas inside the mechanical pencil, where the extra lead belongs. If you turn the water bottle around, wonder of wonders, you can read a list of Egypt’s pharaohs and the monuments each one left behind, with an asterisk for Hatshepsut, the first female pharaoh-all magnified by the liquid inside, all discretely tucked behind the label.

  “From now on, the rule prohibiting cell phones will be strictly enforced at Abraham Lincoln High School. Hooded sweatshirts, mechanical pencils, and water bottles with labels are hereby banned. The same goes for mp3 players, graphing calculators, and PDAs.”

  “Public Displays of Affection?” Ms. Vitello whispers to Herr Franklin.

  “Quiet back there,” Mr. Klimchock barks. “I expect every one of you to visit these websites tonight, and learn more about how your students have made fools of you.”

  He hands out a list of sites such as CheatersProsper, CheatStreet, and EZA.com.

  Mr. Watney clears his throat.

  “All right, let’s hear your rebuttal, Timothy.”

  (Killer instinct: Mr. Klimchock has correctly guessed that Mr. Watney hates to be called by his full first name.)

  “Some of us have been talking-“

  “I see. A mutiny.”

  “And we agree with you that the cheating has to stop, that it’s bad for the school and bad for the students.”

  “Go on. Plunge your dagger in.”

  “What we can’t agree with is the harshness of the penalty. What you’re doing is way out of proportion.”

  Ms. Singh-a lovely young pistol, full of dazzling white teeth and energetic gestures-dives into the fight headfirst. “You have to understand where they’re coming from. There’s so much pressure on them. If they want to get into a top school, they have to perform at a superhuman level. Not only do they need perfect grades in the hardest subjects, but they also have to excel in an extracurricular activity, and that takes time. The system practically pushes them to cheat-it’s almost impossible to meet the requirements any other way.”

  Herr Franklin adds, “Instead of severely punishing them, I think we should have them take a Saturday class in ethics. That way, they might learn something from all this.”

  “Anyone else?” Mr. Klimchock asks. “Go ahead, this is your big opportunity. Hit me with your best shots. Don’t be afraid-what can I do? Fire you?”

  The room goes quiet again. No one dares to speak-except frail, white-haired Mrs. Rose, who comments tremulously, “It’s just a shame the way everything has gone downhill. Just a shame.”

  “I agree, Amelia. Things have gone downhill-including teachers’ understanding of right and wrong. Isn’t there anyone else in this room who sees that we have to crush dishonesty?”

  Miss Verp, built like a football player but with a pixie haircut and an itty-bitty voice, raises her hand.

  “Ah. An ally.”

  “I’ve never met a student with a conscience,” she pipes sweetly. “Nothing makes an impression on them except severe punishment.”

  Mr. Klimchock rewards her loyalty with praise-though he despises her for currying favor. “That’s the first sensible comment I’ve heard so far. As for the rest of you, your ‘sympathy’ and ‘understanding’ are misplaced. By coddling wrongdoers, you let them thrive and multiply. You might as well fight bacteria by putting them in a damp, warm intestine.”

  “But you’re-”

  “When you run this school, Timothy, you can run it your way. Until then, disagree in silence.”

  “Speaking of running the school,” says Ms. Vitello, “ where’s Mr. Hightower? Why isn’t he leading this meeting? Does he know what you’re doing?”

  These are excellent questions. No one has seen the principal in months. Mr. Fernandez, who joined the staff mid-year, right out of college, after Mrs. Langerhans collapsed in the bio lab, has never met Mr. Hightower and isn’t convinced that he really exists. (Mrs. Langerhans is doing better now, thanks for asking, and sends greetings to friends and colleagues from her retirement condo in Pompano Beach,
Florida.)

  “Mr. Hightower has a lunch meeting with the superintendent today,” Mr. Klimchock explains. “There are certain staffing issues they need to work out. I wouldn’t worry for now-not till we hear something definite. As for your other question, yes, I met with him this week and explained my plans, and he gave me his blessing. I couldn’t do this without his support, could I?”

  His forced smile leads Mr. Watney to suspect that Mr. Klimchock may be doing the exact thing he’s denying, i.e., running this whole reign of terror behind the principal’s back. If he could just get the principal alone and ask some questions-

  A firm knock knock knock on the door derails Mr. Watney’s train of thought.

  “Open that, please, Charlene,” Mr. Klimchock says, frowning at the interruption. Miss Verp obeys.

  Standing at the door is a student, someone we haven’t met before. Her hair frames her face in a neat, spray-hardened oval. Her gray slacks, with a straight crease down the front of each leg, seem to have been delivered by time machine from a more conservative decade. She wears too much makeup, more than a girl her age needs, including a thick coat of foundation. This leads the women in the room to assume she’s covering up acne scars, but in fact, there’s nothing underneath the makeup but fierce ambition and a peculiar directness.

  “Mr. Klimchock, I’m Samantha Abrabarba,” she announces. (Her voice, loud and grating, reminds Mr. Watney of a car engine, backing up fast.) “I’m writing a story for The Emancipator. Could I speak to you in private?”

  He’s about to ask, Can you see that we’re in the middle of a meeting?, but she adds, “I’m investigating cheating at school.”

  Never too busy to hunt his quarry, Mr. K. excuses himself and joins Samantha in the hall.

  As soon as the door closes, the murmuring begins.

  “He’s demented!”

  “He’s psychotic!”

  “How does a person get like that?”

  “Obviously he was abused as a child.”

  “Can’t we go to Mr. Hightower and say this has to be stopped?”

  “Good luck finding him.”

  “Then we should go to the superintendent. If the whole teaching staff goes downtown and protests-”