Michael Laser - Cheater

“Cara did,” Karl croaks.

“Cara Nzada? You can’t compare yourself with her. She has a pathological attitude problem. She’ll go far-from misdemeanor to felony to life in a trailer park, looking older than her years.”

Until now, Karl wasn’t sure he’d be able to withstand the assistant principal’s threats. Thanks to this reminder of Klimchock’s cruelty, however, Karl discovers that he’s stronger than he thought.

“Time’s running out. Let’s get that hand moving.”

Staring at the shiny pink head, Karl can’t stop hearing the words Come to the Dark Side, Luke.

“You’re not going to sacrifice your future for a bunch of brats who used you like a vending machine: put in ten cents’ worth of flattery, make the twerp feel like he’s in with the in crowd, and out come the right answers. What a bargain.”

Ouch.

The eye of the hurricane passes. All is still for a few moments. Klimchock stares out the window, then wanders over to his Fiddler on the Roof poster. Turning his back to Karl, he inspects the shoe that rests on the tiny, sagging house. “You may be thinking to yourself, How did this man get to be so fanatical, so obsessed? Am I right?”

“Not exactly.”

“There’s a reason, Karl. If I despise cheating, if rooting it out is my passion, I have good cause. A long time ago, when I was roughly your age, attending this high school, I lost out on something I wanted very badly. And the reason I lost was that the other guy cheated. So-now you’re thinking, Get over it! But I never did get over it-because it changed the course of my life. It crept into my guts and stayed there. There is nothing on earth I hate more than a cheater.”

“What did you lose out on?”

“None of your business. I’m just explaining that I’m not an evil madman who lives to torment teenagers. I seek justice.”

Karl does his best to meet Mr. Klimchock’s gaze, but his eyes keep drifting away, to the place on the assistant principal’s scalp where the creased forehead meets the smooth dome-the swooping line behind which his hair once grew. The startling idea of Klimchock with a full head of hair reminds Karl that the assistant principal was young once, a teenager, and maybe not a vicious maniac. Like a curved universe, this is a concept that’s easy to state but hard to grasp. Karl understands this much, though: if an innocent baby can grow up and become Mr. Klimchock, then there’s no guarantee that some hideous trauma won’t warp him , too.

“I’d like to send you back to class now,” Mr. Klimchock says, and taps the yellow pad.

Time and fate are closing in on him.

“It’s all right, son. I know they manipulated you-I know you didn’t do it to improve your own grades. You’re not the one I’m after.”

He will pay for this the rest of his life if he keeps resisting-all to protect some honorless thieves who (Klimchock has this much right) never cared about him in the slightest-who blackmailed him and threatened his friends to keep him from quitting. (Who was that on the phone with Blaine? The question plagues him like an itch he can’t reach.)

“It takes strength to separate yourself from your peers,” Klimchock says. “But I believe you have what it takes.”

What was it Lizette said on his front steps? Look yourself in the eye and be honest.

Good advice, but it doesn’t seem to apply here.

“Pick up the pen, Karl. Time’s running out.”

“Sorry. I can’t.”

Klimchock slaps the Fiddler on the Roof poster with a flat hand, so hard that particles of ceiling plaster drift down on them. A wormlike vein has popped up on his forehead. Uck.

“All right. There’s one other way. If you can’t bring yourself to tell me their names, you can let them hang themselves. You’ll cheat one more time, on the next test. I’ve suspected for a while that you people were sending each other answers via radio signal. I’m right, am I not?”

Karl sees no point in lying. “Mm-hm.”

“Fantastic! Because I’ve ordered a system that will let me see who’s receiving your signal. I’ll have them dead to rights. You didn’t sell them out-they gave themselves away. But, if you warn them, and no one picks up the signal, then I’ll know you tipped them off, and it’ll be Bye-Bye, Karly.”

The next test, though, would be… the SAT.

“You don’t mean the SAT, right?”

Klimchock considers that for a moment, then smiles contentedly. “Why not? It’s perfect-the widest net, to catch the most fish.”

Karl can’t stretch his brain around this.

“You seem perplexed.”

“I just-you can’t do this. Not on the SAT.”

“I can’t?”

If Klimchock is so far beyond the gravitational force of sanity that he doesn’t understand, then nothing Karl can say will bring him back down to earth.

“Remember the goal, Karl. Sometimes justice requires extreme measures.”

Even if Karl were willing to lure what remains of the Confederacy into Klimchock’s net-which he’s not-he would never do it on the SAT. That would be like… like… spray painting his name, address, and Social Security number all over police headquarters. This isn’t some trivial little grammar quiz-Klimchock is messing around with the Educational Testing Service!

“I wonder,” the assistant principal says, “if we’ve been wrong about you all this time.”

“What do you mean?”

“We all assumed your grades were real. Maybe they’re not. Maybe you’ve been cheating since grammar school. Is that how you always get everything right?”

“No-I just started a few weeks ago.”

“Says you. But if the school newspaper reports that you’ve been caught red-handed, people are going to start wondering. There goes your reputation, Karl.”

“I didn’t get answers from them. I gave answers to them.”

“You enjoy being thought of as a genius, don’t you? Behind that modest facade, you really thrive on it. It’s all you’ve got, really. But maybe you don’t deserve your status.”

Klimchock plops into the rolling chair behind his desk and lets the insults sink in. The weird part is that, except for the false accusation, he has nailed Karl, exactly. This is extremely disturbing. When a sadistic psychopath comes out with a startling, accurate insight into your soul, what do you do with the information?

“Either way, Karl, it looks like you’ve come to the end of your reign. The Reign of the Brain. Soon you’ll just be one more doofy adolescent.”

Karl shakes his head-not in despair, but to throw off confusion. This is not the time to mistake the enemy for a psychoanalyst. He can deal with his new self-knowledge later; right now, he’s got a duel to fight.

In Greek mythology, Athena equips Perseus with the magical weapons he’ll need to survive his encounter with Medusa. Karl has no heavenly helper, but he does have some useful, strategic knowledge, gained from watching hundreds of episodes of Law and Order. He can see what Klimchock is trying to do-apply pressure to his weak point, his pride, until he snaps and blurts out something self-incriminating, like, I AM a genius! They MADE me help them. The small-brained idiots-they USED me. THEY’RE the criminals, not me!

Knowing this, he disengages his emotions.

Klimchock keeps studying him, waiting for him to crack. It’s embarrassing to be watched so closely. Karl looks down at his hands, wishing he could blink and rematerialize on another continent.

Maybe he should tell Samantha. If he explains what Klimchock wants him to do-if she prints it in the school newspaper-that would wreck Klimchock’s plan, it would disgrace him.