Michael Laser - Cheater

The symptoms last all weekend. He’s achingly tired, and on Monday an X-ray shows he’s got pneumonia-and not just that, the lining of his lungs is inflamed, a condition known as pleurisy. That’s why it hurts so much every time he coughs-which means he can’t bring up the mucus and clear his lungs the way he needs to-which means, according to Dr. Dahesh, that his best bet is to spend a few days in the hospital for a course of antibiotics.

No longer a pediatric patient, Karl has an older roommate in the hospital, a soft-spoken, white-haired man named Mr. Hydine, who has no noticeable symptoms. In the middle of the night, though, Mr. Hydine turns into Dr. Jekylline, screaming, “Help!” hoarsely, hysterically, repeatedly. Karl can’t leap out of bed and help him, because he’s got an intravenous tube in his arm-he can’t even see his roommate from inside his ripply gold curtain-for all he knows, the guy has turned into a werewolf-but he pushes the Nurse Call button and shouts through the curtain, “It’s okay, Mr. Hydine, I called the nurse, she’ll be right here.”

The nurse doesn’t show up right away, though, and Mr. Hydine keeps screaming, so Karl tries again, “Mr. Hydine, what’s wrong? Is there anything I can do?” to which Mr. Hydine sobs, “They’re trying to kill me.” Though dubious, Karl asks, “Who is?” and Mr. Hydine replies, “All of you,” moaning tearfully until the nurse finally arrives and calms the old man with gentle words.

“He just gets confused and agitated in the dark,” she explains to Karl.

As if to prove her right, Mr. Hydine repeats his terrifying performance three more times that first night.

A painful tug on his arm wakes Karl at 7 A.M. A different nurse is administering his antibiotic through the IV line, and she has carelessly backed against the tube that leads to Karl’s forearm. “Good morning, Karl,” Mr. Hydine says pleasantly.

All of this explains why, when his parents come to visit, Karl looks even more haggard than he did when he entered the hospital.

He’s so wiped out that he can be forgiven for sleeping through Jonah and Matt’s visit, and Blaine’s phone call. When Samantha calls, he tells her that Mr. Klimchock just came to see him and threatened him with a knife. “Ha ha ha,” Samantha replies, which helps Karl understand that he dreamed the visit. (“Such a disappointing spring break.” Samantha sighs. “All this rain, and you sick, and you not calling me once. Very sad.”)

He tries to reach Cara, but the number has been disconnected.

Waking from a nap, he finds a note written on a napkin on his lunch tray.

Your conscience is telling you something.

Listen to it! I miss my friend -L.

Happy and excited, he picks up the phone to call her but hangs up before dialing because what can he say? If he tells her about Klimchock’s coercion, she’ll get so outraged that she might try to expose it in public, and then the whole thing would explode in his face.

Still, he misses her, and keeps the note in his hands, and wonders what she really thinks of him, and what he would want, if it were a possibility, even though it’s not.

Cough, cough. Cough cough cough. Pain. Grimacing.

“You can ask for a painkiller, you know,” says Mr. Hydine.

“I can?”

“No point suffering unnecessarily.”

That sounds like wisdom, even if it comes from a midnight maniac. He presses his Nurse Call button, and almost instantly, a frowning beauty appears at his bedside. Francesca Subitsky, her ID card says. She has short blond hair, rectangular glasses, rosy cheeks, a perky nose, and a massive copy of Bride’s magazine in her hand.

“Yes?” she asks impatiently.

“My chest-when I cough, it hurts a lot. Would it be okay if I took a Tylenol?”

“Sure,” she says brusquely, and stomps away. She comes back with a pill in a paper cup, saying, “Here.”

“Thanks for the advice,” Karl says to Mr. Hydine when she’s gone, but the old guy has fallen asleep. Karl doesn’t want to wake him, so he leaves the TV off and tries reading the dusty, yellowed science fiction paperbacks his dad brought, Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land. Trouble is, the books leave huge empty regions in his brain where dark visions of his future unfold-mopping floors? welcoming drive-thru customers to Burger King?-and so he puts the books down and plays with the bed’s controls, trying to see how many different angles and shapes he can make with the mattress, and when he has his feet up high, his back flat, and his butt in a deep trough, Phillip Upchurch walks into the room.

“Comfortable?” Upchurch asks. He’s wearing white tennis shorts and a white polo shirt, and as Karl returns the bed to a simple obtuse angle, he surveys the remains of Karl’s lunch on the rolling tray: the yellow Jell-O, the limp, oily fries, the crusts of white bread, the sad, putrid green beans in diagonally sliced segments.

“Hi,” Karl mumbles. “What are you doing here? Are you a volunteer?”

“Not this year.”

An odd smell reaches Karl, sort of like the air freshener his family keeps in the bathroom, a foresty scent with some lemon in it.

Upchurch’s cologne.

“How are you feeling?”

“Not too bad,” Karl says, and coughs, once, twice, thrice. He tries to speak, but the rest of his coughing fit prevents him, rattling his ribs, making him wince, until he’s got a mouthful of gunk that must be gotten rid of, not swallowed. He spits it into the curved plastic pan the nurse left by his bedside the first day. “How are you?”

Upchurch, stiff-backed, grimaces.

Karl’s head is too clogged to think of a polite way to ask the visitor why he has come, but the answer arrives soon enough. Upchurch wanders to the door, peers up and down the hall, and comes back in-an odd thing to do, but not as odd as when he waves at Mr. Hydine’s face. The old man keeps snoring.

“What’s going on?” Karl asks.

“I’m going crazy because no one knows how much you told Klimchock.”

Karl watches the gold curtain sway languorously in Upchurch’s breeze. Maybe he’s in some sort of pneumonia-induced hallucinogenic stupor.

“You have to tell me, Karl. This is serious.”

“Why do you want to know?”

(Because he might be a spy: not a secret member of the Confederacy, but an informer sent by Klimchock to impersonate a cheater.)

Upchurch spreads out the three hip-hop CDs Karl’s mother brought-a salesman’s recommendation, the polar opposite of Karl’s musical taste. Shaking his head disdainfully, he explains: “I told Blaine to recruit you because I didn’t trust any of those morons to come up with the right answers. Before you joined the group, Blaine screwed up on a chemistry test-he spelled Avogadro wrong, so the rest of us did, too. Luckily Nudell was out sick that week and Grantley marked her papers for her. Do you have any idea what would have happened if Nudell caught us all writing Abogado ? We would have fried. But Grantley didn’t notice-or didn’t care.”

Upchurch has pimples that Karl never noticed before, because they’re covered by a cream that matches his flesh perfectly. His eyebrows are thick and lie along a prominent ridge; they don’t meet in the middle, but Karl suspects a tweezer may have been involved.

The surface of Upchurch is all he can bear to explore. What lies beneath is too awful to think about. (That story about wanting to beat out Karl for valedictorian-did he make that up on the spot, as a cover-up, or is it still true? Karl can’t judge, he’s too dizzy and confused.)

“Shocked?” Upchurch asks. “Get over it.”

“I just thought you really were smart.”