COMMANDO KARL’S ROOKIE MISSION TARGET: German quiz-prepositionsRECEIVERS: Tim, IanAPPARATUS: spy mike, earphonesDEFENSIVE BARRIER: Herr FranklinRISK OF DETECTION: low
No room for second thoughts, attacks of conscience, or chickening out now. Tyranny must be opposed, as Blaine reminded him. The cruel Klimchock must be defeated, one test at a time.
The wireless mike sewn inside his collar, behind the top button, weighs next to nothing. Tim and Ian have their earphones in-not the usual white buds, but imperceptible flesh-tone itty-bitties. The members of the Confederacy give him last-minute encouragements as he makes his way down the hall: a pat on the back, an arm squeeze. “Concentration,” Vijay whispers. “Just relax,” Blaine says.
I should have practiced more, Karl thinks.
Tim stops in his tracks as they enter. “Oh no. He installed a Zorbo-Scope!”
Karl searches the room, panicking, for the half second before he realizes it’s a joke.
“Steady there, soldier,” Ian says.
At his desk, he takes three deep breaths.
“You okay?”
That’s Jonah, to his right. A ghost from his previous, law-abiding life.
“Yeah, why?”
“You look like you might throw up.”
“Willkommen,” says Herr Franklin-better known to his students as Doctor Franklinstein. He counts quiz sheets and hands them to the first student in each row. “Please keep them facedown until I tell you. You’re on your honor.”
The quiz sheets run out before Karl gets one. He has to raise his hand. Herr Franklin comes briskly, apologetically, special delivery. Flakes of dandruff rain down on the desk.
“All right. Now this is stuff we’ve gone over and over, so I’m expecting every one of you to ace it. Don’t disappoint me.”
“We won’t,” says Tim.
“That’s the attitude I like to see. Is everybody ready? Nehmt euere Bleistifte raus. Eins, zwei, drei, und… fangt mal an!”
The quiz is so easy, it seems a waste to cheat-but Karl understands, this is a trial run, meant to build his confidence. Fill in the missing prepositions that take the dative case: aus, ____________________, bei, ____________________, nach, ____________________, von, ____________________. Same for accusative case, and for the doubtful prepositions, which Herr F. likes to call the switch-hitters.
When the teacher returns to his desk up front, Karl leans in close to the desk, concealing his face behind Justin Pflamm’s back. “Dative,” he whispers into his collar, moving his lips as little as possible. “Ausser… mit… seit… zu.”
Something hits him on the left side of the head. There it is, down on the floor by his sneaker: a tiny red and black eraser in the shape of a ladybug. Ian is jabbing his own collar with his finger, mouthing the words, Turn the mike on!
Oops.
After sliding the switch from twelve o’clock to four, Karl repeats the message. Ian gives him a discreet thumbs-up.
“Five more minutes,” Herr F. announces and goes to his supply closet in the back of the room. A stack of canary yellow paper spills from the top shelf, all over the floor. “Dingus!” blurts Herr F., squatting to clean up the bright mess. “Never mind. Just concentrate on your work.”
Karl obeys. He’s on the very last preposition, zwischen, when Herr F., alongside him, says, “Pardon?”
What does a heart really do at moments like this: stop or sink? Neither, to be physiologically accurate. It would be entirely correct, however, to say the blood deserts Karl’s face like helpless villagers fleeing a volcanic eruption.
“Did you say something, Karl?” Herr F. asks.
“I must have been thinking out loud.”
“That’s a bad habit during tests.” The teacher laughs. “Better keep those answers to yourself!”
Chuckle, chuckle. Not for a moment, though, is Karl in danger of getting caught.
Passing his quiz forward-mission accomplished-Karl glances at Ian, who sends him a congenial nod.
The Confederacy meets at lunchtime at Blaine’s car, where high fives and yee-has are awarded to the rookie cheater. “Today you are a man,” Tim says.
Cara pinches Karl’s cheek, and then they all go their separate ways, for secrecy’s sake, leaving Karl with the smell of perfume in his nostrils, intoxicated and alone.
One of his weekly chores is dumping all the little waste-paper baskets in his house into a big trash bag. While he’s shaking the bathroom basket and watching the tissues and Q-tips tumble out, he hears his mother venting to his father in the bedroom. “They’re like piranhas, they taste a drop of blood and they’re all over us.”
“What did you tell them?” his father asks. “You can’t exactly deny what’s standing there in broad daylight.”
Karl can’t figure out what they’re talking about, only that his mother seems to have had another bad day at work. The door opens. They emerge in their evening sweatshirts and freeze at the sight of him.
“What happened?” he asks. “Are you okay?”
She explains on the way to the kitchen. “Paul left me to handle the reporters by myself all day, which is the part of the job I hate the most.”
“Why were reporters bothering you?”
“Well. He did something that was a bit…”
“Illegal?” Karl’s dad suggests.
“Audacious.”
“What did he do?”
In the kitchen, his mother pours pistachio nuts into a plastic bag and pounds them on the cutting board with a wooden mallet. They’re having Pistachio Pasta for dinner tonight: tortellini with tomatoes, scallions, and nuts, and Parmesan on top. It’s Karl’s favorite dinner, but other concerns have him too distracted to notice.
“Mom? What did your boss do?”
His father snickers.
“Stop that,” Mom grumbles. She keeps hammering as she explains. “He decided to build a few more floors than originally planned.”
“Three, to be exact,” Dad contributes.
“And the city government is upset because he didn’t get approval for the change.”
“Also, the lot isn’t zoned for a building that tall,” Dad adds.
“Meanwhile, it was a slow news day, and the press is all over us.”
“But why would he suddenly add three extra floors?” Karl asks.
While his father snickers some more, his mother blushes. “You have to understand, Karl, commercial real estate in New York is worth a lot. Every square foot of it.”
“So he broke the law to make extra money?”
“He disagreed with the Planning Commission’s decision. He felt the site could easily accommodate thirty-four floors.”
Karl has been setting the dinner table; his parents are working in the kitchen. He assumes they won’t notice his silence from this distance, but he’s wrong.
“Listen,” his mother pleads, “I wish he’d just done what he was supposed to do. My life would be much simpler, and my head wouldn’t be pounding. But it’s his decision, and I can’t get on my high horse and condemn him, and I really wish you wouldn’t either, because half of everything we own comes from his success at cutting through bureaucracy.”
Karl stands mutely with his hand on the fork he has just set down. She’s not sleazy, he tells himself. It’s her boss, not her.
“As crimes go, it’s really fairly harmless,” she says. “He’ll pay a big fine and that’ll be that.”
“He’ll probably pay his lawyers more than the fine,” Karl’s father says.
“And he’ll still come out ahead. That’s the magic of Manhattan real estate.”
“Yes, there’s a lot of money in dirt.”
His father gives Karl a sly grin-and his mother slams a cabinet door shut. “As if your clients were model citizens.”
“Careful,” his father says, grinning nervously. “There are minors present.”
“What does she mean?” Karl asks.
“Nothing.”
“They just hide all their assets in offshore corporations, that’s all. Which Dad sets up for them.”
“All according to law.”
“But you do have to go to court sometimes, to explain why Bob the Billionaire only paid two hundred dollars in taxes.”
“The only time I have to go to court is when the I.R.S. decides to throw a scare into the public. Now could we please change the subject?”
During dinner, Karl’s parents misunderstand his unhappiness. They think it’s all about them, and they go to great lengths to convince him that there’s nothing wrong with the work they do. He’d like them to just stop talking, but he can’t explain that what’s really bothering him is his own dishonesty, not theirs.
He’s reading Die Ilse ist weg for school and listening to Good Vibes on WUHU (the mellow sound of the vibraphone usually smoothes away his rough edges, but not tonight) when someone or something raps on his bedroom window.
“Nevermore,” squawks Matt.
“Come on, Hermit Crab,” Lizette calls to him, “we’re going to Friendly’s.”
“I don’t think so,” Karl mumbles.
“It’s okay, we all took showers,” Jonah says.
“Sorry, I’m”-umm, not busy, but what?-“not feeling that great.”
Matt pretends to tear his hair out. “He doesn’t like us anymore!”
“What’s wrong, Herm?” Lizette asks. “That time of the month?”
“I’m just not in the mood. I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”
He shuts the window and draws the shade.
They tap on the glass, all three of them in unison, rapidly, persistently, comically. He has to lift the shade and wave them away.
The doorbell rings, of course. Karl’s dad lets Lizette in and chats with her briefly before sending her to Karl’s room.
“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 unFriendly 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.
He ducks away from Vijay and Ian after class, and catches up with Phillip Upchurch on the stairs.
“Why did you do that?” he asks.
Upchurch rolls his eyes. “You’re welcome.”
Karl says, “Sorry-I meant to thank you. I just don’t get it.”
“Consider it charity.”
Karl still doesn’t understand. Why would P.U. want to save him from disaster?
“All right, if you really have to know, I’ll tell you-but this is just between you and me. Everyone around here expects you to be the valedictorian, but I’m planning to beat you. What happens if you get expelled? Every moron in the school is going to say, Phillip wouldn’t be the valedictorian if Karl were still here. So, whatever you were up to in there, I had to save your behind, unpleasant as that was. Now do you understand?”
Bizarre as it sounds, there’s no other plausible explanation. “I don’t know what to say,” Karl murmurs.
“That’s because, deep down, you’re really dumb. And untalented, too.”
Phillip accelerates, leaving Karl behind-stung and confused.
Sometimes it happens this way: you find yourself owing a large debt of gratitude to a nasty jerk. There isn’t much you can do about it, except wait for a chance to save his life and erase the debt.
In his garage, installing gear wheels with a screwdriver bit attached to the electric drill, Karl doesn’t hear the VW Beetle pull up to the curb. A scent of musk enters his nostrils; he assumes it’s a trick of the brain, a memory masquerading as a real fragrance. If Cara comes to see me, I’ll just tell her I’m through with the whole thing.
“Wow. What’s the invention, Mr. Edison?”
He covers the stainless steel dome quick as a flinch (well, not really, because sheets tend to float slowly downward, darn them) and stands before Cara, tongue-tied.
“It looks like a metal turtle with little pipes coming out of its back,” she says. “Let’s see… is it a remote-controlled spy submarine? That shoots poison darts at enemy scuba divers?”
He shakes his head.
“Am I close?”
Another head shake, since he can’t speak.
She pats the outer shell through the sheet.
“Goofy and Pluto. Hm. Which is which, anyway? I can never keep them straight.”
It occurs to him that she may be a foreign-born secret agent. That would explain the missing vowel in her last name, Nzada. Maybe they sent her here to corrupt America’s youth.
“So, I assume you’re thumbs-down on the cheating thing.”
“That’s right.”
“Understandable, after a near-death experience. A lesser man would’ve fainted on the spot.”
“It’s not just about almost getting caught.”
“Oh?”
She says this with a sparkle, as if anticipating an extremely creative lie.
He watches his sneaker rub the garage floor. “The dishonesty is bothering me.”
“Really?”
She comes closer. He steps backward and bumps against the rim of Project X’s shell.
“Tell me more about this-what do you call it? A conscience?”
Annoyed and hyperstressed, he lets loose a flood of misery over his parents’ sleazy work, and how he doesn’t want to be like that. “I just don’t like what I’m doing.”
“I have a question,” she says. “You’re seventeen, right?”
“I will be in a few weeks.”
“Close enough. Aren’t you a little old to believe in the tooth fairy?”
He sees where she’s going, and it disappoints him. Everything he said came from the heart. If all she can say in reply is that honesty is a fairy tale, intended only for small children, then she’s not as captivating as he thought, because she’s trying to sell him a lie-and it’s not even an original lie.
Cara responds to his sour face by turning in a new direction. “The whole world is unfair, Karl. It’s just a fact of life. Your parents aren’t bad people-they’re normal. Cheating is just a quick, efficient way to reach your goals. There’s no room for purity and virtue once you get a job. Name any career and there are compromises that go with it.”
“Doctor.”
“I didn’t mean name a job, Karl, I meant it’s a universal thing. But okay, since you don’t believe me-let’s say you’re Dr. Petrofsky, and you know that your sick patient, Mrs. Bobo, needs to stay in the hospital two days, but the HMO says, Sorry, outpatient surgery. Next! You argue, you protest, but in the end you do what you’re told, because otherwise you’re out of business.”
He doesn’t know if she’s right or wrong. How could he know? The only job he’s ever held was scooping ice cream last summer at Baskin-Robbins, and the only compromise he had to make was when an entire soccer team came in: a couple times, he didn’t dunk the scooper between flavors.
“I don’t understand why you should be lecturing me about how the world works. It’s not like you’re five years older than me.”
“Probably it’s because you spend your life in a garage. This is all common knowledge, Karl. My dad used to say how funny it is, the way people talk so nobly and meanwhile there’s all this thievery and backstabbing going on. He said, ‘The ones that preach the loudest are the always the biggest crooks.’”
He wishes he could disprove everything she’s saying, but he can’t.
“Personally,” she adds, “I think it’s cool that your mom’s boss built those extra floors. That’s nerve.”
Grimly studying the garage floor, Karl notices the silvery flecks left over from painting his first thermosensitive shingle. Those were the good old days.
“Hey, Edison-don’t pout, it makes your mouth look weird.”
She prods his skinny midsection (you can’t really call it a belly) with her index finger. He fears the long, sharp nail will pierce the skin and draw blood.
“Question,” she says. “Did school suddenly get less cruel and unfair than it was yesterday?”
He shakes his head gloomily.
“So let’s be honest, since you like honesty. You got scared because you almost got caught. Really, if you peel away all the talk, this is about fear, not lofty principles. It’s about nerve-so get some! Like your mom’s boss.”
A long shelf covered with dusty tools and doodads travels the length of the garage, shoulder high. Karl stares at the jug of blue windshield washer fluid-clinging to it like a shipwrecked sailor bobbing on the waves, just trying to hang on and survive.
She plucks a chocolate crumb from his collar. (Must have been there the whole time, a souvenir of his after-school Mallomars.) “Changing the subject slightly, do you agree that it would be a good thing to act on your desires once in a while, instead of giving up in advance because it’s scary and you might get in trouble?”
“I guess I can agree with that.”
“Good!”
She leans back against the top tube of his bike, smiling mischievously. Her silver satin shirt shimmers.
She’s waiting for something.
“What’s going on?” Karl asks nervously.
“I’m giving you a chance to practice.”
Karl is roughly as scared as he was when Mr. Watney called him to the front of the room. “What do you mean?”
“Uh-uh-uh. That’s a delaying tactic. You know what I mean.”
Because he lives on a cul-de-sac, there’s not much chance that a car, bike, skateboarder, or knife-wielding psycho will pass by. He has no excuse whatsoever to look anywhere but into Cara’s eyes.
She shifts her weight, crosses her ankles the other way. She seems willing to wait indefinitely.
“I don’t understand all this,” Karl says.
“Yes you do.”
“No, I don’t. I mean, why are you doing this?”
“Ohhhhh. You think I’m… using you.”
Karl turns his back to her and visits with Goofy. The situation is unbearably humiliating. He can’t face her.
“Karl-I’m not using you. Really.”
Her hands appear down below, on his waist. Is he still breathing?
“The truth is, I don’t care that much if you help us cheat or not,” she says. “There are other reasons why I’m interested in you. Should I name them? Okay. First, you’re the only person at school who’s as smart as I am-though in a different way. Second, I’m enjoying the whole Shy Guy Comes Out of His Shell thing. There’s a definite cuteness about you-the Awkward Genius. It’s new for me.”
She’s still there, behind him, holding his waist, waiting for him to turn and kiss her. Whether or not she really means what she said-honesty means nothing to her, so it’s hard to tell-he would be a pathetic coward if he didn’t accept the challenge.
Having never kissed a girl before, he goes instinctively for the cheek.
“I’m not your aunt,” she says. “Try over this way,” and she points to her smile, which seems more amused than adoring.
He finds, when his lips arrive at hers, that he can’t believe this is happening. Literally: it’s not real, a voice in his head keeps saying. She can’t like him this way. And what about Blaine, are they together or aren’t they?
He pulls away a bit, figuring it’s best to end the kiss before she gets bored. Once disconnected, he’s at a loss for words.
“Isn’t it better to grab what you want?” she asks.
“Yes.”
“And are you going to do more of it in the future?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. Because shy is only cute up to a point.” There are flecks of gold in her green irises. Those eyes are so beautiful, they inspire him to hope. He wants to become a person she respects, not an entertaining project. He agrees with her: he has been cowardly, he should be braver. It’s time to crack the shell.
He puts both hands in her hair. It’s so soft, so fine, he feels he’s touching a goddess. Nonetheless-Courage!-he kisses her again.
She smiles. “Well done.”