Cheater (15 page)

She’s a nice person,
Karl reflects as he steps through the door.
How can she stand to work for him?

Mr. Klimchock, sucking on something, holds an open tin of lemon Altoids out to Karl, across his desk. Karl shakes his head, then adds, “No thank you.”

“Sit down, sit down,” he’s told as the assistant principal rises to his feet.

A peculiar calm settles on Karl as he takes a seat. Most likely it’s a physiological response to anxiety-overload—but he’s actually relieved to be here. No matter what happens, he has escaped once and for all from the Confederacy.

Klimchock moves around the office like a boxer, never settling in one spot for long. “Expelled? Disgraced? A brilliant career flushed down the toilet? There’s no way a boy like you is going to let it happen.”

He sounds cheerful. Karl waits for the sledgehammer’s blow.

“The good news is, I’m willing to keep this entire incident out of your records.”

In his fear of being asked to name names, Karl forgot that part—the penalty for cheating, the permanent record of his crime. He commands himself to hold it together, to stay strong and not think about his parents and their ivy-covered dreams, at least until he’s out of here—but his head keeps getting lighter and lighter.

Or, what if . . .

Having nothing to lose, he goes for the long shot. “Um— what are you talking about?”

Klimchock comes up alongside him. Before Karl knows what’s happening, Klimchock has snatched the I-Ball pen from his shirt pocket. The assistant principal studies the pen until he finds the tiny lens near the tip. “Denial won’t work, Karl. You shouldn’t have been so obvious—moving the pen over the paper like a flashlight,
tsk tsk.
”

He hands Karl a yellow pad. “I’ll keep this pen as evidence. You can use one of mine.” Giving Karl a Bic pen from the mug on his desk, he puts a finger to his own lips and says, “I won’t say a word. Just write what I need to know and you can leave. No harm, no foul.”

Karl rests his hand on the pen so it won’t roll away and fall on the floor. He’s thinking hard. What could he do that would make a college overlook the note on his records? What he comes up with is: single-handedly rescuing a dozen girls and a nun from a stranded cable car over a rocky gorge.

“Feel free to give me the names any way you like. You can paint them on my wall if that’ll make you happy.”

When Karl fails to join in Klimchock’s chuckle, the assistant principal drums his fingertips on Karl’s shoulder. “I know this isn’t easy. There are so many nasty names for people who do this. Rat. Stool pigeon. Informer. But there’s another way to look at it. When you inform on bad people, you’re really a hero. Not a snitch—a whistle-blower. Someone who sees rottenness and reports it, for the common good. What a service you’ll be doing for this school! Remember what the Munchkins sang to Dorothy? ‘You will be a bust, be a bust, be a bust, in the Hall of Fame.’”

Karl worries that, by stubbornly refusing to take up the pen, he’s behaving rudely. The assistant principal checks his watch and paces the room. “I have a little time problem, Karl. I’m supposed to meet with the superintendent in ten minutes. I’m sorry, but I really don’t have the luxury of letting you wallow in your qualms. I expect you to do the right thing and save your hide—so let’s cut the bull and get down to it.”

Karl considers his options. One: sacrifice his future to protect a bunch of slimeballs. Two: turn them in like a cowardly, treacherous sleaze, just to protect himself
.

A gentle rap at the door interrupts the stillness. “What is it?” Mr. Klimchock barks.

The door opens slightly, and a small, gift-wrapped box appears, in the palm of a pale hand that belongs, it turns out, to Miss Verp.

“I saw something at Town Stationery and I thought you would—”

Finding Karl there, twisting his neck to see her, Miss Verp freezes with her jaws open.

“Didn’t Edna tell you I had a student with me?”

“She stepped away.”

“Just leave it on the file cabinet. Go, thanks, good-bye.”

The door closes. The mystery gift, in blue and gold metallic wrapping paper, sits cheerily on the gray steel.

“Getting back to business,” Klimchock says, “think of it this way. Would your so-called friends risk anything to keep
your
name secret? Would they risk, say, dessert for a month?”

“Cara did,” Karl croaks.

“Cara Nzada? You can’t compare yourself with her. She has a pathological attitude problem. She’ll go far—from misdemeanor to felony to life in a trailer park, looking older than her years.”

Until now, Karl wasn’t sure he’d be able to withstand the assistant principal’s threats. Thanks to this reminder of Klimchock’s cruelty, however, Karl discovers that he’s stronger than he thought.

“Time’s running out. Let’s get that hand moving.”

Staring at the shiny pink head, Karl can’t stop hearing the words
Come to the Dark Side, Luke.

“You’re not going to sacrifice your future for a bunch of brats who used you like a vending machine: put in ten cents’ worth of flattery, make the twerp feel like he’s in with the in crowd, and out come the right answers. What a bargain.”

Ouch.

The eye of the hurricane passes. All is still for a few moments. Klimchock stares out the window, then wanders over to his
Fiddler on the Roof
poster. Turning his back to Karl, he inspects the shoe that rests on the tiny, sagging house. “You may be thinking to yourself,
How did this man get to be so fanatical, so obsessed?
Am I right?”

“Not exactly.”

“There’s a reason, Karl. If I despise cheating, if rooting it out is my passion, I have good cause. A long time ago, when I was roughly your age, attending this high school, I lost out on something I wanted very badly. And the reason I lost was that the other guy cheated. So—now you’re thinking,
Get over it!
But I never did get over it—because it changed the course of my life. It crept into my guts and stayed there. There is nothing on earth I hate more than a cheater.”

“What did you lose out on?”

“None of your business. I’m just explaining that I’m not an evil madman who lives to torment teenagers. I seek justice.”

Karl does his best to meet Mr. Klimchock’s gaze, but his eyes keep drifting away, to the place on the assistant principal’s scalp where the creased forehead meets the smooth dome—the swooping line behind which his hair once grew. The startling idea of Klimchock with a full head of hair reminds Karl that the assistant principal was young once, a teenager, and maybe not a vicious maniac. Like a curved universe, this is a concept that’s easy to state but hard to grasp. Karl understands this much, though: if an innocent baby can grow up and become Mr. Klimchock, then there’s no guarantee that some hideous trauma won’t warp
him
, too.

“I’d like to send you back to class now,” Mr. Klimchock says, and taps the yellow pad.

Time and fate are closing in on him.

“It’s all right, son. I know they manipulated you—I know you didn’t do it to improve your own grades. You’re not the one I’m after.”

He will pay for this the rest of his life if he keeps resisting—all to protect some honorless thieves who (Klimchock has this much right) never cared about him in the slightest—who blackmailed him and threatened his friends to keep him from quitting. (Who
was
that on the phone with Blaine? The question plagues him like an itch he can’t reach.)

“It takes strength to separate yourself from your peers,” Klimchock says. “But I believe you have what it takes.”

What was it Lizette said on his front steps?
Look yourself in the eye and be honest.

Good advice, but it doesn’t seem to apply here.

“Pick up the pen, Karl. Time’s running out.”

“Sorry. I can’t.”

Klimchock slaps the
Fiddler on the Roof
poster with a flat hand, so hard that particles of ceiling plaster drift down on them. A wormlike vein has popped up on his forehead. Uck.

“All right. There’s one other way. If you can’t bring yourself to tell me their names, you can let them hang themselves. You’ll cheat one more time, on the next test. I’ve suspected for a while that you people were sending each other answers via radio signal. I’m right, am I not?”

Karl sees no point in lying. “Mm-hm.”

“Fantastic! Because I’ve ordered a system that will let me see who’s receiving your signal. I’ll have them dead to rights. You didn’t sell them out—they gave themselves away. But, if you warn them, and no one picks up the signal, then I’ll know you tipped them off, and it’ll be Bye-Bye, Karly.”

The next test, though, would be . . . the SAT.

“You don’t mean the SAT, right?”

Klimchock considers that for a moment, then smiles contentedly. “Why not? It’s perfect—the widest net, to catch the most fish.”

Karl can’t stretch his brain around this.

“You seem perplexed.”

“I just—you can’t do this. Not on the SAT.”

“I can’t?”

If Klimchock is so far beyond the gravitational force of sanity that he doesn’t understand, then nothing Karl can say will bring him back down to earth.

“Remember the goal, Karl. Sometimes justice requires extreme measures.”

Even if Karl were willing to lure what remains of the Confederacy into Klimchock’s net—which he’s not—he would never do it on the SAT. That would be like . . . like . . . spray painting his name, address, and Social Security number all over police headquarters. This isn’t some trivial little grammar quiz—Klimchock is messing around with the Educational Testing Service!

“I wonder,” the assistant principal says, “if we’ve been wrong about you all this time.”

“What do you mean?”

“We all assumed your grades were real. Maybe they’re not. Maybe you’ve been cheating since grammar school. Is that how you always get everything right?”

“No—I just started a few weeks ago.”

“Says you. But if the school newspaper reports that you’ve been caught red-handed, people are going to start wondering. There goes your reputation, Karl.”

“I didn’t
get
answers from them. I
gave
answers to them.”

“You enjoy being thought of as a genius, don’t you? Behind that modest facade, you really thrive on it. It’s all you’ve got, really. But maybe you don’t deserve your status.”

Klimchock plops into the rolling chair behind his desk and lets the insults sink in. The weird part is that, except for the false accusation, he has nailed Karl, exactly. This is extremely disturbing. When a sadistic psychopath comes out with a startling, accurate insight into your soul, what do you do with the information?

“Either way, Karl, it looks like you’ve come to the end of your reign. The Reign of the Brain. Soon you’ll just be one more doofy adolescent.”

Karl shakes his head—not in despair, but to throw off confusion. This is not the time to mistake the enemy for a psychoanalyst. He can deal with his new self-knowledge later; right now, he’s got a duel to fight.

In Greek mythology, Athena equips Perseus with the magical weapons he’ll need to survive his encounter with Medusa. Karl has no heavenly helper, but he
does
have some useful, strategic knowledge, gained from watching hundreds of episodes of
Law and Order.
He can see what Klimchock is trying to do—apply pressure to his weak point, his pride, until he snaps and blurts out something self-incriminating, like,
I AM a genius! They MADE me help them. The small-brained idiots—they USED me. THEY’RE the criminals, not me!

Knowing this, he disengages his emotions.

Klimchock keeps studying him, waiting for him to crack. It’s embarrassing to be watched so closely. Karl looks down at his hands, wishing he could blink and rematerialize on another continent.

Maybe he should tell Samantha. If he explains what Klimchock wants him to do—if she prints it in the school newspaper—that would wreck Klimchock’s plan, it would disgrace him.

And it would create a different sort of permanent record. A public proclamation of Karl’s cheating, in print.

“I wonder if you’ve realized yet,” Klimchock says loudly, jarringly, “that, even if I choose to ignore this incident, no highly selective college will admit you.”

He waits for Karl to ask the obvious question, and Karl obliges him.

“Why not?”

“Because you haven’t done anything for three years except get perfect grades. That won’t fly, Karl.”

“I’ve been working on independent projects outside of school.”

“I don’t care if you’ve cured cancer, AIDS, and hemorrhoids, they still want to see that you’re capable of functioning in a group. You know: plays well with others. When you have your pick of the best and the brightest, there’s no reason to accept a social misfit.”

This sounds true. The news would have paralyzed Karl with despair under other circumstances, but right now, it’s just . . . incidental. Gravy. The icing on the cake.

“I could make that problem go away for you,” Klimchock says. He rolls a yellow pencil playfully across his desk blotter with a flick of a fingernail, then rolls it back the opposite way with the other hand.

“How?”

“I can put you on the fencing team, which I coach myself. And I can write a letter of recommendation, praising your inspirational team leadership, your awesome powers of concentration, and the astonishing grace of your lunges.”

The offer doesn’t feel real. Klimchock’s just spouting words, babbling. He would never do what he says.

“Do I sense distrust? I really can do this, Karl. And will. In exchange for you know what. You can walk out of here right now and tell your friends I just wanted to chat about colleges. There’s no reason for anyone to know about any of this. You help me, and I’ll help you.”

“But—wouldn’t that be cheating?”