I do something that is either stalling or acquiescing and get off the phone. Maya, sprawled like a starfish across the center left of the bed, doesn’t stir. I slide in next to her and lie awake for a long time, until eventually I find myself at a party whose guest list comprises me and two dozen naked women. The room is small, and we are dancing in close proximity, and while dancing the women rub against me and against one another.
We cut to a businessman in a limousine. The businessman is hungry: he requests some hamburgers, which appear on his lap in a McDonald’s bag. A disembodied voice sings the McDonald’s jingle, “You Deserve a Break Today.” I am annoyed that the party has been interrupted by advertising, but even asleep I am aware that the dream’s lavish production values — all those naked women! — have to be subsidized somehow.
6
What makes a good hack is the observation that you can do without something that everybody else thinks you need.
MR. NAYLOR HELD UP a test tube containing a vivid blue solution of copper sulfate. I leaned toward Danny Keach, sitting to my right, and in a low parody of Naylor’s orotund Southern voice said, “I’ve filled this test tube with a sample of my urine.” Halfway through the sentence I became terrified that Danny would think I meant that it was my urine. But he laughed hard enough to cause a small disturbance — he was an enthusiastic laugher — and I had my first experience of social triumph since Tara Pulowski confessed her woes to me two years earlier.
I wouldn’t have had the courage to attempt such a joke until recently. By the middle of junior year a self-conscious maturity had begun to settle on the class of 1996, and my classmates had begun to treat me with neglect rather than contempt. We aspired to adulthood now, and outright cruelty usually sounded juvenile. My ninth-grade notebook was mentioned rarely, almost nostalgically, as though anything that had happened a full two years ago was the work of a younger self for whom I couldn’t be held accountable. Who knows by what social contagion, what hormonal surge or slump, these transformations happen?
At the end of class I wandered alongside Danny as he met his friends Cindy and Paul at a water fountain on the second floor. As far as I could tell they hadn’t expressly planned to meet, but their habits had grown entwined around one another’s, and they tended to intersect at certain interstitial points in the day. We all continued down the hall to the student lounge, and I waited for one of them to say, Uh, are you going somewhere, or are you just following us? but it didn’t happen. Cindy even interrupted a story about her English teacher’s idiocy to fill in the background for me, an accommodation for which I was pathetically grateful.
The student lounge comprised some beat-up furniture in the stump of a hallway, as though someone had said, Let’s just dump it all there and call it the student lounge. By custom it was reserved for juniors and seniors, but the seniors had off-campus privileges and hung out at Carl’s Jr. Danny and Cindy and Paul took the couch, Cindy on Danny’s lap. I was perched on one arm of the armchair, trying to look comfortable. The three of them were in the broad middle of MLK’s social hierarchy, neither popular nor picked on, and the idea of spending a free period with them would not long ago have seemed as realistic as playing professional basketball.
“The platypus is the coolest animal in the world,” Paul was saying. “Because it doesn’t fit into all the, you know, the categories.” Paul had a long, narrow face on which he wore wire-rimmed glasses that made him look prematurely serious.
“What are you talking about?” Cindy asked him.
“You know, it’s like, it’s not a mammal—” Paul began.
“There’s a million things that aren’t mammals,” Danny said. “Birds aren’t mammals. You’re not talking about how birds are so rad.” I wasn’t sure if Danny was being serious or if he just couldn’t be bothered to sit through an explanation.
“I know what you mean,” I said to Paul. Everyone ignored me.
“I’m not a mammal,” Danny said. “Am I the coolest of all the animals?”
“Are too a mammal,” said Cindy, reaching up to tweak his nipple through his T-shirt, making him cry out. Cindy was Danny’s girlfriend. She was less pretty than he was — her smiley features seemed lost in her chubby face — but she wore jeans and sneakers every day, and she never wanted to do anything besides hang out with Danny and his best friend. I had noted these qualities abstractly: having a girlfriend of my own seemed a ludicrous ambition. You need friends to get a girlfriend, especially in high school, where everyone’s social life is on display.
“Cindy loves to pinch my nipples,” Danny said a bit too loudly, grabbing her wrists to prevent her from doing it again.
“Ow!” Cindy said happily. “Let me go!”
And then I heard a deep voice call my name, and Bill Fleig walked up to me — to us — and said, as if it were a point of general interest, “We’re getting the Amiga that used to be in the principal’s secretary’s office.”
I’d known he would wonder why I wasn’t in the computer room, but I hadn’t expected him to come looking for me, in violation of the implicit parameters of our relationship. But here he was, talking about the computer from the secretary’s office, which was apparently going to be moved into the basement lab as the secretary upgraded. This was good news, but it could have waited.
“That’s cool,” I said, trying to sound polite rather than interested.
“It should be set up this week,” Bill said, “if her new Deskpro arrives on time.”
Danny and the others were watching blankly from the couch. I wanted to send Bill some kind of signal, something that would convey Can we please not geek out in public? but Bill was deaf to signals. I considered saying What’s it like to be such a loser, Bill? but that would have been counterproductive as well as crueclass="underline" being a jerk was out of fashion. What I needed was a tone of polite, dismissive condescension. It might be the only time in my life when I’ve consciously looked to my father as a role model.
“Hey, great!” I said vaguely, as though unsure what I was responding to. “That’s real exciting for you, huh?”
Bill looked confused. “I told you it might be happening, remember?” he said.
“Sure!” I said. It was what my dad said to enact a general mood of agreement without actually agreeing to anything. “I’ll have to come down and check it out.”
Bill looked at me for a long time without any particular expression. Then he gave me a little nod that meant goodbye, turned, and walked away, and I felt seasick from the mixture of guilt and triumph.
I was filling out the Stanford application at my dad’s kitchen table, wondering what I could list as extracurricular interests besides computer programming and getting a girlfriend. It was hard to concentrate with Dad yelling into the phone. “I don’t give a crap about the controller chip!” he shouted. “You said the prototype would be done in March, and now it’s practically June, and you’re coming to me with this garbage about a controller chip!”
He put down the phone and looked over at me. “This guy told me he knew what he was doing,” he said in his familiar wounded tone. Then his voice firmed up. “Sometimes you have to let people know who’s boss, you know what I mean?”
“Sure, Dad,” I said.
“It looks like we’re going to have to postpone the launch,” he said. It had already been pushed back twice. “There’s some snags on the road, you come to expect that in business. Especially when you’re doing something nobody’s ever done before.”