Michael Laser - Cheater

“Shut up!” Upchurch screams.

“ Shut up? Okay, Mister, you’re out of here. Say good-bye. And you owe him three CDs-I’m a witness.”

Upchurch says, “You-” but holds back the rest. He tells Karl, “Next time I come, you’d better give me the answer I want to hear.”

Nurse Francesca takes out her cell phone and snaps a picture of Upchurch. “There won’t be a next time: you’re not coming back. I don’t like the way you talk to my patients. This picture is going to the security desk downstairs. Sayonara, creep.”

Upchurch lets out a growl that consists entirely of the letter r : “ Rrrrrrrrrrrr!”

By the time the growl ends, he’s gone.

“Are you really friends with that jerk?” the nurse asks Karl.

“No-the opposite. Thanks for throwing him out.”

“Oh, I enjoyed it.”

Mr. Hydine yawns, opens his eyes, and smiles at Karl and Nurse Francesca. “The sun finally came out, I see.”

At first, Karl thinks the old man is hallucinating again, but a glance out the window shows that Mr. Hydine is right. The sky above the gray concrete has turned pale blue again, the clouds are bright white.

“Hallelujah,” says Nurse Francesca.

Karl wishes he, too, could find cheer in the sunny sky. For him, though, the gray gloom is permanent and inescapable.

After Mr. Hydine’s discharge from the hospital, Karl misses the old guy’s company-for about three minutes. Then he falls asleep.

He dreams he’s wandering down a rocky hillside, into a meadow filled with tall dry grass-a pleasant place, until soldiers start shooting at him, first from the edge of the woods, then from behind the rocks on the opposite side. He understands that they’re not really after him, they’re fighting each other (ragged gray uniforms versus ragged blue uniforms), but these are not noble soldiers, they’re tough, dirty, and sadistic, and they couldn’t care less if he gets shot. So he’s running every which way, searching for a hole he can dive into, but every time he spots one, it turns out to be just a shadow. “I’m not in this!” he shouts at them, pleading for mercy.

His own shout wakes him up. He discovers that he has tangled his sheet in a truly artistic manner. He’s curled on his side, and there’s someone watching him from alongside the bed-a girl in a black sweatshirt with chestnut hair in a short bowl. This confuses him, because Lizette’s hair looked different, shorter, the last time he saw it. Also, she almost always kept it covered with a baseball cap.

“See what happens when you do bad things?” she says. “Eternal torment.”

Almost giddy with happiness, he’s about to say, You broke your vow-you talked to me- but he notices that his hands are on top of his head. Why is that? Because he was dodging bullets a moment ago.

Unscrunching himself, he fixes the sheet so he’s covered up to the neck. “Hi,” he says.

His joy at the sight of her is complicated by shame- because the friend who begged him not to do wrong has returned to find him demolished by his mistake, and she has also seen his underwear, exposed by the twisted hospital gown. He peers at her face, and down at his hands, and back at her face, and down at his hands, and so on.

Lizette has her own confusions and can’t look him in the eye. She picks up the framed snapshot of him with his parents (squinting at the beach) and says, “This is the best picture they could find of y’all?”

“We’re not that photogenic.”

He wishes he could kiss her and hug her, but instead they make small talk.

“So how did your spring break go?” she asks. “Catch up on your rest?”

“Uh-huh. How about you?”

“Pretty dull. A little day trip with the family to Coopers-town, the Hall of Fame, that was nice. You see the error of your ways yet?”

Heart full to bursting, he holds his troubles inside.

He can’t remember, though, why he’s keeping it all to himself. Therefore, he blurts out everything-the whole nasty tale of Klimchock’s coercion and Upchurch’s secret life as the Prince of Sleaze.

He assumes she’ll sympathize, but her face goes cold and distant as he speaks. Maybe she’s saving her compassion for the end.

Or, maybe not.

“I can’t believe you ever got involved with them, Karl. You should have known better. The whole thing is so low-down.”

“I told you, I wish I never started.”

The A/C cycles on, and goose bumps form on Karl’s forearms.

“You dug your own grave, Karl. It’s nobody’s fault but yours.”

By refusing to give him the slightest bit of sympathy, Lizette leaves Karl deeply disappointed. Also, to tell the truth, annoyed.

“Klimchock called Jonah into his office today,” she says.

“Why?”

“He said Jonah was cheating.”

“What?!”

“You know Jonah’s nervous tic, where he turns his neck to the side? Klimchock said he was copying from his neighbor’s test.”

Thinking, thinking… Is it a ploy, a message to Karl? Give in or I’ll crush everyone you care about. Or maybe that’s delusional.

“What happened? Did he get expelled?”

“He got sent home with all his stuff. I helped him empty his locker.”

“How upset was he?”

“How upset do you think?”

That Klimchock would blackmail Karl is one thing. At least Karl really cheated. But Jonah…

“So what are you planning to do?” she asks.

“I don’t have a clue. I wish I could run away and join the circus.”

“There aren’t too many job openings for a lone Flying Stringbini.”

Lunch arrives. Karl and Lizette stare at the pale bread and the green curls of lettuce sticking out past the crust, all strangled by tight plastic wrap.

“They’re just evil,” Lizette says. “Both of them-Klimchock and Upchurch. They deserve to sink in their own vile sludge.”

These are the first kind words she has spoken to Karl in a long time-but they don’t solve the problem, because there is no solution.

A second visitor interrupts their gloom-fest. This one has on a red tank top, tight capris, and red sunglasses worn up above her forehead, right on top of her silky dark bangs, which are new.

“Hello, everybody,” Cara says.

Karl and Lizette are helpless to do anything but stare.

“I heard you were here. Just wanted to stop by and see how everything’s going.”

“I tried to call you, but the number was disconnected,” Karl says.

“We moved to a different apartment. I’m working in my aunt’s hardware store.”

Lizette drifts away, over toward the sink. Cara stands at the foot of the bed. In a way, Karl’s a lucky guy. Two girls he likes both cared about him enough to visit him in the hospital. They would both go out of their way to help him-but they can’t get him out of this predicament, no one can, it’s hopeless, and not just for him, for Jonah, too.

Tears trickle down his cheeks before he can stop them.

“Hey, Edison, what’s up? Why’d you spring a leak?”

Since Karl can’t make his voice work, Lizette explains matters to Cara. Through his teary blur, Karl notices something odd: Lizette never looks Cara in the face. He wonders, could Lizette have a crush on Cara? Was all her criticizing just a way of covering it up?