Cheater (23 page)

“Look—I was in an impossible position.”

“Just one thing,” Blaine insists. “Thank you. For keeping us out of Klimchock’s trap.”

He offers Karl his hand. As they shake, he sighs. “Looks like I’ll be going to Princeton—Review, that is.”

He pats Karl on the back and pushes the heavy door open. “Adios, amigo. I’ll talk to you in a few years, with an investment opportunity.”

The door closes between them. Karl slumps against the handrail, exhausted.

Someone thumps on the door,
wham wham wham wham wham
.

“Karl? You okay in there?”

He pushes the lock bar to let Lizette in, but she pulls the door open so fast that he stumbles out into the bright sunlight.

He sees the near future with perfect clarity: he will tumble down the concrete steps, all dignity gone, and Lizette will lose her respect for him. He may lose a tooth or two as well.

That’s not how the scene plays out, though. She grabs his arm before he takes the tumble, and hoists him up almost vertical.

“Elegant move,” she comments.

Regaining his balance, with Lizette’s hand in his, he blinks in the sunlight. A peaceful breeze stirs the new leaves on the trees. There are no teachers or students around, just him and Lizette.

“Looks like you climbed out of that hole you were in,” she says. “Congratulations.”

You couldn’t choreograph a better lead-in to a first kiss if you planned for months. In fact, Karl knows, if he
doesn’t
kiss her, he’ll be a fool, a coward, a jerk.

Nevertheless . . .

“What is it, Karl?”

Nothing he can put into words. Just that he’s scared out of his wits.

“Anybody need a ride?” his mother calls from the car.

RULE #16: In any given situation, most people take the easy way out. Sure, I could stop cheating, stop taking risks, spare myself the Penalties, make everything simple: graduate on time instead of having to repeat the year, go to a Prestigious college, get a high-Paying job, get an attractive wife and Perfect kids. But that would mean Death by Boredom. Let others Play life straight. I choose cheating!

Chapter 16

The ropes are cutting into Karl’s hands and wrists. He should have put on work gloves, but it’s too late now, he’s got the Turtle in the air and it’s swinging like a heavy pendulum, something he didn’t anticipate—and another problem, the beam he slung the rope over is just a single two-by-four, and it’s creaking under the weight. All he can do now is hurry and lower the Turtle into the test vat (a round kiddy pool, four inflated rings decorated with happy goldfish) as fast as possible, before the garage roof comes crashing down—except, he has to wait for the Turtle to stop swinging, or it’ll hit the topmost ring of the pool, burst it, and flood the garage floor.

A stranger stops at the open garage door. The man is so quiet, Karl doesn’t realize he’s there until he asks, “Karl Petrofsky?”

The visitor is a thin, white-haired man in a brown suit and yellow bow tie, with gold-rimmed glasses and pale, softly wrinkled skin. The face is vaguely familiar; Karl has seen this man before, though he can’t remember where.

There’s no way to hide the Turtle this time. “Yes?”

“May I come in?”

“I’m kind of busy right now.”

The wooden beam groans overhead. Karl lowers the Turtle to within a few inches of the water’s surface. The pendulum motion has narrowed; timing the drop carefully, he lets the rope slip through his hands. The Turtle raises a wave as it cuts into the water and gently pokes the inflated wall. Settling to the bottom, it leaves only a smooth steel dome showing above the surface.

“Is that for school?” the stranger asks. His voice is mild, and dry as paper.

“No, it’s just something I made. Excuse me, I have to do something.”

He bends over the kiddy pool and searches for air bubbles. There shouldn’t be any.
Please, let there not be any,
he prays.

No bubbles surface. Yay!

“What does it do?” the stranger asks.

“Um—nothing. It’s an art project.”

“Oh. I see.”

The visitor’s wrinkled forehead shows that he doubts Karl’s words. He seems concerned, as if the Turtle might be a weapon of mass destruction.

“I was just testing to see if it’s watertight.”

“Ah.”

Karl leads his guest out of the garage and closes the door behind them. “Are you looking for my parents?”

“No. Don’t you know who I am?”

“Should I?”

“Perhaps not. My name is Francis Hightower.”

The principal!
That’s
where Karl has seen him—leaving the school at the end of the day. Quietly. Anonymously.

Terror catches up with him like a bullet. He took the SAT a week ago; he thought he’d escaped without a scratch. It’s never that easy, though, is it?

“Is something wrong?” he asks weakly.

“Wrong? No, I just came to thank you.”

They’re standing in the driveway. Mr. Hightower’s shoe is practically touching the dirty red Frisbee that has sat under the forsythia hedge for the past six years.

“Um—thank me for what?”

Before Mr. Hightower can reply, Ivan Fretz waves to Karl from the sidewalk. He’s walking his shaggy black dog. “How’s it going, neighbor?”

For the first time since childhood, Ivan comes down the driveway. “Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to run something by you. What would you think about making some extra money over the summer, tutoring me for the SAT?”

The dog sniffs his way up Karl’s thigh.

“You’re going to take it again?”

“I hardly even studied! It didn’t seem to matter. But now it does, so—think it over, Karl. This could be good for both of us. Come on, Bibsy.”

Ivan gives the leash a tug, and the dog growls as they go back the way they came.

“He seems cheerful,” Mr. Hightower says.

“He had something really bad in his records, and it got taken off.”

“I know that, Karl. I’m the one who took it off.”

“Oh.”

“As I said, I wanted to thank you. You accomplished what I wanted to do and couldn’t for many years.”

The sun of understanding begins to peek over the hills now, shedding its light on what was dark and mysterious.

“I’m not a public sort of person. I used to teach biology, and I enjoyed my work—but my wife felt that I should keep moving ahead, and so forth. The point is, I shouldn’t have become a principal. When Mr. Klimchock offered to take over some of my more public duties, I gladly accepted. But that turned out to be unwise, as you know. I’ve been searching for a way to get rid of him for years. I don’t know how to thank you.”

Cautiously, in case this is some sort of trap, Karl asks, “Why do you think I had anything to do with him leaving?”

The principal looks down at the red Frisbee, away from Karl. “When the technician was installing those hidden cameras, I had him put one in Mr. Klimchock’s office, too. I saw and heard what he said to you. If I’d had the power to fire him, I would have—but those cameras don’t record, so I didn’t have a strong enough case against him.”

Hidden cameras! Of course! That Karl never guessed Klimchock’s method only proves what a dolt a supposedly smart person can be.

But wait. The principal knew what Mr. Klimchock was doing to Karl and never helped? He just hid in his office the whole time and let Karl fend for himself?

“You have every right to be angry at me—but I didn’t want to ruin your future. If I’d gone to the superintendent, that would have left you with a terrible stain on your record. In the end, whatever you did had a much better outcome. What did you do, exactly? I still don’t know.”

Karl hesitates, still not sure he should trust Mr. Hightower.

“That’s all right, Karl. Whatever it was, I salute you— because now I can go back to teaching biology until I retire, and I won’t have to worry that the school will fall into a maniac’s hands.”

Shyly, the principal shakes Karl’s hand. He smells very clean, in an old-fashioned way, like a bar of soap from a bygone era.

“You have my admiration, and my sincere apologies. I wish I could have helped you more.”

“So do I. But I’m okay now.”

The principal takes his leave. The brown suit passes the Fretz house, the Santangelos, the Carneys, and turns the corner. There’s something extremely unusual about this man, but Karl can’t put his finger on it.

Or—yes, he can. Mr. Hightower came here on foot.

An odd person. But probably a good biology teacher. Karl hopes so, anyway.

When he calls to invite Lizette to Swivel Brook Park, she answers, “Why?”

The tone is key here.
Why?
can be a straightforward question, but more often it’s a challenge:
what you just said doesn’t make sense, so you’d better give me a good reason (and I don’t think you can).

Lizette’s
Why
has more teasing than insult in it. This is how it’s been between them since that stumble at the school’s front door. She has given up on him ever kissing her, it seems. Instead of waiting and hoping, or doing the kissing herself, she makes fun of him.

“There’s something I want to show you,” he replies.

“In the park, in the dark? Doesn’t sound like something my daddy would approve of.”

“Will you please just come with me?”

“I guess. I can’t say no to you.”

She picks him up after dinner, in her father’s station wagon. She’s wearing a Rutgers football jersey and her old Devil Rays cap, and the car has a chaotic pile of sporting goods in the back. Karl makes another of his resolutions on the way to the park: if the Turtle works, and she appreciates it—if she says something like,
Karl, this is amazing
—then he’ll kiss her right then and there. No more fear and hesitation. Just a kiss, period.

On the other hand, the likelihood of her praising him is about equal to the chance that green kangaroos will rain down from the sky.

He takes her through the wooden playground fortress where he once found a plastic space shuttle, his first memory. The sky is a pale, post-sunset blue; the trees are silhouettes. “You’re a mysterious person, Karl,” Lizette says.

“Mmph,” he replies.

The gravel path leads them to the stream. Karl takes a seat on a bench under a lamppost, and she joins him. Some old guys with bats and mitts laugh as they leave the dark softball field.

Karl gazes at the flowing water, trying to influence Lizette to do the same. He’s waiting for her to notice what he brought her here to see, but she’s too preoccupied. Staring at her lap, she shakes her head and snorts unhappily.

“What did you want to show me?” she asks finally.

“You have to look at the water.”

She sees nothing unusual at first, just some ducks, tall grass, cattails, a couple of boulders. Farther downstream, the little waterfall makes a peaceful rushing sound.

Hold on, though.

One of the boulders in front of them isn’t gray-black but shiny blue, a reflection of the sky. There are small holes, regularly spaced, drilled into the smooth surface. A nubby black thing pops up on top.

“Is that the thing you were building in your garage?”

“Uh-huh.”

He reaches into his jacket and takes out a universal remote, the kind that can operate a TV, DVD player, and audio system. The buttons and their labels have all been painted black, except four: the Power button and three others, marked with little white symbols that Lizette interprets as a music note, a drop of water, and a complicated fishhook, upside down. (Or maybe it’s a very sparse tree, a sapling with droopy branches.)

“Go ahead,” Karl says, holding out the remote to her. “Turn it on.”

“It’s not gonna blow up the park, is it?”

“Probably not.”

She hesitates. “You should do it yourself. Since it’s the first time.”

“I’d like you to.”

She bends her head, and the visor of her cap covers her face—or, it would if Karl were in front of her. Even in the dim light, he can see that her cheek has turned red.

Accepting the remote, she says, “Here goes I don’t know what,” and presses Power.

Nothing happens.

“How do you know when it starts working?”

“You have to push the next button.”

“Oh. I thought it was a dud.”

She presses the button with the music note above it. A queer noise joins the quiet burble of the stream: a tremulous, flutelike hum. A moment later, the pulsating note deepens to a lower pitch—and then jumps to a higher one. The notes seem to change at random, but they all sound good.

“It’s the scale Debussy used in
La Mer
,” Karl explains. “The notes are all a whole tone apart.”

“You’re so bizarre, Karl.”

These are not the words he was hoping to hear.

“Press the next button.”

Expecting something water related—the little symbol is a droplet, after all—Lizette literally jumps off the bench when twenty thumb-size flames shoot from the metallic dome— bursting up and then shutting off, in the same rhythm as the musical notes.

“This is supposed to be a
flame
? It looks like a drop of water.”

They watch the jets of fire and listen to the music. Karl worries intensely that Lizette thinks his creation is stupid.

“Should I press the last button?”

“Go ahead.”

Expecting mechanical fish to leap from the water—why else the fishhook symbol?—she’s taken by surprise when several fine streams of water spray from the dome. Each arc begins below the flames and travels away from the dome, so the falling drops won’t put out the fire.

The symbol is a fountain, Lizette sees now—not an upside-down hook.

The yellow flames lend their color to the falling drops, turning them into moving necklaces of gold.

“So, is this what’s supposed to happen?”