Michael Laser - Cheater

“What’s up, Carlo?”

“Nothing’s up.”

She returns to the swamps of Florida, for comedy’s sake. “Hold on there, son. The boys and me invite y’all to Friendly’s and you turn us down flatter than flounders, and then you say ain’t nothin’ wrong? Sounds mighty un Friendly to me.”

“It’s personal, all right? I don’t want to talk about it.”

Lizette has very little of the therapist in her. Uncomfortable, she jokes, “So, do you want to talk about it?”

He gives her a scowl.

“This wouldn’t have anything to do with a certain arm-rubbing, homework-copying person, would it?”

“No.”

She nods, a silent whew. “Well-if you decide you want to talk, let me know.”

He locks the door after she goes, and wishes there were some small part of what’s going on that he could tell her. But there really isn’t.

Most of the gloom wears off by morning. Karl eats lunch with the Slightly Irregular Three, and enjoys the story of the surly waitress at Friendly’s that ends with Jonah saying, “Which part of fleppin-slabob-n’gosh didn’t you understand?” Life seems generally good again, and after school the four of them go to the soggy football field at Van Dinky Park and play Footnis, in which you have to serve the tennis ball in an arc from behind your team’s twenty-yard line-a game Karl himself invented, and there’s much laughter and diving and panting, that is until Blaine calls Karl over to his convertible to discuss the next mission.

Mr. Watney, with his reddish goatee, is widely considered the best teacher in the school. He has a trick of recounting historical events in the present and even the future tense- “Over six days, the stock market loses almost a third of its value. For millions, life savings simply vanish. Comedian Groucho Marx will lose over two hundred thousand dollars. He comments later, ‘I would have lost more, but that was all the money I had.’” The Watney style seemed a little weird at first, but now his students get goose bumps as the stories of Pearl Harbor and the Scopes Monkey Trial unfold.

Mr. Watney has intellect and charisma, but he also has one blatant character flaw: vanity. He primps. Not only does he comb his hair during class, he even installed three mirrors on the back wall of his room, and you can see him checking himself out from this angle or that during his roaming lectures. If he could cure this one fault, he would be magnificent.

But at least he’s fair. He tells his students four possible essay questions in advance of each test, so they can prepare answers. And he lets them type their tests on their laptops, if they prefer, which is a major kindness to both the nimble typists and the handwriting-challenged.

He also likes to puncture the tension on test days with silliness. He covers the blackboard with a red velvet curtain his mother sewed, and as he pulls the cord, he hums the Olympic fanfare through a blue kazoo. The curtain rises, and there, in pale green chalk, stands today’s test question:

WHO WAS MOST RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CUBAN MISSILE

CRISIS, THE U.S., THE U.S.S.R., OR CUBA?

Karl outlined answers for all four questions, so now he only needs to turn his sketchy outline into coherent paragraphs. He begins: If you work backward in time, you’ll see that the Cuban Missile Crisis stemmed directly from the many U.S. attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, or at least overthrow him.

And so on, through the end of paragraph one, at which point he activates The Plan. Copying the paragraph, he pastes it into an email that he sends to RebGroup, for them to paraphrase.

Who can comprehend the mysteries of the human mind? Why would a person as smart as Karl forget to turn down the volume on his laptop, when the worst thing that could possibly happen would be the loud blibadip that alerts Mr. Watney to the fact that someone has just sent an email? Or, to put the question bluntly: does Karl want to get caught?

Personally, I don’t think so. You’re free to think otherwise, though.

Instantly, Mr. Watney raises his eyes to the mirrors in the back of the room. In the center mirror, he sees (partially eclipsed by Karl’s shoulder) the email window on Karl’s screen.

Mr. Watney twitches-an alarming sight, for this is a supremely confident, unflappable teacher-and says, “Karl, come up here.”

Our hero walks the narrow aisle to the front of the room and follows Mr. Watney to the recessed doorway. A desperate glance at Vijay- What do I do now?!- goes unreturned.

“Did you just send the question to someone in the next period?” Mr. Watney whispers.

“No, I didn’t,” Karl replies, pale as a vampire’s victim.

“That’s good, because I change the questions from class to class. But what did you send? Before you say a word, let me warn you-I’m going to ask to see your computer.”

Karl can neither speak nor raise his chin from his chest.

“I don’t understand. You have absolutely no reason to cheat. I’m hoping there’s an innocent explanation.”

“There is,” says Phillip Upchurch.

P.U., as most students at Lincoln High call him, has come to the doorway to confer with Karl and Mr. Watney as if he had every right to do so. His white shirt collar rises up out of the blazer’s darker collar a perfect half-inch all around.

Baffled, slack-jawed, Karl waits to hear what he will say.

“Phillip, this doesn’t concern you,” Mr. Watney says.

Upchurch keeps his voice down. “Actually, the note he sent was to me.” (Here Karl goes into the Lifeboat State: no longer strong enough to lift a pinky to save himself, he floats passively whichever way the tide carries him.) “I wasn’t sure if you said to double-space or single-space the essay, and I didn’t want to raise my hand and ask such a stupid question out loud. So I emailed Karl. He was just answering my question. That’s why he didn’t bother to turn his volume down, I’m guessing-he didn’t think he had anything to hide.”

Mr. Watney frowns. It’s a far-fetched tale, but how can he doubt the word of Phillip Upchurch, whom he privately refers to as Pious the Twelfth?

“I see now that it was an error in judgment, and I take full responsibility for my mistake-but I didn’t think anyone would ever know. You just need to understand that it would be a gross injustice to accuse Karl of cheating, when he was only trying to answer an innocent question.”

A curl of distaste is visible on Mr. Watney’s lips, even with the goatee. In Karl’s terror, he can’t tell what the distaste refers to, and he’s afraid it’s him. Why P.U. would lie for him he can’t begin to guess; but right now the more urgent question is whether or not the keen-minded Mr. Watney will buy Upchurch’s load of crap.

“Phillip,” he begins, “you have a distinguished career in the law ahead of you. If you can show me the email you sent to Karl, we’ll all forget this ever happened. Can you do that?”

Karl’s head is feeling lighter and lighter: the brains must be evaporating inside. A minute from now, he’ll be on his way to Klimchock’s office. He’s not sure how much longer he can stay vertical.

“No problem,” Phillip says. “Come look.”

Magically, Phillip brings up the lifesaving email on his laptop screen and shows Mr. Watney. How is he doing this? Karl wonders. The only possible answer is that Phillip sent the email right after Karl’s laptop sounded its near-fatal blibadip.

Mr. Watney waves Karl over.

“I owe you an apology,” he says, resting his hand on Karl’s shoulder. “Now go ahead and finish the test. Let me know if you need extra time.”

Karl writes the rest of his essay without passing it along to the Confederacy. Deeply shaken, he keeps his eyes on the screen and ignores the pellets of crumpled paper that bounce off his head.