Cheater (14 page)

“Just so I can sleep tonight—you’re not going to tell Flight Attendant Barbie our secrets, are you?”

Karl scowls at him, offended.

“Sorry. I just had to make sure.”

“Why don’t you think about stopping, Blaine? Instead of trying to change my mind, why don’t you change yours? Before Samantha catches you.”

“I’d like to make you happy, Karl—but your cult of honesty is too weird for me. Besides, I can’t stop, or my grades would drop off the edge of the world. The teachers would send me to the guidance counselor, and she’d ask if there’s any trouble at home, and then she’d call my parents. It’s like dominos—one false move and everything collapses.”

Karl straightens his spine—
Stand up to him
, he tells himself—and discovers that he’s an inch taller than Blaine.

“I’m not going to help you anymore,” he says. “If you want to be my friend, you have to respect my decision.”

Blaine’s calm turns out to be a mere shell. Through it bursts a thunderbolt of panic. “You’re screwing us!”

The explosion means that Karl has finally broken free—or so he thinks. Exhilarated, he plans his future: as soon as Blaine leaves, he’ll call Lizette.

“You’re forcing me to go a way I really don’t want to go,” Blaine says, shaking his head mournfully.

Karl reads this as a bluff and stands firm.

Blaine opens his cell phone and speed-dials.

“Who are you calling?”

Blaine exhales grimly, as if deeply regretting the piano he’s about to drop on Karl’s head. So far, it still looks like a fake-out.

“Hi, it’s Blaine. Listen, I’m with Karl, at his house, and he says he refuses to help us anymore. I tried to change his mind, but he won’t listen. What do you want me to do? . . . I’ve tried, believe me. . . . Okay, but how, exactly?” A look of alarm. An uncomfortable glance at Karl. “You’re sure you want me to do that?” He turns his back to Karl. “But— No, but— No, I don’t. Okay, all right, I understand. . . . I’ll tell him. . . . Bye.”

If not for the buzzing voice on the other end, Karl wouldn’t have believed this: somewhere out there, a mysterious Mr. Big controls Blaine like a puppet.

“Who was that?” he asks.

“Can’t tell you.”

“What’s the message you’re supposed to deliver?”

“I’m sorry about this, Karl. You know I like you.”

“Stop saying you like me.”

“This isn’t how I prefer to deal with people.”

Karl gives him an impatient glare.

“Okay, here’s what he said. You can’t quit now, or someone will set your old friends up so it looks like they cheated, and report them to Klimchock.”

“What old friends do you mean?”

“You know. Jonah. Matt. Lizette.”

It’s weird to hear these syllables from Blaine’s lips—kind of like Zeus addressing a humble shepherd by name.
Yo, Woolius.
You don’t expect them to be paying attention up on Mount Olympus.

“Who was that on the phone?”

“I can’t say. You don’t even know him. But he knows you.”

“Sounds like another bluff to me. Remember
We’ll destroy your cat
?”

“Believe me, Karl, this guy doesn’t make false threats. You don’t want to test him.” Blaine backs out of the garage. “Don’t shoot the messenger, okay?”

How will Karl take this setback? Depression would be understandable. Despair, definitely. But his spirit has grown over the past weeks, and what he’s feeling right now, more than anything, is anger. He’s so mad, in fact, that when he heads back into the house, he flings open the door at the back of the garage, fast; his windbreaker flaps in the breeze, and the doorknob gets caught on the windbreaker’s pocket. This hardly seems possible, but (Petrofsky’s Second Law of Klutzodynamics: When you’re most agitated, that’s when you do the most ridiculously clumsy things) the knob wedges itself into the small pocket inside the outer pocket, and when Karl tries to free himself, he can’t. His anger turns to frantic frustration. He can either stay hooked indefinitely, or he can rip the windbreaker to shreds. He’s leaning toward the latter.

We’ll leave him in this absurd predicament and hope he realizes in time that there’s a third, more sensible option: slip the windbreaker off and come back to it later, when he’s calmer.

(Remember this the next time you find yourself speared like a hot dog on the two sharp prongs of a dilemma: there’s usually a third solution that doesn’t involve the destruction of self or property. To find it, take a deep breath, calm down, and
think.
)

RULE #10 (also known as the Tiny Elevator Rule): You go down alone. When you’re caught, they may offer a deal--but your comrades are all depending on your courage. Not everyone has the guts to resist. But who do you want to model yourself on, the gutsy hero or the yellow-bellied snitch? Be strong. Be proud. Don’t cave!

Chapter 10

Happy birthday, Karl.

You’re seventeen today—old enough to drive alone in your home state, once you pass the road test.

Your friends Vijay and Noah have purchased a special gift for you, a little gizmo that you’re sure to love. Go ahead, open it. (Don’t look so grim! It’s your birthday, for goodness’ sake!)

“Oh—it’s a pen.”

I-BALL, say the letters on the clip. For a few happy milliseconds, he mistakes this for an ordinary pen, a dull but appreciated gift from two guys who cared enough to acknowledge his birthday.

“Click it,” Vijay tells him, grinning.

He does.

“Noah, what time is it?” Vijay asks.

“I can’t tell. Karl, what does my watch say?”

Karl glances at Noah’s watch and sees—huh?—a jittery image of a sneaker on concrete.
His
sneaker. Wait—the image moves—now a silver PT Cruiser is driving by on Noah’s watch dial—just like the one that’s turning the corner onto Shlink Street.

Vijay moves the tip of the pen so it points at himself, and there he is on the watch dial, crisp and clear. He points it back at the school, and there’s Lincoln High, tiny on the dial. “We all chipped in. It’s from an online spy store.”

“Best birthday present you ever got, right?”

Uncharacteristically peppy, Vijay puts on some unidentifiable accent (Arnold Schwarzenegger?) and says, “It is the maximum in miniaturization.”

If they perceive his misery, they don’t show it. He’d really like to snap the pen in two and throw the pieces over the nearest roof, but that would be rude, and besides, he’s pretty sure they’ll be expecting him to use the pen during tomorrow’s German test. Which he can’t refuse to do, no matter what, or innocent victims will suffer.

Vijay has to get a haircut, and the barbershop is halfway to Karl’s house, so they walk together. “We’re lucky to live in the electronic age,” Vijay remarks.

Deep in his sorrow, Karl blurts a blunt question. “Why do you keep cheating? At some point your luck’s going to run out. You’ll ruin your life when you didn’t need to.”

Vijay swings his book bag merrily. “You must be on some kind of antihappiness drug. Lighten up!”

Though he didn’t expect to convince Vijay instantaneously, this disappoints Karl.

“You know why I really do it?” Vijay says. “The technical challenge is only half the reason. I like that people need my skill. No one else at school can do this—just me. I wouldn’t give that up.”

Here’s what hurts: Karl
likes
Vijay (though the memory of the cat-destruction threat hangs behind his friendly feelings like a toxic cloud). He really wants to alter Vijay’s trajectory before he flies right into Klimchock’s wide-open jaws. But he doesn’t know how.

“Anyway,” Vijay adds, “what’s the point of having technology if you don’t use it?”

They’ve come to the barbershop. Vijay shakes Karl’s hand and repeats his Happy Birthday wish before going in. Then he reminds Karl to take good care of his gift until tomorrow.

Musings of a young American walking home alone on his seventeenth birthday:

After a quick stop at home to drop off his backpack, it’s over to the driving school on Hillside Avenue—where Jonah is standing at the curb, waiting for his lesson.

He had to trade days because of an orthodontist appointment, he explains. In the awkward minutes before their instructors take them out, they stand together, shifting their weight from foot to foot.

“So—happy birthday,” Jonah says. “You going to do anything?”

“No, just going out to eat with my parents.”

Karl assumes Jonah must be thinking about the same thing
he’s
thinking about: Lizette’s birthday, in December, when they went bowling and Matt’s fingers got stuck in the ball and he slipped on the slick lane and went sliding halfway to the pins, and they couldn’t stop laughing.

But that’s not what Jonah’s thinking. “How come you dumped us, Karl?” he asks.

Somewhere, a woodpecker drums against a tree trunk. And again.

“I didn’t think you were that kind of person—who’d ditch your friends because you found some cooler ones.”

“That’s not what happened. Really—it’s not.”

At least, it’s only half the story.

“Okay, then, what happened?”

Here comes Mr. Pizzuti, in the blue Corolla, holding his cigarette out the window.

“Lizette got mad at me. We had a fight.”

“About what?”

“I can’t tell you. But she was right and I was wrong.”

Jonah has a habit of covering his braces with his lips at all times, except when he’s so happy that he forgets about them. The sun glints brightly now on the steel bonded to his front teeth. “Maybe if I told her you said that, you guys could talk it over and make up.”

Make up.
As if they were a couple.

“I wish we could, but she won’t. It’s complicated.”

“You never know until you try.”

“Usually that’s true, but not this time.”

During his lesson, Karl imagines Jonah reporting his words to Lizette (
He says he was wrong and you were right!
) and Lizette coming over to ask if he’s going to stop cheating now, and him saying he can’t, they’re blackmailing him, and her not believing him and slapping his face—right cheek, left cheek, right cheek, left cheek—before stomping out and slamming the door. Fortunately, these visions don’t interfere with his driving, except for when he fails to stop for a school bus letting off its tiny passengers. (Mr. Pizzuti jams on
his
brake, and the bus driver gives Karl the sort of glower usually reserved for swindlers of widows and orphans.)

His parents take him out to dinner at Beau Thai. After this long, gruesome day, spending his birthday night with his parents is an almost unbearable sorrow. “What would you like to do after dinner, Karl?” his mom asks. “We’re up for just about anything.”

“Skiing may be hard to arrange this time of year,” his dad comments.

“No, um, I made plans with some friends, if that’s okay,” he lies.

“Oh, the heartbreak,” Dad says, pretending to sob.

“Do you want us to drop you off at someone’s house?”

“No, it’s not till later. I can walk.”

At home, he waits in hope and dread for Lizette to call. The phone rings—but it’s Grandma Agnes, calling from California to sing “Happy Birthday to You” with her pals at the pool.

Walking to his, er, friend’s house—in other words, walking aimlessly through town, on quiet streets where no one will see him—Karl thinks back to other birthdays. There was the party at the tae kwon do place in kindergarten, when Jonah threw up. The blur of parties in the house when he was tiny, recorded in never-watched videos and in the family photo album. (Chocolate all over his face and hands, cone-hat on his head.) The backyard carnival party with the tug-of-war and the egg race.

This birthday stands alone, though. The absolute low point.

The next morning, Karl uses the I-Ball pen to give Tim and Ian the answers to a German test on adjective endings. As he’s filling in the
-er
after
gut-
(
Ich bin ein guter Student
), the hiss of the P.A. system forewarns everyone that an announcement is coming.

“Karl Petrofsky. Pack your books. You’re going to Mr. Klimchock’s office. Leave your test where it is. See you soon.”

Karl and Herr Franklin stare at each other, equally helpless, equally paralyzed.

“Right now, Karl,” says The Voice. “I’m waiting.”

Herr Franklin clearly wants to offer support as Karl goes out, but all he can do is place his hand on Karl’s shoulder— a hand that burns, partly because Karl knows he doesn’t deserve the sympathy, and partly because it’s really hot.

The picture in Karl’s mind, as he makes the long journey down to the office, comes from
War of the Worlds,
with Tom Cruise: a giant robot tentacle reaches down, grabs a plump, juicy human, and hoists him into the spidery alien vessel, screaming and fighting. Karl’s face has gone bloodless. The empty, echoey stairwells still smell like paint.
How did he know? Did someone tell him about the pen? It couldn’t have been Herr Franklin.
Past the small display case of trophies won by the math and chess teams, past the exhibition of blue, multiarmed deities painted by Sita Tiwari—
Is there any chance this
isn’t
about cheating?

At last he arrives at the office, where Mrs. D’Souza, Mr. Klimchock’s secretary, keeps a plate of gingerbread cookies on the corner of her desk, a consolation for any student unfortunate enough to be called down to see her boss.

“Mr. Klimchock wanted to see me,” Karl mumbles.

“Yes, Karl, I heard. Would you like a cookie first?”

“No, but thanks.”

“Good luck.”

She does an odd thing with her face. She pulls her lips in tight, knits her brow as if in anguish, and nods.
Courage. Be strong.