The Impossible Fortress(11)

I found my mother in the kitchen, making me a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner. She was already dressed in her white Food World uniform; her shift started in twenty minutes, but for some strange reason she wasn’t rushing to get out the door.

“Have you seen my power box?”

She didn’t answer. She just pressed the sandwich into the pan with a metal spatula.

“It looks like a black brick,” I explained. “With wires coming out of it.”

I studied her more closely and realized she was upset. It looked like she was channeling her anger into the sandwich; she was leaning so hard on the spatula, I thought the handle might snap.

“I saw it in your bedroom,” she finally said. “Under your computer desk.”

“It’s not there anymore.”

“You’re damned right it’s not.”

She flipped the grilled cheese onto a plate and then dropped it on the table. I realized my report card was waiting there with the rest of the day’s mail. This is what it looked like:

“I can explain,” I said.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Tell me how you get a D in gym. Tell me how you fail a class called Rocks and Streams.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t apologize to me. You’re not hurting me. Three months ago we sat at this table and you promised me you would do better. But look at these marks. You’ve gone from Ds to Fs. You’re failing Rocks and Streams!”

At the start of my freshman year, my mother dragged me into the principal’s office to protest my new class schedule. She explained I had no place in a class called Reading FUNdamentals. “Billy knows how to read,” she said. “He belongs in Honors English, not a bunch of dummy classes.”

Mr. Hibble, the principal, smiled and nodded with the patience of a man who had heard it all a thousand times before. When my mother finally finished, he directed her attention to my eighth-grade transcripts (all Cs and Ds) and my state assessment tests (“lowest 25th percentile”). He suggested that a little remedial work would raise my academic performance, and offered to make a deal: “When we get to the end of the first quarter, we’ll look at Billy’s grades. If he earns a B+ or better in any of these classes, we’ll bump him up to the general level equivalent. And if he succeeds there, we’ll bump him up to Honors.”

My mother shook his hand, satisfied that she’d solved the problem. She felt confident I would be taking Honors Everything by the middle of ninth grade. On the way home we stopped at Dairy Queen and Mom treated us to ice cream. I sat on the hood of our Honda, licking a soft-serve vanilla cone, while she paced back and forth in the parking lot, giving me an animated pep talk. “We’ll show that Mr. Hibble, won’t we? As soon as you get that report card, we’re going to march right back into his office. And I can’t wait to see the look on his face!”

The next day I returned to school determined to please her. I wanted to bring home a report card that would impress her, the sorts of grades that mothers post on refrigerators. I sharpened all my pencils and organized my Trapper Keeper notebook for maximum efficiency.

But every time I walked into a classroom, my willpower vanished. I’d try to focus on the teacher; I’d try to listen and take careful notes. But after five or ten minutes I’d be doodling, and eventually one of my doodles would morph into a sprite, an animated shape constructed of 504 bits in a 24-by-21 grid. Or I’d just scribble down a few lines of BASIC code, something to test on my computer when I got home from school. I’d mastered the art of hiding reading material underneath my notebook so I could study the Commodore Programmer’s Guide while my classmates drilled the parts of speech or hunted for common denominators. As long as I sat in the back and kept quiet, my teachers were happy to ignore me ignoring them.

And now I was failing Rocks and Streams.

“These teachers think you’re an idiot,” Mom told me. “And all you’re doing is proving them right.”

“I’ll do better,” I promised.

“Yes, you will. And I’m keeping that power box until you do. You’re playing too many games.”

“I’m not playing games,” I said. “I’m making games.”

“Not anymore. Not until your grades improve.”

I started to feel nervous. Normally she was too tired to argue with me, but that night she seemed unshakable.

“Look, Mom, I promise As and Bs, all right? But I really need my computer. Fletcher Mulligan is coming to New Jersey and he’s the king of video games—”

“I said no more games! You’re fourteen years old, Billy. You’re not a little kid anymore.” She checked the clock—now she was really late for work—then grabbed her car keys and hurried for the front door. “I am busting my butt to take care of you,” she said. “I cook your food, I clean your clothes, I even give you an allowance. But you’re not keeping your end of the deal.”

She was right, I knew she was right, and I felt terrible. My mother was much younger than all the other moms at my school, only thirty-three years old. Her long brown hair was streaked with gray. All she ever did was work and take care of the house. She never went out for fun; she didn’t really have friends. On her nights off, she watched Dallas and Dynasty, and gabbed on the phone with my aunt Gretchen, who was married to a big-shot Realtor in Manhattan and sent checks every month to keep us afloat.