Michael Laser - Cheater

Cara knocks that thought out of his head with a loud laugh. “Phillip Upchurch? He’s Blaine’s secret overlord? The up-sucking weasel with the pole up his butt?”

She lets out a snort.

“That’s hilarious. I can just see Blaine-‘Yes, sir, Your Oiliness.’ That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all year.”

Karl isn’t laughing, though. His attention has returned to the matter at hand-how Klimchock’s cruelty and injustice are matched only by Upchurch’s fraudulence and general disgustingness. They both deserve to be exposed.

The seed of an idea sprouts instantly: he’ll do it. He’ll tell the world the truth about both of them, no matter the consequences. It needs to be done.

“There’s no way out of this,” he says. “My future is already wrecked. I’m going to expose them both.”

“Hold on,” says Cara. “There’s one little problem: nobody will believe you. We’d better stop and think this over.”

The three of them ponder Karl’s plight in silence.

“This is so frustrating,” Lizette comments.

They’re stumped. Nurse Francesca finds them moping together when she comes to administer Karl’s afternoon antibiotics. She teases Karl while setting the dosage on the IV computer. “Uh-oh, looks like they found out about each other. It’s dangerous, being a ladies’ man.”

Lizette turns a sunburned red. Not Cara, though. “I don’t mind sharing him,” she says. “As long as I get him half the time.”

“If I weren’t engaged,” Francesca says, “I might want to find out what all the excitement’s about.”

Karl blushes redder than Lizette and scrutinizes his own lap. He doesn’t see that Lizette’s face has puckered into a tormented little cluster of features. Cara, on the other hand, not only sees, but understands.

Discreetly, she backs away from the bed and joins Lizette at the sink. Lizette moves away from her-as Cara knew she would-and ends up back at the bed.

As soon as Francesca leaves, Cara says, “If you really want to expose them, you’ll need proof.”

“That sure is helpful,” Lizette complains. “What should he do, go back in time with a tape recorder?”

“You’re going to have to wear a wire, Karl, and get them to repeat what they said.”

Lizette ridicules the idea. “This isn’t TV. Real people don’t wear wires. And even if Karl somehow got them to speak right into the microphone, I still don’t like the idea of him messing up his whole life.”

“That’s because you care about him so much,” Cara answers, smiling.

Jerked alert, suspended in the still space between two heartbeats, Karl focuses eyes and soul on Lizette.

She pretends that Cara didn’t say anything unusual or life-altering. “No, really-I just wish-I wish there were a way for Karl to duck and let them fire away at each other.”

It’s intriguing to Karl how closely this thought resembles his dream, the one with the blue and gray soldiers firing across the meadow, and him in the middle. To him, this means that their minds are connected-complementary.

Wanting to earn her respect, he works out his plan in detail: he will do as Cara says, get the proof, and then mail it to newspapers and local TV stations. Maybe he’ll give Samantha a copy, too. He always wanted to undermine the unjust powers that be; now he can do it for real. If, that is, he can get them on tape.

He admits his uncertainty to his friends. “I just don’t know if a regular person can do this sort of thing.”

Cara reassures him. “You’re not a regular person, Karl. Never were and never will be.”

Lizette adds an encouragement of her own. “I guess it’s like my daddy says: you can’t climb out of a hole without getting dirty.”

She forces herself to look him in the eye, and she’s rewarded for her courage, because, with two girls to choose from, he’s gazing into her eyes, not Cara’s.

Certain confusing questions are beginning to get answered here. Just as some chemical reactions produce heat, this rapid sorting-out produces powerful emotions- powerful enough to send Lizette’s hand over to where Karl’s foot is poking up under the sheet. What, he wonders, will it do there?

She holds his big toe through the sheet. His ecstasy is so complete that he doesn’t notice Cara leaving, even though she’s humming a song-a very familiar song, which Karl and Lizette hear as background music.

Can you guess? Can you deduce? Can you feel the love tonight?

Karl’s parents are kissing him good-bye the next day when Lizette returns to the hospital room. She’s wearing a plain white T-shirt and cutoff jeans with the fringes just above her knees. Her legs and arms, which Karl has never seen before, are long, lean, and full of goose bumps. She’s beautiful , he thinks.

A short, stocky man follows her in, wearing a bright blue T-shirt, baggy red shorts, and white socks up to his knees. This can’t possibly be her father (first, how could this little guy have produced such a tall daughter, not to mention her two titanic brothers? and second, he looks ridiculous!) but that’s exactly who he is. Lizette introduces him to Karl and his parents, and the first words out of Mr. Frenais’s mouth, directed at Mr. and Mrs. Petrofsky as he shakes their hands, are, “Sorry to hear about all this trouble of yours.”

Funny, isn’t it, how a lightning bolt can strike from a cloudless sky, when you’re worried about a completely different catastrophe, and leave you charred, with a jagged mouth and only one crooked wisp of hair remaining?

“What do you mean?” Karl’s father asks.

Karl had been recovering nicely from his illness, but now he breaks into a drenching sweat.

Honest, sincere Lizette invents the quickest cover-up Karl has ever seen. “Daddy, you’re confusing Karl with my other friend, the one who got hit by that ice-cream truck. Karl’s fine, he’s just getting over pneumonia. Please don’t scare his parents.”

“Oh. Ohhhhh. Sorry about that. Well-glad to meet you.”

“You had me scared for a minute.” Karl’s father laughs. “Whew!”

Exit the chuckling parents. On with the intrigue.

Mr. Frenais knows all about Karl’s situation. He has come with Lizette to help set up the hidden microphone, the one she bought online yesterday, paying an extra fifteen dollars for overnight delivery. (The mike is a tiny black box with a switch, not much bigger than the nine-volt battery that fits inside it.) Though Mr. Frenais agreed to help, Karl keeps expecting him to deliver a lecture about honesty; the lecture never comes, however.

The mike works best when the mesh screen points directly at the speaker’s mouth. Mounting it on Karl’s nose would be ideal, but since that might not be the best location, secrecy-wise, they experiment with other options.

Placing the mike inside Karl’s hospital gown doesn’t work. “All I could hear was fabric rubbing on it,” Mr. Frenais says. “And stomach-gurgling.” He suggests gluing the mike to Karl’s scalp and concealing it inside Karl’s floppy mop of hair. Sounds a bit silly, but they give it a go. After fluffing Karl’s hair to hide the mike, Mr. Frenais goes out in the hall and listens on his earphone as Lizette says, “So, Karl, I hope you’ve learned your lesson.”

He’s still fumbling for an answer when Mr. Frenais comes back into the room with two thumbs up, announcing, “Loud and clear.”