Michael Laser - Cheater

She takes a break from drinking in the splendor of her rock star’s face, and glances out the window. Karl turns his back so fast that his blazer’s tail whips around. He keeps going up State, head turned unnaturally to the right-but peeks back after a few steps, unable to resist. Instead of Cara in the window, he spots Lizette, Jonah, and Matt in the tiny park next to the café.

There’s a tall sweetgum tree by the curb. Karl hides behind its wide trunk and spies on his old friends.

They’re sipping from pink Shake Shack cups, along with a fourth person Karl doesn’t recognize. Matt tosses his cup in a trash can and asks loudly, “Are you ready, Stringbinis?”

The fourth friend, Karl’s replacement, takes out a little video camera, and the Fabulous Flying Stringbinis perform for both passersby and posterity. First comes the Stringbini Handstand: Jonah squats with his hands on the grass in front of him while Lizette and Matt step on his hands with one foot apiece and shout, “Hey!”

Behind his tree trunk, standing in a lake of sweetgum prickly balls, Karl wishes desperately that he could cross the street and join his old friends, even if they do look extremely stupid. He regrets that he ever mocked (even silently, to himself) Jonah’s braces and Matt’s hyperactivity. It would be so much better to clown around with them than to hide behind a tree, humiliated by a pretty girl who couldn’t care less about him.

Here comes the stunt called Falling Down Sideways, which he made up himself. Lizette-a halfhearted Stringbini, it seems-stands straight and tall while Jonah and Matt play a drumroll on their thighs. On the count of three, she raises her arms above her head and falls over, straight as a plank. The others catch her just before she hits the ground, shouting, “Hey!” Without Karl there, her weight surprises them; she hits the grass, and sighs.

Thumping music comes from the café next to the park. Cara’s date turns out to be the singer of the band that’s playing on the small stage. Out in front of the others, he throws his head around as if he were conducting an orchestra with it. Cara smiles like the Mona Lisa.

“Karl Petrofsky, right?”

Huh? Whuh? Who-?

A girl has come up behind him: the weird one from school, with the immobile hair and the plaid slacks that always have a straight crease-the one who drags around a small rolling suitcase instead of a backpack, and therefore looks like a flight attendant as she strides through the halls.

She sticks her hand out straight, to shake his. “Samantha Abrabarba. Nice to meet you. Why are you hiding behind a tree?”

“No reason. I just-didn’t have anything to do.”

“On a Friday night? Tut, tut. But look on the bright side: that means I can interview you. How about this bench- shall we?”

Samantha, it turns out, wants to profile him for The Emancipator , as the quiet genius of the junior class and next year’s presumed valedictorian. The prospect of having the whole school read about his prodigious brainpower appeals to him in the same way that large quantities of water appealed to the Wicked Witch of the West-but he doesn’t want to walk away, because that would mean losing sight of Cara and the Stringbinis.

He follows her to the yellow bench outside the Enchilada Encantada, the Mexican restaurant, and answers her questions distractedly-about his study habits, and who was his most influential teacher, and what extracurricular activities he’s involved in. Hearing that he, um, doesn’t do any extracurricular activities, she rests her leather-bound pad on her lap and lectures him. “That’s really not smart, you know. Even with grades like yours, colleges want to see that you’re, quote, well-rounded, unquote. Every body does something. You’re not abnormal, are you? Just kidding. I mean, I don’t love tutoring dumb, lazy freshmen, but I do it-and working on the newspaper, you wouldn’t believe how much crap I have to do, pardon the expression.”

Though depressed and a hundred feet away in spirit, Karl can’t resist: “You do a lot of crap on the newspaper?”

“I know, you think I’m just a trained dog, doing what I’m supposed to do, when and where I’m supposed to do it. But not everyone has your grades. The rest of us have to find any way we can to shine.”

Despite her announced ambition to become a New York Times reporter, Samantha talks much more than she listens. When Karl (not wanting to sound like a walking computer in her article) tells about the projects he works on in the garage, like the thermosensitive shingles, she says, “So you’re the next Thomas Edison, tinkering in your basement laboratory, pouring chemicals into beakers?”

“No. In the garage. Without beakers.”

“But you’re planning to go into chemistry, right?”

“Not exactly. I don’t really know what I want to do.”

“Too bad. I do. I want to interview foreign heads of state, and get them to reveal their secret plans. My strategy is, the pretty face will put them off guard. While they try to impress innocent little me, I’ll be digging for classified information.”

She does have a pretty face, sort of-angular, sharp-featured, with elegantly elongated eyes-but it’s weird to hear someone call herself pretty, and she uses way too much makeup and hair spray, and also she’s so oblivious to him, even as she asks him questions, that the main impression she gives is of someone born with a defective social-interaction gene.

“I guess I’ll go home now,” he says.

“That’s rude. I’m not as interesting as your beakers?”

“I’m just tired.”

“What if I told you I’m working on a top secret exposé? Can you keep this…” She lifts a nonexistent hat and pantomimes putting something under it.

“Excuse me?”

“ Under your hat. Are you slow?”

“What are you talking about?”

She peers around, left and right-a hokey gesture that he’s never seen an actual person perform. “Mr. Klimchock told me not to tell anyone, but I can trust you. I’m trying to catch the cheaters, at school, so I can expose them.”

Normally fair-complexioned, Karl feels himself growing paler. “Hm,” he says, and then adds, “hm.”

“The big question is, Who’s Doing It? So far I haven’t caught anyone, but I’m on the case.”

“That’s really interesting. But, I’m sorry, I was up late last night, I have to go.”

“Not so fast. Just answer a simple question: have you heard anything?”

“No. I really don’t know a thing.”

Across the street, his old friends are executing the Quick Pick-Me-Up of Death. Lizette crouches, and Jonah and Matt each put a foot on one of her hands, and then she stands fast and flips them up and away, so that they fly, flailing, up and onto the grass. (No, she doesn’t have the strength of Hercules. The trick is to perform the move quickly, before the audience, if there is one, notices the boys springing up with their knees.)

“Hey!” his three friends shout.

“Look at those dorks,” Samantha says. “Get a life.”

“Well. See you at school.”

“I guess I could go ask them what they know. I just hope their nerdiness isn’t contagious.”

She stands up; Karl grabs her by the wrist and pulls her back down.

“A little aggressive, aren’t we?” she says, smirking. “Not so shy after all.”

“No-I just wanted to ask: are you keeping your eye on anyone in particular?”

“I have certain suspicions. But I wouldn’t want to name any names until I have proof.”

“That sounds like the right thing to do.”

She does her left-right sneaky peek again, and lowers her voice. “Do you see Cara Nzada, in that window across the street? Doesn’t it seem a little strange that she gets on the high honor roll every year? What’s someone like that doing on the high honor roll? Methinks me smells something rotten in New Jersey, and it’s not a chemical factory.”