The Impossible Fortress(42)

I trudged off in the downpour, walking the long mile from Market Street to Baltic Avenue. When I finally reached home, the cul-de-sac was flooded and the house was silent. My mother was working, of course, and the bulb over our porch had burned out a week earlier. I sloshed through the knee-deep water, wading up to the front door, fumbling for keys in the dark.





2100 REM *** PAUSE GAME ***

2110 PRINT "{HOME}{12 CSR DWN}"

2120 PRINT "{8 SPACES} THY GAME IS PAUSED."

2130 PRINT "{2 CSR DWN}"

2140 PRINT "{3 SPACES} HIT Q TO QUIT."

2150 PRINT "HIT ANY OTHER KEY TO CONTINUE."

2160 GET A$

2170 IF A$="" THEN 2160

2180 IF A$="Q" THEN END





2190 RETURN




THE NEXT MORNING, I woke to an empty house. My mother had left a note on the kitchen table, explaining that she was getting her driver’s license renewed and wouldn’t be back until noon. I sat down with a bowl of Frosted Flakes to watch TV, but the shows were all kiddie crap—Care Bears and Punky Brewster and Pound Puppies. Wrestling wouldn’t start for another hour, so I stomped up to my bedroom.

I knew Mary had lied to me. I didn’t imagine her little game with the 50,000,000 points, with my ranking of MOST AWESOME GUY I KNOW. She’d been toying with me, leading me on, complimenting me. Making me feel good about myself. And then she acted shocked when I tried to kiss her?

I’m sorry if I gave you wrong signals.

In a flash of clarity I understood all the stories I’d heard about girls—all the movies and TV shows and pop songs—they were all true! Girls lied. They were manipulative and untrustworthy. David Lee Roth had tried to warn me. So had Eddie Murphy! So had Andrew Dice Clay! But, like a dope, I’d trusted Mary, and gave her half of the credit for MY video game. I’d lost my two best friends—my only two friends—trying to protect her. And now here I was, alone on a Saturday morning with no one to talk to.

My mind went around and around. The fat bitch.

It felt good to think of her that way: the fat bitch. I took out a sheet of loose-leaf and wrote the words over and over: fat bitch fat bitch fat bitch. It felt great to write it down, great to channel the anger through a pencil. Fat fat fat bitch bitch bitch. No wonder all her friends ditched her! She probably lied to them, too! Fat fucking bitch.

I put on my Walkman and lay on my bed and cranked up Van Halen’s “Panama.” I looked up at my posters of Kathy Ireland and Paulina Porizkova and Elle Macpherson, all my gorgeous and willing supermodels with their slender legs and hairless arms and pouting lips. From now on, I would set my sights on one of them like a normal person. My next girlfriend would not be ashamed to walk on the beach in a bikini. My next girlfriend would be gorgeous, a knockout, a perfect 10. And Mary Zelinsky would die a virgin—unloved, unwanted, untouched. I cranked the volume on my headphones all the way up, burning out my eardrums.

Eventually I became aware of a noise behind the music, a rattling behind the melody. I opened my eyes and saw Clark’s claw tapping on my window screen. I threw off my headphones.

“We tried the front door,” he said. “You didn’t answer.”

I’d never been so relieved to see him. “I’ll be right out.”

I pulled on a clean shirt and went out to the backyard, where I kept my bike leaning against the side of the house. Alf and Clark were waiting in my driveway, perched on their bikes and chugging bottles of Mountain Dew.

I braced myself for the worst. They were angry and they deserved to be angry, and I deserved every awful insult they’d hurl at me. But as long as they were sitting in my driveway, I knew I had a chance to make things right.

“Hey,” I said.

Alf took another swig of Mountain Dew. He started to say “What’s up” but ended up belching, so the words came out: “What’s urrrrggghp?”

He looked tired. There was a large scrape over his left eye—it looked like someone had massaged his face against a concrete sidewalk—plus several smaller scrapes on his neck and a Band-Aid stretched awkwardly over the top of his left ear.

“What happened to your face?” I asked.

“Rob Castro happened to my face,” he said. “Nick Barsanti happened to my neck, and John Simmons happened to my chest.” He lifted up his shirt, revealing a massive gash across his ribs. “They want their money back.”

“We’ve got a plan for raising the cash,” Clark explained, “but we need your help getting—”

“Yes,” I said, astonished and grateful and relieved that forgiveness could come so easily. “I mean, sure, I’ll totally help. What we are doing?”

Alf unzipped his backpack and removed a well-worn 64-ounce Big Gulp cup. It was just like the cup that the battery thief had brought to Zelinsky’s. “I figured we’d hit the record store. Pick up some new tapes and sell them for cash.”

“You’re going to steal four hundred dollars’ worth of tapes?”

“No,” Alf said, “I’m going to steal twenty dollars’ worth. Just enough to pay the guys who want to kill me today. Tomorrow there will be new guys ready to kill me, and I’ll steal more tapes to pay them.”

“Baby steps,” Clark said, nodding. “Rome wasn’t built in a day.”