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  Above them, the basement ceiling creaked with footsteps as the rest of the Ramirez family woke up. With every step, Jay and Colin tensed, expecting to hear an exclamation and then feet trampling toward the basement stairs. The footsteps receded, and Jay relaxed. He lay on his back and watched dust motes float through the light that now filtered through the sliding glass doors leading to the outside porch. He shifted his legs to catch some of the warmth.

  “God, it’s just that stupid Mantis Boss.”

  “Did you get the game guide?”

  Jay rolled his eyes. “No, GamePro keeps saying next issue, next issue, but—”

  As he spoke, Colin fished out a small cupcake with pink frosting from his sleeping bag.

  “Happy birthday to youuu, happy birthday to youuuu . . .”

  “Eww. Don’t sing so quietly. It’s creepy.”

  Jay took the cupcake and sniffed. “How long’s that cupcake been in there?”

  “Just a few hours.”

  Jay scarfed it down. The sweetness hurt Jay’s unbrushed teeth. His eyes were dry from a night of gaming; they’d been staring at that stupid screen for so long.

  Colin produced another cupcake and mechanically chewed it.

  “Happy birthday,” he said between mouthfuls.

  “Thanks, man.” Jay yawned, stretching and grabbing his half-full can of Mountain Dew. “One more go?”

  Someone upstairs stomped across the floor, heading toward them. Jay and Colin froze, eyes wide. The basement door swung open. Jay and Colin scrambled into action, switching off the Super Nintendo, turning off the TV, burrowing into their sleeping bags. Behind them, someone thundered down the stairs. Jay squeezed his eyes tight, but it was too late. There was a scream of indignation, and then Mrs. Ramirez—Colin’s mom—was rushing over, yelling in Spanish:

  “¿Qué están haciendo aquí?!”

  She pointed at the rat’s nest of sleeping bags and the food on the floor. Mrs. Ramirez was a small bullish woman who wore lots of makeup and terrified Jay. Jay noticed how the thick shoulder pads under her blouse turned her torso into a brick wall. She had one earring dangling in her left hand as she ripped their Super Nintendo from the wall. Jay and Colin bolted out of their sleeping bags in protest, but she rounded on them, now speaking in English.

  “What do I have to do? Chain you to your beds? No games on a school night!”

  “But, jeez,” Jay pleaded, “it’s my birthday.”

  She stuck a finger in his chest. “I’m calling your mom. No more sleepovers. No more games, period. Colin, I’m throwing your Nintendo away!”

  “No! Mom! Please, anything but that.”

  “She’s not really gonna do it,” Jay whispered.

  Mrs. Ramirez spun back to Jay. “Cuidado con lo que dices. Don’t you try me, Banksman.”

  She pointed at the ceiling. “Upstairs. Now. March!”

  Main Drag

  Despite Mrs. Ramirez’s fury, there was, in fact, still plenty of time for Jay and Colin to get to school. After a leisurely stop at the Morning Market for coffee, they enjoyed the scenic route.

  Jay never drove. He didn’t have $14 for a driver’s license, let alone money for a car. So, he sat in the passenger seat of Colin’s Volkswagen Bug, which had been salvaged together from at least five other Volkswagen Bugs. Its body was mostly black, but its two front wheel wells were yellow, and its bumper was orange. To start it, Colin would stick a screwdriver in the hole where the ignition should have been, turn it, then ring a doorbell that was nailed to the dashboard. The car had only three gears and refused to go in reverse. When it ran, which was about 75 percent of the time, its backfire sounded like a shotgun blast, and its exhaust routinely caught fire, shooting large jets of flames through the tailpipe. The kids at school jokingly called it the “Batmobile.” Someone had gone so far as to spray-paint crude Batman logos on its sides, with large penises hanging off the bats. Colin had blacked out the penises but left the Batman logos intact.

  It was in the Batmobile they now rode. The rattle of its engine was so loud, Jay and Colin had to yell to be heard. Colin’s enormous frame was smashed up against the steering wheel, so that his coffee sloshed and spilled in one hand while he gripped the bucking steering wheel with his other.

  Jay shivered in the cold that seemed to blow in from every direction through invisible seams. He fiddled with the radio dial, a crude installation that stuck out jarringly from the front panel. By adjusting the knob a micrometer at a time, he slowly fiddled his way through static, past the Cinnaburst and Juicy Fruit jingles, until suddenly a clear signal popped in. They listened for a moment as a rhythmic guitar looped over and over, and a drum machine kicked out a beat.

  “Oh, that’s good,” Colin noted.

  “It always is.” Jay popped open the glove box and grabbed a notebook, waiting.

  When the music cut out, Jay reflexively pounded on the dashboard until it came back. Finally, it faded, and a man with a slow, low voice spoke.

  “That was Beck, playing ‘Loser.’”

  Jay scribbled: “Beck. ‘Loser.’”

  “. . . the first single from a career . . . we’ll all be watching . . .

  with great anticipation. And this,” added the radio voice, “is Marvelous Mark, the DJ with real underground hits . . . the world’s not ready for this stuff.”

  Jay and Colin shook their heads in silent agreement. Despite his name, Marvelous Mark didn’t sound that marvelous. His voice was softer than the DJs on the few FM stations that filtered into Bickleton. They had to crank the radio to hear him whenever he came on. And he accentuated his speech with pauses so long, Jay sometimes thought the radio had gone out. Despite all this, his music taste was esoteric and dangerous and nothing like the bland pop that blasted the halls of Bickleton High. One of Jay’s deepest thrills was that he’d discovered the hidden gem, 669 AM, all on his own.

  “Up next . . . we have . . .” Jay leaned in as the radio died. Then he put the notepad back in the glove box and ruffled around. “You still got the Columbia House Music Club catalog in here? I could see if they have Beck.”

  Colin shook his head. “Nah, it fell out.”

  Jay stared down at his feet. There was a hole in the passenger floor, roughly the size of a backpack. The Columbia Music catalog wasn’t the first thing to fall through it, and Jay kept his feet braced against the frame whenever he rode. The Batmobile didn’t have seat belts, and it was one of Jay’s biggest fears that Colin would slam on the brakes and send him tumbling down to meet his doom.

  “Ah, well.” Jay readjusted his feet. “I’ve got mine at home.”

  “Mmmm.” Colin nodded, distracted. They were entering “the drag.” It began with “the bluff,” a small gravel turnout that served, in theory, as a vantage point. It did have a lovely view, overlooking the bony Skookullom River, and was perfectly poised to capture sunsets melting over the far bluff. But Bickleton residents had seen sunsets aplenty, and no one ever stopped there, aside from the Fourth of July and high school after-parties, when the next morning would find Rainier cans and condom wrappers littered amid the dusty gravel. Most of the time, though, the viewpoint was empty, as it was now.

  There wasn’t much to Bickleton. Nestled in the Cascade Range, surrounded by national forest, it was possibly the most isolated town in the state of Washington. Jay was always reminded of this driving through Bickleton’s tiny “commercial district.” There was the Drug Mart, the Bowl-o-Rama, Petey’s Barbershop, C&C Distribution Services (whatever that was), followed by the Classy Chassis car repair shop, with its terrible sign that was always lit: “We want your body.”

  There was the Bickleton Theater, the town’s single-screen movie theater where Colin worked as an usher. It only showed about seven movies a year and was currently stuck on Indecent Proposal, which neither Colin nor Jay had seen. Instead, they were salivating over the small “Comi
ng Soon” sign under the marquee that listed Cliffhanger as coming in May. It was Jay’s goal to catch Cliffhanger in Bickleton and then skip town by the time Jurassic Park rolled around.

  After that came the Bickleton Insurance Company with the tagline “Make your insurance as good as a ’57 Chevy,” the Bickleton Creamery, and Golden Flour Bakery. As they passed slowly by, Jay craned his neck, looking for fellow students. He thought he saw a few kids inside the Golden Flour Bakery, but he couldn’t make out who they were. And then the Batmobile began backfiring loud cannon blasts, and Jay pressed himself back in his seat, embarrassed. Once they passed, he leaned forward again to pull a shrink-wrapped magazine out of his backpack.

  Colin leaned eagerly over, nearly plowing into a pack of freshmen hiking up the small hill. Jay seized the grab handle to keep from dropping his book bag through the floor.

  “What’s that?”

  “The new Serious Gamer.”

  “How come it’s wrapped in plastic?”

  “Because . . .” Jay spun it around to show Colin a single black floppy disk lying loose in the back. “. . . it came with a free demo.”

  “What?! How come mine didn’t come with that?”

  Jay shrugged, ripping his finger through the plastic to pull out the magazine. “Dunno. I must be a valued customer. How long have you been subscribing?”

  “Six months.”

  “Yeah, see, you got to stick with it at least a year, probably. Although, this is the first time they’ve sent me anything, to be honest.”

  Jay flipped the little black disk over in his hands. There was a single sticker over the front that read The Build. It looked as if someone had printed the label on a dot matrix printer. Colin peered over, reading.

  “The Build. Never heard of it.”

  “Me neither. Let’s see if they mention it in here.” Jay thumbed through the magazine. “Oh my God!”

  Colin swerved in alarm.

  “What?! What is it?”

  “Dude, Wing Commander III is coming next year with full-motion video and branching story arcs! It’s gonna be on CD-ROM technology. ‘Don’t watch the game, play the movie.’ Wow, what a tagline. And guess who plays Blair?”

  “Who?”

  “Mark Hamill!” Jay buried his head in the pages. “Oh, it’s got Jonathan Rhys-Davies from Indiana Jones, Biff from Back to the Future.”

  “Wow, on CD-ROM technology . . .”

  They passed blocks of mobile homes. Most of the aluminum siding was faded and chipped, yards were littered with rusted car parts, and satellite dishes rimmed the roofs. The front of half a Volkswagen Bug leered out from under an ancient tarp. Above it a tattered American Flag, purple from sun exposure, fluttered in the morning breeze. A yellow “Dead End” sign was pockmarked with bullet holes. They started to turn down the road to C-Court, but Jay shook his head.

  “Let’s go to A-Court.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah, I’m feeling lucky.”

  They continued down Main Street for another minute before turning into a sea of proud Fords, Chevys, and Dodge Rams. To their left, a metal cage topped with barbed wire held the school’s five buses but was otherwise empty. Two of the buses were delivering a line of kids to school, which sat small and nestled in the gently sloping hill. Colin wound his way through the rows of trucks, and Jay shook his head while reading the bumper stickers: “Proud to Be a Redneck,” “Vandal Nation,” “Hometown Pride.”

  “What a joke.” Jay snorted. “Might as well say ‘Proud to Be Ignorant.’”

  “Welfare Pride,” Colin joined in.

  “Incest Pride.”

  Colin turned off the Batmobile, and they both got out and stretched. A ride in the Batmobile was like riding a mechanical bull, and Jay woke up sore pretty much every day. He still felt disgruntled from their stinging defeat at the claws of the stupid Mantis Boss, but now he was starting to feel sick from a night of no sleep. They watched a stream of students shuffle off a bus and into A-Court, and Jay nodded.

  “Y’all ready for this?”

  Colin looked incredulous. “You want to go through A-Court?”

  “Not through. We’ll sneak in the side, stealth our way through Little Mexico, and pop back out before anyone notices.”

  “But what if someone does notice?”

  “We’re due for a change in luck.” Jay cracked his knuckles. “I think today’s the day.”

  Turtles Pies

  The Bickleton High campus was broken into several main buildings. The biggest were A-Court and C-Court. A-Court was nearest to the main parking lot and thus more important. It held the principal’s office, the largest classrooms, the cleanest blackboards, the prettiest kids, and the school’s only vending machine.

  Out its rear spewed a little grassy lawn and a small hill. Atop the hill sat the library, where the school’s timid souls fretted away the periods until last bell. Next door was shop class, full of screaming saws and churning drills and a collection of squat brutes—largely disregarded by the rest of the school—looking for trouble.

  Then there was the horticulture building, some portables, and C-Court, which was a poor man’s A-Court. It was smaller, and shabbier, and the windows never let in enough light. The kids who went into C-Court were dumb, poor, or had a chip on their shoulder. They were smokers, skinny kids in big jeans, or big kids in skinny jeans. They threw rotten apples at the baseball field and even got beat up by the Johns, very occasionally giving a black eye that the Johns would solemnly carry back into A-Court.

  C-Court was too raw for Jay’s tastes, and A-Court was too vanilla (or so he told himself). He lived mostly in Tutorial, and the portable suited him mostly fine. However, last week, item number H5 in the school vending machine had been switched from cherry pie to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Pie, and this change had not gone unnoticed. Stevie Melbrook and Todd Hammond had bragged about successfully entering A-Court, purchasing Turtles Pies, and living to tell. They were reported to taste slightly metallic and heavenly.

  Today, Jay felt emboldened to follow in their footsteps. But penetrating A-Court in the morning, when the other Bickleton seniors were caffeinated and on alert, was madness. Jay—high from a combination of his birthday, a lack of sleep, and the strongest black coffee the Morning Market could make—had a plan. The interior of A-Court was a square. In each corner, a small corridor led to an entrance. On the south side, the main corridor led to the parking lot and was flooded with students. Going through that corridor would have led Jay and Colin into the massive herd of the baseball team (i.e., insta-death).

  On the west side of A-Court, a second corridor led to the parking lot, but by way of the main office, where the administrators and Principal Oatman lived (i.e., torture and interrogation).

  The north corridor led to a cement walkway that branched off to C-Court, the library, shop class, horticulture, and the portables. It was possible to safely penetrate A-Court through that route, but Jay and Colin would risk running into surprise jocks heading early to shop class (i.e., also insta-death). Plus there was always the chance that a stray John, Amber, or Gretchen would use their locker, and Jay didn’t know where their lockers were.

  The safest way was through the east corridor. It led south to the parking lot and north to C-Court, and was inconvenient to everyone. This corridor was unofficially called “Little Mexico.” At some point over the last decade, the school’s significant Latino population had taken camp there and claimed its lockers.

  The Latinos were no friends of the jocks. Colin wasn’t really “one of them,” as he hung out with Jay and the other nerds. But he’d tottered around enough with them as babies, and gone to enough quinceañeras, that he was safe around them. And Jay, a fellow outcast and friend of Colin’s, was safe as well.

  Now, as Jay and Colin tiptoed past the lockers, a tall Latino teen sang his version of Tom Petty’s
“Free Fallin’”: “And I’m freeeeee! Fri-joles!” A group of Latinas broke into giggles.

  As they met the edge of Little Mexico, Latinos gave way to cowboys and jeans and sweatshirts with “The Gap” written over their fronts. Jay peered around the corner. The vending machine was nestled between a break in the lockers and the drinking fountains. It wasn’t far, but it would leave them exposed.

  “Hey, you two!”

  Jay’s head snapped up. Gretchen, Amber, and Liz Knight were staring at him. Every hair on Jay’s body leapt up. The jig was up. Gretchen, Amber, and Liz were the paragons of A-Court. The prettiest, most popular girls in the school. Staring at him. They could call all manner of fury and hellfire down upon him. Jay stood, frozen, awaiting their judgment.

  Liz stepped forward and Jay shrank back. Gretchen and Amber were beautiful, but it had always been clear that Liz was in a class of her own. Her skin was smooth and dark, a mix of white and Latina. She strode the two cultures effortlessly, to everyone’s awe. Like everyone in Bickleton, Jay had known her for as long as he could remember. Back in first grade, back when the playing field was more level, they’d even held hands once. That was ages ago, of course, and he was certain Liz had forgotten. Now, Jay stared into those dark green eyes, trying not to panic.

  She stood looking down at him. All A-Court jokes, rumors, and trends filtered through her. If she laughed at it, gossiped about it, or wore it, so did the rest of Bickleton. The current wave of baby doll dresses and knee-high stockings were Liz’s latest doing. She was constantly voted most popular, best smile, best hair, most likely to—

  “Um, hello?” Liz snapped her fingers in his face. “Yearbook boy? When do I get my yearbook?”

  “Oh, uh. W-we’re actually not on yearbook,” Jay stuttered.

  Liz sighed. “Then what good are you?”

  Before Jay could respond, the three girls whipped around and headed toward the bathroom. Colin wiped his brow.