Cheater (17 page)

The symptoms last all weekend. He’s achingly tired, and on Monday an X-ray shows he’s got pneumonia—and not just that, the lining of his lungs is inflamed, a condition known as pleurisy. That’s why it hurts so much every time he coughs—which means he can’t bring up the mucus and clear his lungs the way he needs to—which means, according to Dr. Dahesh, that his best bet is to spend a few days in the hospital for a course of antibiotics.

No longer a pediatric patient, Karl has an older roommate in the hospital, a soft-spoken, white-haired man named Mr. Hydine, who has no noticeable symptoms. In the middle of the night, though, Mr. Hydine turns into Dr. Jekylline, screaming,
“Help!”
hoarsely, hysterically, repeatedly. Karl can’t leap out of bed and help him, because he’s got an intravenous tube in his arm—he can’t even
see
his roommate from inside his ripply gold curtain—for all he knows, the guy has turned into a werewolf—but he pushes the Nurse Call button and shouts through the curtain, “It’s okay, Mr. Hydine, I called the nurse, she’ll be right here.”

The nurse doesn’t show up right away, though, and Mr. Hydine keeps screaming, so Karl tries again, “Mr. Hydine, what’s wrong? Is there anything I can do?” to which Mr. Hydine sobs, “They’re trying to kill me.” Though dubious, Karl asks, “Who is?” and Mr. Hydine replies, “All of you,” moaning tearfully until the nurse finally arrives and calms the old man with gentle words.

“He just gets confused and agitated in the dark,” she explains to Karl.

As if to prove her right, Mr. Hydine repeats his terrifying performance three more times that first night.

A painful tug on his arm wakes Karl at 7 A.M. A different nurse is administering his antibiotic through the IV line, and she has carelessly backed against the tube that leads to Karl’s forearm. “Good morning, Karl,” Mr. Hydine says pleasantly.

All of this explains why, when his parents come to visit, Karl looks even more haggard than he did when he entered the hospital.

He’s so wiped out that he can be forgiven for sleeping through Jonah and Matt’s visit, and Blaine’s phone call. When Samantha calls, he tells her that Mr. Klimchock just came to see him and threatened him with a knife. “Ha ha ha,” Samantha replies, which helps Karl understand that he dreamed the visit. (“Such a disappointing spring break.” Samantha sighs. “All this rain, and you sick, and you not calling me once. Very sad.”)

He tries to reach Cara, but the number has been disconnected.

Waking from a nap, he finds a note written on a napkin on his lunch tray.

Your conscience is telling you something.
Listen to it! I miss my friend —L.

Happy and excited, he picks up the phone to call her but hangs up before dialing because what can he say? If he tells her about Klimchock’s coercion, she’ll get so outraged that she might try to expose it in public, and then the whole thing would explode in his face.

Still, he misses her, and keeps the note in his hands, and wonders what she really thinks of him, and what he would want, if it were a possibility, even though it’s not.

Cough, cough. Cough cough cough. Pain. Grimacing.

“You can ask for a painkiller, you know,” says Mr. Hydine.

“I can?”

“No point suffering unnecessarily.”

That sounds like wisdom, even if it comes from a midnight maniac. He presses his Nurse Call button, and almost instantly, a frowning beauty appears at his bedside. Francesca Subitsky, her ID card says. She has short blond hair, rectangular glasses, rosy cheeks, a perky nose, and a massive copy of
Bride’s
magazine in her hand.

“Yes?” she asks impatiently.

“My chest—when I cough, it hurts a lot. Would it be okay if I took a Tylenol?”

“Sure,” she says brusquely, and stomps away. She comes back with a pill in a paper cup, saying, “Here.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Karl says to Mr. Hydine when she’s gone, but the old guy has fallen asleep. Karl doesn’t want to wake him, so he leaves the TV off and tries reading the dusty, yellowed science fiction paperbacks his dad brought,
Dune
and
Stranger in a Strange Land.
Trouble is, the books leave huge empty regions in his brain where dark visions of his future unfold—mopping floors? welcoming drive-thru customers to Burger King?—and so he puts the books down and plays with the bed’s controls, trying to see how many different angles and shapes he can make with the mattress, and when he has his feet up high, his back flat, and his butt in a deep trough, Phillip Upchurch walks into the room.

“Comfortable?” Upchurch asks. He’s wearing white tennis shorts and a white polo shirt, and as Karl returns the bed to a simple obtuse angle, he surveys the remains of Karl’s lunch on the rolling tray: the yellow Jell-O, the limp, oily fries, the crusts of white bread, the sad, putrid green beans in diagonally sliced segments.

“Hi,” Karl mumbles. “What are you doing here? Are you a volunteer?”

“Not this year.”

An odd smell reaches Karl, sort of like the air freshener his family keeps in the bathroom, a foresty scent with some lemon in it.

Upchurch’s cologne.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad,” Karl says, and coughs, once, twice, thrice. He tries to speak, but the rest of his coughing fit prevents him, rattling his ribs, making him wince, until he’s got a mouthful of gunk that must be gotten rid of, not swallowed. He spits it into the curved plastic pan the nurse left by his bedside the first day. “How are you?”

Upchurch, stiff-backed, grimaces.

Karl’s head is too clogged to think of a polite way to ask the visitor why he has come, but the answer arrives soon enough. Upchurch wanders to the door, peers up and down the hall, and comes back in—an odd thing to do, but not as odd as when he waves at Mr. Hydine’s face. The old man keeps snoring.

“What’s going on?” Karl asks.

“I’m going crazy because no one knows how much you told Klimchock.”

Karl watches the gold curtain sway languorously in Upchurch’s breeze. Maybe he’s in some sort of pneumonia-induced hallucinogenic stupor.

“You have to tell me, Karl. This is serious.”

“Why do you want to know?”

(Because he might be a spy: not a secret member of the Confederacy, but an informer sent by Klimchock to impersonate a cheater.)

Upchurch spreads out the three hip-hop CDs Karl’s mother brought—a salesman’s recommendation, the polar opposite of Karl’s musical taste. Shaking his head disdainfully, he explains: “I told Blaine to recruit you because I didn’t trust any of those morons to come up with the right answers. Before you joined the group, Blaine screwed up on a chemistry test—he spelled
Avogadro
wrong, so the rest of us did, too. Luckily Nudell was out sick that week and Grantley marked her papers for her. Do you have any idea what would have happened if Nudell caught us all writing
Abogado
? We would have fried. But Grantley didn’t notice—or didn’t care.”

Upchurch has pimples that Karl never noticed before, because they’re covered by a cream that matches his flesh perfectly. His eyebrows are thick and lie along a prominent ridge; they don’t meet in the middle, but Karl suspects a tweezer may have been involved.

The surface of Upchurch is all he can bear to explore. What lies beneath is too awful to think about. (That story about wanting to beat out Karl for valedictorian—did he make that up on the spot, as a cover-up, or is it still true? Karl can’t judge, he’s too dizzy and confused.)

“Shocked?” Upchurch asks. “Get over it.”

“I just thought you really were smart.”

Letting that pass, Upchurch says, “For the record, I didn’t organize this to benefit myself. It’s for the whole town.”

The claim is so preposterous, there’s no way to challenge it without calling Upchurch a liar. “I don’t see how that could possibly be true.”

“Then listen: the school’s standardized test scores have been going down, and that’s affecting the real estate market.
New Jersey Magazine
didn’t include our school in its Top Fifty last year. No one’s going to pay a million for a four-bedroom house in a town where the high school sucks. Now do you understand?”

Karl is lost as a lamb in a dark labyrinth, but he can’t bring himself to admit it. “Sort of.”

A deep sigh, a roll of the eye. “My father’s going to run for mayor in November. You know who he is, right? Randall Upchurch? Cathedral Realty?”

“Uh-huh.”

Mr. Hydine groans in his sleep and says, “Please—no!” Upchurch freezes, and waits until the snoring resumes.

“Okay, I’ll spell it out for you. Raise the school’s SAT scores and you raise the value of every house in town.”

“But, for that to happen,
lots
of people would have to be part of the Confederacy. And they’re not.”

“Oh, they are. Just because they keep a low profile, that doesn’t mean they’re all playing it straight.”

“But I only saw”—he counts on his fingers—“. . . six people cheat. Plus you.”

“A lot goes on under the surface. The point is, the principal knows all about it, and he
wants
us to cheat, because that way he can keep his job, which he wouldn’t if everyone got scores like last year’s.”

Karl can’t decide whether or not he should believe a word Upchurch has said. On the one hand, anything’s possible. On the other, if the whole school has been cheating and the principal approves, that’s just too . . . hideous.

But he doesn’t want Upchurch to know he’s upset. “Aside from the property values, I guess the higher grades won’t hurt when you apply to colleges.”

“Are you insulting me? Are you saying I’m really doing it just for myself? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“That’s right, Karl. You really don’t know much about anything.”

A cell phone rings, playing “Hail to the Chief.” Upchurch checks the caller’s number and moves to the doorway. He keeps his back to Karl. “What? . . . The Friendly Kitchen doesn’t
have
a security person, how can they ask volunteers for ID? . . . That’s insane . . . Well—just tell them you lost your wallet, you don’t have any ID on you. Look, figure it out. I’m not going to pay you if you don’t sign me in, obviously.”

Uninformed and ill though Karl may be, he’s able to piece together these clues. A profile in
The Emancipator
last fall reported that Upchurch volunteered at the Rainbow Afterschool Center, tutoring little kids; at the Ida and Bob Jergenson Senior Center, visiting with the elderly; and at the Friendly Kitchen, serving hot meals to the homeless. Karl wondered back then how one person could find the time to do so much, on top of his many other activities. Now he has the answer: someone else has been serving those hot meals and signing Upchurch’s name. Chances are he has similar arrangements at the Afterschool and Senior centers.

Though Karl never speaks the insult aloud—
You sleaze-bag!—
it must be legible on his face.

“There are reasons for everything I do, Karl. And I don’t go around breaking rules unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

“How is faking community service absolutely necessary?”

“If you want to go to an Ivy League school and you’re not an athlete or the son of an alumnus, it’s
totally
necessary. There aren’t that many slots, Karl—and the applicants are all superhuman. They don’t just win every competition they enter—they deliver medicine to sick Eskimos by dogsled, and play the oboe with the New York Philharmonic. You would know all this if you ever lifted your head out of whatever stupid comic book you waste your time on.”

The more Upchurch talks, the more Karl wishes he had the physical strength to punch him in the nose. Since he doesn’t, and since Upchurch’s cologne is starting to make him sick to his stomach, he asks bluntly, “Why did you come here?”

Again, Upchurch waves at Mr. Hydine’s unconscious face and peeks up and down the hall. He leans in close to Karl so no one else will hear.

“I have to know what you told Klimchock. And I need you to help us with the SAT.”

If Upchurch thinks Karl will help him after all his insults, then Upchurch’s brain has a serious defect. Karl laughs at him contemptuously—but this proves to be a painful mistake, because it triggers another coughing fit.

“What if I don’t help you?” he chokes out.

“You’ll be squashed like a worm under a boot. Bad things will happen to you. But that’s not how it’s going to be. You’re going to help us.”

Why does his tone of voice sound so familiar? Wait— could it be? Yes—he’s modeling himself, confusingly, on Klimchock. It’s as if the Joker’s son became Batman’s new sidekick.

“Take a look at this,” Upchurch says. From the pocket of his shorts, he removes . . . a number two pencil.

Karl withholds his admiration.

“Don’t judge a pencil by its looks. This is not your father’s Dixon Ticonderoga. Look here.”

His fingernail points to a small opening in the ferrule, the metal part that holds the eraser on.

“Take a feel.”

He hands Karl the pencil. It’s heavy—as if it were made of steel, not wood.

“That opening is a lens. Inside this pencil—which you can also use to write your answers—is a compact, state-of-the-art cheating machine. First, it recognizes letters and numbers. Second, it generates a voice that speaks the number of the question and the letter you darkened. Third, it transmits the message to whoever’s listening by earphone. You fill in the answers, then sweep the lens over them, and the Magic Pencil does the rest. The only thing missing is a human brain to supply the right answers.”

So far, Karl has taken all of Upchurch’s bullying like . . . like . . . a sick person in a hospital. The time has come to fight back.

“What if I say no—and if you do anything to me, then I’ll turn you in as the biggest cheater of all, and a community service fraud?”

An effortless parry: “Sorry, but there’s no evidence against me, and you’re already in disgrace. Anything you say will sound like desperate raving.”