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.
“Mary found our address in the White Pages,” Mom explained, like this was a feat worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself. I could tell she was over the moon; it was her first time welcoming a straight-A student into our home. “She says your game is so good, you could use it for college applications. Like a special essay.” She hadn’t looked so excited since Prince Charles married Lady Diana, and I hated to burst her bubble.
“The game doesn’t work,” I said. “It’s a failure.” Mary’s copy of How to Learn Machine Language in 30 Days was open on the table, and I felt like flinging it across the kitchen. “We did everything that stupid book says. We followed the instructions to the letter. But it doesn’t work.”
“Exactly,” Mary said. She was leaning across the table, her face glowing, bursting with a secret she couldn’t conceal any longer. “I kept thinking the same thing: We did everything the book said. We followed the instructions to the letter. And that’s when it hit me, Will: What if the book was wrong?”
At first I didn’t realize what she meant. I was raised to believe that everything in a book had to be true. Books were written by Writers and edited by Editors. They were created by smart, educated professionals who triple-checked everything before the text was printed. This was 1987 and I was fourteen years old, and there was no such thing as a wrong book.
Mary turned the pages to a map of the 64’s memory. “We’ve been putting the ML at 4915,” she said, “but that number has to be a misprint. Look at the map. There’s a missing digit, a missing two. We want 49152.”
This was so obvious, I couldn’t believe I didn’t realize it sooner. All the type-in programs in my hobby magazines were loaded into 49152. It was the largest swath of free ML storage in the 64’s RAM. Of course it was 49152!
“You’re totally right,” I said.
“I know,” Mary said.
“That has to be it.”
“I know!”
“Back up a minute,” Mom said. “What’s 41592?”
There was no time to explain. I wanted to try it immediately, but my copy of the game was back at the showroom.
“I wish I had the disk,” I said.
Like a genie, Mary reached inside her purse and produced a floppy disk with the Planet Will logo on it. “Where’s your 64?”
I ran back to my bedroom to power up my computer. I hadn’t made my bed in a decade. The floor was a minefield of dirty underwear, dirty dishes, and splayed-open hobby magazines, but there was no time to tidy up or to be embarrassed. I kicked a path from the door to the computer desk, and Mary trailed behind me in a sort of awe. The walls and ceiling were covered with posters of swimsuit models—Elle Macpherson and Paulina Porizkova, Kathy Ireland and Carol Alt. They were crawling and prancing and preening all over my walls in various states of undress, a panoramic fantasy surrounding my bed.
Mom followed along, too. “We don’t get a lot of guests,” she explained to Mary. “Most days, I just keep his door closed and try to ignore it.”
I loaded the game into memory and tweaked the code, changing the 4915 to a 49152. When I typed RUN, the screen went black and nothing happened. I braced myself for the inevitable error message.
But then a mountain sprang up from the bottom of the screen, rising above the land with an earthshaking, lava-spitting fury. Seven ogres were scrambling atop its peak—seven different ogres, all moving independently, seemingly with minds of their own. The princess flailed in her cage, suspended by chains over the top of the mountain.