The Impossible Fortress(28)

“I wish I knew why he left,” I told her. “That’s one thing I’ve never understood.”

She had stopped typing and turned to face me. “He’s going to come back someday,” she said. “Sooner or later, he’s going to want to meet you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.” Mom didn’t offer a lot of details about my dad, but she’d spent hundreds of hours discussing him with my aunt Gretchen, and I’d become an expert at eavesdropping on their phone conversations. Mom described him as “reckless and irresponsible” and “a narcissist” and (this one hurt the most) “a loser.” She insisted he was never coming back, that there was a better chance of Paul Newman showing up on our doorstep.

“Your mother’s wrong,” Mary said. “One day your dad is going to get curious about you. It’s bound to happen. But by the time he gets here, it’ll be too late, because you’ll already be living in California.” She tapped the monitor with the pink eraser at the end of her pencil. “As soon as Fletcher Mulligan sees this code, he’s going to insist on adopting you.”

I laughed. “I’m not sure my mom will agree to that.”

Mary didn’t let logic get in the way of her fantasy. “First it’ll just be a job offer. He’ll want to hire you for Digital Artists. But once you get out there, you’ll need a place to stay, so he’ll give you a spare room in his mansion. You’ll start hanging out, eating dinner with Fletcher and his wife. And once they get to know you, they’ll insist on making it legal. So you can inherit the entire company after Fletcher dies. Like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

I felt like Mary had somehow read my mind. I can’t tell you how many times I daydreamed this exact scenario, lying in bed at night in the moments before I drifted off to sleep.

“You’re crazy,” I told her. “Where do you get these goofy ideas?”

“It’s going to happen, Will.” She looked at me with absolute certainty, radiating confidence like no one else I’d ever met. “Just promise you’ll let me visit the mansion someday. You have to promise you won’t forget about me.”





1300 REM *** ERROR BUZZER ***

1310 FOR L=0 TO 24:POKE S+L,0





1320 NEXT L


1330 POKE S+1,100:POKE S+5,219

1340 POKE S+15,28:POKE S+24,15

1350 POKE S+4,19

1360 FOR T=1 TO 1000:NEXT T

1370 POKE S+4,18

1380 POKE S+24,0





1390 RETURN




MARY AND I ONLY had one argument. It was our fourth afternoon of working on the game. Zelinsky was at the cash register, talking antique lighters with a pair of collectors from Philadelphia, and Mary was helping a customer with fountain pens, so I found myself alone in the showroom. Howard Jones was on the radio, and I was still working on the guard animation, fine-tuning the movements of their arms, when a girl walked up to my desk and said, “Excuse me.”

She was two or three years older than me—a junior or a senior, dressed like a punk mini-Madonna with army boots, ripped stockings, and a skirt made of vinyl. Her eyes were ringed with blue makeup. “Do you work here?”

“No,” I said.

She shrugged like it didn’t really matter. I was hunched over the keyboard, surrounded by notebooks, printouts, highlighters, and candy wrappers. If I wasn’t an employee, I was close enough.

“My dad sent me here to buy disks.” She reached into the folds of her skirt for a sheet of notepaper. “He needs ‘ten five-one-four-inch floppy disks.’?”

“Five and a quarter inch,” I corrected. “I can show you.”

We walked down the aisle to the computer supplies and I explained the options. “He’s got Fuji and Maxwell. They’re the same price, but Maxwells are black and Fuji comes in rainbow colors.”

“Cool,” she said, reaching for the Fujis. “Thanks.”

She carried the disks to the front of the store and Zelinsky rang up the purchase. I walked back to the showroom and Mary was waiting at her computer. She grinned at me. “She was awful flirty, huh?”

“What do you mean?”

Mary mimicked the girl in a squeaky singsong voice. “?‘I need five-one-four-inch floppy disks. Because I’m too cute to understand fractions!’?”

“She didn’t say that.”

“It’s the way she said it. Like she was some kind of helpless baby animal. That’s flirting, Will.”

I blushed. “Whatever.”

“Oh, God, please tell me she’s not your type. Don’t tell me you like these punk rock chicks with the raccoon eye shadow.”

“I don’t have a type.”

“Everyone has a type.”

“Not me. I’ve never even had a girlfriend.”

“But you have a type that you like,” she said. “Brunette, redhead, tall, short, goth, cheerleader—”

“I like all those types,” I said. “I don’t discriminate.”

“Everyone discriminates,” she said. “Everyone has personal biases and preferences. That’s basic human psychology.”

I felt like I was back in Hibble’s office—no answer was going to satisfy her.