Free Cheater by Michael Laser Page B

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