The Impossible Fortress(38)
In the mornings I biked to school alone. At lunch I worked in the school library, because I knew Alf and Clark wanted nothing to do with me. I’d only seen them once since the fight in Alf’s basement. We’d passed each other in the hallway outside the music room, and the guys didn’t even look at me. I might as well have been invisible. And that was fine with me.
The night before the contest deadline, Zelinsky kept the store open until ten so Mary and I could work late. He kept busy stocking shelves and polishing the vintage cigarette lighters, but eventually he ran out of things to do. Finally he carried a Wall Street Journal to the back of the store, sat down at one of the showroom desks, and smoked a pipe while he read. The mixtape kept cycling its endless loop—Hall and Oates and Howard Jones and Joe Cocker—and sometimes I’d hear Zelinsky from behind the newspaper, mouthing along to the lyrics. It seemed to happen involuntarily—and as soon as he realized it, he’d silence himself. But a few minutes later, he’d start singing again.
Sometime around nine o’clock, Mary got up to use the restroom (she was constantly going to the restroom; she had the weakest bladder of anyone I’d ever met), and Zelinsky spoke to me from behind his newspaper.
“Mary has a trip coming up. One of these summer study programs. She’ll be in DC for most of July.”
“Right,” I said. “She’ll be back August first.”
I already knew this because Rutgers was announcing the contest winners on August 5, and Mary insisted that we both attend the ceremony to collect our prize.
The newspaper rustled as Zelinsky turned its pages. He continued reading as he spoke to me. “I could use some help while she’s gone. Mostly with the computers. In case people have questions. Plus some stocking shelves and cleaning up. I’m thinking four bucks an hour.”
I realized he was offering me a job. My classmates would be lucky to find work at Burger King or Roy Rogers, and Zelinsky was willing to pay me to work with computers. A real job with air-conditioning, and well above minimum wage.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why not?”
It was that stupid Cosmex internship. There was no getting out of it, not if I wanted to advance to tenth grade. But I couldn’t explain this to Zelinsky. He and Mary had no idea I was one of the dumbest kids in my class, that I was failing Rocks and Streams, and I sure wasn’t going to tell them.
“I just can’t.”
Zelinsky didn’t set down the newspaper, so I couldn’t read his expression. But I knew I’d offended him. “Suit yourself.”
“I wish I could,” I added, a little too late. “But I have this other thing.”
He cleared his throat and turned another page. “Finish your game, Will. I want to go home soon.”
2000 REM *** VICTORY THEME MUSIC ***
2010 READ Q1:READ Q2:READ Q3:READ Q4
2020 READ Q5:IF Q1=0 THEN 4500
2030 POKE W1,17:POKE W2,17:POKE W3,21
2040 POKE H1,Q1:POKE L1,Q2:POKE H2,Q3
2050 POKE L2,Q4:POKE H3,Q1/4
2060 POKE L3,Q2/4
2070 FOR J=1 TO Q5:NEXT J
2080 POKE W1,16:POKE W2,16:POKE W3,16
2090 RETURN
AT FOUR O’CLOCK FRIDAY afternoon, Mary declared the game complete, but I insisted on making one last change to the title screen. I tweaked the code so the game began with the following message: THE IMPOSSIBLE FORTRESS
A Game by Will Marvin and Mary Zelinsky
? 1987 Radical Planet
“Aw, come on,” Mary said. “I don’t need any credit.”
“You deserve all the credit,” I said. “If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t know machine language.”
“What’s Radical Planet?”
“Our new company,” I explained. “I took Radical Music and Planet Will and mashed them up.”
“Radical Planet,” she repeated, testing the name. “It’s not bad.”
The store carried all different kinds of padded envelopes, packing peanuts, and shipping supplies, and Zelinsky encouraged us to use whatever we needed—on the house. “After all this work,” he said, “you don’t want your disk getting mangled by a post office machine.”
By the time Mary finished, the package looked ready to survive a nuclear blast, and we stuck on enough postage to send it around the world. We left the store and walked three blocks along Market Street, arriving at the post office with just minutes to spare. The blue mailbox out front had a sign reading LAST PICKUP 5:00.
I reached for the handle. “Here goes nothing.”
“Wait,” Mary said. “Don’t move.”
“What’s wrong?”
“You’ve got an eyelash.” She reached out and gently swiped my cheekbone, capturing the stray lash on her index finger. Then she held it out so I could make a wish. “Perfect timing.”
If only I’d wished to win the contest, maybe I’d be telling a different story here. Maybe I would have gone home and this all would have ended differently. Now that the game was finished, I didn’t have a reason to hang around the store anymore—but I wished I did. I wanted to do something, I wanted to celebrate, I wanted to go out. I blew on the eyelash and let the door of the mailbox clang shut.
“We’re going to win,” Mary insisted. “The eyelash clinched it.”