Michael Laser - Cheater

“Remember, fifteen percent tip for adequate service, twenty for excellent. It makes a good impression if you seem like you know what you’re doing.”

By this time, he has a strong urge to lock his mother in the closet and run away. “Could we just pick my clothes? Please?”

The lineup of box-checked and plaid shirts thoroughly depresses him. The shirts practically sing, You’re a nerd, you’re a freak, you’re a hopeless goofy geek. But he’s not about to put on Dad’s Hawaiian shirt, and it’s too late to study Blaine’s wardrobe. He’s stumped, and bereft of hope.

“May I make a suggestion?” his mother asks.

“Mm-hm.”

She removes from the closet the blazer he wore last summer at Grandma Irma’s and Grandpa Barney’s golden anniversary party, and then slips his green box-checked shirt, still on its hanger, inside the blazer.

“What about pants and shoes?” he asks.

“You won’t need those.”

His blank face elicits clarification: “Don’t you have a sense of humor? Just keep your jeans and sneakers on and let’s see what we’re working with.”

The shirt and blazer over the jeans and sneakers look surprisingly good in the hallway mirror-or, possibly he looks stupid. He can’t tell for sure.

“ Voilà! You’re hip!” his mother says.

Having paid zero attention to clothing for the past sixteen years, he can’t remember seeing anyone dressed like this. Also, he’s grown since last summer, and his arms stick out of the blazer’s sleeves a bit too far-almost as much as Brett Handshoe’s, playing young Abe Lincoln.

Or Frankenstein’s.

While dubiously studying his reflection, he feels a tug on his hair. His mother, with scissors, has a brown curl in her fingers. “It was sticking out right there. Don’t worry, I fixed it.”

Annoyed and grateful at the same time, he asks, “You think I look okay?”

“My honest opinion? You could use a haircut. Other than that, you’re Prince Charming.”

Her beaming smile tells him that her judgment can’t be trusted.

The gods must be on his side: they have provided, for his first official date, the first warm night in April. As he walks along the gravel path through Swivel Brook Park, the prettiest place in town, he watches the ducks paddle serenely on the stream, and listens to the quiet little waterfall-but it’s no use, nothing can calm his pounding heart or put the strength back in his rubbery legs.

Still, he tries to appreciate this beautiful night, and the bright sliver of moon. If he can just think positive (instead of worrying endlessly that Cara will change her mind about him due to his nervous uncoolness), this may turn out to be the best night of his life.

It might not be a bad idea to take Mom’s advice and think of some conversation topics. He could ask if she has any idea what she wants to do as a career-or what colleges she’s thinking about-or if she has any pets, or brothers and sisters. (Starting to panic here.) Did she ever take music lessons? If she were stranded on a desert island, what three coconuts, I mean books, would she want with her?

He’s boring her to death already, and he hasn’t even said hello yet.

Cara lives at 650 State Street. He knows this because he has the address on a slip of paper, and he’s taken it out of his pocket thirteen times since leaving home. To reach number 650, he has to go down the slope, past the railroad tracks and the car wash. The creepiness of this deserted neighborhood harmonizes perfectly with his anxiety.

When he arrives at number 650, it’s a dry cleaner. Maybe he has the number wrong? No-a fourteenth glance confirms the address. Did she send him here as a cruel joke?

No, she didn’t. Next to the dry cleaner is another door, which also says 650.

Inside, there’s nothing but mailboxes, and a flight of steps covered by a worn brown carpet. The one light at the top of the stairs doesn’t really do the job. He hopes he won’t find a murderer hiding at the top of the stairs.

What did his mother tell him? Listen when she talks. Don’t sit near the speakers.

The doorbell may not work-or else they can’t hear it inside because of the music, an old song playing extremely loud. “Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?”

His polite knock doesn’t stand a chance. Regretfully, he pounds on the door like the FBI.

Smoke hits him in the face when the door opens. Cara’s mother, a slender woman in tight white pants and a magenta satin blouse, has a glass of wine in her hand. Behind her, at a folding table with metal legs and a Monopoly game in progress, a heavyset, black-haired guy sits and smokes, red-faced. There are posters of the Matterhorn and the Eiffel Tower on the walls, plus a fuzzy poster of cats fishing.

Cara’s mom looks a lot like her except that her mom’s hair is short and sandy blond and swoops down over one eye. Indian bangles jangle on both of her wrists. “Yeeeeeees?” she asks, having fun.

“Hi. Is Cara home?”

“No, she went out a while ago.”

The English language has several words for Karl’s state of mind. Disconcerted. Flustered. Discombobulated. Flummoxed. My personal favorite is nonplussed .

“I was supposed to-I told her I’d pick her up at seven-thirty.”

“Oh. Hm.” She makes a series of quizzical expressions. “That’s odd. You’re saying you had a date with her?”

Did she just say it was odd that Cara agreed to go out with him?

“Yes.”

“Well. Wow.”

The guy at the table takes a long drag on his cigarette, holding it between his thumb and index fingertip. He shakes his head at Karl slowly, sympathetically, as if to say, Tough break, kid.

A striped cat leaps up on the table and walks across the Monopoly board without disturbing a single house or hotel.

“Do you think she’ll be back in a minute or two?”

“No, I really don’t think so. Because-this is awkward, isn’t it?-she left with another young man. How long ago was that, Wendell?”

“Twenty minutes.”

Karl gropes for understanding, in vain.

“She must have just forgotten. Sorry-what’s your name, so I can yell at her for standing you up?”

“Karl.”

As he speaks the syllable, his name sounds fatally lame to him-the kind of name you’d have if you were born to be forgotten, blown off, laughed at.

“Don’t let it get you down, Karl. She’s a little flaky sometimes. I’ll tell her you stopped by, okay?”

Silent and immobile, Karl stands in the carpeted hallway, a statue of himself.

“You have a good night, Karl,” the man says from the table as the door closes.

He can’t remember descending the stairs. All he knows is, he’s wandering up State Street like the ghost of a slain soldier, back the way he came.

When he gets to Swivel Brook Park, instead of turning toward home, he keeps going on State-floating uphill, past the fire station and the Laundromat, too destroyed to think-or no, that’s not right, because his brain is working, it takes all his mental strength to keep it aimed away from Cara, who didn’t care enough about him to remember they had a date. He searches for distraction in the windows of the Chinese and Indian restaurants, and then, farther up the hill, the Thai, Cajun, and French restaurants-and then the antique shops, and the four stone banks at the corner of Park-the same way he would have walked with Cara. Maybe it’s his own fault, he delayed too long and someone else sneaked in ahead of him. (Is it someone he knows?)

This might be a good time to consider Lizette’s advice. Get a spine. It wasn’t just Klimchock’s tyranny that made him join the Confederacy, was it?

Café EnJay has a painted red coffee cup on its window, from which wavy lines of steam rise. A waitress leads two people to a window table inside; the red cup eclipses their heads, but when they sit, Karl sees that the girl is Cara and the guy is some kind of rock star-looking person in his twenties, wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt to show off his muscles. This guy has short, rumpled, blond hair and a matching mustache. Even from across the street and through glass, Karl can see that his eyes are intensely blue, and that Cara is enjoying their blueness.