Cheater (16 page)

Klimchock rubs his watery eyes with his pinkies, frowning. Karl can’t tell if the assistant principal will see the error of his ways, or throw a stapler at him.

“I’m willing to bend the rules,” Klimchock says, “just this once. In pursuit of a higher goal.”

He swivels in his chair, 180 degrees, giving Karl privacy so he can decide.

Karl weighs the alternatives one more time: turn the Confederates in, or sacrifice himself for their sake. He remembers that they blackmailed him and don’t deserve his loyalty. He remembers that he doesn’t want to be a slimy snitch.

“I’m late for the superintendent,” Klimchock says to the wall behind his desk. “I need your decision now.”

Karl says, “Okay.”

Klimchock swivels fast and stops himself by slapping the blotter with two flat hands.

“My decision is . . . I have to think about it.”

The pink fingers on the blotter retract slowly, and turn into fists.

Mrs. D’Souza offers Karl a cookie on his way out. He doesn’t hear her.

(She understands: it happens all the time.)

RULE #11: You Play chess, right? Say your opponent gets you in a fork, and you’re going to lose either your queen or your castle. Don’t give UP! Put him in check instead! Then, on his next move, he has to Protect his king, not loot and Pillage you. Maybe it’s just delaying the inevitable--or maybe it’ll save your behind! The same holds true if you get caught cheating. Sure, it looks hopeless ... but your opponent may be vulnerable. I’ll leave it at that, wink wink.

Chapter 11

Shell-shocked, pale, basically blasted to pieces, Karl takes his backpack from his locker and heads out of the school. The bell sounds just as he reaches the front steps. It’s the first of the lunch periods, and swarms of students follow him out.

He keeps his back to her and speeds up, but the clatter of little wheels on concrete gets louder and louder, closer and closer. It’s like waiting for a torpedo to hit.

“What did he say to you? What was that about?”

Samantha and her small rolling suitcase accompany him as he turns toward the corner. His main objective is not to fall apart in front of her.

“Nothing. He just wanted to talk to me about colleges.”

“I seriously doubt that. You’re hiding something, aren’t you? Let’s see if I can guess. He wants to catch cheaters. What would he want with you? Hmmm.”

Time oozes forward. Another ordeal to get through.

“Did he ask you the same thing I did? About people approaching you for help? And he swore you to secrecy?”

“Er—I shouldn’t say.”

“Listen, Karl, if you tell him anything, you can leak it to me, too. You
have
to.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Do you want to come over to my house for lunch?” she asks, out of the bluest blue. “I live right over there.” She points to a pink and purple house with a great deal of decorative molding. “I could show you my room,” and she winks at him, which is the second most terrifying event of the day.

“My parents are expecting me at home,” he lies.

“You could call them. If you came with me, we’d have the whole house to ourselves.”

“I better not,” he mumbles.

She shakes her head. “I wish you didn’t have to play so mysterious with me. We’ll never get anywhere that way.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s like you’re always hiding something.”

“I’m not.”

“Yes you are.” She pokes the side of his head with her index finger. “I know you’re in there, secrets. Come out with your hands up.”

They’ve come to her house. Lining the edges of the front walk like soldiers are two parallel rows of bushes, each a perfectly pruned sphere. Up on the second floor, one of the windows reveals a baby blue ceiling through sheer lavender curtains. A row of stuffed animals sits on the sill.

Her finger tickles his scalp. “You will come to my room,” she says, hypnotist-style. “You will obey.”

A silver Mercedes goes by, with Phillip Upchurch at the wheel. Upchurch watches them with a malevolent sort of fascination. He heard the announcement on the P.A., no doubt. Karl gets the message:
you couldn’t stay out of trouble,could you? Well, I can’t save you this time, moron.

He veers away from Samantha. “Sorry. I’ll see you later.”

There’s an ominous quiet behind him: the little wheels aren’t clattering. He doesn’t look back.

Just before dinner, he finds three new messages in his email, not counting the pharmaceutical spam. He opens Lizette’s first.

I HOPE THE KLIMCHOCK THING WASN’T WHAT IT SOUNDED LIKE. BTW, HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LATE. I’M STILL NOT TALKING TO YOU.

If he could climb into the monitor, he would search until he found her, so he could tell her—what?

To his relief, Blaine’s message doesn’t contain a threat against his property or his loved ones: it’s just a question mark. He deletes it without replying.

Since he can’t have Lizette’s sympathy, he sends Cara a note. KLIMCHOCK CAUGHT ME, TOO. THERE GOES MY LIFE.

Will she respond?
Don’t hold your breath
, he advises himself.

Jonah’s note, last of the three, includes a mysterious link to YouTube. When he plays the video, it’s the Fabulous Flying Stringbinis, that night on State Street. Their faces freeze in absurd, clowning expressions each time the stream buffers. He consumes the small blurred images hungrily, and when the clip ends, he plays it again.

The Quick Pick-Me-Up of Death: Jonah and Matt go flying.
“Hey!”

“One of my high school friends went to Princeton,” Karl’s dad is saying, “and he used to tell crazy stories about the fraternity pranks there. Supposedly, this one guy hung naked from the top of my friend’s door, and when he came back to his room, the guy grabbed his head in a naked scissor-lock. I always wondered if my friend was exaggerating.”

Karl stares queasily at the highway directions on his dad’s old iMac, while the printer spits out the route.

“Don’t let it scare you, Karl, that was a long time ago. And he ended up liking the school a lot.”

The hard wooden back of his father’s spare office chair presses uncomfortably against Karl’s vertebrae.

“Am I making everything worse? Sorry. Maybe I should shut my big trap.”

He types in his next route request: from Princeton to the University of Pennsylvania.

“One last thing: did you know that Albert Einstein taught at Princeton? Can you wrap your brain around that?”

“Dad,” Karl blurts out, “a friend of mine is in trouble. I’m worried about him.”

His father goes solemn. He asks quietly, “What sort of trouble?”

“He got caught cheating on a test.”

“Whew!”

His dad’s cackle offends him.

“Why are you laughing?”

“Sorry—not to minimize your friend’s problem—it’s just that, when a son says, ‘My friend is in trouble,’ a parent always assumes he’s talking about himself, in code. You had me scared for a minute. Go on, tell me what’s up with your friend.”

His father divides his attention between Karl’s story and the route to Philadelphia. Karl wishes he could get his dad to listen more carefully, but he’s afraid to demand it, because then his father might guess the truth.

After many
Hm
s, his father takes his fingernail from the monitor glass and says, “Your friend really got himself into a jam. I hope, if nothing else, you can learn from his mistake. Although I can’t imagine you ever screwing up to that degree. Hey, look at this, it’s under an hour from Princeton to Philly. We’ll just have to be careful to avoid rush hour.”

“What should my friend
do
, Dad? Can you give me some legal advice, that I can tell him?”

“Sorry, I don’t have a clue—this is way out of my field. If he were my kid, I’d be tearing my hair out right now—and you know how I prize what’s left of my hair.”

While Karl mentally drills a hole toward the earth’s core, in which he can hide for the rest of his life, the phone rings.

“Petrofsky and Son,” his father answers. Then, “It’s for you.”

“I tried your cell but it’s turned off,” Blaine says. “And you didn’t answer my email. You really shouldn’t cut the lines of communication in a crisis, Carlos. So—what did Klimchock say?”

“Um, I’m here with my dad doing MapQuests.”

“Understood. I’ll ask yes or no questions. Did he ask for names?”

“Yes.”

“Did you give him any?”

“No. I’d better go, I’ll talk to you later.”

“Karl, we have to know what’s going on. You honestly didn’t tell him anything?”

“Right. Bye.”

His dad is scrutinizing the little map underneath the directions. “You can talk to your friends, I don’t mind. You sounded a bit rude there, FYI.”

“He’s not really my friend.”

“Oh.”

His father zooms in on Philadelphia. While the iMac’s colorful little Wheel of Waiting spins, Karl seeks refuge from the catastrophe that’s hurtling toward him. The bookshelves are full of histories and biographies—no sanctuary there. Fist-size busts of Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR stand up from the desk like strange bronze vegetation. There’s also a mobile of photos showing him, Karl, at various stages of growth, all happy.

The panic swells until it bursts. “Can an assistant principal even
do
the things he’s doing? Can he put signal detectors around the building? Isn’t there a law against spying on people? And what about kicking people out of school and putting notes on their records? He’s ruining their lives forever—how can he be allowed to do that? And making someone cheat on the SAT
can’t
be legal.”

Hopeful for the first time since he heard his name over the P.A., Karl clutches the spiral cord of his father’s phone and eagerly awaits the verdict.

His father leans back in his chair and swivels toward Karl. “You’re a good friend, to care this much. Okay, let’s take your points one at a time. First—I believe the school does have the right to install surveillance devices in classrooms, because they’re considered public places. And it’s my understanding that the principal or assistant principal can take any disciplinary action that’s appropriate, whether it’s expulsion or putting a note on a transcript.”

The Eagle of Hope, shot dead, lands head down in the water with a splash.

“On the other hand, he absolutely can’t tell a student to cheat on the SAT. Basically, he can’t do anything illegal.”

What’s this? A white-feathered head rising from the placid surface?

“Would that include offering to lie on a college application?” Karl asks.

“Mmm—I don’t think that rises to the level of breaking the law. But it’s so improper, he could be fired for it.”

The brass section blares a patriotic fanfare. Our national symbol soars again!

“The problem is
proving
he said these things to your friend. Also, if your friend really did cheat, then he’s in deep doo-doo no matter what happens to the assistant principal. Going public won’t get him out of trouble.”

Karl releases the phone cord and stares at the blotches imprinted on his palm. They look like Morse code—but if there’s a message, he can’t read it.

On his father’s monitor, meanwhile, the route from Princeton to Philadelphia is a lavender worm with a magenta digestive tract: a squiggle connecting two places that have nothing to do with his future.

“You know, Karl,” his father says, “it really doesn’t matter to me which college you end up at.”

“Really?”

“Seriously.
Any
of them will make me ecstatic. Princeton, Yale, Columbia—not only will they open doors for you— when people ask where my son’s going to school, I’ll get to say, ‘Harvard,’ or whatever. That’s going to be one of the high points of my life.”

RULE #12: Did you ever feel Used? Like, you stick your neck way out for someone, and they turn around and step on it? “What does that have to do with cheating?” you ask. I’ll tell you: In this business, you really need to know what human nature is like. Deep down, people are selfish. So don’t be stunned when they ignore what you’ve done for them and walk all over you. Believe me, it’s going to happen.

Chapter 12

Princeton: old stone buildings, tall trees, stone archways, third largest college chapel in the world, Nassau Hall, Woodrow Wilson was president of the university before he was president of the United States, Einstein didn’t actually belong to the faculty, he was at the Institute for Advanced Study, but his office was on campus, and you may recognize this courtyard from the movie
A Beautiful Mind—
John Forbes Nash Jr. still teaches here, by the way—and here’s McCosh Hall, where students take their exams according to the Student Honor Code. But where
are
the students? They’re sanely staying out of this pouring rain that refuses to let up, while the cheerful sophomore tour guide (native of Hong Kong) never lets the sogginess dampen her smiley spirits. She hopes to work for the U.N. someday, she says, and meanwhile plays bluegrass fiddle as a hobby.

The University of Pennsylvania: more old stone buildings, and here’s the Green, you’ll pass through here many times a day, there’s Ben Franklin, who founded the university, and kids love to climb on the big Button (Claes Oldenberg, 1981), and did you know that ENIAC, the world’s first all-electronic digital computer, was created here in the Towne Building in the 1940s, and you’d be seeing lots of Frisbees and footballs flying here on the Quad if the weather were nicer—but it’s not, the April showers are threatening to drown all potential May flowers, drenching Karl and his parents, and all the stone buildings are swirling together in one big wet whirlpool, while the future that should have awaited him washes away like a sandcastle at high tide. All he wants is to close his eyes and go to sleep, he’s so tired and this whole trip is so pointless—though his parents don’t know it, they’re beaming, damp-faced, at every historic hall and courtyard—and he hasn’t slept well in days, but he drifts off in the car, and when he wakes up, they’re pulling off the turnpike and he’s sweating and coughing, and when he wakes up the next morning he has a high fever and chills, he can barely catch his breath, he keeps coughing painfully, and when he spits out the gunk, the mucus is pale green.