Karl has a strong impulse to confess that he exaggerated, that there’s really only one envelope, at his aunt’s house in Teaneck.
“I just want to say one thing,” Blaine begins.
“Look-I was in an impossible position.”
“Just one thing,” Blaine insists. “Thank you. For keeping us out of Klimchock’s trap.”
He offers Karl his hand. As they shake, he sighs. “Looks like I’ll be going to Princeton-Review, that is.”
He pats Karl on the back and pushes the heavy door open. “Adios, amigo. I’ll talk to you in a few years, with an investment opportunity.”
The door closes between them. Karl slumps against the handrail, exhausted.
Someone thumps on the door, wham wham wham wham wham.
“Karl? You okay in there?”
He pushes the lock bar to let Lizette in, but she pulls the door open so fast that he stumbles out into the bright sunlight.
He sees the near future with perfect clarity: he will tumble down the concrete steps, all dignity gone, and Lizette will lose her respect for him. He may lose a tooth or two as well.
That’s not how the scene plays out, though. She grabs his arm before he takes the tumble, and hoists him up almost vertical.
“Elegant move,” she comments.
Regaining his balance, with Lizette’s hand in his, he blinks in the sunlight. A peaceful breeze stirs the new leaves on the trees. There are no teachers or students around, just him and Lizette.
“Looks like you climbed out of that hole you were in,” she says. “Congratulations.”
You couldn’t choreograph a better lead-in to a first kiss if you planned for months. In fact, Karl knows, if he doesn’t kiss her, he’ll be a fool, a coward, a jerk.
Nevertheless…
“What is it, Karl?”
Nothing he can put into words. Just that he’s scared out of his wits.
Honk!
“Anybody need a ride?” his mother calls from the car.
RULE #16: In any given situation, most people take the easy way out. Sure, I could stop cheating, stop taking risks, spare myself the Penalties, make everything simple: graduate on time instead of having to repeat the year, go to a Prestigious college, get a high-Paying job, get an attractive wife and Perfect kids. But that would mean Death by Boredom. Let others Play life straight. I choose cheating!
Chapter 16
The ropes are cutting into Karl’s hands and wrists. He should have put on work gloves, but it’s too late now, he’s got the Turtle in the air and it’s swinging like a heavy pendulum, something he didn’t anticipate-and another problem, the beam he slung the rope over is just a single two-by-four, and it’s creaking under the weight. All he can do now is hurry and lower the Turtle into the test vat (a round kiddy pool, four inflated rings decorated with happy goldfish) as fast as possible, before the garage roof comes crashing down-except, he has to wait for the Turtle to stop swinging, or it’ll hit the topmost ring of the pool, burst it, and flood the garage floor.
A stranger stops at the open garage door. The man is so quiet, Karl doesn’t realize he’s there until he asks, “Karl Petrofsky?”
The visitor is a thin, white-haired man in a brown suit and yellow bow tie, with gold-rimmed glasses and pale, softly wrinkled skin. The face is vaguely familiar; Karl has seen this man before, though he can’t remember where.
There’s no way to hide the Turtle this time. “Yes?”
“May I come in?”
“I’m kind of busy right now.”
The wooden beam groans overhead. Karl lowers the Turtle to within a few inches of the water’s surface. The pendulum motion has narrowed; timing the drop carefully, he lets the rope slip through his hands. The Turtle raises a wave as it cuts into the water and gently pokes the inflated wall. Settling to the bottom, it leaves only a smooth steel dome showing above the surface.
“Is that for school?” the stranger asks. His voice is mild, and dry as paper.
“No, it’s just something I made. Excuse me, I have to do something.”
He bends over the kiddy pool and searches for air bubbles. There shouldn’t be any. Please, let there not be any, he prays.
No bubbles surface. Yay!
“What does it do?” the stranger asks.
“Um-nothing. It’s an art project.”
“Oh. I see.”
The visitor’s wrinkled forehead shows that he doubts Karl’s words. He seems concerned, as if the Turtle might be a weapon of mass destruction.
“I was just testing to see if it’s watertight.”
“Ah.”
Karl leads his guest out of the garage and closes the door behind them. “Are you looking for my parents?”
“No. Don’t you know who I am?”
“Should I?”
“Perhaps not. My name is Francis Hightower.”
The principal! That’s where Karl has seen him-leaving the school at the end of the day. Quietly. Anonymously.
Terror catches up with him like a bullet. He took the SAT a week ago; he thought he’d escaped without a scratch. It’s never that easy, though, is it?
“Is something wrong?” he asks weakly.
“Wrong? No, I just came to thank you.”
They’re standing in the driveway. Mr. Hightower’s shoe is practically touching the dirty red Frisbee that has sat under the forsythia hedge for the past six years.
“Um-thank me for what?”
Before Mr. Hightower can reply, Ivan Fretz waves to Karl from the sidewalk. He’s walking his shaggy black dog. “How’s it going, neighbor?”
For the first time since childhood, Ivan comes down the driveway. “Sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to run something by you. What would you think about making some extra money over the summer, tutoring me for the SAT?”
The dog sniffs his way up Karl’s thigh.
“You’re going to take it again?”
“I hardly even studied! It didn’t seem to matter. But now it does, so-think it over, Karl. This could be good for both of us. Come on, Bibsy.”
Ivan gives the leash a tug, and the dog growls as they go back the way they came.
“He seems cheerful,” Mr. Hightower says.
“He had something really bad in his records, and it got taken off.”
“I know that, Karl. I’m the one who took it off.”
“Oh.”
“As I said, I wanted to thank you. You accomplished what I wanted to do and couldn’t for many years.”
The sun of understanding begins to peek over the hills now, shedding its light on what was dark and mysterious.
“I’m not a public sort of person. I used to teach biology, and I enjoyed my work-but my wife felt that I should keep moving ahead, and so forth. The point is, I shouldn’t have become a principal. When Mr. Klimchock offered to take over some of my more public duties, I gladly accepted. But that turned out to be unwise, as you know. I’ve been searching for a way to get rid of him for years. I don’t know how to thank you.”
Cautiously, in case this is some sort of trap, Karl asks, “Why do you think I had anything to do with him leaving?”
The principal looks down at the red Frisbee, away from Karl. “When the technician was installing those hidden cameras, I had him put one in Mr. Klimchock’s office, too. I saw and heard what he said to you. If I’d had the power to fire him, I would have-but those cameras don’t record, so I didn’t have a strong enough case against him.”
Hidden cameras! Of course! That Karl never guessed Klimchock’s method only proves what a dolt a supposedly smart person can be.
But wait. The principal knew what Mr. Klimchock was doing to Karl and never helped? He just hid in his office the whole time and let Karl fend for himself?
“You have every right to be angry at me-but I didn’t want to ruin your future. If I’d gone to the superintendent, that would have left you with a terrible stain on your record. In the end, whatever you did had a much better outcome. What did you do, exactly? I still don’t know.”