Just another ordinary AP calculus test, ∫(2sec2x- 5csc2x)dx. A bit hard to make it out, though, because of the weird angle. Next time they definitely have to find a better place for the camera than Karl’s wrist.
“What’s that?” Vijay asks, pointing to a tiny squiggle on his laptop screen. “Does it say ‘squared’ or ‘cubed’?”
“Can’t tell,” Noah replies-but Karl, sixty yards away in Mr. Imperiale’s classroom, obligingly shifts his hand, and the itty-bitty exponent is revealed to be a 2.
Blaine’s parked car sways. It’s Cara, leaning against the door. “Is this study hall?” she asks through the window.
“Ssh! The test is next period,” Blaine says as the three scholars industriously copy Karl’s solution onto their tiny cheat sheets.
Upstairs, meanwhile, Karl performs his role so smoothly that Mr. Klimchock, studying the monitor in his office, detects nothing.
There’s one hairy moment, though, when Mr. Imperiale hovers over Karl as he works. The hairiness is due to the fact that Karl’s shirt cuff has slipped back a centimeter, revealing the front end of the small black camera.
As soon as he notices, Karl starts to sweat. He must hide the camera without calling attention to it, immediately.
Inspired, he yawns and stretches-not with his arms up in a Y, but down at his sides. Shaking his wrists a bit, a plausible finale to the yawn, he gets the cuff to slide back down over the camera.
“Uh-oh,” Mr. Imperiale says, freezing the blood in Karl’s veins. “If you’re yawning, I guess I’d better come up with some tougher questions next time.”
Karl leaves his left arm dangling over the edge of his desk, hiding the bulge in his cuff. “No, I was just up late last night.”
“Good for you! Human computer AND party animal. Breaking the stereotype, twenty-four seven. You wild and crazy guy.”
The teacher moves on, murmuring to Conor Connolly, “Remember the Power Rule”-leaving Karl to finish the test and the transmission in peace.
Climbing the hill toward Sunrise Place that afternoon, past the diamond in Blortsmek Park where a girls’ softball game is in progress, Karl worries that he should have worn different clothes. Cara will be there: what will she think of his dull box-check shirt and his ill-fitting jeans?
Once he sees which house is Blaine’s, other worries take over. It’s the really big one, made of gray stone, with the giant sloping lawn and the brick driveway that swoops up the hill and around behind. His whole life, Karl has wondered who lived here, and what did they do with all those rooms. (Dive into mounds of gold coins?) But now he’s going to a party here, and his sneakers suddenly look unacceptably soiled, the once-white rubber pathetically worn in front and coming off a bit, and there are frayed threads at the bottoms of his jeans.
The only path from the driveway to the front door consists of a few small squares of slate set in the grass. It rained this morning, and the lawn is still wet, and now so are his sneakers, from scuffing over the grass.
Blaine opens the door, chuckling, and explains that no one actually uses this entrance. If Karl feels a bit foolish, the foolish feeling fades fast in the face of the furnishings within. The marble floor gleams, the staircase is a spiral; the life-size photorealist paintings show men in suits doing ordinary things like sneezing and blowing a bubble-gum bubble. Everything here reflects light, dustlessly. When Blaine asks him to take off his wet sneakers, Karl obeys instantly.
Familiar but incongruous noises from the basement prepare Karl for the sight of Blaine’s amazing antique Fun Land, featuring Skee-Ball, arcade bowling (you know, the kind where you slide the steel puck and the pins fall up instead of down), Ping-Pong, foosball, a pool table, darts, and six friends enjoying themselves.
Inserting a dime in the old Coke machine, Blaine takes the glass bottle from behind the little window and hands it to Karl. “All hail our honored comrade,” he announces, putting his hand on Karl’s shoulder. Tim tootles a trumpet fanfare on his fist, and the Confederates interrupt their play to hoist their beverages.
“We thank you, Karl,” Blaine says, “for all you’ve done, and more importantly, for all you’re going to do. Your smartness is matched only by your generosity.”
“For he’s a jolly good cheater,” they sing, which inspires Karl to inspect his sock toes.
That’s about it for hoopla. The gathering is low-key, and more comfortable than Karl expected. Alcohol, drugs, cigarettes-there are none to be found here. The party actually seems wholesome. Tim and Ian are smashing the Ping-Pong ball as hard as they can, a comic sight until Ian’s paddle whams the table and breaks. (“Oops-sorry, old chap,” he tells Blaine.) SCHOOL IS PUNISHMENT FOR THE CRIME OF BEING YOUNG, says Noah’s T-shirt; he banks Skee-Balls off the left wall of the ramp as he describes his career plans (study Chinese, get recruited by the CIA, destroy the agency from the inside), while Vijay, his audience, chuckles and slides the steel puck. Cara dances sinuously as she aims her darts, like a soft reed in slow-moving water.
Ever since that afternoon in his garage, Karl has obsessed over the question, What to do about Cara? Obvious Answer Number One: call her and invite her to go someplace with him. But wouldn’t she disdain any destination he could think of? Finally, he called his cousin Michelle at NYU for advice, and she, who lived in town for most of her life, suggested Café EnJay, which has live music and Italian desserts-but when he got up the nerve to call Cara, he couldn’t find her last name in the phone book. He could have asked Blaine for her number, but there was that lingering confusion about whether they used to be a couple and maybe still were, sort of. He could have talked to Cara in school, but somehow that seemed like a step in the wrong direction-after those kisses, to stand by the lockers and fumblingly ask her for a date. It just felt backward.
Having exhausted every excuse known to man, in other words, he finds himself a mere six feet away from her, watching her sway slinkily and throw darts. He knew this moment would come when Blaine invited him, and he welcomed the opportunity-in the abstract. In the flesh, things are trickier.
“Hey, stranger. How’s your dart game?”
“Don’t know. I never tried.”
“Then you might turn out to be the best player in the world. Let’s find out.”
His first dart hits the outermost wire and falls off the board.
“The secret,” she says, “is to throw it with the pointy end in front.”
All of Cara’s darts stick in the board, which is more than Karl can say about his. What was that she said in his garage? Act on your true desires. It’s hard to know exactly what his true desires are, under this pressure. Maybe he should put his arm around her. No, he can’t, not in front of everyone. He may lose his chance by doing nothing, though. The window of opportunity is coming down fast, and he’s got his fingers on the sill.
The Confederacy rescues him from his worries with much-needed distraction. Blaine brings around a wicker tray full of goodies, including potato chips that break oh-so-delicately between Karl’s teeth, cookies still warm from the microwave, and chocolate mint squares with the manufacturer’s logo engraved on the top of each individually wrapped brick. “Someday,” says Vijay, chewing, “students will cheat with bionic chips implanted in their eyes.”
“I predict it’ll happen by 2020,” Tim says. “Get it? 2020?”
Vijay and Noah give him the look that groans, Laaaaaaaame.
“Anyone see Mark Madson’s tattoo?” Ian asks.
No one has.
“It’s so idiotic: a little dragon on his shoulder. I can’t believe my former best friend thinks a dragon tattoo is cool.”
“Zack Barone used to be my best friend,” Blaine says, “and now he has so many piercings, he looks like an acupuncture chart.”
“Your taste has obviously improved,” Vijay comments.
Cara surprises Karl by joining in. “I found out my friend Sheryl, at my old school, was telling my secrets to everyone. Know how I caught her?”
“How?” Karl asks, tossing a dart that sticks in the wall paneling.
“I told her I had a rare medical condition that was making my breasts swell up. The next day, half the school was staring at my chest.”
“That proves nothing,” Ian says.
“So, I guess she’s not your friend anymore,” Karl says.
“I don’t believe in friends anymore.”
There isn’t time to question this startling statement, because Tim quickly seconds it: “A best friend is just a disappointment waiting to happen.”
In the sudden stillness, Ian flings a potato chip at Tim’s face, Frisbee-style, and says, “Bite fast.”
Tim does, though not fast enough.
“One thing’s guaranteed,” Vijay says. “When you think you can count on someone, that’s when they let you down.”
“Or they just don’t get it,” Noah grumbles.
Karl’s head feels like it’s under murky water. Here they are, bad-mouthing the whole idea of friends-but aren’t they all friends?
He ventures a quiet quip. “If you don’t have friends, who’ll tell you your breath smells like rotten bananas?”
Blaine bursts out laughing. “You never know what this guy’ll say next.”
It feels good to bask in the warmth of Blaine’s appreciation-and even better when he says, “Hey, Karl, come upstairs with me, I want to show you something. Cara- you too.”
Leaving their darts on the pool table, Karl and Cara follow their host up the stairs. Karl wonders if the others resent this preferential treatment. (Was each of them the new guy once, the favorite?) He also wonders if Blaine knows about him kissing Cara and will suddenly turn around and punch him in the nose.
They end up behind the house, between the swimming pool and the greenhouse, in the hot tub. Blaine lends Karl a baggy bathing suit, while Cara reclines daringly in her underwear. The air at head level is cold and damp, but from the neck down, Karl floats deliciously in hot, swirling water. We’re chillin’ in the hot tub, he thinks. The funky, Cloroxy smell keeps the experience from being pure heaven-and you can’t exactly call it relaxing to see this much of Cara- but then she rests her ankle across his shins, an alcohol-free form of intoxication. She wouldn’t do that if she were anything to Blaine, right?
“It really smells today,” Blaine says. “My parents are so insane about spa hygiene. I think they intentionally double the disinfectant tablets.”
Karl’s head is lighter than usual. Between the hot water and the possibly toxic fumes, maybe he ought to be concerned about passing out and sinking below the surface.
“My mom is the opposite,” Cara replies. “I don’t think she’s ever cleaned the bathtub since I was born. I started doing it myself.”
“How do they get so strange?” Blaine muses. “It’s like amnesia strikes when they hit thirty, and they forget the whole concept of being normal.”
Cara’s laughing, Blaine’s laughing, and Karl notices that he alone hasn’t exposed some ridiculous secret of his parents’. Not that it’s required, but he’s clearly behind. To truly belong to this inner circle, he must reveal something stupid about Mom and/or Dad. Trouble is, he doesn’t want to-and besides, nothing comes to mind.
“My dad was talking about the Nobel Prize at supper last night,” he finally says. “He handed me a picture of the gold medal. He said I need to get more focused, so he’ll still be alive when I win. The scary part is, he meant it seriously.”
Blaine snorts. “We would never put that kind of pressure on you, Karl. All we ask is the right answers, from now till June.”
“I’ll do my best,” Karl says.
“We can’t ask any more than that.”
Cara strokes the bottom of his foot with the end of her big toe. “Bet you didn’t expect to be here a month ago,” she says.
Good thing Karl’s head is attached to his shoulders. Otherwise it would float away.
Down on the diamond in Blortsmek Park, meanwhile, Lizette has just had the roughest day of her softball career. Though ranked by a scout as one of the five best high school windmill pitchers in the state, she just couldn’t hit the corners today, and it was all Karl’s fault. Early in the game, she saw him heading up the hill; she watched from the mound, between pitches, as Blaine let him in. There just isn’t room in one teenage brain for total game focus and preoccupation with a close friend’s suspicious doings. Alone and distracted inside the chalk circle, she went through her routine before the next pitch-deep breath, nose wiggle, right foot shake-but she put the ball in the dirt, which you really don’t want to do with a runner on base, and then (the runner having advanced to second), she couldn’t shake it off, she walked the next two batters, even with the team chattering support and the coach calling out, “Get better, Lizette,” until finally Mr. Rubinoff came out to see what the heck was going on, and she couldn’t say, I’m worried about my best friend’s soul, so she just shrugged and popped a piece of Orbit gum in her mouth, her preferred tranquilizer. Mr. Rubinoff didn’t give her as hard a time as he might have; he said, “Talk to yourself, Lizette. You’re our inspiration, you’re our engine. You know better than to linger on a bad pitch. Tell yourself: nothing but strikes. Get fired up!” And it worked, she put the next ball right over the middle and didn’t give up a grand slam the way she feared, just a high pop-up between second and third, and she crossed the grassless dirt infield for it but didn’t see Sarah Leone, the shortstop, coming in, too, until Mr. Rubinoff screamed, “CALL IT,” in response to which both girls shouted, “I got it!” and then collided, and all of the Lincoln Presidents jumped up and down in their blue and black shirts, a team-wide tizzy, as the fluorescent green ball rolled away and two of the Pumas crossed home plate.
Neither girl got hurt-Lizette helped Sarah up, Sarah apologized, and Lizette said, “No, it was my stupid fault” (really annoyed at Karl now, blaming him for this whole slapstick humiliation) and this time Mr. Rubinoff just said tersely, “Get in the game, Lizette”-which stung, because no one on the team was ever half as in the game as she was, usually.
She got out of the inning by luck, not skill (the last batter swung at a wild pitch), but managed to drive in three runs with a triple, and her attitude settled down after that.
The game’s over now. (The Presidents won, as always.) Lizette loads the bases into the coach’s trunk and turns down her usual ride with Natasha Swenson. The convoy of parent vehicles pulls away from the field as Lizette heads up the hill toward Blaine’s house, alone.
No signs of life come from the enormous stone mansion-except for a laugh in the backyard.
Heading straight up the driveway, she arrives at the palatial rear end of the house, with its terraced hillside, its Egyptian gods holding up globe lights along the tiled stairs, and its border of tall, regularly spaced, skinny poplars.
She pauses in amazement beside the greenhouse and hears Karl say, “My dad was talking about the Nobel Prize at supper last night.”
You’d have to know Lizette even better than her friends know her to understand why Karl’s gentle mockery gives her guts a twist. You see, her mother died when she was in third grade, and her father, a college football coach, has raised her and her brothers by himself ever since. In Lizette’s world, you don’t speak disrespectfully about your father, EVER. And here’s Karl, exposing an embarrassing private conversation with his dad, one of the few people she’s met since moving here from Florida who made her feel welcome, who seemed happy his son was friends with her. Suffice it to say that she’s deeply disappointed in Karl.
It gets worse. When she hears Blaine say, All we ask is the right answers, from now till June, tears pool in Lizette’s eyes. Not tears of grief-we’re talking anger here. Okay, with a little grief mixed in.
She can’t confront Karl, though. You can’t accuse someone if you can’t stand to look at his face.
After a quick shower, during which Cara calls in teasingly, “Hey, why’d you lock the door?” Karl heads back home-on foot, since Cara has to pick her mother up from work. It’s a mile-and-a-half walk, so he has plenty of time to plan his next move. Tomorrow, at the Lincoln Day Celebration (postponed from Lincoln’s birthday because the painters still hadn’t finished the auditorium), he’ll grab the seat next to Cara’s, and during the pageant, he’ll hold her hand. (Or would she consider that terminally uncool?) Anyway, as the festivities are reaching a climax, he’ll invite her to Café EnJay. That’s the plan-final-no backing out.
Lizette is sitting at the top of his front steps when he gets home. She’s staring at him with a blank face that’s so unlike her, he might not have recognized her without the dirty uniform and the glove.
The cinnamon-colored dirt on her cheek is streaked with drip marks that he hopes are sweat.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
She keeps her voice down. “At first I thought I wouldn’t ever talk to you again, because you’re nothing but slime. Then I thought, Let him try to talk his way out of it. I’ll listen to his bull, and then I’ll know I was right, he’s a lying disgrace and I can’t be friends with him anymore. So go ahead-let me hear your excuses. Come on, I’m waiting.”
Confused and alarmed, he assumes this must have something to do with Cara-but he can’t figure out what, exactly.
“What are you talking about?”
“‘All we ask is the right answers, from now till June.’”
Karl has been worrying about this ever since he joined the Confederacy: what’ll I do if someone catches me? Interestingly, getting found out doesn’t feel like the end of the world. He tells himself he always knew it would happen.
Still, he can’t look Lizette in the eye.
“How’d you ever get mixed up with them, Karl? I bet they used Cara as bait. Here, dumb fishy, look at me wiggle.”
That touches a nerve. Maybe she’s right. Is he the world’s biggest idiot, to believe a word Cara said?
“I thought you were a good person. How could you let them talk you into this?”
He needs to puff himself up if he’s to defend himself. Annoyed-okay, angry-he says, “Do you think I’m doing it to help myself? Don’t you remember what Klimchock did to Ivan? School is an unfair place-this is just a way of hitting back. It’s like rebelling against a vicious system.”
She stares at him as if he’d recited the Gettysburg Address in Portuguese. “What kind of logic is that? Klimchock’s a mean old crud-head, so you’ll make the world a better place by cheating? That’s like protesting a war by pissing in the reservoir-one thing doesn’t have anything to do with the other.”
“You’re not listening. The whole system of grades isn’t for our benefit-it’s to sort people out. Some go to Yale, others get to collect the garbage. Is that fair?”
“I can almost see what you’re saying, but-so what? You cheating doesn’t help anybody.”
She’s making him angrier by the second. She doesn’t want to understand-and now he can’t remember the words Noah used, which made perfect sense at the time.
“You don’t have to make such a big deal out of it,” he says. “Most people at school cheat, one time or another.”
“Says who? I don’t cheat. And till now I didn’t know anyone else who did.”
“Well, it’s going on, whether you know it or not.”
Her big dark eyes won’t let go of him. This isn’t what friends usually do. Usually, friends see things from your point of view and sympathize; they don’t blast you out of the water like a shotgunned duck.
He’d like to go inside and not see her again for a long time-but he can’t, because she’s blocking the way.
“Karl,” she says, and even in the shadow of her visor, he can see her eyes soften, “my dad taught me about cheating a long time ago. You know what he said? He said it’s a matter of pride. He said, ‘I don’t care if it’s moving the ball one more inch away from the wall in minigolf-you don’t cheat. Ever. Because once you open that door, it gets easier and easier to open it again, till you turn into a different person- sneaky and low, never doing the things you’re supposed to do.’ Maybe you think you can’t say no to these people, but you’re wrong. You can.”
She’s watching him like a searchlight. Even though she still hasn’t gotten the point-he’s not doing this to get ahead unfairly-explaining again won’t help.
“You gonna say something? Or are you too ashamed to open your mouth?”
Here’s where Karl makes a bad mistake. The second the words leave his lips, he recognizes how stupendously dumb they are, but by then it’s too late.
“Are you going to report us?”
She throws her mitt at his face. He ducks to the side; it cartwheels along the concrete walk behind him.
“You need to face up to what you’re doing, Karl. Look yourself in the eye and be honest about it.”
She stands up. Since she’s on the second step from the top, she towers over him like Moses on the mountain.
“What do you want me to say? That I promise never to do it again and please forgive me?”
“Yeah, that’d be a good start. Just stop, Karl. Don’t let her play you like a harmonica. Get a spine!”
He’s never seen Lizette this angry before. It’s frightening: all that passion aimed straight at him, criticizing him, instead of teasing him playfully.
She pushes past him and gives his shoulder a shove. “Don’t talk to me again unless you quit. I’m serious.”
Wait, he wants to call out, but he can’t say Wait unless he also says, I’ll stop-and, after this afternoon in the hot tub, he’s not ready to do that.
But what’s this agonized urge to run down the street and physically keep her from leaving? What’s that all about?
The blue and black uniform gets smaller and smaller, until she turns the corner and disappears behind Mr. Miyasaki’s pear tree. There’s an odd, acrid scent in his nostrils, which confuses him. Does torment smell?
No, it’s just a leftover trace of funky Clorox.