Below the stage, the orchestra tunes up, melodious as a car alarm. The heavy green curtain ruffles, bumped by unseen bodies. Abraham Lincoln peeks out, stage left, shielding her eyes from the lights. (Is that Juliette Chang behind the beard?) Karl is a couple minutes late-locker jam-and he can’t see Cara anywhere. A waving hand from the far right signals him, Sit here-it’s Jonah, next to Matt- and Lizette, too, glancing, scowling, looking away.
Karl sweeps the auditorium with his gaze, pretending he didn’t see.
“Sit down,” Miss Verp commands, sweetly smiling. “You’re impeding traffic.”
Crushed and defeated, he slips into an aisle seat. So much for resolutions.
“Mind if I join you?” Cara asks and slips past him, into the seat next to his, leaving a perfumed breeze behind.
“I’m glad you made it, I paid a fortune for these seats,” he ad-libs, thrilled at his own quick wit.
She rubs her arm against his, saying, “Good work, Petrofsky. Keep it up.”
Suddenly, the future is all sunshine.
They murmur discreetly about this and that. Cara comments that Miss Verp has a strange admiration for kings and dictators. Karl says, “I think she wishes the American Revolution turned out the other way.”
The lights go down, the orchestra plays “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and an African-American Abraham Lincoln slips out between the curtains, spotlit. Applause, a few piercing whistles, some jocks chanting, “A-bie! A-bie!”- same as last year, when Jonah commented, “That’s as far as they got in the alphabet”-and then the celebration begins, with reenacted scenes from Lincoln’s life. The outgrown buckskin breeches look hilarious on Brett Handshoe, the basketball player, but the slave mother crying as her babies are sold makes Karl’s heart squeeze, even though the babies are dolls. Cara’s fingertips walk discreetly over the armrest to his leg. “Mind if I visit?” “I’m okay with that.” Her fingers drum on his leg as if to say, This is so booooooring; the hand vanishes each time Miss Verp cruises by. When Honest Abe walks three miles to pay back the six cents he overcharged a customer, Cara asks, “Would you do that for me, Karl?” and he answers, “I would walk six miles to give you three cents. And I’d bring you a cookie.”
He’s quite pleased with himself, and a bit drunk on her perfume-but now comes the hard part, asking her out. There’s Lizette across the auditorium, glaring at him and looking away fast, while a new Lincoln proclaims, “Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally,” and then comes the Gettysburg Address, and the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Malice Toward None and Charity for All speech, and Karl knows his fear is ridiculous, since she’s done everything humanly possible to encourage him, but what if she’s just fooling around, flirting for fun, and she doesn’t really mean it?
John Wilkes Booth sneaks up behind the president. Karl knows that it’s now or never, the whole assembly won’t last another five minutes. As the loud shot sounds and Antonio Feferman slumps forward, Karl responds to the cap gun as if it were a starter’s pistol. He cuts off Cara’s mockery (“Where’s the blood, I want to see blood”) and asks, “Want to go to Café EnJay with me, Friday night?”
“Oh,” she says, “I told Leo DiCaprio I’d go dancing with him,” and Karl-assassinated-can’t make his vocal apparatus work again until she adds, “You’re so gullible. It’s cute! What time will you pick me up?”
A chorus line of high-kicking Lincolns in stovepipe hats, tights, and tap shoes crosses the stage, singing. Instead of “One-singular sensation,” they sing, “One-undivided nation-and you can forget the war.”
The shock of it (a joke! at school! on the stage, on Lincoln Day!) lifts Karl to new heights of joy. He’s so happy that, when Miss Verp grabs his arm and says, “You-no talking-go stand in the back,” he doesn’t mind. He floats up the aisle contentedly, on his own private cloud.
Friday night is a different story. Profoundly nervous, he says not a word at dinner. His mother doesn’t notice, she’s too tangled up in cell phone calls from her boss, and his father is in Houston on business, so Karl has all the mental space he needs for visions of bliss and catastrophe.
He’s taking a practice SAT at his computer-or, he would be if he weren’t staring blankly at the two-inch souvenir bust of Ben Franklin on the shelf above-when his mother passes his doorway and notices something amiss. “Are you feeling all right?”
His failure to respond clinches the diagnosis. “Okay,” his mother says, “who is she?”
That wakes him up.
“Who’s who?”
“The girl you’re pining over.”
He debates internally: to spill, or not to spill? “I have a date tonight,” he says sheepishly. “I’m a little nervous.”
His mom’s grin shows only a fraction of her pleasure. “What are you going to wear?”
He hadn’t thought about that. He’s stumped. Calculus he can do; fashion is another matter entirely.
“Let’s look in your closet together. This is going to be fun!”
While standing at the open closet door, contemplating, she asks, “Do you need me to drive you? Or would that embarrass you?”
“I was planning to walk. We’re just going to Café EnJay, downtown.”
“Good. Do you have enough cash?”
“I have twenty dollars.”
She hands him two more twenties from her pocket and proceeds to think of one useful tip after another. “You want to sit as far from the speakers as possible, so you don’t have to shout at each other to hear. By the way, is this anyone I know?”
“No, I just met her recently.”
Next she ventures beyond helpful hints, into the realm of insanity. “You should think about conversation topics in advance. Keep the talk flowing, keep it sparkling-but don’t be scared of brief silences, don’t rush in and fill them with nervous babble.”
“Okay, I won’t. Can we figure out what I should wear now?”
“One more thing. My mother used to tell me, ‘Be a good listener,’ so I would just sit there pretending to hang on my date’s every word while he blabbed on and on. That’s just baloney. You be a good listener, too. Go back and forth- you’ll both be happier in the long run.”
“This is getting a little weird, Mom.”
“Should you bring her a little gift? What does she like?”
Even as he pleads with her to stop, he realizes unhappily that he has no idea what Cara likes, other than darts, perfume, and cheating.
“Remember, fifteen percent tip for adequate service, twenty for excellent. It makes a good impression if you seem like you know what you’re doing.”
By this time, he has a strong urge to lock his mother in the closet and run away. “Could we just pick my clothes? Please?”
The lineup of box-checked and plaid shirts thoroughly depresses him. The shirts practically sing, You’re a nerd, you’re a freak, you’re a hopeless goofy geek. But he’s not about to put on Dad’s Hawaiian shirt, and it’s too late to study Blaine’s wardrobe. He’s stumped, and bereft of hope.
“May I make a suggestion?” his mother asks.
“Mm-hm.”
She removes from the closet the blazer he wore last summer at Grandma Irma’s and Grandpa Barney’s golden anniversary party, and then slips his green box-checked shirt, still on its hanger, inside the blazer.
“What about pants and shoes?” he asks.
“You won’t need those.”
His blank face elicits clarification: “Don’t you have a sense of humor? Just keep your jeans and sneakers on and let’s see what we’re working with.”
The shirt and blazer over the jeans and sneakers look surprisingly good in the hallway mirror-or, possibly he looks stupid. He can’t tell for sure.
“Voilà! You’re hip!” his mother says.
Having paid zero attention to clothing for the past sixteen years, he can’t remember seeing anyone dressed like this. Also, he’s grown since last summer, and his arms stick out of the blazer’s sleeves a bit too far-almost as much as Brett Handshoe’s, playing young Abe Lincoln.
Or Frankenstein’s.
While dubiously studying his reflection, he feels a tug on his hair. His mother, with scissors, has a brown curl in her fingers. “It was sticking out right there. Don’t worry, I fixed it.”
Annoyed and grateful at the same time, he asks, “You think I look okay?”
“My honest opinion? You could use a haircut. Other than that, you’re Prince Charming.”
Her beaming smile tells him that her judgment can’t be trusted.
The gods must be on his side: they have provided, for his first official date, the first warm night in April. As he walks along the gravel path through Swivel Brook Park, the prettiest place in town, he watches the ducks paddle serenely on the stream, and listens to the quiet little waterfall-but it’s no use, nothing can calm his pounding heart or put the strength back in his rubbery legs.
Still, he tries to appreciate this beautiful night, and the bright sliver of moon. If he can just think positive (instead of worrying endlessly that Cara will change her mind about him due to his nervous uncoolness), this may turn out to be the best night of his life.
It might not be a bad idea to take Mom’s advice and think of some conversation topics. He could ask if she has any idea what she wants to do as a career-or what colleges she’s thinking about-or if she has any pets, or brothers and sisters. (Starting to panic here.) Did she ever take music lessons? If she were stranded on a desert island, what three coconuts, I mean books, would she want with her?
He’s boring her to death already, and he hasn’t even said hello yet.
Cara lives at 650 State Street. He knows this because he has the address on a slip of paper, and he’s taken it out of his pocket thirteen times since leaving home. To reach number 650, he has to go down the slope, past the railroad tracks and the car wash. The creepiness of this deserted neighborhood harmonizes perfectly with his anxiety.
When he arrives at number 650, it’s a dry cleaner. Maybe he has the number wrong? No-a fourteenth glance confirms the address. Did she send him here as a cruel joke?
No, she didn’t. Next to the dry cleaner is another door, which also says 650.
Inside, there’s nothing but mailboxes, and a flight of steps covered by a worn brown carpet. The one light at the top of the stairs doesn’t really do the job. He hopes he won’t find a murderer hiding at the top of the stairs.
What did his mother tell him? Listen when she talks. Don’t sit near the speakers.
The doorbell may not work-or else they can’t hear it inside because of the music, an old song playing extremely loud. “Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me cry?”
His polite knock doesn’t stand a chance. Regretfully, he pounds on the door like the FBI.
Smoke hits him in the face when the door opens. Cara’s mother, a slender woman in tight white pants and a magenta satin blouse, has a glass of wine in her hand. Behind her, at a folding table with metal legs and a Monopoly game in progress, a heavyset, black-haired guy sits and smokes, red-faced. There are posters of the Matterhorn and the Eiffel Tower on the walls, plus a fuzzy poster of cats fishing.
Cara’s mom looks a lot like her except that her mom’s hair is short and sandy blond and swoops down over one eye. Indian bangles jangle on both of her wrists. “Yeeeeeees?” she asks, having fun.
“Hi. Is Cara home?”
“No, she went out a while ago.”
The English language has several words for Karl’s state of mind. Disconcerted. Flustered. Discombobulated. Flummoxed. My personal favorite is nonplussed.
“I was supposed to-I told her I’d pick her up at seven-thirty.”
“Oh. Hm.” She makes a series of quizzical expressions. “That’s odd. You’re saying you had a date with her?”
Did she just say it was odd that Cara agreed to go out with him?
“Yes.”
“Well. Wow.”
The guy at the table takes a long drag on his cigarette, holding it between his thumb and index fingertip. He shakes his head at Karl slowly, sympathetically, as if to say, Tough break, kid.
A striped cat leaps up on the table and walks across the Monopoly board without disturbing a single house or hotel.
“Do you think she’ll be back in a minute or two?”
“No, I really don’t think so. Because-this is awkward, isn’t it?-she left with another young man. How long ago was that, Wendell?”
“Twenty minutes.”
Karl gropes for understanding, in vain.
“She must have just forgotten. Sorry-what’s your name, so I can yell at her for standing you up?”
“Karl.”
As he speaks the syllable, his name sounds fatally lame to him-the kind of name you’d have if you were born to be forgotten, blown off, laughed at.
“Don’t let it get you down, Karl. She’s a little flaky sometimes. I’ll tell her you stopped by, okay?”
Silent and immobile, Karl stands in the carpeted hallway, a statue of himself.
“You have a good night, Karl,” the man says from the table as the door closes.
He can’t remember descending the stairs. All he knows is, he’s wandering up State Street like the ghost of a slain soldier, back the way he came.
When he gets to Swivel Brook Park, instead of turning toward home, he keeps going on State-floating uphill, past the fire station and the Laundromat, too destroyed to think-or no, that’s not right, because his brain is working, it takes all his mental strength to keep it aimed away from Cara, who didn’t care enough about him to remember they had a date. He searches for distraction in the windows of the Chinese and Indian restaurants, and then, farther up the hill, the Thai, Cajun, and French restaurants-and then the antique shops, and the four stone banks at the corner of Park-the same way he would have walked with Cara. Maybe it’s his own fault, he delayed too long and someone else sneaked in ahead of him. (Is it someone he knows?)
This might be a good time to consider Lizette’s advice. Get a spine. It wasn’t just Klimchock’s tyranny that made him join the Confederacy, was it?
Café EnJay has a painted red coffee cup on its window, from which wavy lines of steam rise. A waitress leads two people to a window table inside; the red cup eclipses their heads, but when they sit, Karl sees that the girl is Cara and the guy is some kind of rock star-looking person in his twenties, wearing a sleeveless black T-shirt to show off his muscles. This guy has short, rumpled, blond hair and a matching mustache. Even from across the street and through glass, Karl can see that his eyes are intensely blue, and that Cara is enjoying their blueness.
She takes a break from drinking in the splendor of her rock star’s face, and glances out the window. Karl turns his back so fast that his blazer’s tail whips around. He keeps going up State, head turned unnaturally to the right-but peeks back after a few steps, unable to resist. Instead of Cara in the window, he spots Lizette, Jonah, and Matt in the tiny park next to the café.
There’s a tall sweetgum tree by the curb. Karl hides behind its wide trunk and spies on his old friends.
They’re sipping from pink Shake Shack cups, along with a fourth person Karl doesn’t recognize. Matt tosses his cup in a trash can and asks loudly, “Are you ready, Stringbinis?”
The fourth friend, Karl’s replacement, takes out a little video camera, and the Fabulous Flying Stringbinis perform for both passersby and posterity. First comes the Stringbini Handstand: Jonah squats with his hands on the grass in front of him while Lizette and Matt step on his hands with one foot apiece and shout, “Hey!”
Behind his tree trunk, standing in a lake of sweetgum prickly balls, Karl wishes desperately that he could cross the street and join his old friends, even if they do look extremely stupid. He regrets that he ever mocked (even silently, to himself) Jonah’s braces and Matt’s hyperactivity. It would be so much better to clown around with them than to hide behind a tree, humiliated by a pretty girl who couldn’t care less about him.
Here comes the stunt called Falling Down Sideways, which he made up himself. Lizette-a halfhearted Stringbini, it seems-stands straight and tall while Jonah and Matt play a drumroll on their thighs. On the count of three, she raises her arms above her head and falls over, straight as a plank. The others catch her just before she hits the ground, shouting, “Hey!” Without Karl there, her weight surprises them; she hits the grass, and sighs.
Thumping music comes from the café next to the park. Cara’s date turns out to be the singer of the band that’s playing on the small stage. Out in front of the others, he throws his head around as if he were conducting an orchestra with it. Cara smiles like the Mona Lisa.
“Karl Petrofsky, right?”
Huh? Whuh? Who-?
A girl has come up behind him: the weird one from school, with the immobile hair and the plaid slacks that always have a straight crease-the one who drags around a small rolling suitcase instead of a backpack, and therefore looks like a flight attendant as she strides through the halls.
She sticks her hand out straight, to shake his. “Samantha Abrabarba. Nice to meet you. Why are you hiding behind a tree?”
“No reason. I just-didn’t have anything to do.”
“On a Friday night? Tut, tut. But look on the bright side: that means I can interview you. How about this bench- shall we?”
Samantha, it turns out, wants to profile him for The Emancipator, as the quiet genius of the junior class and next year’s presumed valedictorian. The prospect of having the whole school read about his prodigious brainpower appeals to him in the same way that large quantities of water appealed to the Wicked Witch of the West-but he doesn’t want to walk away, because that would mean losing sight of Cara and the Stringbinis.
He follows her to the yellow bench outside the Enchilada Encantada, the Mexican restaurant, and answers her questions distractedly-about his study habits, and who was his most influential teacher, and what extracurricular activities he’s involved in. Hearing that he, um, doesn’t do any extracurricular activities, she rests her leather-bound pad on her lap and lectures him. “That’s really not smart, you know. Even with grades like yours, colleges want to see that you’re, quote, well-rounded, unquote. Everybody does something. You’re not abnormal, are you? Just kidding. I mean, I don’t love tutoring dumb, lazy freshmen, but I do it-and working on the newspaper, you wouldn’t believe how much crap I have to do, pardon the expression.”
Though depressed and a hundred feet away in spirit, Karl can’t resist: “You do a lot of crap on the newspaper?”
“I know, you think I’m just a trained dog, doing what I’m supposed to do, when and where I’m supposed to do it. But not everyone has your grades. The rest of us have to find any way we can to shine.”
Despite her announced ambition to become a New York Times reporter, Samantha talks much more than she listens. When Karl (not wanting to sound like a walking computer in her article) tells about the projects he works on in the garage, like the thermosensitive shingles, she says, “So you’re the next Thomas Edison, tinkering in your basement laboratory, pouring chemicals into beakers?”
“No. In the garage. Without beakers.”
“But you’re planning to go into chemistry, right?”
“Not exactly. I don’t really know what I want to do.”
“Too bad. I do. I want to interview foreign heads of state, and get them to reveal their secret plans. My strategy is, the pretty face will put them off guard. While they try to impress innocent little me, I’ll be digging for classified information.”
She does have a pretty face, sort of-angular, sharp-featured, with elegantly elongated eyes-but it’s weird to hear someone call herself pretty, and she uses way too much makeup and hair spray, and also she’s so oblivious to him, even as she asks him questions, that the main impression she gives is of someone born with a defective social-interaction gene.
“I guess I’ll go home now,” he says.
“That’s rude. I’m not as interesting as your beakers?”
“I’m just tired.”
“What if I told you I’m working on a top secret exposé? Can you keep this…” She lifts a nonexistent hat and pantomimes putting something under it.
“Excuse me?”
“Under your hat. Are you slow?”
“What are you talking about?”
She peers around, left and right-a hokey gesture that he’s never seen an actual person perform. “Mr. Klimchock told me not to tell anyone, but I can trust you. I’m trying to catch the cheaters, at school, so I can expose them.”
Normally fair-complexioned, Karl feels himself growing paler. “Hm,” he says, and then adds, “hm.”
“The big question is, Who’s Doing It? So far I haven’t caught anyone, but I’m on the case.”
“That’s really interesting. But, I’m sorry, I was up late last night, I have to go.”
“Not so fast. Just answer a simple question: have you heard anything?”
“No. I really don’t know a thing.”
Across the street, his old friends are executing the Quick Pick-Me-Up of Death. Lizette crouches, and Jonah and Matt each put a foot on one of her hands, and then she stands fast and flips them up and away, so that they fly, flailing, up and onto the grass. (No, she doesn’t have the strength of Hercules. The trick is to perform the move quickly, before the audience, if there is one, notices the boys springing up with their knees.)
“Hey!” his three friends shout.
“Look at those dorks,” Samantha says. “Get a life.”
“Well. See you at school.”
“I guess I could go ask them what they know. I just hope their nerdiness isn’t contagious.”
She stands up; Karl grabs her by the wrist and pulls her back down.
“A little aggressive, aren’t we?” she says, smirking. “Not so shy after all.”
“No-I just wanted to ask: are you keeping your eye on anyone in particular?”
“I have certain suspicions. But I wouldn’t want to name any names until I have proof.”
“That sounds like the right thing to do.”
She does her left-right sneaky peek again, and lowers her voice. “Do you see Cara Nzada, in that window across the street? Doesn’t it seem a little strange that she gets on the high honor roll every year? What’s someone like that doing on the high honor roll? Methinks me smells something rotten in New Jersey, and it’s not a chemical factory.”
“Appearances can be deceiving.”
“Come on, Karl. If it walks like a duck and tastes like a duck.”
“But you just said you need proof.”
“I’m in English and Spanish with her. I’ve been sitting behind her, one seat over. It’s just a matter of time before I catch her in the act.”
In the café window, the rock star is leaning way forward and singing to Cara. She seems pleased and amused-as if this were her due, as queen.
They have a test on Moby-Dick coming up on Monday. He has to warn her.
Unless he doesn’t.
In the park, Jonah and Matt are doing the Winter Pepper, the opposite of a somersault. Lizette is staring at Karl.
He turns his head sharply, away from Lizette, away from Samantha.
“I can see it now: ‘First High School Student Ever to Win Pulitzer Prize.’”
“But why are you so fixated on this?” Karl asks. “Cheating isn’t that big a deal-relatively speaking. It’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“Are you kidding? This is a sensational story: ‘Behind the wholesome suburban facade lurks a festering pit of dishonesty.’”
“A ‘festering pit’?”
“Come on, Karl, doesn’t it bother you that people like Cara get better grades than everybody else, without even studying? When I catch them, I’m going to print their names in three-inch letters on the front page, with the headline, ‘DIE, CHEATERS, DIE.’”
Lizette takes a step toward Karl. Whatever blood was left in his face now drains at high speed.
She doesn’t cross the street, though. She calls to the others and leads them away, out of the park, up State Street.
“You know, you’re actually a decent conversationalist. Most people are so boring-all they want to talk about is Me Me Me. They’re so self-involved. I hate that, don’t you?”
He watches his three friends plus his replacement recede into the distance. Sadness nearly smothers him.
“Hey-I just thought of something. You could help me catch the cheaters!”
“I could?”
“You’re the guy they’ll all come to, to see if you’d give them answers. You’re the perfect bait. I bet people have approached you already.”
“No, not really.”
“Well, it’ll happen. And when it does, you’ll say, Yes! You can go undercover and catch the whole rotten bunch of them!”
She reaches around and pats herself on the back. “Who’s clever? Who’s a muckraker? Thank you, thank you.”
A police car races past them with its lights flashing, blue, white, and red. The siren gives one startling blast, and Karl jumps off the bench.
“I’d better get going now. See you, bye.”
“I’ll check in with you, Karl. Very discreetly. We’ll make a great team.”
She laughs, behind him, a happy little bird.
His mother is reading a book in the living room, with her nightly mug of tea wrapped in one hand. (It’s the bright orange jack-o’-lantern mug Karl painted in second grade, faded now, but still her favorite.) Before she can speak even one teasing syllable about his date, she sees the look on his face and censors herself.
For that, he’s grateful.