Cheater Read online

  “Whoa, Nelly. I don’t know about the rest of you, but there’s no way I’m going to complain to the superintendent. I’m too old to start job hunting.”

  “It doesn’t have to be unanimous. Who’s willing to go with me to the superintendent’s office?”

  Four hands go up.

  “I can’t believe this! You’re cowards!”

  “What about you, Mr. Grantley? You haven’t said a word.”

  “I’m staying out of it. That’s how I’ve survived here for twenty years. Let the storms rage on the surface; down here the seas are always calm.”

  “Great. You’re an inspiration to us all.”

  Miss Verp chirps her dissent. “Looks to me like some of you are on the cheaters’ side.”

  “You-you just want Attila the Hun to ask you out.”

  “It’s such a shame, such a shame.”

  “If we could just-“

  And so on. Now you can see why evil madmen and nasty politicians win as often as they do: because everyone else wastes time squabbling instead of uniting to oppose them.

  While the teachers bicker among themselves, let’s see what’s up in the hallway.

  “Yes, Miss… Abracadabra, was it?”

  “Abrabarba. Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.”

  She whips out a memo pad, bound in black leather, with her initials on the front in gold script, S.A.

  “Yes, I’m quite interested in this subject, as you know. And I appreciate your coming to see me. Now what information do you have for me in that little black book?”

  She opens the pad to a blank page. “I don’t have any information yet. I wanted to ask if you’ve caught anyone since Ivan Fretz, and what you’re planning to do next. This is a really important story. If I do a good job, I might be able to sell it to the New York Times, as a stringer.”

  Mr. Klimchock exhales slowly through his nostrils, venting his disappointment. “In other words, you’d like to publish my plans and alert the student body so they can take the necessary precautions.”

  “I-what?! Are you kidding? I hate cheaters. I’d like to see them all expelled. That’s why I’m doing this story-to expose them.”

  “I see. Well, then, maybe we can help each other. Keep your eyes and ears open. Be cagey-don’t go around announcing what you’re up to. If you hear anything that could be useful, share it with me. And I promise, in return, if I have any news to report, I’ll give you the scoop. How’s that for a deal?”

  “Okay, but are you sure you can’t tell me anything right now?”

  He considers giving her a dramatic quote, something along the lines of “Let the cheaters be warned, the day of reckoning is near.” In the end, though, he sticks with his No Comment strategy. The goal, after all, is to catch them, not to scare them straight.

  “I’m sorry, but secrecy is essential.”

  She jots those words on her pad.

  “But you do have a plan, right? Is that what you’re meeting about in there?”

  It’s not hard to imagine Samantha, a few years down the road, thrusting a microphone in a disgraced senator’s face and asking, When did you first start taking bribes to support your drug habit?

  “I have to ask you,” Mr. Klimchock says, with as much paternal benevolence as he can simulate, “not to even mention my plans. If you do, you’ll compromise the entire effort.”

  “But that’s a violation of freedom of the press. You can’t ask me not to do the story.”

  “I’m not ordering you to be silent. I’m asking you, as a citizen of this school, not to tip off the bad guys. Talk it over with Mr. McPune, he’s your faculty adviser.”

  Note to self, Mr. Klimchock thinks. Threaten McPune later. The paper can’t print one word about this.

  Back in his office, with only a few minutes left in the period, Mr. Klimchock booms, “Finishing up. Our goal right now is to capture as many of the enemy as possible, and make examples of them. To do that, we’re going to set a trap. This weekend, when the building is empty, technicians will install hidden video cameras in each of your classrooms. No matter what personal opinions you may hold”-he sears Mr. Watney and Ms. Singh with two consecutive glares- “you will keep this plan secret. You WILL NOT warn the students about the cameras, because you will remember which side you’re on. If that’s not enough, I’ll add one more encouragement: if any of you tell your students in spite of my warnings, I’ll find out, and you’ll find yourselves not only unemployed, but unemployable. Even the all-powerful teachers’ union can’t protect people who aid and abet cheaters.”

  Sensing that the others aren’t quite as exhilarated as he is-Ms. Singh has her head in her hands and she’s shaking it from side to side-he shifts gears and tacks on an inspiring conclusion. “This isn’t forever, my good instructors. It’s just a surgical strike. We’ll rid ourselves of the creeping menace and terrify the others so thoroughly that they’ll walk the line for the rest of their lives. Just as Herr Franklin hoped, this will be a valuable educational experience. The floor is about to drop from beneath the feet of some very deserving students-and I wouldn’t be surprised if we find some unexpected faces caught in our net. Honesty will prevail at Lincoln High. Thanks for coming, everybody.”

  As the teachers file out-their opposition expressed only in the noisy clenching of paper bags-Mr. Klimchock pops the CD of Guys and Dolls into his boom box. They’re out in the hall by the time he starts singing along, but they can hear his vigorous, piercing tenor, “When you see a guy reach for stars in the sky…”

  RULE #6: Your old, noncheating friends may annoy you with their tedious, narrow-minded attitudes. The best approach is to just drop them, before you get in an argument and they report you. Screw them if they can’t accept the new you! Snakes shed their old skin as they grow, right? Change is a fact of life. Learn to accept it.

  Chapter 6

  Just another ordinary AP calculus test, ∫(2sec2x- 5csc2x)dx. A bit hard to make it out, though, because of the weird angle. Next time they definitely have to find a better place for the camera than Karl’s wrist.

  “What’s that?” Vijay asks, pointing to a tiny squiggle on his laptop screen. “Does it say ‘squared’ or ‘cubed’?”

  “Can’t tell,” Noah replies-but Karl, sixty yards away in Mr. Imperiale’s classroom, obligingly shifts his hand, and the itty-bitty exponent is revealed to be a 2.

  Blaine’s parked car sways. It’s Cara, leaning against the door. “Is this study hall?” she asks through the window.

  “Ssh! The test is next period,” Blaine says as the three scholars industriously copy Karl’s solution onto their tiny cheat sheets.

  Upstairs, meanwhile, Karl performs his role so smoothly that Mr. Klimchock, studying the monitor in his office, detects nothing.

  There’s one hairy moment, though, when Mr. Imperiale hovers over Karl as he works. The hairiness is due to the fact that Karl’s shirt cuff has slipped back a centimeter, revealing the front end of the small black camera.

  As soon as he notices, Karl starts to sweat. He must hide the camera without calling attention to it, immediately.

  Inspired, he yawns and stretches-not with his arms up in a Y, but down at his sides. Shaking his wrists a bit, a plausible finale to the yawn, he gets the cuff to slide back down over the camera.

  “Uh-oh,” Mr. Imperiale says, freezing the blood in Karl’s veins. “If you’re yawning, I guess I’d better come up with some tougher questions next time.”

  Karl leaves his left arm dangling over the edge of his desk, hiding the bulge in his cuff. “No, I was just up late last night.”

  “Good for you! Human computer AND party animal. Breaking the stereotype, twenty-four seven. You wild and crazy guy.”

  The teacher moves on, murmuring to Conor Connolly, “Remember the Power Rule”-leaving Karl to finish the test and the transmission in peace.

  Climbing the hill toward Sunrise Place that afternoon, past the diamond in Blortsmek Park where a girls’ softball ga
me is in progress, Karl worries that he should have worn different clothes. Cara will be there: what will she think of his dull box-check shirt and his ill-fitting jeans?

  Once he sees which house is Blaine’s, other worries take over. It’s the really big one, made of gray stone, with the giant sloping lawn and the brick driveway that swoops up the hill and around behind. His whole life, Karl has wondered who lived here, and what did they do with all those rooms. (Dive into mounds of gold coins?) But now he’s going to a party here, and his sneakers suddenly look unacceptably soiled, the once-white rubber pathetically worn in front and coming off a bit, and there are frayed threads at the bottoms of his jeans.

  The only path from the driveway to the front door consists of a few small squares of slate set in the grass. It rained this morning, and the lawn is still wet, and now so are his sneakers, from scuffing over the grass.

  Blaine opens the door, chuckling, and explains that no one actually uses this entrance. If Karl feels a bit foolish, the foolish feeling fades fast in the face of the furnishings within. The marble floor gleams, the staircase is a spiral; the life-size photorealist paintings show men in suits doing ordinary things like sneezing and blowing a bubble-gum bubble. Everything here reflects light, dustlessly. When Blaine asks him to take off his wet sneakers, Karl obeys instantly.

  Familiar but incongruous noises from the basement prepare Karl for the sight of Blaine’s amazing antique Fun Land, featuring Skee-Ball, arcade bowling (you know, the kind where you slide the steel puck and the pins fall up instead of down), Ping-Pong, foosball, a pool table, darts, and six friends enjoying themselves.

  Inserting a dime in the old Coke machine, Blaine takes the glass bottle from behind the little window and hands it to Karl. “All hail our honored comrade,” he announces, putting his hand on Karl’s shoulder. Tim tootles a trumpet fanfare on his fist, and the Confederates interrupt their play to hoist their beverages.

  “We thank you, Karl,” Blaine says, “for all you’ve done, and more importantly, for all you’re going to do. Your smartness is matched only by your generosity.”

  “For he’s a jolly good cheater,” they sing, which inspires Karl to inspect his sock toes.

  That’s about it for hoopla. The gathering is low-key, and more comfortable than Karl expected. Alcohol, drugs, cigarettes-there are none to be found here. The party actually seems wholesome. Tim and Ian are smashing the Ping-Pong ball as hard as they can, a comic sight until Ian’s paddle whams the table and breaks. (“Oops-sorry, old chap,” he tells Blaine.) SCHOOL IS PUNISHMENT FOR THE CRIME OF BEING YOUNG, says Noah’s T-shirt; he banks Skee-Balls off the left wall of the ramp as he describes his career plans (study Chinese, get recruited by the CIA, destroy the agency from the inside), while Vijay, his audience, chuckles and slides the steel puck. Cara dances sinuously as she aims her darts, like a soft reed in slow-moving water.

  Ever since that afternoon in his garage, Karl has obsessed over the question, What to do about Cara? Obvious Answer Number One: call her and invite her to go someplace with him. But wouldn’t she disdain any destination he could think of? Finally, he called his cousin Michelle at NYU for advice, and she, who lived in town for most of her life, suggested Café EnJay, which has live music and Italian desserts-but when he got up the nerve to call Cara, he couldn’t find her last name in the phone book. He could have asked Blaine for her number, but there was that lingering confusion about whether they used to be a couple and maybe still were, sort of. He could have talked to Cara in school, but somehow that seemed like a step in the wrong direction-after those kisses, to stand by the lockers and fumblingly ask her for a date. It just felt backward.

  Having exhausted every excuse known to man, in other words, he finds himself a mere six feet away from her, watching her sway slinkily and throw darts. He knew this moment would come when Blaine invited him, and he welcomed the opportunity-in the abstract. In the flesh, things are trickier.

  “Hey, stranger. How’s your dart game?”

  “Don’t know. I never tried.”

  “Then you might turn out to be the best player in the world. Let’s find out.”

  His first dart hits the outermost wire and falls off the board.

  “The secret,” she says, “is to throw it with the pointy end in front.”

  All of Cara’s darts stick in the board, which is more than Karl can say about his. What was that she said in his garage? Act on your true desires. It’s hard to know exactly what his true desires are, under this pressure. Maybe he should put his arm around her. No, he can’t, not in front of everyone. He may lose his chance by doing nothing, though. The window of opportunity is coming down fast, and he’s got his fingers on the sill.

  The Confederacy rescues him from his worries with much-needed distraction. Blaine brings around a wicker tray full of goodies, including potato chips that break oh-so-delicately between Karl’s teeth, cookies still warm from the microwave, and chocolate mint squares with the manufacturer’s logo engraved on the top of each individually wrapped brick. “Someday,” says Vijay, chewing, “students will cheat with bionic chips implanted in their eyes.”

  “I predict it’ll happen by 2020,” Tim says. “Get it? 2020?”

  Vijay and Noah give him the look that groans, Laaaaaaaame.

  “Anyone see Mark Madson’s tattoo?” Ian asks.

  No one has.

  “It’s so idiotic: a little dragon on his shoulder. I can’t believe my former best friend thinks a dragon tattoo is cool.”

  “Zack Barone used to be my best friend,” Blaine says, “and now he has so many piercings, he looks like an acupuncture chart.”

  “Your taste has obviously improved,” Vijay comments.

  Cara surprises Karl by joining in. “I found out my friend Sheryl, at my old school, was telling my secrets to everyone. Know how I caught her?”

  “How?” Karl asks, tossing a dart that sticks in the wall paneling.

  “I told her I had a rare medical condition that was making my breasts swell up. The next day, half the school was staring at my chest.”

  “That proves nothing,” Ian says.

  “So, I guess she’s not your friend anymore,” Karl says.

  “I don’t believe in friends anymore.”

  There isn’t time to question this startling statement, because Tim quickly seconds it: “A best friend is just a disappointment waiting to happen.”

  In the sudden stillness, Ian flings a potato chip at Tim’s face, Frisbee-style, and says, “Bite fast.”

  Tim does, though not fast enough.

  “One thing’s guaranteed,” Vijay says. “When you think you can count on someone, that’s when they let you down.”

  “Or they just don’t get it,” Noah grumbles.

  Karl’s head feels like it’s under murky water. Here they are, bad-mouthing the whole idea of friends-but aren’t they all friends?

  He ventures a quiet quip. “If you don’t have friends, who’ll tell you your breath smells like rotten bananas?”

  Blaine bursts out laughing. “You never know what this guy’ll say next.”

  It feels good to bask in the warmth of Blaine’s appreciation-and even better when he says, “Hey, Karl, come upstairs with me, I want to show you something. Cara- you too.”

  Leaving their darts on the pool table, Karl and Cara follow their host up the stairs. Karl wonders if the others resent this preferential treatment. (Was each of them the new guy once, the favorite?) He also wonders if Blaine knows about him kissing Cara and will suddenly turn around and punch him in the nose.

  They end up behind the house, between the swimming pool and the greenhouse, in the hot tub. Blaine lends Karl a baggy bathing suit, while Cara reclines daringly in her underwear. The air at head level is cold and damp, but from the neck down, Karl floats deliciously in hot, swirling water. We’re chillin’ in the hot tub, he thinks. The funky, Cloroxy smell keeps the experience from being pure heaven-and you can’t exactly call it relaxing to see this much o
f Cara- but then she rests her ankle across his shins, an alcohol-free form of intoxication. She wouldn’t do that if she were anything to Blaine, right?

  “It really smells today,” Blaine says. “My parents are so insane about spa hygiene. I think they intentionally double the disinfectant tablets.”

  Karl’s head is lighter than usual. Between the hot water and the possibly toxic fumes, maybe he ought to be concerned about passing out and sinking below the surface.

  “My mom is the opposite,” Cara replies. “I don’t think she’s ever cleaned the bathtub since I was born. I started doing it myself.”

  “How do they get so strange?” Blaine muses. “It’s like amnesia strikes when they hit thirty, and they forget the whole concept of being normal.”

  Cara’s laughing, Blaine’s laughing, and Karl notices that he alone hasn’t exposed some ridiculous secret of his parents’. Not that it’s required, but he’s clearly behind. To truly belong to this inner circle, he must reveal something stupid about Mom and/or Dad. Trouble is, he doesn’t want to-and besides, nothing comes to mind.

  “My dad was talking about the Nobel Prize at supper last night,” he finally says. “He handed me a picture of the gold medal. He said I need to get more focused, so he’ll still be alive when I win. The scary part is, he meant it seriously.”

  Blaine snorts. “We would never put that kind of pressure on you, Karl. All we ask is the right answers, from now till June.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Karl says.

  “We can’t ask any more than that.”

  Cara strokes the bottom of his foot with the end of her big toe. “Bet you didn’t expect to be here a month ago,” she says.

  Good thing Karl’s head is attached to his shoulders. Otherwise it would float away.

  Down on the diamond in Blortsmek Park, meanwhile, Lizette has just had the roughest day of her softball career. Though ranked by a scout as one of the five best high school windmill pitchers in the state, she just couldn’t hit the corners today, and it was all Karl’s fault. Early in the game, she saw him heading up the hill; she watched from the mound, between pitches, as Blaine let him in. There just isn’t room in one teenage brain for total game focus and preoccupation with a close friend’s suspicious doings. Alone and distracted inside the chalk circle, she went through her routine before the next pitch-deep breath, nose wiggle, right foot shake-but she put the ball in the dirt, which you really don’t want to do with a runner on base, and then (the runner having advanced to second), she couldn’t shake it off, she walked the next two batters, even with the team chattering support and the coach calling out, “Get better, Lizette,” until finally Mr. Rubinoff came out to see what the heck was going on, and she couldn’t say, I’m worried about my best friend’s soul, so she just shrugged and popped a piece of Orbit gum in her mouth, her preferred tranquilizer. Mr. Rubinoff didn’t give her as hard a time as he might have; he said, “Talk to yourself, Lizette. You’re our inspiration, you’re our engine. You know better than to linger on a bad pitch. Tell yourself: nothing but strikes. Get fired up!” And it worked, she put the next ball right over the middle and didn’t give up a grand slam the way she feared, just a high pop-up between second and third, and she crossed the grassless dirt infield for it but didn’t see Sarah Leone, the shortstop, coming in, too, until Mr. Rubinoff screamed, “CALL IT,” in response to which both girls shouted, “I got it!” and then collided, and all of the Lincoln Presidents jumped up and down in their blue and black shirts, a team-wide tizzy, as the fluorescent green ball rolled away and two of the Pumas crossed home plate.