Cheater (2 page)

Lizette and Jonah scowl at Matt. Really—the lad does cross the line sometimes.

“Speaking of lunch,” Lizette says, “Karl, did you bring us any Jelly Bellies?”

No reply from Karl.

“Paging Karl Petrofsky—are you with us?”

No, he isn’t with them. He’s still back at his desk, juggling the idea of sleepy-cool Blaine with the text message thing. The two won’t stay in his head at the same time.

“Karl, you’re scaring us.” She bangs her backpack against his arm. “Anybody got a remedy for zombie-bite?”

“What are you talking about?” Karl says, rubbing his arm.

“He’s back!”

A voice from a different universe interrupts the banter. “Hey, Karl, can I talk to you for a minute?”

The tall visitor in the striped J. Crew sweater steps between Karl and Lizette.

“I just had a question about the test.”

Blaine’s straight, white, smiling teeth arouse admiration all by themselves. Karl walks into a water fountain and hits his hip bone, hard.

“Any chance I could get you alone?”

“I’ll catch up with you,” Karl mumbles to his friends. They head downstairs to the cafeteria, glancing back in perplexity as they go.

That’s more or less what Karl expects to hear, but Blaine plays it cryptic. “Come on,” he says, and leads Karl toward the corner exit, which goes nowhere except to the student parking lot. The strap of Karl’s bulging backpack weighs so heavily on his right shoulder that he has to lean leftward to balance it; Blaine, meanwhile, carries nothing at all. He holds out a box of green Tic Tacs, and Karl takes one, not wanting to seem hostile. The Tic Tac turns out to be lime, not wintergreen—an unwelcome surprise, but he can’t exactly spit it out and say,
Blechhh,
can he?

There’s no one else around. Their footsteps ring and echo on the steel steps.

“I wasn’t planning to tell anyone,” Karl says.

Blaine throws open the exit door. The bright sun makes both of them blink.

“I didn’t think you were, Karl. You’re a good guy.”

The BMW is parked close to the exit. Blaine unlocks it and gestures for Karl to get in. This may rank as the most confusing moment of Karl’s life so far: because, even as he guards against a surprise assault with a lead pipe, he’s inflating like a Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon of himself. Blaine Shore considers him a
Good Guy
!

“Where are we going?” he asks.

“It’s lunch period. I was thinking about the Leaning Tower.”

Before Blaine can climb in, though, someone else flips the driver’s seat forward and slips into the back. Karl smells the musky, dusky perfume before he sees her: Cara Nzada, in tight jeans that stop far below her navel and don’t seem to have a zipper.

“Hi, Karl.”

She knows his name!

The top goes down. Blaine’s sunglasses go on. “Everybody good?” he asks.

Karl buckles his shoulder harness. “Mm-hm,” he says, feebly.

The wind does a funny thing in a convertible, he discovers. It doesn’t hit you in the face, it just makes your hair stand up and dance. In Karl’s case, his floppy mop does a highspeed hula.

They drive past his friends, who are blowing up the brown bags their lunches came in. He hears three loud
pops
in quick succession.

Why does he keep worrying that Blaine is going to drive him to an abandoned warehouse, tie his hands behind his back, and—

“I just wanted to explain why I cheat,” Blaine says.

“You don’t have to. It doesn’t really matter.”

“You’re wrong. Try to keep an open mind.”

“Open up,” Cara says, and scratches the top of his head with two fingers.

The spot tingles long after she stops.

“There are two reasons,” Blaine begins. “Let’s start with the selfish one. You were born with a sticky brain, Karl. You study for half an hour and you know the whole book. Me, I study the same page for three hours and I remember maybe seventy percent. Do I deserve to go to M.I.T.? Absolutely not. I’m not fooling myself. I just want to go to a decent school, get a good job, and enjoy my life. Can you tell me what’s wrong with that?”

The way he puts it, it’s hard to call his cheating vile. Of course, everything he just said is a rationalizing excuse— but, with Cara’s perfume still in his nose, in this car that doesn’t have a single crumb on the floor mats or a speck of dust on the dashboard, Karl can’t put into words why Blaine is wrong.

“Not exactly,” he says.

“Good! Then there’s the other reason. You may not have noticed this, Karl, but school is basically unfair. People like you succeed, while other people never do, no matter how hard they try. Teachers make us learn all this information we’ll never need, just to sort out the Chosen Few from everybody else.”

“You’re saying the system doesn’t care about us, so it’s okay to cheat?”

Blaine examines him uncertainly, between glances at the road. “I can’t tell—are you agreeing or disagreeing?”

“Neither, I’m just paraphrasing.”

“Oh. Okay.” Thrown off, he seems to have lost his place in the script. “Help me out, Cara.”

She leans forward. Her smooth black hair glistens. “Karl, what Blaine is saying is total crap.“

She rests her hand on Karl’s shoulder. Her features are so sharp and delicate, her olive skin so creamy, you could die from the frustrated desire to touch her.

“The reason he cheats, the reason
I
cheat, the reason just about everyone except you cheats—is pure laziness. I can’t see studying all night to get the same grade I can get in ten minutes. They like to keep us busy so we won’t get into trouble—but I
like
to get into trouble. Why let them steal my life? You won’t tell on us, will you?”

She squeezes his shoulder. He meets her cool green eyes.

“Um. No.”

“Good man!” Blaine shouts as he pulls into the Leaning Tower’s parking lot.

Inside the pizzeria, a mom is feeding her cute, tiny son cut-up mouthfuls of pizza by fork. She gives the three students a friendly smile as they sit down with their slices.

“I knew Karl was all right,” Blaine tells Cara as he soaks the grease from his slice with paper napkins. “I could tell, without ever talking to him.”

“
Talk
to him!” the toddler chirps.

Uncomfortable with the flattery, Karl folds his slice and puts the vertex in his mouth.

“So,” Blaine says, “would you like to help us?”

In a movie, Karl’s first bite of pizza would get caught in his throat, and he would writhe and choke on the floor, looking grotesque and idiotic in front of Blaine and Cara. In the world he really inhabits, though, he only burns the roof of his mouth.

“You okay, Karl?”

“Good pizza, huh?” says Cara, amused.

He breathes in and out through O-shaped lips, delivering cool air to his palate while waiting for them to say,
Had you scared there for a minute, didn’t we?

“We’ve wanted to ask you for a long time. I just didn’t want to take a chance on you turning us in. But, now that you know . . . how about it?”

Over the cash register, the cartoon tower of pizza leans humorously to the left. An anchovy hangs on to the edge, trying not to fall off. How long can Karl go without answering Blaine’s question? Let’s see—twenty seconds. Thirty seconds.

Forty seconds. Fifty.

“What do you think, Karl?” Blaine prods.

“I know what’s going on in your mind,” Blaine says.
“
You’re thinking,
Why should I help them? What’s in it for me?”

“That’s not what I was thinking.”

“It’s a valid question. Why in the world would you help us cheat, when you yourself don’t need help—when you would only be helping others?”

“I’ll tell you one reason, Karl,” Cara says. She sips through her straw. “We would both be extremely grateful.”

“And so would a lot of other people. Everyone would stop thinking you’re just a geek, a brain on two feet who only looks out for Number One. They would see the good guy behind the goofy exterior. A generous person, willing to help the rest of us poor slobs.”

“You would be unique,” Cara says. “The Genius Who Cares.”

Her lips are thin, her smile crooked and sort of mocking, as if all of this is just teasing and only a fool would take it seriously. On the other hand, she keeps gazing into his eyes like a snake charmer.

Behind the counter, the pizza guys are watching a soccer game with the commentary in Spanish. The cute kid pounds the table and studies his fist curiously. Ordinary though his surroundings may seem, Karl has the feeling he has fallen down a rabbit hole. Tumbling dizzily, end over end, he hears people say things they would never say in real life—Blaine inviting him cheerfully to cheat, Cara Nzada almost flirting with him. Any minute now, men made of playing cards may start swinging axes at his neck.

“I’ll tell you what I like about you, Karl,” Cara says. “You don’t pretend to be cooler than you are. You’re just
you.
That’s a good thing—but you need to break out of your little world. Don’t be so afraid! You have the potential to be more than a brilliant nerd and a social disaster.”

Obviously, she’s manipulating him—shamelessly, outrageously. If he could make a wish, though, it would be for her to keep going.

She reaches over and puts her hand on top of his. It’s cold from the soda can. “Is your life so wonderful the way it is that you don’t want it to ever change?”

He sits very still and waits for these hallucinations to end.

“It’s kind of fun to break the rules,” she says.

She strokes the backs of his fingers with one of hers, and he looks up again. In her eyes, he sees the strangest sight of all: a small person flying through the air.

“Bye bye bye!” the little boy calls happily as his mother carries him, over her head, out of the pizzeria.

Karl, too, is flying. If only he could get back to solid ground.

RULE #2: The stakes are high, so think twice before you brag to a buddy who may blab your secrets around the school--because, if your bud blabs to the wrong Person, you’re going down like the Titanic.

Chapter 2

Okay. What do you want me to do? Are these the words you’re expecting poor bedazzled Karl to mumble? Don’t hold your breath. Even in the face of Cara’s flirtation and Blaine’s confusing logic—even though part of him longs to keep sitting here with this gorgeous pair, as if they were all friends—Karl is still Karl, and he has more common sense than your stereotypical math genius or absentminded professor.

“So, are you with us?” Blaine asks optimistically.

“Are you crazy?” Karl sputters. “
NO
, I’m not with you!”

The only question in his mind, really, is whether or not to walk straight out the door. He chooses not to, mostly because it would seem hostile, but also because he would have to jog the mile and a half back to school.

Blaine takes the rejection amiably. “You never know unless you ask.”

Cara gives Karl a mischievous grin. “I hope you don’t look down on us, Karl—just because we weren’t born with your advantages.”

“I’m not looking down on you.”

“That’s good. Because, if you change your mind, the door’s always open.”

An awkward patch follows. Karl watches the Ecuadorian team score a goal on the TV, and is grateful to the announcer for filling the silence with his crazed howl, “GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!”

At the last minute, Blaine and Cara decide to skip the last three periods, leaving Karl in a minor panic—even at a sprint, he’ll get to German late—but Blaine generously offers to drop him off a block from school. His last words, as Karl climbs out of the car: “Don’t worry, amigo. Be happy.”

Cara’s hair whips behind her as she waves good-bye, arm straight up, looking forward, not back.

Of all the mind-bending words spoken that lunch period, these are the ones that haunt Karl:
Is your life so wonderful the way it is that you don’t want it to ever change?

His friends are coming out of the cafeteria with aluminum foil antennae sticking up out of their hair (or, in Lizette’s case, her baseball cap). So soon after gazing into Cara’s green eyes, the three of them are not a pretty sight. Jonah has enough steel on his gigantic teeth to open a small hardware store, and his hair stands up like stiff straw. Tiny Matt can’t keep all of his body parts still at the same time. (No, it’s not a neurological disorder, just a case of hyperactivity he should have outgrown by now.) And Lizette—well, actually, Karl found her so appealing when she first moved here from Florida that he almost got up the nerve to ask her for a date (she’s a tall beanpole just like him, with shaggy, shortish, chestnut hair, a long nose, and a southern accent, and the whole package just tugged at his heart, in part because she seemed to actually
like
him), but Jonah fortunately pointed out that she was obviously gay before Karl embarrassed himself. With her Devil Rays cap pulled down to her eyebrows and her loose gray sweat suit, she could easily pass for a guy—to be honest, her nonhetero orientation is what took the pressure off and let him relax around her and become friends—but right now, Karl wishes she would dress just a little more attractively, no matter which gender she prefers.

Yes, he knows it’s disloyal, superficial, and basically odious to judge his friends by their exteriors, but the radiance of Blaine and Cara has blinded him temporarily, and he’s still waiting for his eyes to adjust.

“Where’d you disappear to?” Jonah asks. “What did Sweater Boy want with you?”

“We saw you drive away with him,” Lizette says accusingly. “Very strange, Karl.”

“He just wanted me to explain something. From the chem test.”