The Impossible Fortress(36)
Alf walked over to a wooden shelf where his mother stored extra food that wouldn’t fit in their kitchen pantry. It was loaded with an astonishing amount of junk food.
“What’s she like better?” Alf asked. “Twinkies or Oreos?”
I didn’t answer him. I knew he was trying to goad me into proving a point.
“Never mind,” Alf said, reaching for a bottle of Hershey’s Chocolate Syrup. “This is the good stuff. I’m going to pour this on some very private places, you know what I’m saying?”
Clark made another silly comment, but his voice was just more noise in the background. I blinked several times, trying to clear the picture in my mind.
“The funny thing is, she’s actually got nice boobs,” Alf continued. “I won’t mind that part of it. Unhooking her bra and watching those giant melons tumble out. What do you think her nipples are like?”
I pushed him, hard. I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just needed him to stop talking. But the force sent Alf stumbling backward and he fell onto the model of Wetbridge, collapsing the Lego train station. Miniature cars careened off the sides of the platform. The plywood base slipped off the sawhorses, and all of Wetbridge came crashing down. And not even this could get Alf to shut up.
“What the fuck, Billy? What’s wrong with you?” He rolled off the model, crushing Crenshaw’s Pharmacy and stepping on the bike shop, a giant Godzilla stomping Tokyo. “This was your idea! You volunteered to do this!”
I was ready to hit him again. As soon as he stood up, I was going to knock him back down. “Stay away from her,” I said. “If you go anywhere near Mary, I’ll tell Zelinsky what you’re planning, and he’ll call the cops.”
Alf’s grandmother came hurrying down the basement stairs, waving a lit cigarette and balancing Alf’s baby brother on her hip. “What the hell is going on?”
I ran past her, ran out into the yard and scaled the chain-link fence that led into the Catholic cemetery. It was dark, but I still knew every inch of the place by heart—all the tombstones with the crazy names, and all of the old rabbit holes, and the dried-up creek that twisted and turned through the graves.
I ran to the old oak on the far side of the cemetery, a tree that functioned as our headquarters until we were too cool to climb trees. It was always our secret rendezvous point after any disaster—a place where we could discuss the fallout without being overheard by our parents.
There were fresh footprints and Bazooka gum wrappers scattered around the trunk; some other younger kids had obviously made it their own. The wooden slats we’d nailed into the trunk were still there; I climbed to the highest perch, a curved limb that was wide enough to cradle you like a hammock. From this height, I could see six lanes of interstate traffic thundering past on the nearby Garden State Parkway. Me and Alf and Clark used to pass entire summers up in this tree, playing James Bond or Indiana Jones or whatever movie happened to be on TV the night before.
This wasn’t my fault. That’s what I told myself. A long time ago, I’d wanted to see the Vanna White photos—every guy in America wanted to see the Vanna White photos—but I never agreed to all this other stuff: the color Xeroxes, the early-bird orders, the profits. It wasn’t my fault Alf lost the stupid money, or that forty-six guys were going to kick his ass. I would not lie to Mary. Not after all the help she’d given me. Not after our sunset talk on the roof, and not after the way she’d touched my hand in the blackout. I knew that something extraordinary was happening and I didn’t have a name for it yet, but I wasn’t going to let Alf or Clark screw it up.
1800 REM *** BONUS LIFE ***
1810 LIVES=LIVES+1
1820 FOR I=0 TO 24:POKE L1+I,0
1830 NEXT I:SP=10
1840 POKE L1,150:POKE L1+1,SP
1850 POKE L1+5,0:POKE L1+6,240
1860 POKE L1+24,15:POKE L1+4,17
1870 FOR SP=10 TO 250 STEP 4
1880 POKE L1+1,SP:NEXT:FOR T=0 TO 100
1890 NEXT T: RETURN
LATER THAT EVENING, WHEN I finally returned home, I heard familiar voices coming from the kitchen.
“My first choice is MIT, obviously, but that’s going to depend on scholarships. Since I’m a girl, if I keep my four-point-oh, I’ve got a decent shot.”
“You have a four-point-oh? Straight As?”
“My backups are Rutgers or Stevens Institute, because they’re so close to home. I could still see my dad on weekends.”
Mom and Mary were sitting in the breakfast nook, drinking tea and chatting like old friends. I didn’t bother to mention this earlier, but our house was pretty old. Mom kept it clean, but the place needed many hundreds of dollars of repairs. The linoleum tiles on the kitchen floor had warped along the seams, and the corners were curling back. The faucet in the sink was broken, so we used a garden hose snaked through a window over the counter. None of this stuff ever bothered me before—I’d lived with it so long, I stopped noticing it. But with the arrival of Mary, I saw it all with fresh eyes.
“Why are you here?” I asked.
“For the game,” Mary said. “We don’t have much time.”
She didn’t seem fazed by our kitchen. She sat drinking tea out of a chipped mug at our wobbly Formica table like it was all perfectly normal.