Cheater (5 page)

“Seems like we’re dealing with a case of A.D.D. today.”

“Hm?”

She grabs her baseball cap and raises it into whacking position, but gives up. “You’re gonna wear out my hittin’ arm.”

In the fountain, the waters lap quietly. The many coins shift back and forth, back and forth, an illusion that makes Karl a bit seasick. He can’t remember lying to Lizette before today, and he would really like to never do it again.

“How’d you get here, anyway?” she asks. “You take the bus?”

“Uh-huh,” he lies.

“Well, if you promise not to do anything perverted, I’ll give you a ride home. What’d you come here to shop for, anyway?”

“I don’t know—just looking around.”

She shakes her head. “Seems like there’s a lot you don’t know.”

Understatement of the year,
he thinks.

RULE #4: It’s not how excellent your cheating methods are—it’s how excellently you execute them. Think of it like golf. If you want to be Tiger Woods, you have to Practice, Practice, Practice!

Chapter 4

COMMANDO KARL’S ROOKIE MISSION TARGET:
German quiz—prepositions
RECEIVERS:
Tim, Ian
APPARATUS:
spy mike, earphones
DEFENSIVE BARRIER:
Herr Franklin
RISK OF DETECTION:
low

No room for second thoughts, attacks of conscience, or chickening out now. Tyranny must be opposed, as Blaine reminded him. The cruel Klimchock must be defeated, one test at a time.

The wireless mike sewn inside his collar, behind the top button, weighs next to nothing. Tim and Ian have their earphones in—not the usual white buds, but imperceptible flesh-tone itty-bitties. The members of the Confederacy give him last-minute encouragements as he makes his way down the hall: a pat on the back, an arm squeeze. “Concentration,” Vijay whispers. “Just relax,” Blaine says.

I should have practiced more,
Karl thinks.

Tim stops in his tracks as they enter. “Oh no. He installed a Zorbo-Scope!”

Karl searches the room, panicking, for the half second before he realizes it’s a joke.

“Steady there, soldier,” Ian says.

At his desk, he takes three deep breaths.

“You okay?”

That’s Jonah, to his right. A ghost from his previous, law-abiding life.

“Yeah, why?”

“You look like you might throw up.”

“
Willkommen
,” says Herr Franklin—better known to his students as Doctor Franklinstein. He counts quiz sheets and hands them to the first student in each row. “Please keep them facedown until I tell you. You’re on your honor.”

The quiz sheets run out before Karl gets one. He has to raise his hand. Herr Franklin comes briskly, apologetically, special delivery. Flakes of dandruff rain down on the desk.

“All right. Now this is stuff we’ve gone over and over, so I’m expecting every one of you to ace it. Don’t disappoint me.”

“We won’t,” says Tim.

“That’s the attitude I like to see. Is everybody ready?
Nehmt euere Bleistifte raus. Eins, zwei, drei, und . . . fangt mal an!
”

The quiz is so easy, it seems a waste to cheat—but Karl understands, this is a trial run, meant to build his confidence.
Fill in the missing prepositions that take the dative case: aus, ___, bei, ___, nach, ___, von, ___.
Same for accusative case, and for the doubtful prepositions, which Herr F. likes to call the switch-hitters.

When the teacher returns to his desk up front, Karl leans in close to the desk, concealing his face behind Justin Pflamm’s back. “Dative,” he whispers into his collar, moving his lips as little as possible. “
Ausser . . . mit . . . seit . . . zu.”

Something hits him on the left side of the head. There it is, down on the floor by his sneaker: a tiny red and black eraser in the shape of a ladybug. Ian is jabbing his own collar with his finger, mouthing the words,
Turn the mike on!

Oops.

After sliding the switch from twelve o’clock to four, Karl repeats the message. Ian gives him a discreet thumbs-up.

“Five more minutes,” Herr F. announces and goes to his supply closet in the back of the room. A stack of canary yellow paper spills from the top shelf, all over the floor. “Dingus!” blurts Herr F., squatting to clean up the bright mess. “Never mind. Just concentrate on your work.”

Karl obeys. He’s on the very last preposition,
zwischen,
when Herr F., alongside him, says, “Pardon?”

What does a heart really do at moments like this: stop or sink? Neither, to be physiologically accurate. It would be entirely correct, however, to say
the blood deserts Karl’s face like helpless villagers fleeing a volcanic eruption.

“Did you say something, Karl?” Herr F. asks.

“I must have been thinking out loud.”

“That’s a bad habit during tests.” The teacher laughs. “Better keep those answers to yourself!”

Chuckle, chuckle. Not for a moment, though, is Karl in danger of getting caught.

Passing his quiz forward—mission accomplished—Karl glances at Ian, who sends him a congenial nod.

The Confederacy meets at lunchtime at Blaine’s car, where high fives and yee-has are awarded to the rookie cheater. “Today you are a man,” Tim says.

Cara pinches Karl’s cheek, and then they all go their separate ways, for secrecy’s sake, leaving Karl with the smell of perfume in his nostrils, intoxicated and alone.

One of his weekly chores is dumping all the little waste-paper baskets in his house into a big trash bag. While he’s shaking the bathroom basket and watching the tissues and Q-tips tumble out, he hears his mother venting to his father in the bedroom. “They’re like piranhas, they taste a drop of blood and they’re all over us.”

“What did you tell them?” his father asks. “You can’t exactly deny what’s standing there in broad daylight.”

Karl can’t figure out what they’re talking about, only that his mother seems to have had another bad day at work. The door opens. They emerge in their evening sweatshirts and freeze at the sight of him.

“What happened?” he asks. “Are you okay?”

She explains on the way to the kitchen. “Paul left me to handle the reporters by myself all day, which is the part of the job I hate the most.”

“Why were reporters bothering you?”

“Well. He did something that was a bit . . .”

“Illegal?” Karl’s dad suggests.

“Audacious.”

“What did he do?”

In the kitchen, his mother pours pistachio nuts into a plastic bag and pounds them on the cutting board with a wooden mallet. They’re having Pistachio Pasta for dinner tonight: tortellini with tomatoes, scallions, and nuts, and Parmesan on top. It’s Karl’s favorite dinner, but other concerns have him too distracted to notice.

“Mom? What did your boss do?”

His father snickers.

“Stop that,” Mom grumbles. She keeps hammering as she explains. “He decided to build a few more floors than originally planned.”

“Three, to be exact,” Dad contributes.

“And the city government is upset because he didn’t get approval for the change.”

“Also, the lot isn’t zoned for a building that tall,” Dad adds.

“Meanwhile, it was a slow news day, and the press is all over us.”

“But why would he suddenly add three extra floors?” Karl asks.

While his father snickers some more, his mother blushes. “You have to understand, Karl, commercial real estate in New York is worth a lot. Every square foot of it.”

“So he broke the law to make extra money?”

“He disagreed with the Planning Commission’s decision. He felt the site could easily accommodate thirty-four floors.”

Karl has been setting the dinner table; his parents are working in the kitchen. He assumes they won’t notice his silence from this distance, but he’s wrong.

“Listen,” his mother pleads, “I wish he’d just done what he was supposed to do. My life would be much simpler, and my head wouldn’t be pounding. But it’s his decision, and I can’t get on my high horse and condemn him, and I really wish you wouldn’t either, because half of everything we own comes from his success at cutting through bureaucracy.”

Karl stands mutely with his hand on the fork he has just set down.
She’s not sleazy,
he tells himself.
It’s her boss, not her.

“As crimes go, it’s really fairly harmless,” she says. “He’ll pay a big fine and that’ll be that.”

“He’ll probably pay his lawyers more than the fine,” Karl’s father says.

“And he’ll
still
come out ahead. That’s the magic of Manhattan real estate.”

“Yes, there’s a lot of money in dirt.”

His father gives Karl a sly grin—and his mother slams a cabinet door shut. “As if
your
clients were model citizens.”

“Careful,” his father says, grinning nervously. “There are minors present.”

“What does she mean?” Karl asks.

“Nothing.”

“They just hide all their assets in offshore corporations, that’s all. Which Dad sets up for them.”

“All according to law.”

“But you do have to go to court sometimes, to explain why Bob the Billionaire only paid two hundred dollars in taxes.”

“The only time I have to go to court is when the I.R.S. decides to throw a scare into the public. Now could we please change the subject?”

During dinner, Karl’s parents misunderstand his unhappiness. They think it’s all about
them
, and they go to great lengths to convince him that there’s nothing wrong with the work they do. He’d like them to just stop talking, but he can’t explain that what’s really bothering him is his own dishonesty, not theirs.

He’s reading
Die Ilse ist weg
for school and listening to Good Vibes on WUHU (the mellow sound of the vibraphone usually smoothes away his rough edges, but not tonight) when someone or something raps on his bedroom window.

“Nevermore,” squawks Matt.

“Come on, Hermit Crab,” Lizette calls to him, “we’re going to Friendly’s.”

“I don’t think so,” Karl mumbles.

“It’s okay, we all took showers,” Jonah says.

“Sorry, I’m”—umm, not
busy,
but what?—“not feeling that great.”

Matt pretends to tear his hair out. “He doesn’t like us anymore!”

“What’s wrong, Herm?” Lizette asks. “That time of the month?”

“I’m just not in the mood. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

He shuts the window and draws the shade.

They tap on the glass, all three of them in unison, rapidly, persistently, comically. He has to lift the shade and wave them away.

The doorbell rings, of course. Karl’s dad lets Lizette in and chats with her briefly before sending her to Karl’s room.

“What’s up, Carlo?”

“Nothing’s up.”

She returns to the swamps of Florida, for comedy’s sake. “Hold on there, son. The boys and me invite y’all to Friendly’s and you turn us down flatter than flounders, and then you say ain’t nothin’ wrong? Sounds mighty
un
Friendly to me.”

“It’s personal, all right? I don’t want to talk about it.”

Lizette has very little of the therapist in her. Uncomfortable, she jokes, “So, do you want to talk about it?”

He gives her a scowl.

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain arm-rubbing, homework-copying person, would it?”

“No.”

She nods, a silent
whew.
“Well—if you decide you want to talk, let me know.”

He locks the door after she goes, and wishes there were some small part of what’s going on that he could tell her. But there really isn’t.

Most of the gloom wears off by morning. Karl eats lunch with the Slightly Irregular Three, and enjoys the story of the surly waitress at Friendly’s that ends with Jonah saying, “Which part of fleppin-slabob-n’gosh didn’t you understand?” Life seems generally good again, and after school the four of them go to the soggy football field at Van Dinky Park and play Footnis, in which you have to serve the tennis ball in an arc from behind your team’s twenty-yard line—a game Karl himself invented, and there’s much laughter and diving and panting, that is until Blaine calls Karl over to his convertible to discuss the next mission.

Mr. Watney, with his reddish goatee, is widely considered the best teacher in the school. He has a trick of recounting historical events in the present and even the future tense— “Over six days, the stock market loses almost a third of its value. For millions, life savings simply vanish. Comedian Groucho Marx will lose over two hundred thousand dollars. He comments later, ‘I would have lost more, but that was all the money I had.’” The Watney style seemed a little weird at first, but now his students get goose bumps as the stories of Pearl Harbor and the Scopes Monkey Trial unfold.

Mr. Watney has intellect and charisma, but he also has one blatant character flaw: vanity.
He primps.
Not only does he comb his hair during class, he even installed three mirrors on the back wall of his room, and you can see him checking himself out from this angle or that during his roaming lectures. If he could cure this one fault, he would be magnificent.

But at least he’s fair. He tells his students four possible essay questions in advance of each test, so they can prepare answers. And he lets them type their tests on their laptops, if they prefer, which is a major kindness to both the nimble typists and the handwriting-challenged.

He also likes to puncture the tension on test days with silliness. He covers the blackboard with a red velvet curtain his mother sewed, and as he pulls the cord, he hums the Olympic fanfare through a blue kazoo. The curtain rises, and there, in pale green chalk, stands today’s test question:

WHO WAS MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CUBAN MISSILE
CRISIS, THE U.S., THE U.S.S.R., OR CUBA?

Karl outlined answers for all four questions, so now he only needs to turn his sketchy outline into coherent paragraphs. He begins:
If you work backward in time, you’ll see that the Cuban Missile Crisis stemmed directly from the
many U.S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, or at least
overthrow him.