The Great Interactive Dream Machine

by Richard Peck

  “This must be an upscale community,” Aaron said. “Nobody’s stolen the phone book.”

  It was the Yellow Pages for Netherhampton, Long Island.

  We were about a hundred miles from home.

  “The Hamptons,” we said. “We’re in the Hamptons.”

  “But why?” Aaron asked. “Ophelia just wants to go to the park. She wouldn’t know the Hamptons from a hole in the ground.”

  “Forget Ophelia,” I said. “What time is it, anyway?” We checked our watches. It was a quarter to six.

  “Anyway, we know where we are,” he said. “We can take a train home.” We pooled our money to make sure we had enough. “I’ve got a phone card. You can call home and say we’ll be late. And then your mom can call my mom.”

  “Why me, Aaron? We’re going to have to tell big fibs, because who’ll believe the truth? Why don’t you call your mom, and she can call my mom?”

  “It’s my phone card,” he said. So I guess that meant I had to call my mom. It was eerie. Half an hour ago I thought we might be eaten by dinosaurs on a prehistoric beach. Now I was direct dialing via AT&T. Heather picked up on the first ring.

  “Muffie?”

  “Josh.”

  “Why aren’t you home? It’s almost dinnertime. Mom’s beginning to get steamed.” Heather sounded happy.

  “I’m with Aaron. I guess we lost track of time. We’re ... still at school. We’re ... studying.”

  “Please,” Heather said. “If I couldn’t lie any better than that, I’d never get to go anywhere.”

  “No, really. But listen, Heather, was there a power outage in our building?”

  “I thought Aaron was with you,” she said. “No, the electricity’s on. What’s your angle here? Are you going to try to tell Mom you’re late because of a blackout?”

  Aaron nudged me. “And call Aaron’s mom,” I said. “Tell her we’ve got a lot more studying to do—at least three hours—for a quiz tomorrow in Mr. Headbloom’s class.” I hung up fast.

  “What quiz?” Aaron said.

  We found the Long Island Rail Road station without too much trouble. We bought our tickets from a guy at the window and only had to wait a little while for the train.

  “Heather says there wasn’t a power outage at our building.”

  “So?” said Aaron.

  “Aaron, you were there. The whole room blew apart. The walls fell off. Your technopolis experienced extreme meltdown.”

  He put up a small hand. “That was just our perception of what was happening. It was our cells reorganizing. It wasn’t the room disintegrating. We were. My equipment will be fine, but I have a major fiddle to do on that formula. Back to the drawing board.”

  “About the formula, Aaron. I—”

  But the train roared in, and we got on. Ophelia rode free.

  At Remsenburg a few more people got on. A guy in a cap came around to punch our tickets. Ophelia lunged at him but missed.

  We didn’t get back to Manhattan till after ten. Then we had to get a cab from Penn Station because you can’t take a dog on the subway, unless it’s a guide dog, which, believe me, Ophelia isn’t.

  It had really been one of those days. I was wiped out. And I’d had to booktalk Mom all the way through Jack Finney’s Time and Again to prove to her Aaron and I had been studying for the quiz. And still she wasn’t satisfied.

  “Josh, don’t think you can stay out till all hours. Just don’t start with that.”

  But Heather of all people came to my rescue here. “Mo-om,” she said, “you don’t need to know where we are every minute. Especially me. If you’re going to be on our case all the time, we’ll end up druggies. Especially Josh.”

  I couldn’t wait to get into bed. Then I had to shake all that sand out of my pants. Then could I sleep? Forget about it. My cells just wouldn’t settle down. Finally as I was drifting off, the truth hit me.

  I sat straight up in bed like Aaron on his dune. Heather. I remembered what Heather had said. It was like she was right here in the room, repeating herself. “Two words,” she’d said. “Muffie McInteer.” Heather wanted to spend the summer at Muffie’s house in the Hamptons. The one with the servants and the heated pool and the boys on the beach. Parties.

  It was probably my fault, but Aaron’s formula had picked up not only Ophelia’s need, but Heather’s too. It was a two-for-one deal. We got Ophelia’s body and Heather’s wish, which was better than the other way around. Though when you think about it, Ophelia and Heather aren’t that different. They both whine. They both think they’re great looking. And they both want to go out all the time.

  The force field or whatever had reached four floors down to our apartment and Heather’s room. Probably at the very minute Aaron was entering his formula, Heather was thinking about the Hamptons, counting the days.

  In a way it was more interesting than Aaron’s boring computerized schematics of dinosaur days.

  But where would it end? I really wondered. Then I was sound asleep.

  Aaron wasn’t on the bus Tuesday morning, missed homeroom, and barely made it to Headbloom’s class for the quiz. I know Aaron. He’d been hacking all night, and he’d come to school early to keep on working at the terminals in the Black Hole. He looked terrible. Red hair, greenish face, staring eyes, and stumbling around. He kept running into desks on the way to his.

  Class was about to start, but I couldn’t wait. As he lurched past me, I grabbed him by the dress code. “Aaron,” I muttered. “One word. Heather. It’s Heather who thinks if she doesn’t spend summer in the Hamptons, then her life is over. Nobody needs like Heather. Your formula picked up on her.”

  “Oh, right,” he said. “I figured it was something like that.”

  Which was the thanks I got.

  “Meet me in the Black Hole at lunch,” he said. “We’re on a roll.”

  I decided not to.

  Leave Aaron alone. Let him refiddle his formula back to normal and send himself to computer camp. Who cares? Let him fax himself to the moon. He’s more trouble than he’s worth. He looks funny, and he acts funny. If he wasn’t my best friend, I wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

  Then I realized I was going to have to eat lunch alone in the lunchroom while Terrible Daryl and his peer group made mincemeat out of me.

  The BOTH COMPUTERS DOWN sign was on the door as usual.

  I entered the Black Hole.

  Mrs. Newbery wasn’t around. Aaron was by himself between the terminals with formula on both screens. “Come in,” he said, not looking around, “but don’t think.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said, with my back against the door.

  “Just keep your mind blank,” he said. “You know, pretend you’re in Math class. I don’t want us projecting any particular need close to these terminals. They’re not state-of-the-art anyway. They’re practically vacuum tube.”

  Now he was hunched between the screens, one hand on a keyboard, one hand on a mouse. A pointer drifted along and stopped.

  “See that digital cluster? A bug, maybe even a virus, is skulking around in that particular part of the formula, but I can’t—”

  “Aaron, I—”

  “But look what happens when I bypass.” The screens blanked, and something else popped up.

  “What is it?”

  “Just what it looks like,” he said. “A chemical equation.”

  We don’t do chemistry till upper school.

  “It either expresses the sedimentary composition of the K-T boundary or something else. I’m not sure. It could be the chemical contents of a dinosaur’s stomach. Who knows? But anyway, I’m getting there. Computer camp, here I come.”

  He spun around in his chair. “If it’s lunchtime, why aren’t we eating?”

  “We should have gotten there earlier,” I reminded him. “You know how Daryl—”

  Aaron stood up. “Josh, do you know how much tuition our parents pay to send us to this school? We’re talking five figures here. We’r
e laying out that kind of money, and we can’t have lunch? Please.”

  This was tall talk from the shortest kid in class.

  “Are we going to let Daryl—”

  “And his peer group including Buster,” I said.

  “And his peer group including whoever deprive us of basic nutrition and a balanced diet?”

  It was a good speech. I wished it was coming out of somebody bigger. I wished it hadn’t been half alto. But Aaron was right, and I was hungry.

  We started to leave for the lunchroom while we still had the nerve. But Aaron went back to store his formula.

  Then it happened.

  And this time it hurt.

  The walls bulged. The floor buckled. The terminals blurred. I seemed to be seeing Aaron through one of those fun-house mirrors. He’d laid one finger on his keyboard, and it was all happening again:Cellular reorganization

  Personal disintegration

  Interactivity

  I went blind for a minute. Pains shot around me where I’d never had them before. Feet, spine, you name it. Somebody had thrown a rope around my neck and was trying to strangle me. Somebody—Daryl?—had me in a hammerlock and was pinning my shoulders. But at least I wasn’t falling this time. In fact, I seemed to be getting higher in the room.

  Then it all stopped.

  There was a little steel-gray haze drifting in the room. At least it was still the Black Hole and not the Hamptons. But why was I hurting so bad?

  And where was Aaron?

  5

  A Couple of Complete Strangers

  Not that I was alone. I was hurting too bad to think, but somebody was in the Black Hole with me. At first I thought I knew him. Then I didn’t. Over by the computers was this big, red-headed guy. Upper school at least. He shaved. In fact, he needed a shave.

  There was something else you really noticed about him. He was wearing Huckley dress code like anybody else. But it was six sizes too small for him. His shoulders were busting out of his blazer. His big wrists hung way down from his sleeves. His pants stopped a foot from the floor. He swallowed, and the collar button on his shirt cut loose and flew over his Huckley tie.

  I was still being strangled, but it wasn’t Daryl. It was my shirt. My collar button popped too. We both watched the buttons roll around the floor.

  “Who—” we both said, except it wasn’t my voice.

  “Aaron?” I said in my dad’s voice.

  He blinked, and they were still Aaron’s eyes, pink and dazed.

  We were both twice our size and trapped in our dress code. I could get my tie loose, but my pants were cutting me in half. Aaron winced and stooped down to untie his shoes. His pants made a ripping sound. He eased out of his shoes, and feet popped out. They couldn’t be Aaron’s feet. They were about size eleven. There’s always a hole in his sock. A huge toe with a thorny nail poked through.

  I couldn’t bend over without snapping every stitch of my clothes, but I could kick out of my shoes. Then my feet sort of sprang to life, and they were as big as Aaron’s, maybe bigger.

  “Look at you,” we said.

  “Who are we?” we said.

  “What have we done?” Aaron smacked his forehead.

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t think. I scratched my chin. I needed a shave. And another thing, we were tall. Aaron was five ten, easy, and I was looking down at him. I was so tall that when I looked down, I got dizzy.

  Aaron’s stubbly face fell into his big hands. “No,” he said, “no, no, no, no.”

  “What happened, Aaron? You know. You have a theory.” I couldn’t get used to my voice. It was like my dad was sitting on my tongue, talking out of my mouth.

  “Emotional Component,” he said, “too close to the keyboard.”

  “But my mind was a blank,” I said.

  “Not when we were going to lunch,” he said. “Then we were really worried about Daryl’s peer group, right? What did we both want at that moment?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Didn’t we just want them off our case?”

  “Go with that thought.”

  “Oh. We both wished we were bigger than they are. And older. We wanted to be—”

  “That’s it,” Aaron said. “We had the same thought at the same time. We wanted to be upper-school size. We wanted to be seniors.”

  The sacred word seniors hung in the air. My dress code was binding me bad.

  The bell rang, and lunch was over.

  “Aaron, how are we going to explain this? I wouldn’t know you if I met you on the street. We’re a couple of complete strangers. How can we go to History like this? How can we go home? This isn’t the Hamptons. We can’t just take a train.”

  “No,” he said, “but it’s the same principle, except instead of Ophelia and Heather, it’s us. Our need combined spontaneously with my formula. That virus in it made it so interactive, it’s almost infectious. I’m thinking radioactivity. I’m thinking—”

  “Aaron, shut up.”

  He thought for a minute. A big new vein in his forehead pulsed. Then, making senior gestures with his ham-sized hand, he said, “Here’s the plan: Forget about History class. We couldn’t pass ourselves off as us. Anyway, look how we’re dressed. We’re ridiculous. We wait till the bell rings again. Then we give it another ten minutes. Then we make a break for the upper-school locker room. After they’ve changed for P.E., we’ll get into their lockers and take some clothes that fit us.”

  “Is this stealing?”

  “It’s borrowing, and do you have a better idea?”

  We waited. Another bell rang, and the school settled down for afternoon classes. We waited some more, and I couldn’t get used to this body. It bulged all over, and my head was so far from the floor, I nearly had a nose-bleed. Then at the last minute we remembered our sixth-grade shoes and hid them in a file drawer. As Aaron said, if Mrs. Newbery found our shoes but not us, it would just deepen the mystery.

  “Let’s synchronize watches,” he said at the door. Luckily both watchbands were expandable. We had wrists like tree trunks. “We do this at a dead run,” Aaron whispered. “If Mrs. Newbery’s at her desk, sprint right past her. She won’t know us anyway.”

  When Aaron opened the Black Hole door, we ran into each other. Then we started galloping through the media center. Mrs. Newbery wasn’t around, which was just as well. I was pretty sure that somebody was in the book stacks, but I didn’t really look because everything was a blur. We weren’t used to being this big. It was like running on stilts. All four of our legs got tangled up, and we came crashing down in front of the Leisure Reading revolving rack. We were both grunting. Also, our dress code strangled us all over. When we got up, I heard the seat of Aaron’s pants go completely.

  The upper-school locker room is in the basement at the other end of school. It was two flights down, and we fell twice each. Our sock feet were like flippers. Then we were thundering down an endless corridor, taking huge strides, following the smell of the upper-school locker room. Then we were in it, and it was empty. The big guys were all over at the soccer field in the park.

  “Aaron, we don’t know the combinations of any of these locks.”

  “If they’re anything like the middle school, half of them are broken.” He ran a gigantic hand along the locker doors. He jerked one open, then another.

  And inside ... big dress code.

  “Aaron, what if they don’t fit?”

  “Josh, this isn’t The Gap. We’re not shopping.”

  The upper-school guys’ books were in their lockers with their names on them. “Hey, look,” I said. “This is Harrison ‘Hulk’ Hotchkiss’s stuff.”

  “And I’m getting Otis ‘Stink’ Stuyvesant’s stuff,” Aaron said. “We’re in luck. These are two of the bigger guys in upper school.”

  I pulled out a huge blazer. “Whoa,” I said.

  “Don’t dawdle,” Aaron said. “Get naked and get dressed.”

  I hadn’t thought about getting naked. I don’t usually think too
far ahead.

  I wrestled out of my little blazer. Taking off my shirt was like shedding a skin. When I peeled off my pants, my door keys popped out of a pocket and fell on the floor. I swept them up. Hanging on a hook in the locker were Hulk Hotchkiss’s big underpants. I wasn’t too crazy about wearing somebody else’s used underpants. But my sixth-grade pair really had me tied in knots.

  Aaron was down to his underpants too. We turned our backs on each other. Finally we were free.

  Then we said, “Wow.”

  6

  Better Than Grown

  We could keep our own socks. They stretch. Hulk Hotchkiss’s shoes were a tight fit. I could have used a size larger. The hardest part was knotting our Huckley ties with our big hands. We had fingers like sausages. Aaron was really slow. Until just lately, his mom’s been tying his tie for him. When we were finished, we looked each other over. It was fantastic. It was unbelievable.

  My fully formed heart pounded in my well-developed chest. “Okay,” I said, “where do we go from here?”

  “We get out of the locker room before anybody comes back,” Aaron said. “We get out of school.”

  “Just walk out?”

  “Senior privileges,” Aaron said.

  Huckley School is a block away from Central Park. Halfway to the corner, we met the upper-school guys coming back.

  Stink Stuyvesant and Hulk Hotchkiss led. Everybody was in Huckley sweatshirts and shorts, swaggering toward us. I started to get in the gutter like you have to do when you’ve got upper-school people coming at you.

  “Forget that,” Aaron said, and we held our ground. They walked around us, the whole class. They didn’t know us. They couldn’t place us. But we were the same size as they were, bigger than most. It felt great.

  Hulk Hotchkiss had brushed right by me. Little did he know he’d just walked past his own underwear.