In Beta Page 7

  It was a small bedroom. By the door, a futon couch lay open as a bed. A thin blanket and sheets were fastidiously made up, but the pillowcase was greasy and disheveled. The single window had a shade pulled; the room’s only illumination came from the giant computer looming on a large oak desk. Three monitors issued dark blue light, casting the room in shadow. A giant PC, encased in glass, towered over the monitors, its innards flashing with small colored lights. The computer emitted a soft beep, and the Recluse studied it intently. Then he took a seat and peered into the screen.

  Desperate Measures

  Colin’s house was several times larger than Jay’s, styled after a traditional hacienda, but painted dark to blend in with the winter moss. Built into the side of a gentle slope, its huge windows faced south, so that all three of its stories caught both sunrise and sunset. Colin and his sister Anya slept on the second story, but the finished basement had remained Colin’s “playroom,” evolving along with Colin’s tastes. The bins of Legos and action figures had been shoved away to make room for Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis controllers.

  One by one, Jay tossed his broken games into a metal trash can while Richard Simmons’s voice blared from the television as he jumped in purple spandex.

  “Goddamnit,” he muttered, fighting back tears. “I spent at least a hundred bucks on these games. Think I can sue?”

  He threw the last disk in the trash. Colin plucked it out.

  “What are you doing?”

  Colin examined it. It was The Build. The game Jay had gotten in his Serious Gamer magazine.

  “This one’s not so bad,” Colin murmured.

  Jay took it from him and examined the painful-looking crease in the plastic. Colin was right, though. It wasn’t nearly as bad as the others.

  “Try unbending it?” Colin offered.

  “Wish we had a RadioShack.”

  “I bet . . . I bet Stevie could fix it?” Colin blushed.

  Jay sat on the sofa, head in hands. If anybody could fix the disk, it was Stevie, but the thought of her smug smile made Jay want to yank his eyeballs out of his head. But he had to agree, she was the best hope they had.

  “Sure. Whatever. What do we have to lose?”

  Still blushing, Colin dialed.

  “Um, hello? Stevie?”

  Colin laid out their problem, and Jay listened carefully. Through the line, he could hear Stevie growing more and more excited.

  The next day at school, however, Stevie hardly bothered to look at their disk. All morning, Jay tapped his foot, glaring as she cheerfully ignored him to focus on her workload. At lunch,

  she had overdue library books, and then she had to check on the Cornish game hens in the horticulture field. The more urgent Jay’s glare, the bigger her smile. Finally, in fourth period, she laid her pencil down and grinned.

  “Okay, I’m ready.”

  He and Colin crowded behind her as she took her seat before the computer, grabbed their disk, and ripped off its metal safety shutter.

  Jay shrieked so loudly, the rest of the class turned.

  “Relax,” Stevie assured him. “All it does is keep dirt out.”

  “Yeah,” Jay retorted, “but now dirt’s gonna get in!”

  “It’s fine. We’re making a copy.”

  She inserted the disk and began a file scan. She clucked at what she saw, and Jay leaned in, wishing he’d spent less time gaming and more time learning to code.

  She pulled a fresh disk from her backpack.

  “On the house.” She winked.

  A few more moments clicked by, then she spun around and handed the new disk to Jay.

  “There you go.”

  Jay looked at her in awe. “It works?”

  She smiled. “It might!”

  Jay shoved in the new disk, and the monitor filled with The Build load animation: the pixelated pastoral scene of a small town nestled in the mountains. Jay fist-pumped and cheered, earning a stern “Shh” from Ms. Rotchkey. The title rolled across the front of the load screen, and in the lower left-hand corner, next to the copyright, was some text he hadn’t noticed before: in beta v0.84.

  Jay frowned. “Huh. Still in beta.”

  A small window popped up in the center of the screen: do you want to load poopville? yes/no.

  Jay clicked yes. The title screen flashed, and they were staring at a top-down map of a small pixelated house. The screen was centered on a tiny bathroom, and in a small shower stood a girl of no more than sixty pixels, all a uniformly tan color.

  Jay choked. “She’s naked.”

  Colin turned away, bright red. “What kind of game is this?”

  Jay moused over the girl until a name popped up: liz knight. below that, there were boxes of statistics. strength: 5. speed: 6. hit points: 5. intelligence: 8. Colin refused to look at the screen.

  “It’s like Leisure Suit Larry. We shouldn’t be playing this at school.”

  “It’s, uh, very thorough for a world-building game.” Jay coughed.

  Jay zoomed out to see he was looking at a house sitting a few blocks away from a market and a park. It looked familiar.

  “Dude. This is Bickleton.”

  Colin squinted, and Jay zoomed out a few more clicks. Sure enough, there was the town hall, the main drag, and the Skookullom River cutting its way through the west half of town. All perfectly pixelated.

  “Is this a joke?”

  Colin frowned. “Scroll up to the school.”

  Jay scrolled until the screen rested on the Bickleton campus. There was no motion, except for the undulating animation of swaying trees. A tiny, pixelated figure stepped out of the C-Court doorway and walked toward A-Court.

  Jay clicked and a window popped up.

  derek deckford. strength: 3. speed: 3. hit points: 3. intelligence: 6.

  Colin frowned. “Wait . . . is everyone in there?”

  Jay scrolled over the dense pines to their portable. He zoomed in until the trees gave way and their roof disappeared to reveal a bird’s-eye view of their room. A tiny pixelated figure sat in a beanbag chair. Two more pixelated figures leaned over a chessboard. And in the far corner were another two pixelated figures, one big and one small, crouched over a computer.

  Jay raised his hand. After a moment’s delay, Jay’s onscreen avatar held up its hand.

  “Oh my—”

  A voice came from behind them. “What’s that?”

  Jay jumped up and ejected the disk. The screen crashed with a gray error message, and Jay spun around to find Stevie behind them.

  “Oh, uh . . . n-nothing. The game is, uh, better than new, actually. There’s a new patch; I didn’t recognize some stuff.”

  She beamed. “Can I see?”

  Colin shrank back, panicking. “Well . . .”

  “The disk broke,” Jay quickly lied.

  Stevie frowned. “But you just said it was better than new?”

  Before Jay could answer, the school bell rang. The class erupted from their seats and poured out of the portable. Jay shoved the disk back into its case and hurried past a confused-looking Stevie. As he and Colin trudged down the ramp, Jay whispered to his friend.

  “Okay, so that game is definitely not a SimCity rip-off.”

  Colin shook his head. “How could it know who everyone is?”

  Jay was thinking the same thing.

  “It’s gotta be a practical joke. I mean, your Serious Gamer couldn’t have come with that disk. Someone knew it was my birthday, and they slipped that plastic cover over my magazine and added that disk.”

  “That’s a lot of work for a practical joke.”

  Jay looked away. And what, exactly, was the punch line?

  After Careful Consideration

  Jay, grateful for a distraction from the dual issue of Liz and Todd, was still puzzling over his stran
ge new game when he returned home. The potbellied stove blazed in the corner, and the house smelled of pine smoke. The sizzle of bacon came from the kitchen, and he paused to flip through the mail on the counter, plucking out the latest issue of Game Informer. Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind was on the cover.

  He snorted. “I got this issue last month!”

  He flipped through the magazine, shaking his head as he recognized all the Gameboy and Game Genie ads.

  “Real sloppy.”

  In the living room, the small TV played America’s Funniest Home Videos. Jay glanced up as Bob Saget stared ruefully at his animated cartoon sidekick, Stretchy McGillicuddy.

  “Don’t get a little touchy, Bob, I’m just a little stretchy!”

  The screen erupted in canned laughter.

  “Jay?” his mom called from the kitchen.

  Jay was looking over a double spread for Flintstones, T2: The Arcade Game, and Sunset Riders, trying to see if there were any differences at all.

  “Yeah, Mom,” he called absentmindedly.

  “There’s something I want to show you.”

  He looked up. His mom’s bushy hair was still in curlers, and her makeup was only half-finished, which he knew meant she was going to Chips poker later. The smell of Winston cigarettes was stronger than usual, and he saw she had one in her hand. She grinned triumphantly, a hand on her hip.

  Jay cocked an eyebrow. “Why are you being weird?”

  “Sit down, sit down.”

  She motioned to the dining room table. Jay was surprised to see it was cleared of all the bills, stacks of magazines, and other junk that was usually strewn across it. Instead, there was a stack of pancakes, some bacon, and a grapefruit. Jay frowned.

  “We making a Fruity Pebbles commercial? What’s with the complete breakfast?”

  His mom pulled a stack of envelopes from behind her back.

  “You’ve got maillll.”

  Jay’s heart stopped. He knew immediately what the envelopes had to be. He plopped down into his chair and wordlessly accepted the envelopes. There were six in all. Six different stamps. Six colleges. The room was silent, except for another bout of canned laughter from the TV.

  “I almost opened them,” his mom giggled. “To stop myself, I called Pam again.”

  Pam was his mom’s personal psychic. Mrs.Banksman discovered her in a television infomercial that blasted the airwaves with 1-900-PSYCHIC. She cost them ninety-nine cents a minute to talk with, so Kathy used her sparingly, although not as sparingly as Jay would have liked.

  He lifted the top envelope. It was thin and light, from Western University. He carefully inserted an index finger, cracked the seal, and pulled out a letter. His mom held her hand to her mouth. Jay scanned it, reading aloud:

  “‘After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you a spot in our freshmen class of 1993 . . .’”

  Jay’s voice trailed off. His mom’s face went pale, but she quickly recovered.

  “Open another!”

  Jay grabbed the envelope from Portland College and tore into it.

  “‘After careful consideration, we regret to—’”

  He ripped open the rest.

  “‘We regret. We regret. We regret. We regret.’”

  He laid the letters side by side on the table. His mom read each one silently. In the other room, Jay heard the TV: “Hey, lady, your cat’s on fire!”

  “I don’t believe this,” his mom muttered. “I thought for certain . . . Ms. Rotchkey seemed sure . . .”

  “I should have listened to Miss Molouski,” Jay muttered.

  “Oh, hon.” She wrapped her arms around his neck. “We should have applied to more schools. Maybe we still can? I’m gonna talk to Miss Molouski—”

  Jay shook his head. “Don’t bother.”

  His mom was rereading the letters. “The community colleges rejected you? How is that possible? You’ve got a 3.7 GPA. Any college would be glad to have you.”

  “Except the six I applied to, apparently.”

  His mom strode to the kitchen, wiping her hands. “I’m gonna call.”

  Jay grabbed a piece of bacon off the plate next to the stove and chewed it. In the back of his mind, he’d feared Ms. Rotchkey would be wrong. And even though he’d tried to prepare himself for this moment, he felt sick to his stomach.

  He heard his mom talking into the phone. “Hello, I’d like to speak to the admissions off—”

  His mom slammed the receiver down. “Everything’s automatic! ‘If you’d like to speak to admissions, please press one.’ How am I supposed to do that on a rotary phone? Why can’t things just be easy for once?”

  But Jay’s eyes had begun to glaze. For the last four years, he’d kept every part of his being focused on college. It was his single road out of the hopeless despair that was Bickleton. That road was crumbling. A future he’d never permitted himself to contemplate rose all around him. He watched his mom yell angrily into the phone and saw himself there, doing the same thing for his own son; thirty years would pass in the blink of an eye. The truth of what Ms. Molouski had said hit him: there truly was no escaping Bickleton.

  Dark House

  The Recluse had lived alone in his house for many years. He’d long given up caring about its poor, dilapidated exterior. It was an old house, with chipping paint and birds’ nests under the rafters. He knew the people of Bickleton called him a hoarder, but he rarely interacted with them anyway, preferring the claustrophobic comfort of his tiny corridors. Among the five rooms, he spent nearly all his time in the bedroom with his computer, where he now stood, breathing heavily, listening. The machine gave out a small whine. The Recluse moved his head closer to it, his breath fogging the glass case. He ran his small palm through the air next to it, feeling for heat. He jiggled the mouse, and the harsh light of the monitor awoke, shining out over the room.

  He leaned forward until his belly hung over the keyboard, then grabbed the mouse and twirled open a series of windows. Then he straightened, nodding approvingly, and clicked the monitors back into darkness. The whine continued as the Recluse drifted back through the corridor of cardboard boxes, and into the dining room.

  The hallway branched left, but the Recluse did not look in that direction. There was something intentional in the way he trained his gaze to remain steadily forward. As if he were purposefully avoiding whatever was at the end of the hall. The thing he refused to look at was a wood-paneled door with a single dead bolt. Its shiny golden brass fresh and—should anyone look closely—covered in wood shavings, as though recently installed.

  Under this door, waves of black wires cut rivulets through the shag carpet. They ran the hall, strung together by zip ties, and they finally ducked into the computer room. The Recluse purposefully stepped over the flood of wires, his face flushed imperceptibly. He looked, for a moment, like a little boy up to no good.

  Then he was in the kitchen, and the door lay still, quiet, and forgotten.

  Liz and Jeremy

  When Jay slipped into Tutorial the next morning, he found the whole class in a state of shock. The other seniors were a wreck, faces red with tears, bodies slouched on desks, cheeks lying on Bakelite slabs. One girl was slumped in her chair, eyes unfocused on the ceiling. Everyone, it seemed, had received their rejection letters. All hope of college had been wiped out in an evening.

  Jay moved to the class computer, but Ms. Rotchkey cleared her throat. At the front of the class, she seemed to be having as hard of a time as any of them. Her gray skin sagged in the morning light. The first bell rang, and she turned to address them.

  “I’ve spoken with most of you already, but I take it from the expressions I’m seeing that no one got into college?”

  Silence.

  “Well . . .” Her voice cracked. “I want you to know how proud I am of you.
Not getting into college is not a reflection on your abilities. It’s a reflection of this town. The Bickleton Curse is real. When graduation commences, I encourage each of you to find a way to leave, one way or another. Move to Portland. Seattle. Go to Paris, Budapest, or—”

  Ms. Rotchkey stopped, unable to finish.

  Lunchtime came, and Jay pulled his Lunchables tray from his bag and went for a walk. He reached the edge of the trees surrounding Tutorial and scanned the courtyard. There was a smattering of students on the grass, bundled against the breeze as they picnicked. The usual C-Court crowd. He hiked up the hill to the library, and sat on the steps, where he could see the comings and goings. He opened his Lunchables tray, pulled out crackers, cheese, and a slimy piece of ham, and folded them into a sandwich.

  A young woman with puffy hair and shoulder pads, who he recognized as an office assistant, ran the sidewalk in short heels. Three kids in cowboy hats and Dickies sauntered to A-Court. A kid was thrashing wildly, dancing to an invisible song, laughing:

  “Slam dancing is a way of life!”

  Jay shook his head, disgusted. Then a voice came from behind him.

  “We thought we were so cool.”

  He spun round. Standing under the library awning, cigarette in hand, was Liz. There were dark circles under her eyes as she scanned the grass. Jay saw she had a choker necklace on and looked drawn and pale, which somehow made her seem even more romantic. Jay gulped.

  “You’re back?”

  She didn’t respond.

  “You smoke?”

  “I do now.”

  “Um . . .” Jay stared at the cigarette in her hand. “If Miss Shirell catches you smoking, she’s gonna send you to Mr. Oatman. Do you . . . remember that?”

  Liz took a drag and regarded him coldly. “I remember everything.”

  “Do you . . . remember what happened before they took you to the hospital? Like, the assembly, when they told us Todd was gone? And after? At the Bickleton Creamery?”