Michael Laser - Cheater

She pushes past him and gives his shoulder a shove. “Don’t talk to me again unless you quit. I’m serious.”

Wait, he wants to call out, but he can’t say Wait unless he also says, I’ll stop -and, after this afternoon in the hot tub, he’s not ready to do that.

But what’s this agonized urge to run down the street and physically keep her from leaving? What’s that all about?

The blue and black uniform gets smaller and smaller, until she turns the corner and disappears behind Mr. Miyasaki’s pear tree. There’s an odd, acrid scent in his nostrils, which confuses him. Does torment smell?

No, it’s just a leftover trace of funky Clorox.

Below the stage, the orchestra tunes up, melodious as a car alarm. The heavy green curtain ruffles, bumped by unseen bodies. Abraham Lincoln peeks out, stage left, shielding her eyes from the lights. (Is that Juliette Chang behind the beard?) Karl is a couple minutes late-locker jam-and he can’t see Cara anywhere. A waving hand from the far right signals him, Sit here- it’s Jonah, next to Matt- and Lizette, too, glancing, scowling, looking away.

Karl sweeps the auditorium with his gaze, pretending he didn’t see.

“Sit down,” Miss Verp commands, sweetly smiling. “You’re impeding traffic.”

Crushed and defeated, he slips into an aisle seat. So much for resolutions.

“Mind if I join you?” Cara asks and slips past him, into the seat next to his, leaving a perfumed breeze behind.

“I’m glad you made it, I paid a fortune for these seats,” he ad-libs, thrilled at his own quick wit.

She rubs her arm against his, saying, “Good work, Petrofsky. Keep it up.”

Suddenly, the future is all sunshine.

They murmur discreetly about this and that. Cara comments that Miss Verp has a strange admiration for kings and dictators. Karl says, “I think she wishes the American Revolution turned out the other way.”

The lights go down, the orchestra plays “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and an African-American Abraham Lincoln slips out between the curtains, spotlit. Applause, a few piercing whistles, some jocks chanting, “A-bie! A-bie!”- same as last year, when Jonah commented, “That’s as far as they got in the alphabet”-and then the celebration begins, with reenacted scenes from Lincoln’s life. The outgrown buckskin breeches look hilarious on Brett Handshoe, the basketball player, but the slave mother crying as her babies are sold makes Karl’s heart squeeze, even though the babies are dolls. Cara’s fingertips walk discreetly over the armrest to his leg. “Mind if I visit?” “I’m okay with that.” Her fingers drum on his leg as if to say, This is so booooooring; the hand vanishes each time Miss Verp cruises by. When Honest Abe walks three miles to pay back the six cents he overcharged a customer, Cara asks, “Would you do that for me, Karl?” and he answers, “I would walk six miles to give you three cents. And I’d bring you a cookie.”

He’s quite pleased with himself, and a bit drunk on her perfume-but now comes the hard part, asking her out. There’s Lizette across the auditorium, glaring at him and looking away fast, while a new Lincoln proclaims, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally,” and then comes the Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Malice Toward None and Charity for All speech, and Karl knows his fear is ridiculous, since she’s done everything humanly possible to encourage him, but what if she’s just fooling around, flirting for fun, and she doesn’t really mean it?

John Wilkes Booth sneaks up behind the president. Karl knows that it’s now or never, the whole assembly won’t last another five minutes. As the loud shot sounds and Antonio Feferman slumps forward, Karl responds to the cap gun as if it were a starter’s pistol. He cuts off Cara’s mockery (“Where’s the blood, I want to see blood”) and asks, “Want to go to Café EnJay with me, Friday night?”

“Oh,” she says, “I told Leo DiCaprio I’d go dancing with him,” and Karl-assassinated-can’t make his vocal apparatus work again until she adds, “You’re so gullible. It’s cute! What time will you pick me up?”

A chorus line of high-kicking Lincolns in stovepipe hats, tights, and tap shoes crosses the stage, singing. Instead of “One-singular sensation,” they sing, “One-undivided nation-and you can forget the war.”

The shock of it (a joke! at school! on the stage, on Lincoln Day!) lifts Karl to new heights of joy. He’s so happy that, when Miss Verp grabs his arm and says, “You-no talking-go stand in the back,” he doesn’t mind. He floats up the aisle contentedly, on his own private cloud.

Friday night is a different story. Profoundly nervous, he says not a word at dinner. His mother doesn’t notice, she’s too tangled up in cell phone calls from her boss, and his father is in Houston on business, so Karl has all the mental space he needs for visions of bliss and catastrophe.

He’s taking a practice SAT at his computer-or, he would be if he weren’t staring blankly at the two-inch souvenir bust of Ben Franklin on the shelf above-when his mother passes his doorway and notices something amiss. “Are you feeling all right?”

His failure to respond clinches the diagnosis. “Okay,” his mother says, “who is she?”

That wakes him up.

“Who’s who?”

“The girl you’re pining over.”

He debates internally: to spill, or not to spill? “I have a date tonight,” he says sheepishly. “I’m a little nervous.”

His mom’s grin shows only a fraction of her pleasure. “What are you going to wear?”

He hadn’t thought about that. He’s stumped. Calculus he can do; fashion is another matter entirely.

“Let’s look in your closet together. This is going to be fun!”

While standing at the open closet door, contemplating, she asks, “Do you need me to drive you? Or would that embarrass you?”

“I was planning to walk. We’re just going to Café EnJay, downtown.”

“Good. Do you have enough cash?”

“I have twenty dollars.”

She hands him two more twenties from her pocket and proceeds to think of one useful tip after another. “You want to sit as far from the speakers as possible, so you don’t have to shout at each other to hear. By the way, is this anyone I know?”

“No, I just met her recently.”

Next she ventures beyond helpful hints, into the realm of insanity. “You should think about conversation topics in advance. Keep the talk flowing, keep it sparkling-but don’t be scared of brief silences, don’t rush in and fill them with nervous babble.”

“Okay, I won’t. Can we figure out what I should wear now?”

“One more thing. My mother used to tell me, ‘Be a good listener,’ so I would just sit there pretending to hang on my date’s every word while he blabbed on and on. That’s just baloney. You be a good listener, too. Go back and forth- you’ll both be happier in the long run.”

“This is getting a little weird, Mom.”

“Should you bring her a little gift? What does she like?”

Even as he pleads with her to stop, he realizes unhappily that he has no idea what Cara likes, other than darts, perfume, and cheating.