What he said was, “You told them about it? What the fuck did you do that for?”
“I didn’t want to,” I said. I was sitting on the desk, my feet dangling. “My mom brought it up.”
“How did she know about it?” he said, and I felt found out. I had given her daily reports on our progress.
“Look, I didn’t mean for it to go like this,” I said, trying to sound more reasonable than I felt. “But so on Saturday Pete is coming over to see it.”
Nicky’s eyes, small to begin with, narrowed to slits. “What, we’re just going to show it to some — some kid?” he said. “Before it’s done and everything?”
“It could be like beta testing,” I said. “Give us a sense of how it’s working.” After eighteen months building a byzantine structure that had been seen by no one but me and Nicky, I was hungry for an audience, even an audience consisting of Pete Oberfell.
The computer room was located near some nexus of the school’s plumbing system, and conversations there were accompanied by muffled gurgles and flushes. Eventually Nicky sighed histrionically. “All right,” he said.
“So, uh, we’re going to need to merge the code again,” I said. Combining my sections of the program with Nicky’s was a tedious process.
“I’ll bring my stuff in tomorrow,” he said. “You’re merging them on your own.”
Friday night I stayed up late, drinking Cokes from the fridge and integrating the two sections. When I finished it was almost three. I lay in bed, buzzed on caffeine and crashing from sugar, excited in spite of myself that I was about to see someone actually playing Tomb of Morbius. I slipped into a well-worn mental rut: when Stacey brought Pete over, Bronwen would be with them. I figured I might as well come along, she would say, a glint of curiosity in her eye. My hand slipped into my pajamas with a new urgency. Bronwen was playing Tomb, looking at me, kissing me, and now we were naked, on my bed, and the feeling in my body was like moving deeper and deeper underground, one level after another, further than I had ever been. I kept going, and Bronwen was on top of me, kissing me, and I kept going deeper until suddenly I was filled with light and I felt something bigger and better than anything else I have felt before or since, and it seemed like it was going to last forever. And then there was semen to clean up, and I felt strange and proud and exhausted.
I was woken by my mom turning off the TV in the living room. Stacey and Pete were at the door a moment later. We ate hot dogs and potato chips for lunch, and then my mom wanted to sit in the living room with Stacey and smoke and drink white wine, so she said, “Do you guys want to go and play on the computer?”
I led Pete into my room, briefly afraid we’d find a little puddle of semen on the bed in the shape of his sister’s initials. “The game isn’t done yet,” I said. “And you’re probably going to think it’s pretty lame — it doesn’t have graphics or a joystick or anything.”
“OK,” he said, too young to know how you’re supposed to respond when people criticize their work in front of you.
I loaded the file and we waited while the floppy drive whirred. Pete, sitting at the keyboard, kicked his legs rhythmically. And then the screen went blank apart from the introductory lines that Nicky and I had written more than a year earlier:
Many centuries ago, there lived a fearsome warrior-king known as His Almighty Magnificence Lord Morbius the Vengeant. After pillaging and laying waste to four continents, Morbius was finally defeated — but before his demise, he buried his legendary treasure in a fathomless dungeon. Generations of warriors have entered the dungeon, searching for the treasures of Morbius… but none have returned.
Now you stand at the gateway to the dungeon. Will you enter?
Pete looked dumbly at all this text. It was clear that he wasn’t reading any of it.
“So, uh — do you want to go into the dungeon?” I asked him. His eyes widened in fear. “In the game, I mean,” I said. “Just type YES.”
He still looked suspicious, but he pecked out Y-E-S with his index finger. I reached over and hit the Enter key.
As you step inside the dank tunnel, you hear a crash. A portcullis has slammed shut behind you.
Pete began reading the words out loud, slowly, one by one. “What’s a p — a port—?”
“A portcullis. It’s like a metal gate, Pete,” I said. “So you’re in a dungeon, and you’re looking for the treasure. Do you want to keep going into the dungeon?”
“OK…,” he said.
“Type GO ON,” I said.
He pecked out the letters and hit Enter, and new text appeared. “You are a faggot,” he read with surprising fluency. “You like sucking cock.” I looked at the screen, and there it was, right underneath Pete’s GO ON: You are a faggot! You like sucking cock!
“Wait, that’s wrong,” I said.
Pete was looking at me with frank hatred. “I am not a faggot!” he said. “You’re a faggot! And this is a stupid game!” He jumped out of his chair and ran crying from the room.
When I emerged, Pete had his arms around Stacey’s waist and his head pressed against her stomach as she stroked his hair. “I really don’t know how that could happen,” my mom was saying. “I think the computer must be broken.”
“We’re going to be leaving,” Stacey said. “Margo, I’ll call you later. And as for you”—she looked coldly at me—“I thought you were more mature than that.” She slammed the front door behind her, although it was too lightweight to slam very well.
Instead of going to the computer room on Monday I stood in the yard and watched kids kicking a ball around. There were sweatshirts on the ground to mark the goalposts, and for a while I stood near them on the chance that someone would kick the ball to me and I could tap it in, but there was always a cluster of people surrounding the ball, moving around the pitch like a cloud, and Thomas Lagos, who was playing goalie, told me to get out of the way. Nicky found me on the sideline.
“So did it work?” he asked.
“Yeah, it worked,” I said. “Nice job. Now fuck off.” The obscenity sounded small and desperate.
“OK, OK,” he said. “It was just a joke.”
“Really funny, Nicky,” I said. “Everyone thinks I’m a child abuser.”
“So they found out the truth, did they?” he said. When I didn’t laugh, he said, “Well, you shouldn’t have gone around talking about the game. So now we’re even.”
“We will be even when I’ve torched your house,” I said. I turned around and walked toward the school building, telling myself not to look back. I looked back anyway. Nicky smiled at me.
What I really wanted to do was write some code. It was the first time I turned to coding for solace; it might have been the first time I ever needed solace that my mom couldn’t provide. In the decade since I walked away from Nicky Boont, who was a dick but who was also my only friend, I still haven’t found anything that keeps anxiety at bay as reliably as coding: the possibilities and ramifications branch outward to colonize all of your available brainspace, and the syntax of the language gives direction to your twitches and impulses and keeps them from firing off into panic.