Michael Laser - Cheater

They meet at Blaine’s convertible. Except for Tim, chomping on an Italian sub with stinky onion slivers hanging down, none of them takes a bite of lunch.

Noah gets straight to the point: “Do you think she gave him our names?”

“Whoa, hold on.” That’s Blaine, smiling, trying to impose calm on the others. “We don’t even know for sure why he called her down.”

“Yes we do,” Vijay says. “There’s only one explanation.”

That they would suspect Cara of betraying them all seems unfair to Karl. “She wouldn’t give him our names. That’s not what she’s like.”

Noah lets out a snort. “You think she’d really say no if he offered to let her off? Just to protect us ?”

“Hold on, let’s think logically,” Ian says. (There’s sweat on his forehead-a first.) “If she gave him our names, why would he send her home with all her stuff? He wouldn’t.”

“Could be a cover-up,” Vijay says. “So we’ll think we’re safe, while he collects evidence against us.”

Tim talks with his mouth full. “Wow, that’s so paranoid.”

“Maybe he sent her home to think over his offer,” Blaine suggests. “Maybe he said, ‘You have two choices: tell me their names, or forget about college. Take a day to make your decision.’”

Ian agrees. “That sounds like his style.”

Vijay has more sweat on his face than Ian. “We have to talk to her. If she hasn’t already told him everything, we have to get to her before she does.”

Noah shakes his head miserably. “I don’t see what we can say. What would convince her to act against her own self-interest?”

Karl reminds him: “How about, You go down alone ?”

Blaine shakes his head. “That’s great in the abstract, but not if Klimchock has her by the throat.”

“There’s really only one way to convince her to keep quiet,” Ian says.

“There is?” Tim perks up. “I didn’t think there was any.”

They all look to Ian for their salvation. Before he can speak, though, Karl spots Samantha at the school’s back door, surveying the parking lot with a flat hand shading her eyes. He dives down behind Blaine’s BMW: an instinctive reflex, but also heroic, in that he’s saving the entire Confederacy from her scrutiny.

“What’s up, Karl? You’re not going to throw up on my car, are you?”

“Ssh! Don’t say my name!” He stays down, crouching. “That girl at the door-don’t look at her!-is she coming this way?”

“No, she’s going back inside. Who is she, your ex-wife?”

Karl peeks over the hood before standing.

“She’s hunting for cheaters so she can put their names in the school newspaper.”

A spontaneous moment of silence… then Noah croaks a string of four-letter words.

“One crisis at a time,” Blaine says. “Ian, what’s your plan? How do we keep Cara from giving Klimchock our names?”

“We have to threaten her.”

“No!” Karl blurts. “That’s ridiculous!”

“It’s better than getting kicked out of school.”

“We wouldn’t have to threaten anything really awful,” Blaine muses. “Just enough so she’d rather not talk.”

No one has any suggestions to offer. And no one is volunteering to make the call. Maybe the odious suggestion will sink into the earth and be forgotten.

“We don’t have to call her,” Vijay says. “We could send an anonymous email.”

“You can do that?” Noah asks. “How?”

“It’s not hard. I can set the Reply To and From headers to any name we choose. It’s called spoofing an address.”

“I know what to put in the email,” Ian says grimly. “Start spoofing, Veej.”

“No!” Karl protests. “This is crazy!”

“Matter of life and death, Buds.” Blaine lays a hand on Karl’s shoulder. “She’s not exactly the most reliable person in the world. You must have figured that out by now.”

Karl steps back, away from Blaine’s hand. “I don’t care. We shouldn’t do this.”

But Vijay already has his laptop open, he’s tapping away, and here comes Ian to type the message.

A few moments from now Karl will wish he’d taken Vijay’s laptop, thrown it on the blacktop, and stomped on it-but that’s hindsight. At the crucial instant he just watches with his mouth agape as Ian types, DON’T GIVE HIM ANY NAMES OR WE’LL DESTROY YOUR CAT.

“Are you out of your mind?” Karl shouts.

Vijay clicks the Send button.

“It’s a desperate situation,” Ian says.

“You’re going to kill her cat?!”

“I didn’t say anything about a cat.”

“You did, you said you’d destroy her cat.”

“I said we’d destroy her car .”

“No you didn’t-you said CAT.”

Vijay opens his Sent Messages box. There’s the proof.

Ian stares down at the keyboard. “The r is right next to the t ,” he mumbles.

“Should we send a correction?” Vijay asks the group.

“Wait a minute,” Noah says. “Does she have a cat?”

Karl and Blaine answer in unison, “Yes.”

“Well, it’s okay, then,” Noah says. “It’ll work either way.”

In grievous turmoil, Karl stalks away, hating them, wanting never to see them again. He ignores Blaine, who’s calling his name, and goes back inside the school.

Then he remembers that his lunch is sitting on the hood of Blaine’s car.

Too bad. Consider it lost.

In spite of the way she stood him up so her singer friend could serenade her, Karl heads straight to Cara’s apartment after school-at a trot for most of the way, in case the Confederates decide to bully her in person.

She’s still wearing the same outfit she had on this morning-the short black skirt, the red and gold halter top-even though that seems like a lifetime ago. Her eye makeup is unsmeared; she hasn’t been crying.

It’s almost as if the whole day never happened… until she speaks. “Who are you, the Cat Destroyer?”

“I tried to stop them but they wouldn’t listen. They panicked.”

“Wimps.”

“They didn’t mean to threaten your cat, by the way. That was a typo.”

“What do they really want to destroy? My hat?”

“Your car. But they didn’t mean it.”

She goes down the narrow hall to her room. He follows, hoping that’s okay.

Lying on her side on the bed, she plays with the cat, who lets her roll him back and forth, oblivious to the death threat. Karl has never seen a sloppier room: she’s got dirty laundry on the floor, a half-eaten cookie on a tissue on the dresser, CDs strewn all over the place, and a chaotic sea of necklaces on the table that serves as her desk, along with a flotilla of makeup.

She wags the cat’s outstretched arm. “They really thought I would give Klimchock their names? What idiots. I guess they assumed I’m just like them.”

There are red, yellow, and blue knobs on Cara’s dresser: a leftover trace of childhood. At the opposite extreme, she also has half a dozen posters of guys taped to the walls- rippling chests, facial stubble, mirrored sunglasses. One of them is flying upside down with crossed skis. If Karl had seen this room sooner, he could have saved himself a lot of false hopes.

“So-are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine.”

“What did he say to you?”

“Basically, he said, ‘Give me all of your friends’ names or you’re permanently expelled.’ So, that’s that. Free at last.”

“He really expelled you?”

“He said I’m free to sue the school district, and he looks forward to it, because that would attract huge publicity and might inspire a zero tolerance movement nationwide.”

She jiggles the cat’s furry white belly. Her calm amazes him. If this happened to him, he would probably be weeping right now.