In Beta Read online

  “Hullo?”

  It was Ms. Shirell from the front office.

  “Jay? Is your mom there?”

  He stared blearily back toward her bedroom. “She’s still asleep.”

  “Miss Rotchkey has called to report your absence for the second day in a row.”

  “Yeah, I’m coming in.” Jay yawned.

  “You can’t just come in; you have to bring a signed note of—”

  Jay hung up the phone and ambled back to his room. Returning to school was the last thing he wanted to do. But then something occurred to him: What if he got suspended from Tutorial? If Ms. Rotchkey cut him off from the computer and started locking her window, he’d be doomed. The Build play disk wouldn’t do him any good without a computer to play it on. He’d better make nice with the school. He slipped on his new clothes, checked out his sunglasses in the mirror, then knocked on his mom’s door.

  “Mom? I need a signed note.”

  Jay pulled into the C-Court parking lot slowly, enjoying the stares of the smokers. He gave a two-fingered wave, found Colin’s Batmobile, and spun his car into the empty spot beside it. It had occurred to him, too, that he now needed to get his driver’s license, which may not be something he could get through The Build.

  He leapt over his Miata door, like he’d seen them do in the movies. It was already lunchtime, and a small crowd of students gathered around his Miata. Kids whistled, running their hands over the paint.

  “Wow.”

  “This a ’93?”

  “It’s nicer than Jeremy’s car!”

  Jay flushed with pride, admiring his car next to the beat-up multicolored Batmobile.

  “How much money did you get?” a wide-eyed freshman asked.

  “Oh,” Jay considered, hedging a little. “Quite a bit.”

  He turned to see faces smiling at his car. He grinned sheepishly at the crowd, grabbed the note his mom had given him, and strode through the courtyard, chin held high. Other kids began to whistle.

  “Jay! Looking fly, my man.”

  “Nice digs!”

  “I won the lottery!” Jay shouted back.

  By the time he reached A-Court, he felt invincible. The cavernous space was mostly empty with all the juniors and seniors out for lunch. Whispers echoed off lockers, and Jay’s combat boots clopped loudly over lacquered cement. He rounded a cement beam and froze. Amber and Gretchen were sitting on a bench, stuffing delicate blue prom invitations into small envelopes. They were totally absorbed in their task and did not look up at Jay.

  “Brenda should get Best Laugh.”

  “Thought she did?”

  “Donna did, and Best Dressed, Most Naive, and Friendliest.”

  Jay realized they were talking about the Beverly Hills, 90210 episode that ran on repeat. He hesitated, then swerved toward them.

  “Hi.”

  They looked up in surprise.

  “You seen Liz?”

  Amber and Gretchen studied his new outfit, then turned to each other, silently assessing.

  “She’s not here,” said Amber carefully.

  He mustered all his confidence. “I need to get our tickets. For prom.”

  Amber looked wary, but stuffed an envelope and slowly handed it to him.

  “Here you go. You talk to her?”

  “Er, yeah . . .” Jay lied.

  “What’s her deal, then? She doesn’t talk to anyone. Ever since Friday, when the tornado hit. She hasn’t been back,” Amber continued. “Won’t answer any calls. It’s like she’s totally changed her personality.”

  Jay shrugged. “Well, seems to be going around.”

  Amber’s brown eyes focused on his outfit.

  “Is that why you’re dressed like that? You trying out a new schtick?”

  “Something like that.”

  Gretchen looked at the wad of cash in Jay’s hand and smacked the gum she was chewing. “That’s twenty bucks for those prom tickets.”

  Jay handed over a twenty, hesitated, then peeled off another bill.

  “Keep the change.” He winked.

  “You givin’ money away too?”

  Jay shrugged. “What’s the good of winning the lottery if you can’t share? Also, I have a Miata. If you ever want to borrow it.”

  Amber leapt up. “Yes! Oh yes. We’re so doing that.”

  Gretchen nodded. “Lunch tomorrow?”

  “Sure.” Jay nodded. “Just come get the keys.”

  Gretchen smiled. “I thought you were into Babylon 5 and the World Wide Web and that kind of stuff.”

  Jay shrugged. “Babylon what?”

  To his surprise, the girls laughed. Jay flushed and grinned back. He held up the keys. “Anytime,” he reminded them, and left while they were still smiling.

  “See you around,” he called over his shoulder.

  He ran right into Jeremy and a line of Johns. Today they were wearing a string of basketball jerseys pulled from a hodgepodge of Portland Trail Blazers and Chicago Bulls players. Clyde Drexler. Danny Ainge. Michael Jordan. Scottie Pippen. Before he could stop himself, he blurted out: “Hey, you guys oughta pick a team.”

  John C leaned down. “Back for more?”

  Jeremy exhaled slowly. “I thought we went over how we’re not supposed to see each other?”

  Jay feebly held up his mom’s note. “I–I have to drop something off.”

  Jeremy grabbed the note and ripped it in two.

  “You look like if George Michael and Elton John had a baby.”

  “Yeah, well, Amber and Gretchen didn’t seem to mind.”

  Jeremy looked over to where the two girls sat, and his face darkened.

  “Gimme the jacket.”

  Color rose to Jay’s cheeks.

  “Guess what? I don’t need your job at the mill anymore. Didn’t you hear? The Banksmans won the lottery.”

  Jeremy grabbed Jay’s hand.

  “Money comes and goes. The McKrakens are forever.”

  Jeremy’s grip tightened, squeezing. Jay gasped and opened his hand, and the twenty-dollar bills drifted to the floor. The Johns laughed and scooped them up. Shame burned in Jay’s chest as Jeremy ripped off Jay’s jacket and pushed him backward. An evil grin spread over Jeremy’s face.

  “Now, gimme the pants.”

  All 10s

  Jay lay in his Miata, seat back, wearing nothing but boxers and an undershirt. His car was idling, heat on full blast, but still he shivered with the fury trapped in his chest.

  The smokers were chatting outside C-Court. He tried to eavesdrop to distract himself, but his mind kept returning to Jeremy. He realized he’d made a grave error. Jeremy and the Johns would never be cowed by money or clothes. The only thing they understood—the root of their success—was muscle. Jay wouldn’t beat them until he could match their raw power. He stared up at the blue sky, hating Jeremy more than he’d ever hated him in his whole life. He wasn’t ready to leave school. To do that would be to admit defeat. But he also had no recourse in staying.

  He heard the crack of a baseball bat and cheers, and he sat up in his seat. Through the windshield, he could see the baseball field where the uniform-clad Johns were taking their positions. A look of wonder spread over his face. Their greatest source of power in Bickleton, he realized, was also their greatest weakness. The town loved them, relied on them, for their baseball. What if Jay made baseball their undoing?

  He looked in the other direction, across the parking lot, over at the cluster of pine trees that hid Tutorial. The classroom would be empty by now. Ms. Rotchkey would be gone, her computer unguarded. Jay grabbed The Build from his Miata and leapt out of the car.

  As Jay had expected, Tutorial was empty and dark. He hurried over to the computer, popped in the disk, and printed himself a new set of clothes. After he’d hurriedly dr
essed, he scrolled to the baseball field. Onscreen, he watched Jeremy’s pixelated avatar toss a tiny white baseball to John W. He clicked on Jeremy, and his stats window popped up. strength: 7. speed: 6. hit points: 6. intelligence: 5.

  Jay scrolled back to his own his avatar in the darkened Tutorial, and clicked. strength: 3. speed: 4. hit points: 4. intelligence: 7.

  As he stared at the numbers, he felt a sliver of doubt grow. Seeing his entire being boiled down to just four statistics . . . it felt somehow demeaning. Reductive. Would it really make a difference to change these scores? And what was the mechanism by which it would happen? Only one way to find out. He double-clicked his strength score until the numbers flashed. He started typing and the numbers maxed out at 10. Jay hit Enter.

  The change hit him like a bolt of electricity. His muscles squeezed, hardening with adrenaline. His jaw clenched and he roared with the effort of it, hands shooting out to grip the desk, the wood flexing under his powerful grip. With effort, he turned his neck to look down. The wood around his fingers was splintered. Slowly, muscle by muscle, he forced his body to relax. He grabbed his jaw with his strong fingers and worked it in circles, loosening it. He stood up and his leg muscles nearly launched him out of his seat.

  A small rectangular mirror hung on the wall with the aspirational platitude: “This is what change looks like.” Jay clambered over to the mirror and stared. Staring back was a different face. He was not taller, nor wider, but his chin looked as chiseled as Dolph Lundgren’s, and veins were cracking out of his neck. He had never been unattractive (“cute,” he’d once overheard Shelby Kline say), but now his eyes and nose had fierce definition, all traces of boyishness gone. He reached to touch the mirror and saw his forearms had doubled in size. Each muscle felt taut, tensing beneath the skin. He was ripped.

  He turned back to the computer, marveling at his steadiness. He clicked up his speed and hit points. Each was followed by a similar blast of adrenaline as his reflexes were suddenly much quicker, and his skin seemed to harden, impervious to pain. He clicked up his intelligence to 10 and hit Enter.

  It was like his brain suddenly clicked online. He felt more awake than he’d ever felt, as if he’d pounded ten cans of Mountain Dew. He could feel a new intellect in his brain, searching through his head like a spotlight. His eyes darted around the room. He spotted a sine trigonometry equation above Ms. Rotchkey’s desk and didn’t even have to think.

  “Forty-two,” he whispered the answer. A thousand more connections flashed through his mind. 42. Six times seven. The meaning of life, according to Douglas Adams. The ASCI code for asterisk. Jackie Robinson’s jersey number. Steven Spielberg’s only comedy. A top-down bullet hell arcade video game.

  Other memories suddenly washed over him. His dad had been forty-two when he died. He was tall, handsome, and had a drooping mustache that Jay desperately wanted to inherit. He remembered the day his mom told him his dad was gone, how she stood in the doorway, tears in her eyes, and looked so very young. The way the dust motes floated through the light. He remembered it like it happened yesterday. Like it was happening now.

  More memories filled his brain. Like how he’d been passing through his living room when Marky Mark dropped his pants and grabbed his crotch on the runway of that Calvin Klein fashion show, and everyone at school had talked about it the next day. Or when he got sick in seventh grade, and Jeremy and the Johns got the whole class to chant “AIDS victim, AIDS victim.” Or Colin’s video game party in ninth grade, when most of Tutorial had been there, and they’d dragged his old Atari from the closet, except a bunch of wasps had made their nest in it, and they flew out and stung everyone. And then he remembered that Colin’s Mario 2 cartridge had fallen behind the basement radiator when the wasps attacked, and Colin had wondered about where it went in the years since.

  And Jay remembered Todd. How in third-grade soccer practice, he, Todd, and Colin had found a dead crow on the edge of the field, and dared one another to pick it up, until they got so comfortable with it, they were throwing it back and forth at one another. They’d been such good friends. The image of young Todd—with his wild red hair and freckles that seemed burned into his cheeks—sat heavy in his gut. Though he and Todd hadn’t been close for years, he found himself missing his old friend, wishing that the three of them hadn’t drifted apart.

  The memories shifted. Now Jay was sitting in a hard chair in a small white room he didn’t recognize.

  “He’ll just be one more minute. I apologize; I know he’s really excited to meet you.”

  Jay spun around. A short woman with a broad mouth and a suit jacket smiled at him through a wide mouth, holding open the door to the office. Behind her, Jay spotted rows and rows of cubicles that fell off into a bland gray room.

  “You’re sure I can’t get you anything? Coffee? Water?”

  “No, thank you,” a strange voice answered.

  She nodded and shut the door. Jay turned around, taking in the room.

  A plain balsa desk with a computer sat in front of him. Jay was surprised to find he didn’t recognize the brand of computer. As he was scanning it for a logo, a large window, taking up a quarter of the wall, grabbed his attention. Through the window, he could see a green strip of grass, with a sidewalk running along it, and a few joggers bustling past. Beyond that lay an enormous stretch of water. It was much larger than Porter Lake, the biggest body of water near Bickleton. That was a large pond compared to this.

  This was dark green, almost black, and stretched as far as he could see. There were small sailboats on it, clustered together in what looked like a race. On the faint horizon, he saw mountains that looked like the Cascades. He felt, for a moment, that he must be looking back at Bickleton from outside the Cascades, that this must be what it felt like to truly escape. He was sure the water must be the ocean, though he’d only ever seen the ocean in movies like Captain Ron. Small white-capped waves lapped against a cement wall.

  He felt, rather than heard, the faint impact of approaching footsteps, and he remembered the woman who’d said someone would be meeting with him. He straightened himself, feeling a thrill of excitement. But something was wrong. The plodding footsteps were coming from outside of his memory.

  He froze. Through the thin walls of the portable, he heard the soft clump of feet ascending the ramp outside. Someone

  was coming. Jay shook away all his new memories and looked for a place to hide. The only possible spot was Ms. Rotchkey’s desk. He dove for it when the door flung open, and Ms. Rotchkey stepped into the room, catching him crouching toward the desk.

  “Jay Banksman!”

  Jay froze.

  “What are you doing?”

  Jay forced himself to straighten. He felt terrifically exposed, the new broadness of his shoulders threatening to burst out of the tightness of his shirt.

  “I, uh, just came to get any homework assignments. You weren’t here, so I was gonna look—”

  “What are you doing with my desk? I heard yelling?”

  “I stubbed my toe.”

  Ms. Rotchkey stepped forward. Jay flinched, uncertain how far Ms. Rotchkey could see through her thick glasses. He started inching his way toward the computer. His biceps felt ridiculously large, his thighs tense and ready to spring. Ms. Rotchkey folded her arms.

  “You’re not allowed back in here until we get approval from the front office for your absences.”

  “I know. I had a note, but Jeremy tore it up.”

  “Well, get another one. Because guess who decides whether or not you graduate?”

  “You?” Jay had almost reached the computer.

  “That’s right. And school policy states that if you get an F in the last semester of your senior year, you won’t graduate.”

  “But I’m not getting an F.”

  “You will if you continue missing class.”

  Ms. Rotchkey tightened her lips, c
learly hoping to have an effect on Jay. Jay’s fingers brushed the computer. They found the button on the front of the floppy drive.

  Ms. Rotchkey continued, “It’s up to you, Jay. You’ve gotta—” She noticed his hand moving. “What are you doing?”

  Jay held up his left hand. “I promise there’s a perfectly good—”

  “Are you taking something?!”

  Jay pressed the Eject button, felt the warm plastic disk pop into his palm.

  “It’s my disk!” Jay protested.

  “Let’s see it.”

  “I can’t.” Jay cringed. Ms. Rotchkey stepped toward him, holding out her hand. Her eyes widened. Her gaze traveled up his bulging limbs, taking in his strange new physique.

  “Wh-what’s happened to you?”

  Jay backed his way to the door.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve got a baseball scrimmage to win.”

  He flung open the door and felt the rush of wind on his cheeks. His body surged with power as he tore down the path and burst into the C-Court parking lot. Down on the field, the Johns were still warming up, throwing the ball. Further down, the cheerleaders were practicing. He felt guilty abandoning Ms. Rotchkey. But he had bigger fish to fry. It was time to give the Johns a game they’d never forget.

  The Scrimmage

  Jay took the cement stairs two at a time, then leapt out onto the field. He saw Coach Amrine on the edge of the track, arms crossed, barking through a bulge of tobacco.

  “Choke up, Barstow. Slow your swing. Dorsey! Move in. McManus! You watchin’ the game or the girls?”

  It was only when Jay stopped in front of him that Coach Amrine swiveled his corded neck and stared down at him through black sunglasses. He had the face of a John, ten years post–high school. A once chiseled jaw was now covered by the bloat of cheap beer.

  “What’s up?”

  Jay straightened. “I’d like to play the team.”