Michael Laser - Cheater

Karl turns his back to her and visits with Goofy. The situation is unbearably humiliating. He can’t face her.

“Karl-I’m not using you. Really.”

Her hands appear down below, on his waist. Is he still breathing?

“The truth is, I don’t care that much if you help us cheat or not,” she says. “There are other reasons why I’m interested in you. Should I name them? Okay. First, you’re the only person at school who’s as smart as I am-though in a different way. Second, I’m enjoying the whole Shy Guy Comes Out of His Shell thing. There’s a definite cuteness about you-the Awkward Genius. It’s new for me.”

She’s still there, behind him, holding his waist, waiting for him to turn and kiss her. Whether or not she really means what she said-honesty means nothing to her, so it’s hard to tell-he would be a pathetic coward if he didn’t accept the challenge.

Having never kissed a girl before, he goes instinctively for the cheek.

“I’m not your aunt,” she says. “Try over this way,” and she points to her smile, which seems more amused than adoring.

He finds, when his lips arrive at hers, that he can’t believe this is happening. Literally: it’s not real, a voice in his head keeps saying. She can’t like him this way. And what about Blaine, are they together or aren’t they?

He pulls away a bit, figuring it’s best to end the kiss before she gets bored. Once disconnected, he’s at a loss for words.

“Isn’t it better to grab what you want?” she asks.

“Yes.”

“And are you going to do more of it in the future?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. Because shy is only cute up to a point.” There are flecks of gold in her green irises. Those eyes are so beautiful, they inspire him to hope. He wants to become a person she respects, not an entertaining project. He agrees with her: he has been cowardly, he should be braver. It’s time to crack the shell.

He puts both hands in her hair. It’s so soft, so fine, he feels he’s touching a goddess. Nonetheless- Courage!- he kisses her again.

She smiles. “Well done.”

In a survey of high-achieving teenagers a few years back, more than three-quarters admitted that they had cheated in school. Of these cheaters, nine out of ten said they’d never gotten caught .”

With eighteen teachers jammed into Mr. Klimchock’s small office, there’s no room for him to pace the floor dramatically. He can’t even throw his arms out to the sides, or he’ll knock over Mr. Grantley’s Diet Pepsi and Ms. Singh’s Snapple, perched on opposite edges of his desk. The smell of Mrs. Kazanjian’s tuna salad dominates the room; posters for Man of La Mancha , Cats , Pippin , and Fiddler on the Roof surround the teachers, making them feel as if they’ve wandered into the lair of a mad theater fan, for whom time stopped in the 1970s.

“You can’t persuade students to behave ethically. You can’t tell them that cheating doesn’t pay when they see dishonesty rampant in politics and business. In the 1940s, only twenty percent of college students interviewed admitted to cheating in high school. But the world has changed since then.”

Mr. Watney gulps down a bite of turkey on rye so he can retort, “The change in numbers may just mean that students answer surveys more honestly now.”

The widespread chuckling shows that most of these teachers oppose Mr. Klimchock and his campaign to wipe out cheating-but the assistant principal doesn’t need their love or their approval. He lives by the famous words of President Lyndon Johnson, “If you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow.”

“As I was saying, schools are the last best hope for restoring honesty to our society. We can’t do it with logic or by pleading. But we can produce honesty through fear.”

The only sound in the room is Mr. Grantley, chomping on his pickle.

From his coat closet, Mr. Klimchock wheels out a mannequin on a rolling desk chair. The mannequin, slumping limply to one side, wears a hooded sweatshirt and sunglasses.

“Know Your Enemy!” Mr. Klimchock blares.

“I have that boy in my algebra class,” says Mrs. Kazanjian-an unexpected joke from the famously cranky chess team adviser.

“Did it ever occur to you that he’s hiding more than his hair?” Mr. Klimchock asks.

With the flair of a magician yanking a tablecloth out from under a ten-course banquet, Mr. Klimchock pulls the hood back, revealing headphones on the mannequin’s ears. The wires disappear inside the sweatshirt; Mr. Klimchock reaches into the pouch and comes out with a CD player. “What’s our little dummy listening to during his biology test?” He pops the player’s lid and shows them the CD label: Lethal Doopy, WA$$UP? “Let me guess. If you got this far, you would now tell your student, ‘I don’t know how you can listen to that awful noise,’ and that would be that. Am I right?”

“No, I never insult their music. I don’t want to sound like my mother.”

“Come here and listen, please.”

Mrs. Kazanjian threads her way among the knees and feet and chair legs. Mr. Klimchock hands her the headphones, and she puts them on. When he plays the CD, her jaw drops. “Diploid cell-chromosomes in homologous pairs,” she hears. “The diploid number, 2n, equals twice the haploid number.”

“This CD was confiscated by a teacher I know in Ho-Ho-Kus. I’ve been doing my research, you see. They have methods we never heard of ten years ago. You can go back to your seat, Fern.”

As Mrs. Kazanjian returns to the back of the room, Mr. Klimchock produces a Thom McAn shoe box from behind his desk. The box is filled with seemingly random objects: a watch, a water bottle, an eyeglass case, a mechanical pencil.

“Now let’s see. What’s the point of this innocent paraphernalia?”

He dazzles his audience with one amazing revelation after another. Taped to the back of the watch is a teeny-weeny, folded-up cheat sheet. There’s a similar index card inside the eyeglass case, hidden behind the lens cloth, and a rolled-up page of physics formulas inside the mechanical pencil, where the extra lead belongs. If you turn the water bottle around, wonder of wonders, you can read a list of Egypt’s pharaohs and the monuments each one left behind, with an asterisk for Hatshepsut, the first female pharaoh-all magnified by the liquid inside, all discretely tucked behind the label.

“From now on, the rule prohibiting cell phones will be strictly enforced at Abraham Lincoln High School. Hooded sweatshirts, mechanical pencils, and water bottles with labels are hereby banned. The same goes for mp3 players, graphing calculators, and PDAs.”

“Public Displays of Affection?” Ms. Vitello whispers to Herr Franklin.

“Quiet back there,” Mr. Klimchock barks. “I expect every one of you to visit these websites tonight, and learn more about how your students have made fools of you.”

He hands out a list of sites such as CheatersProsper, CheatStreet, and EZA.com.

Mr. Watney clears his throat.

“All right, let’s hear your rebuttal, Timothy.”

(Killer instinct: Mr. Klimchock has correctly guessed that Mr. Watney hates to be called by his full first name.)

“Some of us have been talking-“